That is a very Constructionist view on the Establishment Clause, wherein it is a reading of semantic exactness absent any context.
Um, I've been trying to bring context into this. First, in establishing that there are two sides to the right of religion, and second, getting at the motivation of the Founders.
As a result, what further follows is that any religion may be outlawed, or any other religion may be supported, by careful crafting of legislation absent particular key words.
Absolutely not, as the courts are there to prevent laws that are written with the intent to hinder or help religion. What you are arguing is something like the child putting his finger in your face and saying, "I'm not touching you!" The courts take a dim view on these shenanigans, and I'm not advocating this kind of interpretation at all.
What I'm saying is that special privileges should not be afforded to religion, where a secular law with no basis in religion (and not just your pedantic keyword game) should apply equally to all.
You can find relevant passages quoted there, along with an excuse which amounts to just re-interpreting the Bible, as is often the case whenever it is shown to be wrong. One of the reasons the Earth revolving around the Sun was initially rejected and consider heretical was because it contradicted the Bible.
Rights are, by their very definition, unequal in treatment before the law when compared to non-rights.
This particular right comes in a pair. You are only focused on half of it, and ignoring the "respecting an establishment of religion" part.
You have to look at the Constitution in context, where the Founders were well aware of particular religions being targeted and other favored by government. What the founders were trying to prevent were both cases. By carving out niches for religious activities in otherwise secular laws, government is respecting establishments of religion. As an atheist, it doesn't sit right with me.
I'll pick a random one and go with Wisconsin v. Yoder
Thanks for the reference. It's interesting reading, but as I've already said I don't agree with the Court's position.
Ah... and then I would have had those "personal experiences" through osmosis?
You didn't have to mention the "personal experiences" and could have just stuck to the verifiable facts.
The fact that I don't want to advertise my location does not invalidate my claims. It doesn't support them either, this is true, but if anyone has a problem with them, let them present real objections in a reasonable way.
We can't present real objections to an unverifiable story, other than to say it's unverifiable. The true facts of the case are what counts, not your personal recounting of it.
Oh joy, a late entry repeating the same excuse and not addressing any of the arguments made, including the one that even if it was funny, that's not an excuse given the context.
Maybe instead of making light of advocation of murder for political reasons, you should explain your position on the examples I gave of similar humor that you probably wouldn't be so quick to defend.
There's only 1 Bible that's the most widely available book which contains explains fully the past, present, future.
The Bible was written by a group of men who collected a bunch of stories and decided which ones were canon and which ones weren't. It doesn't explain shit, unless you believe in ridiculous Hebrew mythology like Adam & Eve, Noah's Ark, or that the Earth doesn't move and hence doesn't revolve around the Sun.
But why have humans evolved to believe that there is the "all-powerful being somewhere and everywhere in the universe, but you can't see him"?
Because we're more intelligent than our nearest living ancestors, and are smart enough to articulate and ponder our origins. Is this really some amazing concept? You might as well ask why we evolved to do better math than some birds that have some rudimentary counting skills.
Our brain _represents_ these concepts and ideas mechanically, but you are confusing the representation with the actuality.
You haven't presented any evidence beyond the material, other than to meditate, which provides no evidence at all, as people have fooled themselves into thinking all kinds of bullshit based on such practices.
If, in fact, you could directly experience this meta-conscience, you should be able to reliably and unequivocally demonstrate some knowledge gained in this manner that couldn't have been gained through normal means.
On the other hand, there's a vast amount of evidence that points to materialism being the basis for our consciousness without some meta-consciousness that exists separate from it.
It's true some of these things may HAVE BEEN democratic at one point or another, but are enshrined now. You can't, say, change alcohol laws without a small but vocal minority trying to get you unseated from government. It was democracy for our grandparents, but it's dictatorial for us.
I'm sorry, did some dictator take away the right to vote? If not, then stop your whining, get out, and campaign on your issue. Vocal minorities have rights too.
Probably because you misinterpreted my post and called me "confused". So let's see how hard it is for you to either say "sorry" for your original post, or explain just what you are talking about.
I'm afraid I don't get your point, because if you aren't claiming that you can violate fire codes by burning the flag in the name of free speech, then you have contradicted nothing I said, and you need to apply that same careful reading to my post.
Like I said, it was not to collect personal data. That data was picked up as extra payload.
Then they should have just collected the data they needed on the fly. They recognized the privacy concern and then ignored it.
You say things like "embarrassing findings", when the fact was that they didn't want personal names released to the public.
A lot more than just names were redacted, as can be seen by the original redactions at the behest of Google. The FCC told Google in their letter, "Disclosure of this information may cause commercial embarrassment, but that is not a basis for requesting confidential treatment."
Yeah, I sorry, but it is not that simple. In a huge system like Google's, thing are marked for deletion, and then overwritten later on when the space is needed. There is no point in zeroing out anything, since the data is all encrypted anyway.
Laughable. If they can update data on the fly, which they do, then they can delete it as well. And it doesn't matter that it is encrypted when law enforcement demands a copy.
So, you are saying that it was not a mistake? That they did it intentionally? That there was some motivation for them to, what was it, reveal status messages to peoples' contacts?
It was an intentional product decision to publicly share contacts by default in order to fill out their social network. See, for example, this article:
"When you first post to Google Buzz, there is a dialogue box that reads "Before participating in Buzz, you need a public profile with your name and photo."
It also says -- albeit in tiny gray letters against a white background, "Your profile includes your name, photo, people you follow, and people who follow you."
But it does not say that these publicly viewable follower lists are made up of people you most frequently email and chat with."
But the actual information is disposed of fairly quickly. I think it's six months or so.
Try reading the article. Your original claim, "Generally, Google likes to get rid of that stuff as soon as possible.", is completely demolished:
"Google logs an astonishing amount of data, including the search logs from its flagship product. It keeps this data indefinitely, so searching for a combination of yourwife'sname and youraddress and "rat poison in her cereal" is not a particularly smart idea (though search users do this sort of thing anyway).
But the company does "anonymize" this data eventually. The last octet of the IP address is wiped after nine months, which means there are 254 possibilities for the IP address in question (.0 and.255 are reserved addresses). After 18 months, Google anonymizes the unique cookie data stored in these logs.
This isn't especially ambitious; Europe's data protection supervisors have called for IP anonymization after six months and competing search engines like Bing do just that (and Bing removes the entire IP address, not just the last octet). Yahoo scrubs its data after 90 days."
You're not looking hard, or you are using the wrong search engine. Try, "google ftc focused on 2009 help page". It's all over the place.
That's because the 2009 date references a help page, not code as you claimed. The code was intentionally written to work around Safari's cookie blocking. There seems to be a pattern here of you not having your facts straight.
Yeah, good luck breaking into a Google datacenter. You have no idea.
First, I mentioned three agents: Government, hackers, and misbehaving employees. You only addressed one of them. Second,
Burning the flag in violation of fire codes is still free speech and protected as such.
So where's your citation that you can violate fire codes while burning the flag?
But if they prosecute you, it won't be for "speech" - it will be for endangering them.
It would be for violating fire codes, which indeed are there for safety reasons. I never said otherwise.
To claim that this literally means that freedom of speech "has its limits" is disingenuous.
I honestly don't know what you are talking about. All I said was that you can't legally violate laws in the name of free speech. Obviously if the law is aimed at curbing free speech that's a Constitutional matter, but in general, your free speech has to comport with the law.
WiFi sniffing was not to collect personal data. It was a 20% project to get an idea of what sort of traffic was on WiFis these days. No one ever looked at the actual data, and none of the data ever left the lab.
It shouldn't have been collected, and it was recognized as a privacy concern but they went ahead with it anyways. Google then lied about it by saying it was a "mistake" and "unintentional". They then asked the FCC to black out embarrassing findings that contradicted their public statements: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/05/google-wifi-fcc-investigation/
Not deleting email was just a matter of the way data is replicated in the datacenters.
Deleting it is just a matter of replicating the deletion.
The Buzz fiasco was just a mistake.
I'm seeing this excuse a lot. That's quite a "mistake" to make.
I don't see how Google was abusing a loophole when the 2009 Google code was written two years before the 2011 loophole was written.
Reference? I did a search for: "google safari 2009 2011 cookies" and didn't find what you are talking about.
And as for keeping data for too long, I don't know what you are talking about. Generally, Google likes to get rid of that stuff as soon as possible.
As for pervasive tracking, all google cares about is what sort of car you like. They could care less about any actual personal data.
But governments, hackers, and misbehaving employees do.
Tax havens are an unfortunate fact of life. All big companies have to do it. Fix the loopholes and level the playing field. Don't expect individual company to drop their competitive edge when the other companies aren't.
Well, duh, that was my entire point. In the real world Google is a for-profit company that will ultimately act in their self-interest and not according to the angelic standards some think they follow.
Cheering on the activities of a company which comport with their stated purpose is not fanboi-ism
It is when you ignore all the reasons to hold some reservation, when you put a company on a pedestal and then ignore or excuse past and current transgressions, and generally kiss their ass like an uncritical sycophant.
First, indecency standards can certainly still have meaning, because indecency is invariably derived from intent.
When it comes to somebody's boobs or genitalia hanging out, the intent really doesn't matter. Whether you're performing a naked art show in the park or protesting, it's the kind of thing society has decided that they don't want to be confronted with in public.
If it truly meant what you claim it to mean, the very act of mentioning religion specifically would be utterly redundant.
No, it wouldn't. That same argument was made for all the Bill of Rights, but the Founders eventually decided that it was best to be explicit in highlighting the most common and important rights that are trampled on. Reference.
As the case law surrounding the Amish clearly shows, this is not, and never has been, the case in US jurisprudence.
I'm not sure what law you are referring to, but US case law is a checkerboard of inconsistent and unprincipled rulings. Name a principle of law, and I'm sure I can find two inconsistent interpretations of it.
And regardless of what the courts say, I'm talking about what should be the case based on what the Constitution says. The Constitution has been stretched and abused beyond recognition in many aspects (like the Commerce Clause).
The difference is one is a violation of incredibly subjective standards while the example of flag burning can, in some cases, cause a very real and articulable risk to life, health, and/or property.
I agree indecency standards are subjective, but if they are to have any meaning you can't just let people parade around naked in public as a form of protest.
As for religion, even though I am a-religious, I thoroughly believe that restrictions on religious activity should be limited strictly to cases where there is very real and articulable risk to life, health, and/or property.
Religious activity should be given no more, and no less, consideration than any other activity under the law. Doing otherwise violates the first amendment:
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof"
Comcast and Verizon and ATT have REPEATEDLY shown themselves to be rapacious,exploitative and dishonest.
And it when it comes to things like privacy, I gave you plenty of examples where Google was acting in a self-serving manner, which you ignored.
If Google wants to protect NN by laying down fiber and bypassing that group of assholes then I say bully for them and more power to them.
I do too, but ultimately it's in Google's self-interest to do so, and the whole point is that you can't blindly trust Google to not take advantage if they ever gain a dominant position. The other thing, going back to privacy, is that being the ISP means you see all traffic.
The Federal government routinely (anymore) uses National Security Letters to shred the entire Bill of Rights, and one of the provisions of NSLs is an NDA.
Before anybody gets too excited about this theory, from the second sentence in the article: "Dubbed 'Clueful' by Bucharest, Romania-based Bitdefender [..]"
Slashdot Mirror
That is a very Constructionist view on the Establishment Clause, wherein it is a reading of semantic exactness absent any context.
Um, I've been trying to bring context into this. First, in establishing that there are two sides to the right of religion, and second, getting at the motivation of the Founders.
As a result, what further follows is that any religion may be outlawed, or any other religion may be supported, by careful crafting of legislation absent particular key words.
Absolutely not, as the courts are there to prevent laws that are written with the intent to hinder or help religion. What you are arguing is something like the child putting his finger in your face and saying, "I'm not touching you!" The courts take a dim view on these shenanigans, and I'm not advocating this kind of interpretation at all.
What I'm saying is that special privileges should not be afforded to religion, where a secular law with no basis in religion (and not just your pedantic keyword game) should apply equally to all.
Jesus believed in Adam and Eve and Noah's Ark.
So? Does believing in Hebrew mythology make him more or less credible?
It also doesn't say that the Earth does not move.
http://www.aboutbibleprophecy.com/q7.htm
You can find relevant passages quoted there, along with an excuse which amounts to just re-interpreting the Bible, as is often the case whenever it is shown to be wrong. One of the reasons the Earth revolving around the Sun was initially rejected and consider heretical was because it contradicted the Bible.
Rights are, by their very definition, unequal in treatment before the law when compared to non-rights.
This particular right comes in a pair. You are only focused on half of it, and ignoring the "respecting an establishment of religion" part.
You have to look at the Constitution in context, where the Founders were well aware of particular religions being targeted and other favored by government. What the founders were trying to prevent were both cases. By carving out niches for religious activities in otherwise secular laws, government is respecting establishments of religion. As an atheist, it doesn't sit right with me.
I'll pick a random one and go with Wisconsin v. Yoder
Thanks for the reference. It's interesting reading, but as I've already said I don't agree with the Court's position.
(How much longer can China and India be considered "developing" -- India has a space program for instance.)
And so does China.
Ah... and then I would have had those "personal experiences" through osmosis?
You didn't have to mention the "personal experiences" and could have just stuck to the verifiable facts.
The fact that I don't want to advertise my location does not invalidate my claims. It doesn't support them either, this is true, but if anyone has a problem with them, let them present real objections in a reasonable way.
We can't present real objections to an unverifiable story, other than to say it's unverifiable. The true facts of the case are what counts, not your personal recounting of it.
So how is Mr. Bubbles doing these days?
Windows 95 didn't suck. It was well received and a real improvement from 3.1. NT wasn't even targeted for consumer desktops.
Oh joy, a late entry repeating the same excuse and not addressing any of the arguments made, including the one that even if it was funny, that's not an excuse given the context.
Maybe instead of making light of advocation of murder for political reasons, you should explain your position on the examples I gave of similar humor that you probably wouldn't be so quick to defend.
There's only 1 Bible that's the most widely available book which contains explains fully the past, present, future.
The Bible was written by a group of men who collected a bunch of stories and decided which ones were canon and which ones weren't. It doesn't explain shit, unless you believe in ridiculous Hebrew mythology like Adam & Eve, Noah's Ark, or that the Earth doesn't move and hence doesn't revolve around the Sun.
But why have humans evolved to believe that there is the "all-powerful being somewhere and everywhere in the universe, but you can't see him"?
Because we're more intelligent than our nearest living ancestors, and are smart enough to articulate and ponder our origins. Is this really some amazing concept? You might as well ask why we evolved to do better math than some birds that have some rudimentary counting skills.
Our brain _represents_ these concepts and ideas mechanically, but you are confusing the representation with the actuality.
You haven't presented any evidence beyond the material, other than to meditate, which provides no evidence at all, as people have fooled themselves into thinking all kinds of bullshit based on such practices.
If, in fact, you could directly experience this meta-conscience, you should be able to reliably and unequivocally demonstrate some knowledge gained in this manner that couldn't have been gained through normal means.
On the other hand, there's a vast amount of evidence that points to materialism being the basis for our consciousness without some meta-consciousness that exists separate from it.
It's true some of these things may HAVE BEEN democratic at one point or another, but are enshrined now. You can't, say, change alcohol laws without a small but vocal minority trying to get you unseated from government. It was democracy for our grandparents, but it's dictatorial for us.
I'm sorry, did some dictator take away the right to vote? If not, then stop your whining, get out, and campaign on your issue. Vocal minorities have rights too.
Google wants to present you with little ads, that google hopes you will click. And that's it.
Yes, and? Don't you think the best way to get you to click ads is for them to know all about you, and match them with ads that you'll likely click?
IMO: Google's record on privacy is vastly better than facebook's record.
That's not saying much.
One of the things I value about Slashdot is that the comments aren't moderated beyond +/-.
Probably because you misinterpreted my post and called me "confused". So let's see how hard it is for you to either say "sorry" for your original post, or explain just what you are talking about.
I'm afraid I don't get your point, because if you aren't claiming that you can violate fire codes by burning the flag in the name of free speech, then you have contradicted nothing I said, and you need to apply that same careful reading to my post.
Major quote fail. Use preview.
Like I said, it was not to collect personal data. That data was picked up as extra payload.
Then they should have just collected the data they needed on the fly. They recognized the privacy concern and then ignored it.
You say things like "embarrassing findings", when the fact was that they didn't want personal names released to the public.
A lot more than just names were redacted, as can be seen by the original redactions at the behest of Google. The FCC told Google in their letter, "Disclosure of this information may cause commercial embarrassment, but that is not a basis for requesting confidential treatment."
Yeah, I sorry, but it is not that simple. In a huge system like Google's, thing are marked for deletion, and then overwritten later on when the space is needed. There is no point in zeroing out anything, since the data is all encrypted anyway.
Laughable. If they can update data on the fly, which they do, then they can delete it as well. And it doesn't matter that it is encrypted when law enforcement demands a copy.
So, you are saying that it was not a mistake? That they did it intentionally? That there was some motivation for them to, what was it, reveal status messages to peoples' contacts?
It was an intentional product decision to publicly share contacts by default in order to fill out their social network. See, for example, this article:
"When you first post to Google Buzz, there is a dialogue box that reads "Before participating in Buzz, you need a public profile with your name and photo."
It also says -- albeit in tiny gray letters against a white background, "Your profile includes your name, photo, people you follow, and people who follow you."
But it does not say that these publicly viewable follower lists are made up of people you most frequently email and chat with."
But the actual information is disposed of fairly quickly. I think it's six months or so.
Try reading the article. Your original claim, "Generally, Google likes to get rid of that stuff as soon as possible.", is completely demolished:
"Google logs an astonishing amount of data, including the search logs from its flagship product. It keeps this data indefinitely, so searching for a combination of yourwife'sname and youraddress and "rat poison in her cereal" is not a particularly smart idea (though search users do this sort of thing anyway).
But the company does "anonymize" this data eventually. The last octet of the IP address is wiped after nine months, which means there are 254 possibilities for the IP address in question (.0 and .255 are reserved addresses). After 18 months, Google anonymizes the unique cookie data stored in these logs.
This isn't especially ambitious; Europe's data protection supervisors have called for IP anonymization after six months and competing search engines like Bing do just that (and Bing removes the entire IP address, not just the last octet). Yahoo scrubs its data after 90 days."
You're not looking hard, or you are using the wrong search engine. Try, "google ftc focused on 2009 help page". It's all over the place.
That's because the 2009 date references a help page, not code as you claimed. The code was intentionally written to work around Safari's cookie blocking. There seems to be a pattern here of you not having your facts straight.
Yeah, good luck breaking into a Google datacenter. You have no idea.
First, I mentioned three agents: Government, hackers, and misbehaving employees. You only addressed one of them. Second,
Burning the flag in violation of fire codes is still free speech and protected as such.
So where's your citation that you can violate fire codes while burning the flag?
But if they prosecute you, it won't be for "speech" - it will be for endangering them.
It would be for violating fire codes, which indeed are there for safety reasons. I never said otherwise.
To claim that this literally means that freedom of speech "has its limits" is disingenuous.
I honestly don't know what you are talking about. All I said was that you can't legally violate laws in the name of free speech. Obviously if the law is aimed at curbing free speech that's a Constitutional matter, but in general, your free speech has to comport with the law.
WiFi sniffing was not to collect personal data. It was a 20% project to get an idea of what sort of traffic was on WiFis these days. No one ever looked at the actual data, and none of the data ever left the lab.
It shouldn't have been collected, and it was recognized as a privacy concern but they went ahead with it anyways. Google then lied about it by saying it was a "mistake" and "unintentional". They then asked the FCC to black out embarrassing findings that contradicted their public statements: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/05/google-wifi-fcc-investigation/
Not deleting email was just a matter of the way data is replicated in the datacenters.
Deleting it is just a matter of replicating the deletion.
The Buzz fiasco was just a mistake.
I'm seeing this excuse a lot. That's quite a "mistake" to make.
I don't see how Google was abusing a loophole when the 2009 Google code was written two years before the 2011 loophole was written.
Reference? I did a search for: "google safari 2009 2011 cookies" and didn't find what you are talking about.
And as for keeping data for too long, I don't know what you are talking about. Generally, Google likes to get rid of that stuff as soon as possible.
Believe me, I'm even more baffled by your comment. Google hoards information, as their whole business is based on knowing as much as possible. I have no idea where you got this idea that Google likes to throw away data: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/03/google-keeps-your-data-to-learn-from-good-guys-fight-off-bad-guys/
As for pervasive tracking, all google cares about is what sort of car you like. They could care less about any actual personal data.
But governments, hackers, and misbehaving employees do.
Tax havens are an unfortunate fact of life. All big companies have to do it. Fix the loopholes and level the playing field. Don't expect individual company to drop their competitive edge when the other companies aren't.
I've already addressed this in another comment.
Welcome to the real world.
Well, duh, that was my entire point. In the real world Google is a for-profit company that will ultimately act in their self-interest and not according to the angelic standards some think they follow.
Cheering on the activities of a company which comport with their stated purpose is not fanboi-ism
It is when you ignore all the reasons to hold some reservation, when you put a company on a pedestal and then ignore or excuse past and current transgressions, and generally kiss their ass like an uncritical sycophant.
First, indecency standards can certainly still have meaning, because indecency is invariably derived from intent.
When it comes to somebody's boobs or genitalia hanging out, the intent really doesn't matter. Whether you're performing a naked art show in the park or protesting, it's the kind of thing society has decided that they don't want to be confronted with in public.
If it truly meant what you claim it to mean, the very act of mentioning religion specifically would be utterly redundant.
No, it wouldn't. That same argument was made for all the Bill of Rights, but the Founders eventually decided that it was best to be explicit in highlighting the most common and important rights that are trampled on. Reference.
As the case law surrounding the Amish clearly shows, this is not, and never has been, the case in US jurisprudence.
I'm not sure what law you are referring to, but US case law is a checkerboard of inconsistent and unprincipled rulings. Name a principle of law, and I'm sure I can find two inconsistent interpretations of it.
And regardless of what the courts say, I'm talking about what should be the case based on what the Constitution says. The Constitution has been stretched and abused beyond recognition in many aspects (like the Commerce Clause).
The difference is one is a violation of incredibly subjective standards while the example of flag burning can, in some cases, cause a very real and articulable risk to life, health, and/or property.
I agree indecency standards are subjective, but if they are to have any meaning you can't just let people parade around naked in public as a form of protest.
As for religion, even though I am a-religious, I thoroughly believe that restrictions on religious activity should be limited strictly to cases where there is very real and articulable risk to life, health, and/or property.
Religious activity should be given no more, and no less, consideration than any other activity under the law. Doing otherwise violates the first amendment:
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof"
Well you'll be shocked to learn that I actually agree with you.
You have a funny definition of "agree", as you then proceed to go out of your way to make excuses for them and put them on a pedestal.
but the point requires an adult mind to bring adult judgement to a real world situation
It requires a critical mind instead of a fanboy mind, which you obviously lack.
http://www.manufacturing.net/blogs/2012/07/google-made-in-the-usa
I hope it works out and leads to more, but it's a token effort and could just as easily be passed off as a PR stunt.
http://www.google.org/
http://www.corp.att.com/edu/
http://www.google.com/landing/givesback/2011/
Wal-Mart tops list of charitable cash contributors, AT&T No. 2
Comcast and Verizon and ATT have REPEATEDLY shown themselves to be rapacious ,exploitative and dishonest.
And it when it comes to things like privacy, I gave you plenty of examples where Google was acting in a self-serving manner, which you ignored.
If Google wants to protect NN by laying down fiber and bypassing that group of assholes then I say bully for them and more power to them.
I do too, but ultimately it's in Google's self-interest to do so, and the whole point is that you can't blindly trust Google to not take advantage if they ever gain a dominant position. The other thing, going back to privacy, is that being the ISP means you see all traffic.
Thanks for the correction.
The Federal government routinely (anymore) uses National Security Letters to shred the entire Bill of Rights, and one of the provisions of NSLs is an NDA.
Before anybody gets too excited about this theory, from the second sentence in the article: "Dubbed 'Clueful' by Bucharest, Romania-based Bitdefender [..]"