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Comment Re:fascist apologist (Score 1) 264

Roughly, across the US, there seems to be an average conviction rate for police misconduct of 50/month. The average rate of people being killed by police is about 35/month.

So, for every cop convicted of misconduct, there appears to be about 0.7 that get away with murder (assuming, almost certainly incorrectly, that every person killed by police qualifies as "murder" and that all of them "get away with it").

Comment Re:The ACLU (Score 1) 264

"Yes" and "no" are the only ways you get to vote on a bill. They point out quite clearly what needs to be addressed in the bill in order for it to be acceptable to them. They also actively lobby to suggest new legislation and amend in-process legislation. You don't see that here, because that's not what this story is about, because this bill is up for vote.

Comment Re:It's all fun and games until the NSA gets invol (Score 1) 264

Well, the police should be operating exclusively within the U.S. Anyone within the U.S. has 4th Amendment rights, regardless of whether they are a citizen, a resident, or a foreigner. While there is a foreign-intelligence exception (per court findings, not per the text of the amendment), that exception only applies when the intelligence-gathering is directed against a foreign entity reasonably believed to be located outside the US.

I'd love to see the justification someone gins up for tracking individuals that must be physically located within the US for the purposes of gathering intelligence on individuals that are required to be located outside the US.

Comment Re:Until the NSA stops spying on America... (Score 1) 309

You do know that it's possible to criticize bad things done by the US government

Sure it is. How's that working out for Assange and Snowden?

Making public a ton of classified documents is not criticism. It might be right, it might be wrong, it might be some of both, but it's not accurate to describe it as "criticism".

How's criticizing the government going for all the people who criticize their handling of Manning? For the people who are criticizing the NSA now?

Comment Re:"Metadata" is the important stuff (Score 4, Insightful) 193

The holdover of calling it "metadata" is a little odd.

All metadata is, naturally, data. That's not the odd part; people should know that.

It's reasonable to call it "phone call metadata". That's what it is. That indicates that it is not the content of the calls, but it's other data about the calls. So in the context of phone calls, it's metadata, because it's not the phone call content itself. Once it's separated from that context, it's just "data".

Saying "it's just metadata" makes no sense at all, since the "meta-" part give you no information about the data's value.

Comment Re:Crashplan (Score 1) 983

If you're backing up a collection of movies and music, what does it matter?

You want cheap backup and information security? This is one case where encryption is actually magic fairy dust that will solve your problem.

Comment Re:Non sequitur (Score 1) 125

I think the angle they are trying for here is suggesting that they were not confronted about editing articles about themselves because they were donors. That is implying that others who are not donors were confronted about editing articles about themselves. In other words, the donation is buying them out of the policy against editing articles about yourself.

I don't think the article actually presents any evidence to support that insinuation, but I think that's what they're aiming for.

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