The whole point of "using" something is to gain value from it. This word "leverage" is a blight descended from marketing droids trying to make their simple ideas sound fancy. It's not enough to use the tool they are trying to sell you -- no, you will leverage it.
Check the word usage in the summary: "bad guys are leveraging broken CAPTCHAs to ply their evil trade"
Read again in plain English: "bad guys are using broken CAPTCHAs to ply their evil trade"
Your sentence: "because no one has built a system like this that leverages and extends existing email servers - private organizations leveraging social connections have moved in to fill the gap"
Read again in non-marketing English: "because no one has built a system like this that builds upon existing email servers - private organizations using social connections have moved in to fill the gap".
I was working for Morton-Thiokol when it happened, and it was not a fun time for myself or my cow-orkers.
Were you in the conference call the night before that attempted to get NASA to scrub the launch? I saw a special on that, and the interview with the Boisjoly was chilling. Too bad, though, that despite all his heroic efforts, he fell short at the crucial moment and didn't object when the mic was open.
In terms of the electorate caring or even knowing what the issue *is*, this is a tempest in a teapot.
Seems like a fairly big deal on the political blogosphere. The shine is starting to come off him. Whether that hurts his grassroots efforts which ends up hurting him in the general election, *shrug*, who knows.
If he was looking for votes with this move any idiot could tell you it was a bad plan.
I agree, it was a bad plan. Except that politicians are famous for conventional wisdom that makes them look like idiots.
Obama is clearly is running to the right of late, in case you haven't been watching the news, and this is just another example of that. It's all an attempt to be politically shrewd. He figures he can piss off his base now because their alternative is to vote for McCain.
The courts were not actually removed. [...] The telcos have to go before a judge and prove that they were told that what they were being asked to do was legal.
It's for the courts to decide if the telecoms should be held responsible or not. The courts should not have been removed from this decision.
And if you don't think that's possible, I have a bridge to sell you.
Some is certainly possible, but hardly worth talking about.
Also, "tremendous backlash"? 99% of the electorate doesn't even know what FISA stands for, much less has an opinion on the telecom immunity section.
The tremendous backlash is coming from the politically interested. It's why there are 1,000+ comments on this Slashdot story. It's why Salon is posting about it. It's why you are here arguing for Obama's case and making silly claims about McCain plants. It's why Obama felt the need to make a statement, and even admit this may be a "deal breaker".
There are enough Americans that understand where Bush has taken the country -- torture, eroding freedoms, and massive spying. Obama had a chance to stand up for real change and principles, something I think the country is looking for, if you get past the left vs right dogma.
Now he's just another politician trying to appeal to what he thinks is the center but is just Bush and the response to 9/11 that people are looking to move away from. Hardly a candidate of hope.
It's not a sideshow. It's a question of allowing the three branches of government to work as intended. Removing the courts from the process with regards to past misdeeds is a huge deal. Obama is just afraid to look weak on terrorism. He's too busy pandering to Bush's core to take a principled stand.
I have no doubt that some of the "he's lost my vote" folks are, in fact, clever plants by the McCain campaign to make it look like there's more dissent in the party than there actually is.
Yeah, the tremendous backlash is just a bunch of McCain plants. Any other excuses you want to make?
The "center" would have respected him more for sticking to his guns and voting against retroactive immunity for illegal wiretapping. Instead, he looks like just another spineless politician. Kerry 2004 all over again.
and since most of the population still think that FISA is essential to thwarting terrorists
I suspect most of the population doesn't know shit either way. What is clear, though, is that Obama is willing to speak against something, and then vote for it anyways because he wants to pander to whatever political message is most convenient. In other words, politics as usual.
Obama should pay a visit to Jesse Jackson to have his pair removed, since he has no need for them.
Bush pulled the same shit to get elected in 2004, except that nobody called him on it. Remember the massive payout to drug companies for senior prescriptions? His position on legalizing illegal immigrants? That's not small government or core Republican values. That's pandering to seniors and the Latino vote (and also benefiting corporate America).
"Vision appears very noisy in near darkness, that is, the image appears to be filled with a continually changing grainy pattern. This results from the image signal being very weak, and is not a limitation of the eye. There is so little light entering the eye, the random detection of individual photons can be seen. This is called statistical noise, and is encountered in all low-light imaging, such as military night vision systems."
True, I used the wrong wording. I know there will be another trial, but it just boggles my mind a guilty verdict wasn't returned in the first place. I have little confidence that a second jury will get it right.
A jury saw through his lies and they were right, as they tend to be.
I don't know, I can't trust 12 people to convict after Phil Spector got off. They had the body in the guys house, an eyewitness confession, and a history of crazy gun behavior with previous guests. It makes the Reiser case look incredibly weak in comparison. Two of the jurors bought the argument that the victim may have killed herself.
Like I said, I can't back it up, though, because I didn't speak out about it publicly.
Not everybody was so fearful and as silent as you. Where's the evidence? One single site. ONE. I can find sites that were against the war from that time, and that show clear evidence of belief in WMD, except they believed in inspections and containment.
Where is the foreign media, or a foreign government position that claims Saddam had no WMD? Find one single article from an analyst that thinks Saddam was bluffing to hold off his neighbors. You can certainly find them in 2004, but not before the war.
That's nice, but "the inspectors didn't" is a bit different from refuting the idea that a large portion of the American public did.
The inspectors were offered as evidence of an outside source for a belief in no WMD. The original poster offered that evidence, not me, and it shows how people backport the truth.
It was becoming more and more obvious that Saddam's WMD program was an elaborate bluff, primarily targeted at Iran and Israel.
That became a common position held after the war when no WMD was found. People's memories are very squishy, and I find it extremely unlikely you held this position before the war. Could you cite a single "foreign media" news source or "anti-war" page that held this position before the war? We have plenty of news archives on the web, and there is also the archive.org.
We'd had the aluminum tubes and the yellowcake from Niger reports debunked.
First of all, I can't find any news source that "debunked" the Niger yellowcake reports before the war. The big article that started the press rolling was after the war had started. I think this points to the memory problem.
As for the tubes, this did get some press, but not much. At any rate, this points to bad evidence by the Bush administration, but doesn't mean people thought the opposite of Saddam (that he wasn't interested in nukes), and doesn't address issues of biological or chemical weapons.
The idea that none of us were skeptical is just wrong.
There's a difference between skepticism of the evidence or motives vs claiming the belief that Saddam had no WMD. I completely refuted the argument of the original poster that inspectors had come to that conclusion, citing sources and using quotes.
I will consolidate my reply to your various posts in this one.
there were plenty of reports of the UN inspectors saying there were no WMDs [...] At the very least, me and Hans Blix [believed Saddam had nothing].
This is the crux of the problem. You are completely overstating your case with the benefit of hindsight. I recommend reading through Iraq disarmament crisis to get a more balanced perspective. Even more critically, I recommend you read the Transcript of Blix's U.N. presentation, which was made right before the US decided to invade.
In particular, note the atmosphere of uncertainty after 4 years without inspections and the constant cat and mouse games put up by Saddam. Hans made the case that inspections needed more months, whereas Bush had to make a critical decision: All the logistics were in place after months of preparation, Iraqi summer was approaching, and Saddam could have just been stalling for more time.
Consider the following quotes:
"In matters relating to process, notably prompt access to sites, we have faced relatively few difficulties, and certainly much less than those that were faced by UNSCOM [U.N. Special Commission] in the period 1991 to 1998. This may well be due to the strong outside pressure."
[...]
"Mr. President, Iraq, with a highly developed administrative system, should be able to provide more documentary evidence about its proscribed weapons programs. Only a few new such documents have come to light so far and been handed over since we began inspections. It was a disappointment that Iraq's declaration of the 7th of December did not bring new documentary evidence."
[...]
"Mr. President, what are we to make of these activities?
One can hardly avoid the impression that after a period of somewhat reluctant cooperation, there's been an acceleration of initiatives from the Iraqi side since the end of January. This is welcome. But the value of these measures must be soberly judged by how many question marks they actually succeed in straightening out.
This is not yet clear."
[...]
"It is obvious that while the numerous initiatives which are now taken by the Iraqi side with a view to resolving some longstanding, open disarmament issues can be seen as active or even proactive, these initiatives three to four months into the new resolution cannot be said to constitute immediate cooperation. Nor do they necessarily cover all areas of relevance. They are, nevertheless, welcome. And UNMOVIC is responding to them in the hope of solving presently unresolved disarmament issues."
Do you think [Bill O'Reilly] said that out of thin air? Or is it possible that someone was arguing at the time that there were no WMDs?
The full quote shows that he's talking about uncertainty: "But there's a doubt on both sides."
Would you like me to forward you the email exchanges I was having with the war hungry members of my family back in 2002?
I never disputed that there were people hungry for war. I was talking about the hindsight position that he had no WMD.
How would you like some photos of the war protests going on in my hometown?
As I've stated in other posts, I acknowledge there were protests, but the protesters weren't certain about no WMD -- that was NOT the basis for their protest. I think the joint statement from Russian, Germany, and France sums it up best:
"[We] reaffirm that disarming Iraq, in accordance with the relevant resolutions since UN Resolution 687, is the common objective of the international community and must be achieved
I thought Google paid way too much for YouTube, but at least they bought the company with the most market share. Microsoft wants to spend a ton on a company in decline. What are they going to do with it?
I already replied to a post in this thread covering this issue. It doesn't let the original poster I replied to off the hook (who I still see has not responded). Typical hindsight bullshit/spin.
Foreign media. Most people who were cynical about the administration's motives long ago realized that the US media wasn't to be trusted to seriously contradict the President.
That doesn't let the original poster off the hook. He made no mention of foreign media. He only said if you were listening to anybody but the US administration. There was not a single mainstream media outlet that seriously challenged the evidence. None. At least now you have organizations like the NY Times that will spill the beans on massive illegal wiretapping.
Furthermore, in the run up to the war, I spoke with many people outside the US that were against it, and the main argument wasn't that Saddam didn't have WMDs or an active program developing them. What I heard was that Saddam wasn't an imminent threat, and that inspections and containment should be the way to keep Saddam in check. I think there was a general belief that since inspections had stopped, something must have been going on.
I'm sure if you took a poll among the anti-war crowd before the war, very few would have guessed the answer to what we actually found when we went in. Do you remember those times before the war? Do you disagree? How many people actually believed that he had nothing?
I don't like Saddam at all, but I knew, as did a large portion of Americans who were listening to more than just the US administration, that Iraq did not have WMDs and that an invasion was a bad idea.
That's bullshit. Virtually all the US media (even places like the NY Times) was reporting that Saddam likely had WMD. The vast majority of Americans believed he had it. What sources are you referring to when you say: "a large portion of Americans who were listening to more than just the US administration", since virtually all the media was highly uncritical and passed on reports from the administration?
See the many examples of "wrong" used as an adverb in the dictionary reference. I think it's clear that the original poster is used to British English, and it sounds like you are too.
Come on, just because you don't know how to deal with them it doesn't mean it's OK that you kill them. Really flawed logic. Incompetence doesn't make human rights disappear.
Justice, by it's very nature, requires a violation of human rights in response to violation of human rights. Whether you lock somebody up in prison for the rest of their life or kill them, you're violating their human rights. Going by your argument, there's "no fundamental difference". Just need to squint our eyes enough, eh?
I was trying to point out that killing someone is always wrong, even if it's performed by the government, and that it is never OK.
Which is the lecture on morality. I and many others vehemently disagree on this position.
Slashdot Mirror
Is that you, Marv?
The whole point of "using" something is to gain value from it. This word "leverage" is a blight descended from marketing droids trying to make their simple ideas sound fancy. It's not enough to use the tool they are trying to sell you -- no, you will leverage it.
Check the word usage in the summary: "bad guys are leveraging broken CAPTCHAs to ply their evil trade"
Read again in plain English: "bad guys are using broken CAPTCHAs to ply their evil trade"
Your sentence: "because no one has built a system like this that leverages and extends existing email servers - private organizations leveraging social connections have moved in to fill the gap"
Read again in non-marketing English: "because no one has built a system like this that builds upon existing email servers - private organizations using social connections have moved in to fill the gap".
The word is "use".
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=leverage
I was working for Morton-Thiokol when it happened, and it was not a fun time for myself or my cow-orkers.
Were you in the conference call the night before that attempted to get NASA to scrub the launch? I saw a special on that, and the interview with the Boisjoly was chilling. Too bad, though, that despite all his heroic efforts, he fell short at the crucial moment and didn't object when the mic was open.
In terms of the electorate caring or even knowing what the issue *is*, this is a tempest in a teapot.
Seems like a fairly big deal on the political blogosphere. The shine is starting to come off him. Whether that hurts his grassroots efforts which ends up hurting him in the general election, *shrug*, who knows.
If he was looking for votes with this move any idiot could tell you it was a bad plan.
I agree, it was a bad plan. Except that politicians are famous for conventional wisdom that makes them look like idiots.
Obama is clearly is running to the right of late, in case you haven't been watching the news, and this is just another example of that. It's all an attempt to be politically shrewd. He figures he can piss off his base now because their alternative is to vote for McCain.
The courts were not actually removed. [...] The telcos have to go before a judge and prove that they were told that what they were being asked to do was legal.
It's for the courts to decide if the telecoms should be held responsible or not. The courts should not have been removed from this decision.
I said some.
And if you don't think that's possible, I have a bridge to sell you.
Some is certainly possible, but hardly worth talking about.
Also, "tremendous backlash"? 99% of the electorate doesn't even know what FISA stands for, much less has an opinion on the telecom immunity section.
The tremendous backlash is coming from the politically interested. It's why there are 1,000+ comments on this Slashdot story. It's why Salon is posting about it. It's why you are here arguing for Obama's case and making silly claims about McCain plants. It's why Obama felt the need to make a statement, and even admit this may be a "deal breaker".
There are enough Americans that understand where Bush has taken the country -- torture, eroding freedoms, and massive spying. Obama had a chance to stand up for real change and principles, something I think the country is looking for, if you get past the left vs right dogma.
Now he's just another politician trying to appeal to what he thinks is the center but is just Bush and the response to 9/11 that people are looking to move away from. Hardly a candidate of hope.
If he gave on the immunity sideshow
It's not a sideshow. It's a question of allowing the three branches of government to work as intended. Removing the courts from the process with regards to past misdeeds is a huge deal. Obama is just afraid to look weak on terrorism. He's too busy pandering to Bush's core to take a principled stand.
I have no doubt that some of the "he's lost my vote" folks are, in fact, clever plants by the McCain campaign to make it look like there's more dissent in the party than there actually is.
Yeah, the tremendous backlash is just a bunch of McCain plants. Any other excuses you want to make?
The "center" would have respected him more for sticking to his guns and voting against retroactive immunity for illegal wiretapping. Instead, he looks like just another spineless politician. Kerry 2004 all over again.
and since most of the population still think that FISA is essential to thwarting terrorists
I suspect most of the population doesn't know shit either way. What is clear, though, is that Obama is willing to speak against something, and then vote for it anyways because he wants to pander to whatever political message is most convenient. In other words, politics as usual.
Obama should pay a visit to Jesse Jackson to have his pair removed, since he has no need for them.
Bush pulled the same shit to get elected in 2004, except that nobody called him on it. Remember the massive payout to drug companies for senior prescriptions? His position on legalizing illegal immigrants? That's not small government or core Republican values. That's pandering to seniors and the Latino vote (and also benefiting corporate America).
You know how you get that grainy effect in your vision under very low light conditions with well adjusted night vision? That's quantum noise due to individual photons hitting your eye.
Very interesting. From the link:
"Vision appears very noisy in near darkness, that is, the image appears to be filled with a continually changing grainy pattern. This results from the image signal being very weak, and is not a limitation of the eye. There is so little light entering the eye, the random detection of individual photons can be seen. This is called statistical noise, and is encountered in all low-light imaging, such as military night vision systems."
True, I used the wrong wording. I know there will be another trial, but it just boggles my mind a guilty verdict wasn't returned in the first place. I have little confidence that a second jury will get it right.
A jury saw through his lies and they were right, as they tend to be.
I don't know, I can't trust 12 people to convict after Phil Spector got off. They had the body in the guys house, an eyewitness confession, and a history of crazy gun behavior with previous guests. It makes the Reiser case look incredibly weak in comparison. Two of the jurors bought the argument that the victim may have killed herself.
Like I said, I can't back it up, though, because I didn't speak out about it publicly.
Not everybody was so fearful and as silent as you. Where's the evidence? One single site. ONE. I can find sites that were against the war from that time, and that show clear evidence of belief in WMD, except they believed in inspections and containment.
Where is the foreign media, or a foreign government position that claims Saddam had no WMD? Find one single article from an analyst that thinks Saddam was bluffing to hold off his neighbors. You can certainly find them in 2004, but not before the war.
That's nice, but "the inspectors didn't" is a bit different from refuting the idea that a large portion of the American public did.
The inspectors were offered as evidence of an outside source for a belief in no WMD. The original poster offered that evidence, not me, and it shows how people backport the truth.
It was becoming more and more obvious that Saddam's WMD program was an elaborate bluff, primarily targeted at Iran and Israel.
That became a common position held after the war when no WMD was found. People's memories are very squishy, and I find it extremely unlikely you held this position before the war. Could you cite a single "foreign media" news source or "anti-war" page that held this position before the war? We have plenty of news archives on the web, and there is also the archive.org.
We'd had the aluminum tubes and the yellowcake from Niger reports debunked.
First of all, I can't find any news source that "debunked" the Niger yellowcake reports before the war. The big article that started the press rolling was after the war had started. I think this points to the memory problem.
As for the tubes, this did get some press, but not much. At any rate, this points to bad evidence by the Bush administration, but doesn't mean people thought the opposite of Saddam (that he wasn't interested in nukes), and doesn't address issues of biological or chemical weapons.
The idea that none of us were skeptical is just wrong.
There's a difference between skepticism of the evidence or motives vs claiming the belief that Saddam had no WMD. I completely refuted the argument of the original poster that inspectors had come to that conclusion, citing sources and using quotes.
Sorry, I'm overposting now
I will consolidate my reply to your various posts in this one.
there were plenty of reports of the UN inspectors saying there were no WMDs [...] At the very least, me and Hans Blix [believed Saddam had nothing].
This is the crux of the problem. You are completely overstating your case with the benefit of hindsight. I recommend reading through Iraq disarmament crisis to get a more balanced perspective. Even more critically, I recommend you read the Transcript of Blix's U.N. presentation, which was made right before the US decided to invade.
In particular, note the atmosphere of uncertainty after 4 years without inspections and the constant cat and mouse games put up by Saddam. Hans made the case that inspections needed more months, whereas Bush had to make a critical decision: All the logistics were in place after months of preparation, Iraqi summer was approaching, and Saddam could have just been stalling for more time.
Consider the following quotes:
"In matters relating to process, notably prompt access to sites, we have faced relatively few difficulties, and certainly much less than those that were faced by UNSCOM [U.N. Special Commission] in the period 1991 to 1998. This may well be due to the strong outside pressure."
[...]
"Mr. President, Iraq, with a highly developed administrative system, should be able to provide more documentary evidence about its proscribed weapons programs. Only a few new such documents have come to light so far and been handed over since we began inspections. It was a disappointment that Iraq's declaration of the 7th of December did not bring new documentary evidence."
[...]
"Mr. President, what are we to make of these activities?
One can hardly avoid the impression that after a period of somewhat reluctant cooperation, there's been an acceleration of initiatives from the Iraqi side since the end of January. This is welcome. But the value of these measures must be soberly judged by how many question marks they actually succeed in straightening out.
This is not yet clear."
[...]
"It is obvious that while the numerous initiatives which are now taken by the Iraqi side with a view to resolving some longstanding, open disarmament issues can be seen as active or even proactive, these initiatives three to four months into the new resolution cannot be said to constitute immediate cooperation. Nor do they necessarily cover all areas of relevance. They are, nevertheless, welcome. And UNMOVIC is responding to them in the hope of solving presently unresolved disarmament issues."
Do you think [Bill O'Reilly] said that out of thin air? Or is it possible that someone was arguing at the time that there were no WMDs?
The full quote shows that he's talking about uncertainty: "But there's a doubt on both sides."
Would you like me to forward you the email exchanges I was having with the war hungry members of my family back in 2002?
I never disputed that there were people hungry for war. I was talking about the hindsight position that he had no WMD.
How would you like some photos of the war protests going on in my hometown?
As I've stated in other posts, I acknowledge there were protests, but the protesters weren't certain about no WMD -- that was NOT the basis for their protest. I think the joint statement from Russian, Germany, and France sums it up best:
"[We] reaffirm that disarming Iraq, in accordance with the relevant resolutions since UN Resolution 687, is the common objective of the international community and must be achieved
I thought Google paid way too much for YouTube, but at least they bought the company with the most market share. Microsoft wants to spend a ton on a company in decline. What are they going to do with it?
I already replied to a post in this thread covering this issue. It doesn't let the original poster I replied to off the hook (who I still see has not responded). Typical hindsight bullshit/spin.
Foreign media. Most people who were cynical about the administration's motives long ago realized that the US media wasn't to be trusted to seriously contradict the President.
That doesn't let the original poster off the hook. He made no mention of foreign media. He only said if you were listening to anybody but the US administration. There was not a single mainstream media outlet that seriously challenged the evidence. None. At least now you have organizations like the NY Times that will spill the beans on massive illegal wiretapping.
Furthermore, in the run up to the war, I spoke with many people outside the US that were against it, and the main argument wasn't that Saddam didn't have WMDs or an active program developing them. What I heard was that Saddam wasn't an imminent threat, and that inspections and containment should be the way to keep Saddam in check. I think there was a general belief that since inspections had stopped, something must have been going on.
I'm sure if you took a poll among the anti-war crowd before the war, very few would have guessed the answer to what we actually found when we went in. Do you remember those times before the war? Do you disagree? How many people actually believed that he had nothing?
I don't like Saddam at all, but I knew, as did a large portion of Americans who were listening to more than just the US administration, that Iraq did not have WMDs and that an invasion was a bad idea.
That's bullshit. Virtually all the US media (even places like the NY Times) was reporting that Saddam likely had WMD. The vast majority of Americans believed he had it. What sources are you referring to when you say: "a large portion of Americans who were listening to more than just the US administration", since virtually all the media was highly uncritical and passed on reports from the administration?
"spelled honor wrong" is perfectly correct, idiomatic American English. I did some quick searches to back this up:
http://www.usingenglish.com/forum/ask-teacher/101-wrong-wrongly-spelled-spelt.html
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=wrong
See the many examples of "wrong" used as an adverb in the dictionary reference. I think it's clear that the original poster is used to British English, and it sounds like you are too.
Come on, just because you don't know how to deal with them it doesn't mean it's OK that you kill them. Really flawed logic. Incompetence doesn't make human rights disappear.
Justice, by it's very nature, requires a violation of human rights in response to violation of human rights. Whether you lock somebody up in prison for the rest of their life or kill them, you're violating their human rights. Going by your argument, there's "no fundamental difference". Just need to squint our eyes enough, eh?
I was trying to point out that killing someone is always wrong, even if it's performed by the government, and that it is never OK.
Which is the lecture on morality. I and many others vehemently disagree on this position.