Mac Pro's are terrible at raw bang for buck, but since they have custom mobos and everything else, they are much beter optimized for quiet cooling over ATX.
Compare to my home office desktop. It is VERY quiet.
Deluxe ATX motherboard with large heatsinks, no fans. i7 with liquid cooling, enermax ultra quiet power supply. SSD primary drive.
The big video card fan is the only real noise it makes, and only when gaming... when doing other tasks those fans slow right down. I suppose I could upgrade that to liquid too but when I'm gaming I have the volume up high enough that I can't hear it anyway, and its virtually silent when im just at the desktop.
Now sure I spent a LOT more on it than one has to to get a decent PC. Liquid cooling cpu's, premium cases, power supplies etc all cost more. But even so it is still easily 40% cheaper then the price of an entry level mac pro, with a far better video card, 16GB RAM instead of 6GB, a 256MB SSD + a 1TB secondary, and a blu ray player. The only spec the base Mac can boast over it is a "Xeon". But that xeon benchmarks at less than half the i7 I use. So go nuts and get a dual xeon, pay twice as much and it will still be slower for nearly everything I'd do with it.
Having one in an office is quite nice
If you want a powerful but quiet workstation class PC, you can do a lot better than a Mac Pro for a LOT less money.
You buy the indie bundle... humble bundles for example and you are entitled to a DRM free copy. Awesome.
You use the steam key anyway because its as easy as using any other linux package manager. You select what you want, you click play and a few minutes later your playing. You switch to your laptop up stairs, launch steam, click what you want... and start playing.
The DRM free direct downloads are great in the event steam fails or is down or something. But honestly, for all that I dislike about steam, it is easy to use. I use GoG a lot too, but find myself wishing that I could download and install those games via steam as well. Its just nice not to have all the clutter of manual downloads, manual patches, expansion packs, etc.
Because its really no simpler to set one up on OSX than on Linux. Its not really any harder either, but why pay for OSX and Mac mini hardware when you can take your pick of free operating systems, with a wider array of more capable hardware than a mac mini.
Doing postfix and dovecot on OSX is going to involve editing config files, terminal command line interface work, and so on. So if you are comfortable with that on OSX... you might as well use BSD or Linux, and you'll have a lot better community support.
Do you think the laws regarding disclosure of confidential documents are friendly advice?
Do you think the US government is entitled to break the law? Are the laws dictating their behaviour just friendly advice?
Misguided good motivations are just as capable of killing people as evil intentions.
No question there. But we don't punish good intentions to the same extent as malicious reasons for very good reasons. Intent matters.
I guess we've survived Manning, but I'm not interested in finding out how many Mannings we can afford. How many inncoent deaths will you tolerate due to whistleblowers with bad judgement?
As opposed to the innocent deaths I'm supposed to tolerate due to potential whistleblowers who lacked the confidence to come forward?
The action was traitorous and was damaging to the US. That makes him a traitor and an enemy.
So David Petraeus should be strung up as well right? He was reckless, stupid, and violated multiple oaths. We can't afford generals who allow themselves to be compromised like that either, but he just lost his job, and that's fine. And that's all Manning deserves too.
After all, there were tons of laws and threats made against Hussein's Iraq - are empty threats a superior means of foreign diplomacy? Bad leaders make their people suffer; it's dishonest to put 100% blame on the US for every innocent killed in the course of military operations since 9/11.
And our only concern there was oil. Not people. Not diplomacy. Not democracy. Not liberty. Not prestige. Just oil and the politics of oil. There are plenty of shit-holes in the world, some of them far worse than Iraq ever was.
Is the US 100% to blame for every death in Iraq? Of course nothing is ever so simplistic, but American involvement in the middle east has never been about anything other than resources. And that meddling, propping up dictators, playing favorites, playing kingmaker, and playing arms dealer to all sides in the meantime. That's going to have consequences.
Hosting a database in a VM, especially a shared VM, is a bad idea. Unless you are absolutely positive it will be used *very* sparingly.
That's the use case im proposing. A small business accounting system or point of sale system for example is measured in "transactions per minute" if not "transactions per hour"
If you are dealing with something that is doing "transactions per second" then yes, dedicated hardware all the way... but then... if you are doing that, shouldn't things like ECC RAM and other proper server hardware features matter to you?
Medium volume email too. I've run lots of small business mail servers in a VM. But if it reaches the point that I'm willing to pay to colocate a server... then I'm past the point where I'd think a mac mini is the right platform for it... and OSX for a mail server? Not my first choice by a long shot, not for any mail server.
Windows XP boxes are used as a servers all the time too. But you don't colocate a SFF Dell Vostro with XP,
The issue here, as i see it, isn't that people are using mac minis as servers -- its that they are co-locating them.
Clearly there is a demand for 'affordable' OSX servers, and the fact that companies are rack mounting minis in custom enclosures i think speaks more to just how poor value a mac pro is than anything else.
So much this. A VPS is NEVER the same as your own hardware, even hardware as lowly as a mac mini.
Get a decent VPS. You get what you pay for. The newer stuff with clustering / load balancing / live migration means you don't get stuck with a 'hog' as a VM neighbor on your host machine, which was definitely a hassle on the earlier VPS stuff. I have active VPS and CoLo services, so I'm not speculating here. VPS has gotten a lot better.
But that said, yes, a VPS is not the same as dedicated hardware; I won't try to dispute that.
But if your needs are in the dedicated hardware market and you are willing to pay the price premium to get into dedicated hardware but you don't want ECC ram, large cpu cache (Xeon), multiple NICs...? Who out there really needs the performance of dedicated hardware but can't justify putting it on proper server class hardware?
It's nice to knwo you know every possible reason soneone could want to do something.
Care to suggest a valid reason?
We certinaly wouldn't want some who usis OSX to be able to work with something they knw now, would we? idiot.
I covered that option. It amounts to paying significantly more for a significantly inferior solution just to avoid learning something new.
why? oh, because its what you like.
No. Because for a small scale database / hobby database / fun database a VPS is far more ecnomical and just as capable. Filemaker on a windows VPS is FAR cheaper than colocating a mac mini. And if you want mysql postgresql or something? colocating a mac is simply idiotic.
they aren't expensive, they run cooler and require less electricity and space.
More expensive than a VPS. More space. More electricity.
If you need more performance and capacity than a VPS will give you, then you need a proper server. A mac mini isn't one.
It isn't a inferior server solution for small business.
A small business doing what? What small business needs to colocate a mac-mini? For what purpose?
Then don't, asshole.
Give me a good example of what a colocated mac mini is actually good for, that doesn't cost quadruple what an alternative solution would cost.
Spending co-location level costs for an ical server for a small business? That's simply idiotic. You can get hosted ical server for a small business for a YEAR for less than colocating a mac mini for a month. A small Filemaker database for a small business? Same thing... a windows VPS for a year will cost less than a couple months colocating a mac mini. A VPN server so you can have a US ip address?!
Even after you pay an IT consultant to set it up for you because you don't know anything but OSX you are still ahead within a few months.
Show me something that actually makes sense to do with a colocated mac mini.
Its perfectly suitable as a home server if you happened to have an extra one and wanted to use it. But I agree 100% with your post.
There is no rational reason to select a mac mini for a colocated server. Even most of the suggested uses in the summary don't make any sense. Databases should be hosted on linux or windows... even Filemaker can be hosted on windows. Mail servers, calendar servers, etc... a colocated ANYTHING for a VPN server is absurd, and plux media / streaming / etc... again... for the price it just doesn't make sense. For fun / toy servers virtual / shared hosting make sense at a fraction of the cost. Colocating dedidated hardware ?.If you need that... a mac mini make's no sense.
The only people who i could see wanting this are people who simply have no idea how to use another operating system, don't want to learn, and don't mind paying a premium for a substantially inferior server solution.
Sounds like Apple users to me.
(I hate to troll.. but come on that was irresistible, and I say it as a Macbook Pro owner myself.)
That's a cop-out answer up there with "I was just following orders." Neither holds any water. He has a duty and responsibility to think for himself.
Now, if his release *had* served the public interest, you'd expect public support for a presidential pardon; we'd say he is guilty of a crime but for a good cause.
Agreed100%. I think Manning blew it. But when judging him we need to look at his motivations, and they were good, even if misguided. Therefore he should be fired, charged with leaking classified documents, and sentenced modestly. He is not a traitor nor an enemy of America.
But the fact that we're debating this at all shows that the leak is harder to judge if it's not outright unjustified.
That is the dilemma every potential whistleblower faces -- if he's wrong; if the public doesn't rally behind him; then he's a traitor who should rot in a secret prison for the rest of his life?! That's not right.
This is precisely why there is debate about creating law to protect whistleblowers -- because we as a society don't want government crime reporting suppressed because the people who could report it are too afraid of the consequences. Good intentions should not be so harshly punished, even if society ultimately decides they were misguided.
From my perspective, I saw indiscriminate leaking of documents with a goal of self-aggrandizement.
That's why he did it anonymously?
Aid and comfort to the enemy. Official US documents have propaganda value. The "Collateral Murder" framing of the helicopter in combat is a prime example. "Innocent and unarmed people died! War crimes!"
Go ahead and count how many innocent people we've killed around the world since 9/11. We've isolated ourselves from even having to think about it, its disgusting. 10s of thousands. We should be subjected to having to watch them all die. Maybe then we'd figure out it was wrong.
Making the documents public is giving that information to the enemy. "public" includes "enemy" - unless you live in a universe where enemies are incapable of gathering public information. Congratulations on making my point.
Public also includes public, the people ultimately responsible for what the government does. Governement by the people for the people and all that. The needs of the public to know what illegal activity the government is keeping secret transcends any vague potential some poorly defined "enemy" might gather from the information.
Manning's job was to safeguard the documents he had access to - but he chose instead to leak the documents to strangers on his personal judgement.
Manning's duty as a citizen and a patriot is to report the crimes perpetrated by the government to the public. That this conflicts with his job description is a distant secondary consideration.
Recently, we've seen attacks on US embassies rationalized because of some independent filmmaker who lives in the US releasing an obscure internet video. If that's enough pretext for violence, then what of out-of-context documents from the US gov't itself?
What of it? You just said they don't need out of context documents from the govt itself to come up with a pretext.
The difference between your analogy and real life is that going faster than the speed limit is a known and authorized action for the ambulance driver when dealing with emergency transport and his training covers his actions; releasing classified documents was not in Manning's job description nor was he authorized or trained to do so.
Except that you are wrong and there is no difference at all. "Whistleblowing" is a well known and recognized course of action when dealing with government secrets you have been entrusted but those secrets contain information showing the government is itself engaging in illegal and immoral activities. You may recall the Pentagon Papers, or perhaps Watergate?
Do you really not understand that attacking your own government is just one means of aiding the enemies of that government?
Wow. Just wow. The government is 'by the people for the people'. A government conducting illegal and immoral activities and keeping them secret is neither, not merely secret from the public but secret even from the elected representatives who are allegedly responsible for representing us. How the can the government represent the people when the government is keeping secrets even from the elected representatives?!
Exposing those secrets is not "attacking your own government" it is, quite bluntly, a patriotic attempt to try and fix it.
"I didn't intend to drunkenly T-bone that other car and kill that family" is not a valid legal or moral defense. I agreed to drive safely and to be liable for my actions when I got my driver's license and when I turned on my vehicle.
Why did you include "drunkenly"? Why wasn't it enough that he hit another car and caused loss of life? Didn't he agree to drive safely and be liable for his actions when he got his driver's license and when he turned on his vehicle? So when he hits someone while sober, what's the difference? Why did you feel he had to not only kill someone, but that he had to be drunk too to make your case?
I'll tell you why: because choosing to drive drunk has been legally established to effectively add a layer of intent, where there otherwise wasn't one.
I can conceive of no rational universe in which I "unintentionally" take confidential documents and upload them to a stranger on the Internet.
So what?
That just establishes intent to make the documents public.
Making classified documents public does not equate to an intention to aid the enemy. And in this case it was, if anything, the opposite, it was an intent to bring to light what he perceived to immoral and illegal activities by our own government. Moreover the documents primarily embarrassed the government, and the enemy derived no real aid from it.
To restate your flawed car analogy, I might say, "The ambulance driver intended to bring the shooting victim to the hospital, and in his haste he exceeded the speed limit where he felt it was safe but nonetheless potentially increased the risk to other drivers and pedestrians; any accident that could have resulted was clearly not intended, and as it turned out, nobody got hurt anyway."
Lets throw the book at the wanton criminal ambulance driver. Right?
He knowingly released a large stash of documents that he did not have authorization to release
And he's already pleaded guilty to that, and will be sentenced for that. So that should be enough. Why invent more serious things to convict him with if this is all he really did.
Why even have this as a separate crime from outright treason if you are going to infer treason the moment anything slightly classified is ever leaked?
He voluntarily entered that commitment, which is why he had any access; violating that commitment is why he's in the trouble he is in.
And he's pleaded guilty to violating that commitment. Howwever he is in trouble for considerably more than just this.
Leaking them to wikileaks or the news *is* leaking them to the enemy. It's not as exclusive (everybody now knows the information is out there), but it has the exact same effect.
But that was not his intention. Intent matters here.
That you know of. Would you like to set the bar even lower?
Yes, I absolutely want conclusive evidence that the enemy was overtly and substantially directly aided by his actions.
Do you want to live in a world where something you do unintentially that enables a terrorist to maybe derive some sort of vague advancement of his cause will lead you to being convicted of treason?
Because that time you left the back yard gate open... well a terrorist could have used that opportunity to evade capture. I'm charging you with treason. What? There was no terrorist skulking about beyond your house? Well... none that you know of... but there could have been!
Aiding the enemy doesn't have to be a deliberate choice. You don't have to say "today I will aid the enemy."
You do to be convicted of "attempting to aid the enemy". To attempt something requires intent.
If you just want to convict him of "aiding the enemy" instead of "attempting to aid the enemy" THEN you can maybe forego intent, but then you would at least have to prove that he did in fact aid them. So far the analysis hasn't shown there to have been any material aid rendered.
Embarrassing the government, and making a bunch of diplomats look like the complete asshats they are, and exposing dubious behavior to the world is not "aiding the enemy".
So what you are arguing is that the material he released was so meaningless that it makes no difference to anyone. His valiant bravery in releasing documents that seriously compromise US diplomatic efforts didn't actually have any effect on anything at all...
No. I'm arguing that it didn't aid the enemy. Aiding the enemy should be a very significant and overt bar.
Should we charge anyone trying to get rid of rapiscan airport scanners for aiding the enemy? What about people who argue against having to take their shoes off and be subjected to full body searches every time they fly, or people who object to no fly lists, and warrantless searches within 100 miles of the coast? In theory these measures make it harder for terrorists to hurt us, so anyone seeking to get rid of these measures is aiding the enemy? The majority of slashdot are traitors?
Aiding the enemy needs to be a LOT more overt than that.
It seems people are confusing civilian laws with military rules. He is under military oath to protect confidential materials. He knowingly broke that oath and under military law is being prosecuted accordingly.
He has been charged with a couple dozen offenses. He's already pleaded guilty with respect to the protection of confidential materials.
But the remaining charges to which he has pleaded innocent go well beyond the violation of failing to protect those confidential materials.
You are the one who needs to conclusively prove that he wasn't attempting to aid the enemy by releasing volumes of military secrets in time of war.
No. The burden of proof relies on you to conclusively prove that he was attempting to aid the enemy. Innocent until proven guilty... remember?
And its absurd on its face to argue that he was "attempting to aid the enemy", based on his actions. If he was attempting to aid the enemy he would have leaked them straight to the enemy. Its bloody obvious that by attempting to leak to news agencies, and then after that failed to a whistleblower site that he was attempting to alert the public what its own government was doing. "Attempting to aid the enemy" just isn't on the table.
Now you could try and argue that his actions incidentally aided the enemy... but then you run up against the conclusive analysis that it had no practical effect.
So that leaves you with... he wasn't trying to aid the enemy with the leaks, and he didn't incidentally aid them either.
So now your strategy is to make inapplicable analogies to worthless diamond thefts? Is that some sort of prosecution variation of the Chewbacca defense?
His point wasn't that cryptography wasn't useful, but simply that dealing with modern threats doesn't require "better cryptography" because modern threats aren't attacking the crypto. They are attacking the public key infrastructure (PKI), they are attacking the end points before encryption/after decryption.
Our security focus is there. In other words, PGP doesn't protect your email, if you have a virus on your system sending everything to an attacker after its decrypted. PGP doesn't protect your email if the PKI is hacked, and you are signing mail with public keys generated by people impersonating the intended recipients.
Etc. Etc.
A better PGP crypto algorithm isn't going to help you here.
Good point. Thanks for noting that Apple can make a single version run on all Modern versions of windows, but can't manage it on their own operating system.
Slashdot Mirror
Mac Pro's are terrible at raw bang for buck, but since they have custom mobos and everything else, they are much beter optimized for quiet cooling over ATX.
Compare to my home office desktop. It is VERY quiet.
Deluxe ATX motherboard with large heatsinks, no fans. i7 with liquid cooling, enermax ultra quiet power supply. SSD primary drive.
The big video card fan is the only real noise it makes, and only when gaming... when doing other tasks those fans slow right down. I suppose I could upgrade that to liquid too but when I'm gaming I have the volume up high enough that I can't hear it anyway, and its virtually silent when im just at the desktop.
Now sure I spent a LOT more on it than one has to to get a decent PC. Liquid cooling cpu's, premium cases, power supplies etc all cost more. But even so it is still easily 40% cheaper then the price of an entry level mac pro, with a far better video card, 16GB RAM instead of 6GB, a 256MB SSD + a 1TB secondary, and a blu ray player. The only spec the base Mac can boast over it is a "Xeon". But that xeon benchmarks at less than half the i7 I use. So go nuts and get a dual xeon, pay twice as much and it will still be slower for nearly everything I'd do with it.
Having one in an office is quite nice
If you want a powerful but quiet workstation class PC, you can do a lot better than a Mac Pro for a LOT less money.
Utterly pointless in a datacentre.
Just utterly pointless, period, if you ask me.
You buy the indie bundle... humble bundles for example and you are entitled to a DRM free copy. Awesome.
You use the steam key anyway because its as easy as using any other linux package manager. You select what you want, you click play and a few minutes later your playing. You switch to your laptop up stairs, launch steam, click what you want ... and start playing.
The DRM free direct downloads are great in the event steam fails or is down or something. But honestly, for all that I dislike about steam, it is easy to use. I use GoG a lot too, but find myself wishing that I could download and install those games via steam as well. Its just nice not to have all the clutter of manual downloads, manual patches, expansion packs, etc.
Why not OS X for a mail server?
Because its really no simpler to set one up on OSX than on Linux. Its not really any harder either, but why pay for OSX and Mac mini hardware when you can take your pick of free operating systems, with a wider array of more capable hardware than a mac mini.
Doing postfix and dovecot on OSX is going to involve editing config files, terminal command line interface work, and so on. So if you are comfortable with that on OSX... you might as well use BSD or Linux, and you'll have a lot better community support.
Do you think the laws regarding disclosure of confidential documents are friendly advice?
Do you think the US government is entitled to break the law? Are the laws dictating their behaviour just friendly advice?
Misguided good motivations are just as capable of killing people as evil intentions.
No question there. But we don't punish good intentions to the same extent as malicious reasons for very good reasons. Intent matters.
I guess we've survived Manning, but I'm not interested in finding out how many Mannings we can afford. How many inncoent deaths will you tolerate due to whistleblowers with bad judgement?
As opposed to the innocent deaths I'm supposed to tolerate due to potential whistleblowers who lacked the confidence to come forward?
The action was traitorous and was damaging to the US. That makes him a traitor and an enemy.
So David Petraeus should be strung up as well right? He was reckless, stupid, and violated multiple oaths. We can't afford generals who allow themselves to be compromised like that either, but he just lost his job, and that's fine. And that's all Manning deserves too.
After all, there were tons of laws and threats made against Hussein's Iraq - are empty threats a superior means of foreign diplomacy? Bad leaders make their people suffer; it's dishonest to put 100% blame on the US for every innocent killed in the course of military operations since 9/11.
And our only concern there was oil. Not people. Not diplomacy. Not democracy. Not liberty. Not prestige. Just oil and the politics of oil. There are plenty of shit-holes in the world, some of them far worse than Iraq ever was.
Is the US 100% to blame for every death in Iraq? Of course nothing is ever so simplistic, but American involvement in the middle east has never been about anything other than resources. And that meddling, propping up dictators, playing favorites, playing kingmaker, and playing arms dealer to all sides in the meantime. That's going to have consequences.
Hosting a database in a VM, especially a shared VM, is a bad idea. Unless you are absolutely positive it will be used *very* sparingly.
That's the use case im proposing. A small business accounting system or point of sale system for example is measured in "transactions per minute" if not "transactions per hour"
If you are dealing with something that is doing "transactions per second" then yes, dedicated hardware all the way... but then ... if you are doing that, shouldn't things like ECC RAM and other proper server hardware features matter to you?
Medium volume email too. I've run lots of small business mail servers in a VM. But if it reaches the point that I'm willing to pay to colocate a server... then I'm past the point where I'd think a mac mini is the right platform for it... and OSX for a mail server? Not my first choice by a long shot, not for any mail server.
Windows XP boxes are used as a servers all the time too. But you don't colocate a SFF Dell Vostro with XP,
The issue here, as i see it, isn't that people are using mac minis as servers -- its that they are co-locating them.
Clearly there is a demand for 'affordable' OSX servers, and the fact that companies are rack mounting minis in custom enclosures i think speaks more to just how poor value a mac pro is than anything else.
So much this. A VPS is NEVER the same as your own hardware, even hardware as lowly as a mac mini.
Get a decent VPS. You get what you pay for. The newer stuff with clustering / load balancing / live migration means you don't get stuck with a 'hog' as a VM neighbor on your host machine, which was definitely a hassle on the earlier VPS stuff. I have active VPS and CoLo services, so I'm not speculating here. VPS has gotten a lot better.
But that said, yes, a VPS is not the same as dedicated hardware; I won't try to dispute that.
But if your needs are in the dedicated hardware market and you are willing to pay the price premium to get into dedicated hardware but you don't want ECC ram, large cpu cache (Xeon), multiple NICs...? Who out there really needs the performance of dedicated hardware but can't justify putting it on proper server class hardware?
A colo provider can put 8 minis in a 1U shelf/tray
From what I can see 2 mac minis fit in a 1U shelf. The "8 mac mini racks" are 5U.
Sure, you can achieve the same 'magic' with 8 VMs on a 1U server,
Exactly. So ... in 5U, that's 40 VMs -- comfortably. You can likely do even more.
That changes the math considerably.
It's nice to knwo you know every possible reason soneone could want to do something.
Care to suggest a valid reason?
We certinaly wouldn't want some who usis OSX to be able to work with something they knw now, would we?
idiot.
I covered that option. It amounts to paying significantly more for a significantly inferior solution just to avoid learning something new.
why? oh, because its what you like.
No. Because for a small scale database / hobby database / fun database a VPS is far more ecnomical and just as capable. Filemaker on a windows VPS is FAR cheaper than colocating a mac mini. And if you want mysql postgresql or something? colocating a mac is simply idiotic.
they aren't expensive, they run cooler and require less electricity and space.
More expensive than a VPS. More space. More electricity.
If you need more performance and capacity than a VPS will give you, then you need a proper server. A mac mini isn't one.
It isn't a inferior server solution for small business.
A small business doing what? What small business needs to colocate a mac-mini? For what purpose?
Then don't, asshole.
Give me a good example of what a colocated mac mini is actually good for, that doesn't cost quadruple what an alternative solution would cost.
Spending co-location level costs for an ical server for a small business? That's simply idiotic. You can get hosted ical server for a small business for a YEAR for less than colocating a mac mini for a month. A small Filemaker database for a small business? Same thing... a windows VPS for a year will cost less than a couple months colocating a mac mini. A VPN server so you can have a US ip address?!
Even after you pay an IT consultant to set it up for you because you don't know anything but OSX you are still ahead within a few months.
Show me something that actually makes sense to do with a colocated mac mini.
Its perfectly suitable as a home server if you happened to have an extra one and wanted to use it. But I agree 100% with your post.
There is no rational reason to select a mac mini for a colocated server. Even most of the suggested uses in the summary don't make any sense. Databases should be hosted on linux or windows... even Filemaker can be hosted on windows. Mail servers, calendar servers, etc... a colocated ANYTHING for a VPN server is absurd, and plux media / streaming / etc... again... for the price it just doesn't make sense. For fun / toy servers virtual / shared hosting make sense at a fraction of the cost. Colocating dedidated hardware ?.If you need that... a mac mini make's no sense.
The only people who i could see wanting this are people who simply have no idea how to use another operating system, don't want to learn, and don't mind paying a premium for a substantially inferior server solution.
Sounds like Apple users to me.
(I hate to troll.. but come on that was irresistible, and I say it as a Macbook Pro owner myself.)
I know right. The grocery store had a sale on cheese last week, and then today the sale ended.
So that means the grocery store just hit me with a 30% price increase on cheese!
Nevermind that it was exactly the same price it's been all year, except for the sale last week.
Above Manning's paygrade
That's a cop-out answer up there with "I was just following orders." Neither holds any water. He has a duty and responsibility to think for himself.
Now, if his release *had* served the public interest, you'd expect public support for a presidential pardon; we'd say he is guilty of a crime but for a good cause.
Agreed100%. I think Manning blew it. But when judging him we need to look at his motivations, and they were good, even if misguided. Therefore he should be fired, charged with leaking classified documents, and sentenced modestly. He is not a traitor nor an enemy of America.
But the fact that we're debating this at all shows that the leak is harder to judge if it's not outright unjustified.
That is the dilemma every potential whistleblower faces -- if he's wrong; if the public doesn't rally behind him; then he's a traitor who should rot in a secret prison for the rest of his life?! That's not right.
This is precisely why there is debate about creating law to protect whistleblowers -- because we as a society don't want government crime reporting suppressed because the people who could report it are too afraid of the consequences. Good intentions should not be so harshly punished, even if society ultimately decides they were misguided.
From my perspective, I saw indiscriminate leaking of documents with a goal of self-aggrandizement.
That's why he did it anonymously?
Aid and comfort to the enemy. Official US documents have propaganda value. The "Collateral Murder" framing of the helicopter in combat is a prime example. "Innocent and unarmed people died! War crimes!"
Go ahead and count how many innocent people we've killed around the world since 9/11. We've isolated ourselves from even having to think about it, its disgusting. 10s of thousands. We should be subjected to having to watch them all die. Maybe then we'd figure out it was wrong.
Making the documents public is giving that information to the enemy. "public" includes "enemy" - unless you live in a universe where enemies are incapable of gathering public information. Congratulations on making my point.
Public also includes public, the people ultimately responsible for what the government does. Governement by the people for the people and all that. The needs of the public to know what illegal activity the government is keeping secret transcends any vague potential some poorly defined "enemy" might gather from the information.
Manning's job was to safeguard the documents he had access to - but he chose instead to leak the documents to strangers on his personal judgement.
Manning's duty as a citizen and a patriot is to report the crimes perpetrated by the government to the public. That this conflicts with his job description is a distant secondary consideration.
Recently, we've seen attacks on US embassies rationalized because of some independent filmmaker who lives in the US releasing an obscure internet video. If that's enough pretext for violence, then what of out-of-context documents from the US gov't itself?
What of it? You just said they don't need out of context documents from the govt itself to come up with a pretext.
The difference between your analogy and real life is that going faster than the speed limit is a known and authorized action for the ambulance driver when dealing with emergency transport and his training covers his actions; releasing classified documents was not in Manning's job description nor was he authorized or trained to do so.
Except that you are wrong and there is no difference at all. "Whistleblowing" is a well known and recognized course of action when dealing with government secrets you have been entrusted but those secrets contain information showing the government is itself engaging in illegal and immoral activities. You may recall the Pentagon Papers, or perhaps Watergate?
Do you really not understand that attacking your own government is just one means of aiding the enemies of that government?
Wow. Just wow. The government is 'by the people for the people'. A government conducting illegal and immoral activities and keeping them secret is neither, not merely secret from the public but secret even from the elected representatives who are allegedly responsible for representing us. How the can the government represent the people when the government is keeping secrets even from the elected representatives?!
Exposing those secrets is not "attacking your own government" it is, quite bluntly, a patriotic attempt to try and fix it.
Leaking the documents to inform the public was intentional.
"Aiding the enemy" by leaking the documents, was at worst an unintended consequence. (And something which may not even have occurred.)
You are being pretty thick if you can't see the distinction.
"I didn't intend to drunkenly T-bone that other car and kill that family" is not a valid legal or moral defense. I agreed to drive safely and to be liable for my actions when I got my driver's license and when I turned on my vehicle.
Why did you include "drunkenly"?
Why wasn't it enough that he hit another car and caused loss of life?
Didn't he agree to drive safely and be liable for his actions when he got his driver's license and when he turned on his vehicle? So when he hits someone while sober, what's the difference? Why did you feel he had to not only kill someone, but that he had to be drunk too to make your case?
I'll tell you why: because choosing to drive drunk has been legally established to effectively add a layer of intent, where there otherwise wasn't one.
I can conceive of no rational universe in which I "unintentionally" take confidential documents and upload them to a stranger on the Internet.
So what?
That just establishes intent to make the documents public.
Making classified documents public does not equate to an intention to aid the enemy. And in this case it was, if anything, the opposite, it was an intent to bring to light what he perceived to immoral and illegal activities by our own government. Moreover the documents primarily embarrassed the government, and the enemy derived no real aid from it.
To restate your flawed car analogy, I might say, "The ambulance driver intended to bring the shooting victim to the hospital, and in his haste he exceeded the speed limit where he felt it was safe but nonetheless potentially increased the risk to other drivers and pedestrians; any accident that could have resulted was clearly not intended, and as it turned out, nobody got hurt anyway."
Lets throw the book at the wanton criminal ambulance driver. Right?
He knowingly released a large stash of documents that he did not have authorization to release
And he's already pleaded guilty to that, and will be sentenced for that. So that should be enough. Why invent more serious things to convict him with if this is all he really did.
Why even have this as a separate crime from outright treason if you are going to infer treason the moment anything slightly classified is ever leaked?
He voluntarily entered that commitment, which is why he had any access; violating that commitment is why he's in the trouble he is in.
And he's pleaded guilty to violating that commitment. Howwever he is in trouble for considerably more than just this.
Leaking them to wikileaks or the news *is* leaking them to the enemy. It's not as exclusive (everybody now knows the information is out there), but it has the exact same effect.
But that was not his intention. Intent matters here.
That you know of. Would you like to set the bar even lower?
Yes, I absolutely want conclusive evidence that the enemy was overtly and substantially directly aided by his actions.
Do you want to live in a world where something you do unintentially that enables a terrorist to maybe derive some sort of vague advancement of his cause will lead you to being convicted of treason?
Because that time you left the back yard gate open... well a terrorist could have used that opportunity to evade capture. I'm charging you with treason. What? There was no terrorist skulking about beyond your house? Well... none that you know of... but there could have been!
Aiding the enemy doesn't have to be a deliberate choice. You don't have to say "today I will aid the enemy."
You do to be convicted of "attempting to aid the enemy". To attempt something requires intent.
If you just want to convict him of "aiding the enemy" instead of "attempting to aid the enemy" THEN you can maybe forego intent, but then you would at least have to prove that he did in fact aid them. So far the analysis hasn't shown there to have been any material aid rendered.
Embarrassing the government, and making a bunch of diplomats look like the complete asshats they are, and exposing dubious behavior to the world is not "aiding the enemy".
So what you are arguing is that the material he released was so meaningless that it makes no difference to anyone. His valiant bravery in releasing documents that seriously compromise US diplomatic efforts didn't actually have any effect on anything at all ...
No. I'm arguing that it didn't aid the enemy. Aiding the enemy should be a very significant and overt bar.
Should we charge anyone trying to get rid of rapiscan airport scanners for aiding the enemy? What about people who argue against having to take their shoes off and be subjected to full body searches every time they fly, or people who object to no fly lists, and warrantless searches within 100 miles of the coast? In theory these measures make it harder for terrorists to hurt us, so anyone seeking to get rid of these measures is aiding the enemy? The majority of slashdot are traitors?
Aiding the enemy needs to be a LOT more overt than that.
It seems people are confusing civilian laws with military rules. He is under military oath to protect confidential materials. He knowingly broke that oath and under military law is being prosecuted accordingly.
He has been charged with a couple dozen offenses. He's already pleaded guilty with respect to the protection of confidential materials.
But the remaining charges to which he has pleaded innocent go well beyond the violation of failing to protect those confidential materials.
You are the one who needs to conclusively prove that he wasn't attempting to aid the enemy by releasing volumes of military secrets in time of war.
No. The burden of proof relies on you to conclusively prove that he was attempting to aid the enemy. Innocent until proven guilty... remember?
And its absurd on its face to argue that he was "attempting to aid the enemy", based on his actions. If he was attempting to aid the enemy he would have leaked them straight to the enemy. Its bloody obvious that by attempting to leak to news agencies, and then after that failed to a whistleblower site that he was attempting to alert the public what its own government was doing. "Attempting to aid the enemy" just isn't on the table.
Now you could try and argue that his actions incidentally aided the enemy... but then you run up against the conclusive analysis that it had no practical effect.
So that leaves you with... he wasn't trying to aid the enemy with the leaks, and he didn't incidentally aid them either.
So now your strategy is to make inapplicable analogies to worthless diamond thefts? Is that some sort of prosecution variation of the Chewbacca defense?
No one's even going to believe the date story. :)
I think everyone sort of knows what a black hole is by now; who hasn't had an x-ray? and mass is just high school chemistry, if not junior high.
Ions are elementary chemistry as well, and are covered early on in school, grade 7 or 8 at the latest I think. Acids and bases, potato batteries, etc.
And knowing what an "x-ray exam" is doesn't tell you anything about what an x-ray actually is, nor what they are doing near black holes.
His point wasn't that cryptography wasn't useful, but simply that dealing with modern threats doesn't require "better cryptography" because modern threats aren't attacking the crypto. They are attacking the public key infrastructure (PKI), they are attacking the end points before encryption/after decryption.
Our security focus is there.
In other words, PGP doesn't protect your email, if you have a virus on your system sending everything to an attacker after its decrypted. PGP doesn't protect your email if the PKI is hacked, and you are signing mail with public keys generated by people impersonating the intended recipients.
Etc. Etc.
A better PGP crypto algorithm isn't going to help you here.
But again, its not as big of a gaping hole as the summary makes it out to be.
You could phish for them.
Release something 'useful' that uses an ASP and then harvest them...
Good point. Thanks for noting that Apple can make a single version run on all Modern versions of windows, but can't manage it on their own operating system.