Why does that matter? If Barack Obama hadn't run for office, he'd still be Barack Obama, lawyer/community organizer from Chicago. If George Bush hadn't run for office, he'd still be George Bush, oil company executive.
They had money & a political organization backing them, but there were no special qualities they brought to the table that "most of us" don't also have. Point is, they're much more like us than they're not, as much as we'd sometimes rather view them as some sort of evil/sociopathic anomaly.
Why did Europeans Colonize the United States Was it because they were less greedy then the others... No. There were people who were more Greedy who wanted Gold, or people who were more afraid to live in their homeland then to move.
I have a solution for this. Let's start up the Spanish Inquisition again, and make people so afraid of living on earth that they develop a way to colonize other planets!
We are social animals, and each of us has a different amount of greed. Most of us aren't like the sociopaths that run the world.
Many of the most powerful sociopaths in the world are elected from the masses of "most of us." There is very little evidence to support your conclusion that "most of us" are nothing like "them."
Of course, I live in the US, where we can't even spend tax money on bridges. War is about the only thing we're willing to spend tax money on at all.
The federal budget would like to disagree with that statement. The majority of our federal budget is tied up in providing social programs and infrastructure, not in "war". Yes, the defense department gets a comparatively large portion of the budget. NO, it does not comprise all or even the bulk, of government spending. This is a facile talking point that is, unfortunately, entirely false as well.
Of course, as all the recent administrations have shown us, not having the tax money to spend doesn't mean you can't rack up a hell of a credit card bill. Why let things like "insufficient tax revenues" ruin the party?
Well, there's the ethical question then of whether or not this is justified when there could be other forms of life already there on the planets we've targeted with our life-form "bombs".
And besides, wouldn't you feel foolish if all we did was manage to evolve cockroaches and influenza everywhere? They suck enough here on Earth, let's not help them colonize other planets!
Hell, our technology is in decline, besides making faster computers, what has progressed in the last few decades? Nothing fundamental.
In fairness, quite a bit has expanded in our understanding of the fundamental building blocks of life. DNA was first described in 1953... 57 years later, we are mapping genomes (with some organisms fully mapped), manipulating, replacing and removing genes, and discovering the genetic basis for numerous diseases and other traits at an ever-increasing pace.
Just because it ain't silicon & metal doesn't mean it ain't technology.
1/4 your monthly take home is more than you can afford
Actually, rule of thumb for a standard 30-yr fixed rate mortgage is that 28% of your gross pay is the maximum mortgage payment you should be making. That's a bit more than 25% of your take-home.
honestly, unless you have regularly spoke your mine eloquently to your representatives in your government you have zero right to complain.
And what if you passionately and eloquently communicate your views, and your representative pockets another $5k donation from Comcast and ignores you? Or you passionately and eloquently communicate your views, and your representative says, "I disagree with you, and 52% of my constituents disagree with you, and I want to get re-elected... so you lose kid, sorry?" Have we lost our right to complain then, too? And why do I get the sneaking sense that to you, "disagreeing with what I think" == "doing it Glenn Beck style and looking like a tard?"
Shit. Does this mean that the world isn't as simply black and white as you'd like to imagine it?
This man is a hero. He could have taken the easy road but he didn't.
No, he's not a hero. He's an idiot.
You are not subject to the government or anybody else once you've quit or been fired.
Yes, you are subject to the government or "anybody else" when fired. This is such a ridiculous statement it's ludicrous. Your car in the employee lot and the stuff in your desk doesn't automatically become your employers' property because you've quit or been fired. Your employer can't just decide to not pay you your remaining wages because "you quit" or "you were fired," and you certainly have professional, ethical, and obviously - legal - obligations to them as part of the termination process that you are expected to follow - among these, turning over keys and passwords that allow access to sensitive data and systems that your employer still owns.
And even if that were the case, he was not fired until AFTER he refused to reveal the passwords - he was being transferred to a new role, and when asked to give the passwords, he balked, then gave incorrect passwords, then sent an email gloating about how they were no doubt "trying to get access". And for all the people who are clamoring about "but the police weren't authorized users," do you really think this would have ended up this way if he had said, "Look, the police officers aren't authorized users so I can't say the password aloud, but I'll write down the password and hand it to you, the guy who I sent a list of passwords & user names to about a week ago?"
This is not about "Maintain our systems after we've turfed you." This is about, "Give us the keys to our property that are in your possession before you leave." That includes passwords.
Now, is 4 years of jail time a reasonable punishment? I think that's a little harsh. But the man is clearly in violation of ethical & professional standards no matter how you cut it, and richly deserves some form of punishment for that.
Yes, it can be "considered classified" at that point - because it *is* still classified. I don't understand why this seems so difficult for people to grasp - public dissemination of classified data does not automatically "declassify" it - it simply makes it "classified information that was leaked to the public in violation of security regulations."
The soldiers who have any need to see this data - primarily, 6+-month-old operational reports and updates - already have access, or can petition for access through the proper military channels to be granted access.
It's not about "putting the genie back in the bottle," it's about "following policies in place, because the public release of these documents has not changed the fact that the documents are still considered classified by the military - of which the soldiers are members."
There is a process and a policy for handling this sort of information. That process & policy does not include "Go read it on wikileaks for shits and giggles." If the military said "Oh well, it's just a security policy, who cares really? Go read it!" They would be undermining their own security practices by saying "It's not a big deal as long as it's on a web site where everybody can read it."
You may not agree with the policy, but that does not change the fact that the policy exists, and is expected to be followed by members of the armed forces.
what are the brass truly afraid of that the military personnel on the ground will see?
They are afraid that people not cleared to see this classified data will see it. The rules for handling classified information are expected to be followed - pointing your finger at someone else and saying, "But he looked, too!" is not a defense. Most of these documents were *written* by people on the ground, and as I mentioned above, people with a need to see them *can* see them through the proper channels already, or *can* ask to get permission to see them through the proper channels.
And then once you've been fired, you must always be available to your company to provide that service?
Nope, which is why I don't understand why you'd say it's a good idea to waste - literally - years of your life enforcing an employers' security policy when they can you. "Password is XXXXXXX" takes 10 seconds. "Denial of Services" lawsuit took years, and "sentenced to 4 years" just compounds that.
And you're leaving out the fact that Childs had CC'ed the person asking for passwords a week earlier, on an email containing a list of usernames and passwords that he had set up. What changed in the intervening week, where the guy who you claim "wasn't authorized to have them, by city policy" was deemed an authorized user by Mr. Childs, and the day he was fired, when suddenly Mr. Childs decided he wasn't authorized?
For all the people claiming that giving out passwords constitutes "working for free after you've been fired," stop and consider this: what constitutes more work - saying (or writing) down one sentence - "The password is XXXXXXXXX", or enforcing your version of an employers' security policy for them after you've been let go? Less than 10 seconds of writing or speaking, versus a 4 year jail term, and years spent in courts over a ridiculous semantic issue?
I said they are considered damning because of the uproar coming from the DoD.
If you took your policy of security very seriously, wouldn't you be a little upset about somebody taking about 90,000 "secured" documents, and publishing them on the internet?
If you took the safety of people who are providing you with intelligence seriously, wouldn't you be in an "uproar" if somebody leaked 90,000 documents in which some of those people are mentioned by name, village, and even occasionally GPS coordinates?
Wouldn't that be enough to cause an uproar? Or must there also be some hidden evidence of war crimes for it to cause an uproar?
The whole thing about putting people at risk is moot since no specific people are mentioned when wikileaks releases the documents.
Have you bothered reading or listening to a BIT of the coverage? BOTH sides have acknowledged that it absolutely identifies specific people, by name, village, GPS coordinates, and sometimes even references to other family members.
Honestly, do you only get your news from the/. comments?
I'm not even going to answer your straw man. I don't recall saying anything about any other documents from the military.
It's not a "straw man" dummy, it's a question about your thought process. You seem blithely - almost vapidly - unaware of anything about what's in the documents, but that doesn't stop you from characterizing them as "considered so damning." Thus I'm forced to ask if you reach this conclusion (despite your admitted & demonstrated lack of any knowledge of what's actually in them) based on some predisposition to believe that anything related to the military must be sinister, or if you have some other information that nobody else is privy to which allows you to assert that they're so damning?
The fact that these documents are considered so damning is exactly why they should be public.
Please explain exactly how they're "so damning"? I haven't seen any actual evidence of war crimes being uncovered, just a lot of talk about how "they might" show evidence from Mr. Assange & his supporters.
I'm really curious whether or not you have some special knowledge of the docs in question, or if you're just uncritically accepting the tenet that the military can do nothing right, and therefore any document written by the military will probably give evidence of some heinous crime against humanity?
Yes, there's specific content they don't want the soldiers to see - specifically, all of it, unless they have both appropriate security clearance, and a need to know.
This is standard policy for handling classified information, and they are reminding soldiers that it is still in effect, as publication doesn't magically make classified documents become declassified. Soldiers viewing this material without proper clearance & need to know are violating security protocols.
I know it's fun to assume there must be some sinister reason for the military reiterating its policy on handling classified documents, but in this case, I think it's very likely that this is simply a policy reminder.
Do you really think there's going to be a smoking gun in these documents? Who in god's name would write a sitrep stating, "Killed 27 noncombatant civilians after torturing and maiming them. Then proceeded to burn 3 mosques?"
The Dutch government just formally announced its exit from Afghanistan.
Kind of hard for Mr. Assange to imply that this wikiLeaks event is at all related to the Dutch withdrawal, considering it's been in the works since February:
NATO’s request for an extension of the mission sparked a political row that led to the Dutch government’s collapse in February, and the announced drawdown.
They didn't just see these documents and say, "Damn, let's get out of there." They're two separate events.
seems to me that you have no clue what you're talking about, methinks.
This information came FROM the military. It is still classified data until the appropriate classification authority directs that it be declassified, or until the data has aged the appropriate time (10 years, I believe?) with no extension of classification, at which point it automatically is considered declassified.
Military personnel without proper clearance to see this data who went and looked at it would be breaching the security they are supposed to be maintaining.
I don't know if you've done it recently, but I've ported numbers twice in the past couple years (once from Sprint -> ATT for my personal phone, once from Sprint -> Verizon for my work blackberry).
Both times, the transition was incredibly easy and fast. I'm sure there are some people who have had a hash made of a port, but I can't imagine it's all that hard in the majority of cases.
If Google said "We will no longer serve any Google content to any ISP which violates Net Neutrality", the debate would basically be over. You wouldn't even need any government regulation.
That would also probably be a pyrrhic victory for Google: they'd be cutting off their own source of revenue by refusing to serve content. Less ads served = significantly less revenue.
They're certainly influential, and they could probably afford to buy a few senators of their own with ease, but they aren't the only force in the market.
I'm uninformed because you couldn't get the open source project running?
1) There are public servers with etherpad already running on it.
2) The source code is available for free, online, as an open-source project.
3) If you do not have the skill to download and run it yourself, take the money you would have paid Etherpad or Google to purchase a copy, and hire someone to set it up for you.
The person I responded to was proclaiming his dissatisfaction that Etherpad was dead - it is most clearly NOT dead, and has been open-sourced, which he explicitly stated it never was. None of what he stated was accurate, and yet I'm the uninformed arse for pointing out the inaccuracies and providing links to the stuff he claims doesn't exist?
You are an idiot. The stock market is not a zero sum game because it is not a closed system. For it to be a zero sum game, every time one company on the market managed to produce a product that was worth value, other companies would have to fail to make up for that loss.
Lucky for us, that's not the way it works. Maybe you should actually spend a few minutes learning how it works too, and you'll see that you're clueless.
Rights can't be taken away. High frequency trading could be declared illegal tomorrow. If rights can't be taken away and high frequency could be declared illegal tomorrow, then it is not a right.
Learn how the judicial review process works. Congress can declare anything they want to be illegal, and pass a law saying so. And then the courts can strike down those laws when someone challenges them, and affirm that there *is* a right that is being abridged by that law.
The "legality" of something is not a perfect indicator of whether or not that thing is a "right". It used to be "the law" that a black person couldn't marry a white person. Or sit in the same area. Because that law got passed, are you saying that there was no abridgement of the rights of black people? Or would you instead draw the obvious conclusion that the legislature sometimes (maybe even OFTEN times) gets it wrong, and that's part of why the courts are there, to uphold our rights when the government infringes on them?
Now, is "high frequency trading" a right? You'd have to actually define what you mean by "high frequency trading" to be able to say. Not all "high frequency trading" is a bad thing, so the question is, where do you draw the line? Remember, even "free speech" has limits to it that have been upheld in the courts.
Would this be the same Etherpad whose wikipedia page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etherpad) reports that Google open-sourced the software (http://github.com/ether/pad) at the end of 2009?
Maybe the same Etherpad whose site lists a dozen or so public servers (http://etherpad.org/etherpadsites.html) which you can use to get access to the software?
Yeah, I can see why you'd be pissed that Google just killed the project and never open-sourced it. Now you can't save your company a bundle of money by installing the open-source version on your servers for free, and your only recourse is to bitch and moan about how awful Google is here on Slashdot. I seriously feel your pain, man. After going through so much effort to see if the software was still available, I can only imagine the crushing disappointment you feel now that you realize the software is gone forever, and you'll never be able to work with Etherpad ever again.
(And FFS, mods, the parent is not insightful, interesting, or even remotely relevant. It's simply bitching by a lazy person who can't be arsed to do a simple web search.)
I'm also sure that you *cannot* do all of that yourself in a reasonably timely fashion at no cost.
Pray tell - did your school's LAN infrastructure just magically self-assemble? Or did it cost money to build & maintain? And all of that just for your little cyber sessions - now imagine scaling it up to hundreds or thousands of users spread around the world.
If you continue to assert that it can be done at the scale of this conference without experience, knowledge and a significant hardware investment, you're clearly smoking whatever you're growing in your hydroponic tiers.
Not at all. Consider the Trolley Problem [wikipedia.org]. Imagine that the train goes around and around, killing five people at a time, until someone pushes the fat guy off the bridge. Whoever does so does not have a skewed moral compass, despite the fact they just killed a guy.
Wow, just like that you've solved in a pat and complete fashion a tricky philosophical and ethical "thought exercise." Good for you, you ought to be published.
How is exposing these people to harm by the Taliban going to save any lives? Seriously. I want you to answer that single question. There's no indication that it will hasten the withdrawal of NATO forces. There's no indication that it will make either the NATO or the Taliban more capable of causing civilian deaths as collateral during their operations. What exactly is your logic here in saying that publishing a hit-list for the Taliban is going to "save lives" in any scheme?
What you're arguing is that pushing the fat man in front of the trolley will kill him, and the 5 people on board anyway, so you might as well do it because hey, the guy's fat - he'll die of diabetes or heart failure anyway sooner or later, and those 5 people were going to die on the trolley anyway.
So if you're expecting people to pick sides, then the ones who pick the Taliban are legitimate targets, and the ones who pick the Americans can expect to get murdered?
Both are legitimate targets in a wartime situation - the problem is, what wikileaks has done is publish a fucking directory of informants for the Taliban to use. This isn't about "America good Taliban bad," this is about responsible journalism - a concept that is apparently as foreign to you as it is to Mr. Assange.
Far from perfect - they're human after all, but the Whitehouse was given advance notice and the opportunity to vet the documents, the documents that were actually published by the US military in the first place.
These documents were not "published by the US military in the first place," you twat. These documents are classified operational documents that were leaked by one or more members of the military in violation of regulation and law. Why would you reasonably expect the assistance of the government in publishing documents that the government does not acknowledge your right to possess in the first place?
I disagree. If I hear domestic abuse from the apartment next door, my first thought is to call the police, not to wonder if by calling the police the wife may get battered a hell of a lot more because I called the police.
That's great. Too bad that example is absolutely NOTHING like the situation you're applying it to. What they're doing would be more akin to you calling up the ex-husband who ALSO used to beat her and saying, "Hey buddy, you should get in on some of this action too. Here's her address."
At some point someone has to say "This government is killing more people than would be killed by releasing the information that the government is killing people".
Question: On what planet do you live that you don't read the news reports and criticism of NATO forces causing collateral damage - i.e., killing civilians - during their operations? We already know that civilians are being killed. So what new light has WIkileaks shed on this situation? Where are all the reports documenting war crimes and abuses? Where's the investigative report you're basing all your statements on? Or are you, like Mr. Assange, simply asserting that the military reports show things that "could even be war crimes," with no actual reports to cite that, you know, show evidence of war crimes happening?
If the release of these documents does NOTHING to reduce or prevent civilians from dying, then it's a sick, sick country. And I mean the US, not Afghanistan.
Slashdot Mirror
Why does that matter? If Barack Obama hadn't run for office, he'd still be Barack Obama, lawyer/community organizer from Chicago. If George Bush hadn't run for office, he'd still be George Bush, oil company executive.
They had money & a political organization backing them, but there were no special qualities they brought to the table that "most of us" don't also have. Point is, they're much more like us than they're not, as much as we'd sometimes rather view them as some sort of evil/sociopathic anomaly.
I have a solution for this. Let's start up the Spanish Inquisition again, and make people so afraid of living on earth that they develop a way to colonize other planets!
Many of the most powerful sociopaths in the world are elected from the masses of "most of us." There is very little evidence to support your conclusion that "most of us" are nothing like "them."
The federal budget would like to disagree with that statement. The majority of our federal budget is tied up in providing social programs and infrastructure, not in "war". Yes, the defense department gets a comparatively large portion of the budget. NO, it does not comprise all or even the bulk, of government spending. This is a facile talking point that is, unfortunately, entirely false as well.
Of course, as all the recent administrations have shown us, not having the tax money to spend doesn't mean you can't rack up a hell of a credit card bill. Why let things like "insufficient tax revenues" ruin the party?
Well, there's the ethical question then of whether or not this is justified when there could be other forms of life already there on the planets we've targeted with our life-form "bombs".
And besides, wouldn't you feel foolish if all we did was manage to evolve cockroaches and influenza everywhere? They suck enough here on Earth, let's not help them colonize other planets!
In fairness, quite a bit has expanded in our understanding of the fundamental building blocks of life. DNA was first described in 1953... 57 years later, we are mapping genomes (with some organisms fully mapped), manipulating, replacing and removing genes, and discovering the genetic basis for numerous diseases and other traits at an ever-increasing pace.
Just because it ain't silicon & metal doesn't mean it ain't technology.
Actually, rule of thumb for a standard 30-yr fixed rate mortgage is that 28% of your gross pay is the maximum mortgage payment you should be making. That's a bit more than 25% of your take-home.
And what if you passionately and eloquently communicate your views, and your representative pockets another $5k donation from Comcast and ignores you? Or you passionately and eloquently communicate your views, and your representative says, "I disagree with you, and 52% of my constituents disagree with you, and I want to get re-elected... so you lose kid, sorry?" Have we lost our right to complain then, too? And why do I get the sneaking sense that to you, "disagreeing with what I think" == "doing it Glenn Beck style and looking like a tard?"
Shit. Does this mean that the world isn't as simply black and white as you'd like to imagine it?
No, he's not a hero. He's an idiot.
Yes, you are subject to the government or "anybody else" when fired. This is such a ridiculous statement it's ludicrous. Your car in the employee lot and the stuff in your desk doesn't automatically become your employers' property because you've quit or been fired. Your employer can't just decide to not pay you your remaining wages because "you quit" or "you were fired," and you certainly have professional, ethical, and obviously - legal - obligations to them as part of the termination process that you are expected to follow - among these, turning over keys and passwords that allow access to sensitive data and systems that your employer still owns.
And even if that were the case, he was not fired until AFTER he refused to reveal the passwords - he was being transferred to a new role, and when asked to give the passwords, he balked, then gave incorrect passwords, then sent an email gloating about how they were no doubt "trying to get access". And for all the people who are clamoring about "but the police weren't authorized users," do you really think this would have ended up this way if he had said, "Look, the police officers aren't authorized users so I can't say the password aloud, but I'll write down the password and hand it to you, the guy who I sent a list of passwords & user names to about a week ago?"
This is not about "Maintain our systems after we've turfed you." This is about, "Give us the keys to our property that are in your possession before you leave." That includes passwords.
Now, is 4 years of jail time a reasonable punishment? I think that's a little harsh. But the man is clearly in violation of ethical & professional standards no matter how you cut it, and richly deserves some form of punishment for that.
Yes, it can be "considered classified" at that point - because it *is* still classified. I don't understand why this seems so difficult for people to grasp - public dissemination of classified data does not automatically "declassify" it - it simply makes it "classified information that was leaked to the public in violation of security regulations."
The soldiers who have any need to see this data - primarily, 6+-month-old operational reports and updates - already have access, or can petition for access through the proper military channels to be granted access.
It's not about "putting the genie back in the bottle," it's about "following policies in place, because the public release of these documents has not changed the fact that the documents are still considered classified by the military - of which the soldiers are members."
There is a process and a policy for handling this sort of information. That process & policy does not include "Go read it on wikileaks for shits and giggles." If the military said "Oh well, it's just a security policy, who cares really? Go read it!" They would be undermining their own security practices by saying "It's not a big deal as long as it's on a web site where everybody can read it."
You may not agree with the policy, but that does not change the fact that the policy exists, and is expected to be followed by members of the armed forces.
They are afraid that people not cleared to see this classified data will see it. The rules for handling classified information are expected to be followed - pointing your finger at someone else and saying, "But he looked, too!" is not a defense. Most of these documents were *written* by people on the ground, and as I mentioned above, people with a need to see them *can* see them through the proper channels already, or *can* ask to get permission to see them through the proper channels.
Nope, which is why I don't understand why you'd say it's a good idea to waste - literally - years of your life enforcing an employers' security policy when they can you. "Password is XXXXXXX" takes 10 seconds. "Denial of Services" lawsuit took years, and "sentenced to 4 years" just compounds that.
And you're leaving out the fact that Childs had CC'ed the person asking for passwords a week earlier, on an email containing a list of usernames and passwords that he had set up. What changed in the intervening week, where the guy who you claim "wasn't authorized to have them, by city policy" was deemed an authorized user by Mr. Childs, and the day he was fired, when suddenly Mr. Childs decided he wasn't authorized?
For all the people claiming that giving out passwords constitutes "working for free after you've been fired," stop and consider this: what constitutes more work - saying (or writing) down one sentence - "The password is XXXXXXXXX", or enforcing your version of an employers' security policy for them after you've been let go ? Less than 10 seconds of writing or speaking, versus a 4 year jail term, and years spent in courts over a ridiculous semantic issue?
If you took your policy of security very seriously, wouldn't you be a little upset about somebody taking about 90,000 "secured" documents, and publishing them on the internet?
If you took the safety of people who are providing you with intelligence seriously, wouldn't you be in an "uproar" if somebody leaked 90,000 documents in which some of those people are mentioned by name, village, and even occasionally GPS coordinates?
Wouldn't that be enough to cause an uproar? Or must there also be some hidden evidence of war crimes for it to cause an uproar?
Have you bothered reading or listening to a BIT of the coverage? BOTH sides have acknowledged that it absolutely identifies specific people, by name, village, GPS coordinates, and sometimes even references to other family members.
Honestly, do you only get your news from the /. comments?
It's not a "straw man" dummy, it's a question about your thought process. You seem blithely - almost vapidly - unaware of anything about what's in the documents, but that doesn't stop you from characterizing them as "considered so damning." Thus I'm forced to ask if you reach this conclusion (despite your admitted & demonstrated lack of any knowledge of what's actually in them) based on some predisposition to believe that anything related to the military must be sinister, or if you have some other information that nobody else is privy to which allows you to assert that they're so damning?
Well, plenty of idiots, at least.
Please explain exactly how they're "so damning"? I haven't seen any actual evidence of war crimes being uncovered, just a lot of talk about how "they might" show evidence from Mr. Assange & his supporters.
I'm really curious whether or not you have some special knowledge of the docs in question, or if you're just uncritically accepting the tenet that the military can do nothing right, and therefore any document written by the military will probably give evidence of some heinous crime against humanity?
Yes, there's specific content they don't want the soldiers to see - specifically, all of it, unless they have both appropriate security clearance, and a need to know.
This is standard policy for handling classified information, and they are reminding soldiers that it is still in effect, as publication doesn't magically make classified documents become declassified. Soldiers viewing this material without proper clearance & need to know are violating security protocols.
I know it's fun to assume there must be some sinister reason for the military reiterating its policy on handling classified documents, but in this case, I think it's very likely that this is simply a policy reminder.
Do you really think there's going to be a smoking gun in these documents? Who in god's name would write a sitrep stating, "Killed 27 noncombatant civilians after torturing and maiming them. Then proceeded to burn 3 mosques?"
Kind of hard for Mr. Assange to imply that this wikiLeaks event is at all related to the Dutch withdrawal, considering it's been in the works since February:
They didn't just see these documents and say, "Damn, let's get out of there." They're two separate events.
seems to me that you have no clue what you're talking about, methinks.
This information came FROM the military. It is still classified data until the appropriate classification authority directs that it be declassified, or until the data has aged the appropriate time (10 years, I believe?) with no extension of classification, at which point it automatically is considered declassified.
Military personnel without proper clearance to see this data who went and looked at it would be breaching the security they are supposed to be maintaining.
I don't know if you've done it recently, but I've ported numbers twice in the past couple years (once from Sprint -> ATT for my personal phone, once from Sprint -> Verizon for my work blackberry).
Both times, the transition was incredibly easy and fast. I'm sure there are some people who have had a hash made of a port, but I can't imagine it's all that hard in the majority of cases.
That would also probably be a pyrrhic victory for Google: they'd be cutting off their own source of revenue by refusing to serve content. Less ads served = significantly less revenue.
They're certainly influential, and they could probably afford to buy a few senators of their own with ease, but they aren't the only force in the market.
I'm uninformed because you couldn't get the open source project running?
1) There are public servers with etherpad already running on it.
2) The source code is available for free, online, as an open-source project.
3) If you do not have the skill to download and run it yourself, take the money you would have paid Etherpad or Google to purchase a copy, and hire someone to set it up for you.
The person I responded to was proclaiming his dissatisfaction that Etherpad was dead - it is most clearly NOT dead, and has been open-sourced, which he explicitly stated it never was. None of what he stated was accurate, and yet I'm the uninformed arse for pointing out the inaccuracies and providing links to the stuff he claims doesn't exist?
I expected a thank you from him, frankly.
You are an idiot. The stock market is not a zero sum game because it is not a closed system. For it to be a zero sum game, every time one company on the market managed to produce a product that was worth value, other companies would have to fail to make up for that loss.
Lucky for us, that's not the way it works. Maybe you should actually spend a few minutes learning how it works too, and you'll see that you're clueless.
Learn how the judicial review process works. Congress can declare anything they want to be illegal, and pass a law saying so. And then the courts can strike down those laws when someone challenges them, and affirm that there *is* a right that is being abridged by that law.
The "legality" of something is not a perfect indicator of whether or not that thing is a "right". It used to be "the law" that a black person couldn't marry a white person. Or sit in the same area. Because that law got passed, are you saying that there was no abridgement of the rights of black people? Or would you instead draw the obvious conclusion that the legislature sometimes (maybe even OFTEN times) gets it wrong, and that's part of why the courts are there, to uphold our rights when the government infringes on them?
Now, is "high frequency trading" a right? You'd have to actually define what you mean by "high frequency trading" to be able to say. Not all "high frequency trading" is a bad thing, so the question is, where do you draw the line? Remember, even "free speech" has limits to it that have been upheld in the courts.
Would this be the same Etherpad whose wikipedia page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etherpad) reports that Google open-sourced the software (http://github.com/ether/pad) at the end of 2009?
Maybe the same Etherpad whose site lists a dozen or so public servers (http://etherpad.org/etherpadsites.html) which you can use to get access to the software?
Yeah, I can see why you'd be pissed that Google just killed the project and never open-sourced it. Now you can't save your company a bundle of money by installing the open-source version on your servers for free, and your only recourse is to bitch and moan about how awful Google is here on Slashdot. I seriously feel your pain, man. After going through so much effort to see if the software was still available, I can only imagine the crushing disappointment you feel now that you realize the software is gone forever, and you'll never be able to work with Etherpad ever again.
(And FFS, mods, the parent is not insightful, interesting, or even remotely relevant. It's simply bitching by a lazy person who can't be arsed to do a simple web search.)
I'm sure you *can* do all of that yourself.
I'm also sure that you *cannot* do all of that yourself in a reasonably timely fashion at no cost.
Pray tell - did your school's LAN infrastructure just magically self-assemble? Or did it cost money to build & maintain? And all of that just for your little cyber sessions - now imagine scaling it up to hundreds or thousands of users spread around the world.
If you continue to assert that it can be done at the scale of this conference without experience, knowledge and a significant hardware investment, you're clearly smoking whatever you're growing in your hydroponic tiers.
Wow, just like that you've solved in a pat and complete fashion a tricky philosophical and ethical "thought exercise." Good for you, you ought to be published.
How is exposing these people to harm by the Taliban going to save any lives? Seriously. I want you to answer that single question. There's no indication that it will hasten the withdrawal of NATO forces. There's no indication that it will make either the NATO or the Taliban more capable of causing civilian deaths as collateral during their operations. What exactly is your logic here in saying that publishing a hit-list for the Taliban is going to "save lives" in any scheme?
What you're arguing is that pushing the fat man in front of the trolley will kill him, and the 5 people on board anyway, so you might as well do it because hey, the guy's fat - he'll die of diabetes or heart failure anyway sooner or later, and those 5 people were going to die on the trolley anyway.
Both are legitimate targets in a wartime situation - the problem is, what wikileaks has done is publish a fucking directory of informants for the Taliban to use. This isn't about "America good Taliban bad," this is about responsible journalism - a concept that is apparently as foreign to you as it is to Mr. Assange.
These documents were not "published by the US military in the first place," you twat. These documents are classified operational documents that were leaked by one or more members of the military in violation of regulation and law. Why would you reasonably expect the assistance of the government in publishing documents that the government does not acknowledge your right to possess in the first place?
That's great. Too bad that example is absolutely NOTHING like the situation you're applying it to. What they're doing would be more akin to you calling up the ex-husband who ALSO used to beat her and saying, "Hey buddy, you should get in on some of this action too. Here's her address."
Question: On what planet do you live that you don't read the news reports and criticism of NATO forces causing collateral damage - i.e., killing civilians - during their operations? We already know that civilians are being killed. So what new light has WIkileaks shed on this situation? Where are all the reports documenting war crimes and abuses? Where's the investigative report you're basing all your statements on? Or are you, like Mr. Assange, simply asserting that the military reports show things that "could even be war crimes," with no actual reports to cite that, you know, show evidence of war crimes happening?
Your fai