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Government

Jimmy Carter Calls Snowden Leak Ultimately "Beneficial" 424

eldavojohn writes "According to RT, the 39th president of the United States made several statements worth noting at a meeting in Atlanta. Carter said that 'America has no functioning democracy at this moment' and 'the invasion of human rights and American privacy has gone too far.' The second comment sounded like Carter predicted the future would look favorably upon Snowden's leaks — at least those concerning domestic spying in the United States — as he said: 'I think that the secrecy that has been surrounding this invasion of privacy has been excessive, so I think that the bringing of it to the public notice has probably been, in the long term, beneficial.' It may be worth noting that, stemming from Zurcher v. Stanford Daily, Jimmy Carter signed the Privacy Protection Act of 1980 into law and that Snowden has received at least one nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize."

Submission + - Jimmy Carter Calls Snowden Leak Ultimately "Beneficial" (rt.com)

eldavojohn writes: According to RT, the 39th president of the United States made several statements worth noting. Carter said that 'America has no functioning democracy at this moment' and 'the invasion of human rights and American privacy has gone too far.' The second comment sounded like the Carter predicted the future would look favorably upon Snowden's leads — at least those concerning domestic spying in the United States — as he said: 'I think that the secrecy that has been surrounding this invasion of privacy has been excessive, so I think that the bringing of it to the public notice has probably been, in the long term, beneficial.' It may be worth noting that, stemming from Zurcher v. Stanford Daily, Jimmy Carter signed the Privacy Protection Act of 1980 into law and that Snowden has received at least one nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Comment Yahoo! Mission Statement (Score 5, Funny) 91

What exactly does Yahoo sell? Do they even have a mission statement?

From several investor calls she has said:

“Yahoo is about making the world’s daily habits more inspiring and entertaining,”

Which is a little more positive and slightly better than Yahoo!'s previous mission statement:

"Now open up all your little fucking birdie mouths because Papa Yahoo!'s got a big juicy unwanted browser toolbar to slam down your goddamn throats."

Comment 'Gone Their Own Way with Android'? What? (Score 1) 42

More recently, Chinese companies have gleefully gone on their own with Android,

What are you talking about? From that article they made a few comments about how they wish to move away from Google's Android. And actually here's the exact quote that sentiment was extrapolated from:

"Our country's mobile operating system research and development is heavily reliant on Android," according to a white paper from a research division of China's tech regulator, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. "Although the Android system currently remains open source, the core technologies and technology roadmap is strictly controlled by Google."

That's a quote from some Chinese Ministry, not even a group of Chinese developers. I hear that more like "Chinese are reluctantly still installing Google's Android on most of their phones. Google's Android use still rising sharply in China with no end in sight." Can you point me to the Chinese repo for the forked source to android? Surely if it's widely distributed it must also make the source available?

'Gleefully gone their own way'? Yeah, tell you what, fork Android for China and let's compare the two code bases for support and worldwide use one year later. I suspect the glee will be entirely one-sided and it's not going to be China's Android.

Comment Re:Who Cares? (Score 5, Interesting) 1448

Your objection is that it has a message you disagree with. In that sense, I agree with Card. It is intolerance. And closed-mindedness. If you refuse to listen to any argument against what you believe in, you must believe in a lot of things that aren't true.

But I've read all his arguments. I've actually read them all. I went from being a huge Card fan to deciding he shall no longer see a cent of my money and I will no longer read his work. That's not closed-mindedness. He's had his pedestal for quite some time and I'm done with him. I'm not stripping him of his first amendment rights, he can go to the town square and scream himself hoarse for all I care. What I'm stripping him of is my hard earned money that he uses to spread that message on the internet and in his community.

Would you buy fruit from a KKK vendor? Would you pay for magazines spouting racism just to make sure you are covering all your bases and hearing all arguments of the issue? No. Because that issue is settled in your mind and you no longer want to financially support the other side. I feel the same way about homosexual marriage. And from what I've read he's not providing any original viewpoints on this issue. So the guy's not getting one more ounce of my resources and on top of it, I'll let anyone know who brings him up what he's said in his newsletters and websites about equal rights of United States citizens.

Believe it or not, KKK members cannot offer you much better arguments for racism than they could a hundred years ago. And for that I'm not stupid enough to accuse you of being closed minded because you ignore their message today.

Comment Re:Who Cares? (Score 5, Insightful) 1448

In my head, what youre doing to him is on par with what he is doing to homosexuals. Similarly you also have the "i do it because its right"-justification.

Is that a joke? He has a right to his religion. I get upset when that belief infringes on other people's rights. The Federal government has over a thousand laws referring to marriage. Many of those laws benefits couples living together like social security benefits, inheritance rights, etc. I am advocating this from an egalitarian standpoint that those people who are in love with each other are treated like any other pair of human beings consensually in love with each other. And yes, I think that trumps Mr. Card's horseshit religion or his lack of his ability to sit down with his dumbass children and say "Look, two people can love each other no matter what sex they are." But because he's afraid some bearded cloud God is going to fire and brimstone us, I cannot promote equal rights among human beings?

My justification isn't "I do it because it's right" you idiot, my justification is I do it because these laws are ridiculously unfair to a subset of the people who have done nothing wrong in the eyes of a secular government.

If you want to call it a "civil union" or whatever, that's fine. But I don't want employers or government offices calling some people "married" and other people "civil unioned" because that can lead to "second class" treatment and promotes discrimination among employers. In the eyes of the government, two humans should be able to marry each other with equal treatment and equal labeling.

Calling me intolerant on this issue makes no sense. I support freedom of religion but I'm not going to stand for some Christian version of sharia law in what claims to be a secular government.

Capitalism suffers from a lack of responsibility to know what you are supporting. A small group of people boycotting this movie is merely informing people what they are supporting. Just like I would boycott a company that pollutes.

Comment Re:Who Cares? (Score 5, Insightful) 1448

If I cared about the views of the people behind the movies, or the actors... I wouldnt be able to watch any movies. I look forward to seeing this one, whether the author likes or dislikes gay people.

The primary problem is when he uses his artistic medium and influence to spread this message. Which he most certainly has:

In the first place, no law in any state in the United States now or ever has forbidden homosexuals to marry. The law has never asked that a man prove his heterosexuality in order to marry a woman, or a woman hers in order to marry a man.

Any homosexual man who can persuade a woman to take him as her husband can avail himself of all the rights of husbandhood under the law. And, in fact, many homosexual men have done precisely that, without any legal prejudice at all.

Ditto with lesbian women. Many have married men and borne children. And while a fair number of such marriages in recent years have ended in divorce, there are many that have not.

So it is a flat lie to say that homosexuals are deprived of any civil right pertaining to marriage. To get those civil rights, all homosexuals have to do is find someone of the opposite sex willing to join them in marriage.

Translation: "Your entire life has to be a lie because I'm ignorant." And no, I do not go see Tom Cruise movies because he uses his stardom and money he gets from those movies to push a very dangerous religion! There are some issues where I flat out draw the line. I'm not boycotting Clint Eastwood because he's said some politically stupid stuff but there are some issues like homosexuality where I feel like I'm promoting ignorance if I promote those who think homosexuals should not have the same rights as heterosexuals. It's an egalitarian issue in my mind and I'm not going to see Ender's Game nor will I read the rest of the Shadow series.

Comment The Original Research (Score 1) 126

I found this paragraph particularly fascinating: "The environment minister's admission came as a new study claimed that severe air pollution in northern China had slashed life expectancies there by more than five years compared to the south, potentially robbing 500 million Chinese of a total of 2.5 billion years of life"

Why stop there when the original research paper is fully available to all*?

* For values of "all" outside of China where it's probably considered "disharmonious."

Comment What About the Ministry of Censorship? (Score 5, Interesting) 126

What are your list of the other three most embarrassing departments in our world?

Surely the Environmental Ministry cannot be as harmful as the Chinese Ministry preventing this quote from being carried in Xinhua, China Daily or any major news source in China?

Tell me about the uproar that must have erupted from North of the Huai River when it was announced that the lack of environmental compliance has reduced life expectancy on average by five years in the northern half of China. Show me the state sponsored news source that ran that story. Go ahead, compare that article with with this one. The latter makes it sound like it was second hand smoke as the primary source of limited life spans. It's like reading two completely different health reports!

Solve your censorship problem and you will solve a lot of your other problems. Just be prepared to see high turnover in your leadership -- something that has been needed for a very long time in China.

Comment Gonna Have to Disagree with You There (Score 3, Interesting) 658

Wow does this headline have things reversed.

Edward Snowden has been subjected to a month long attack campaign. This started with go after his girlfriend for being a pole dancer. It followed with other negative news stories and criticism by major politicians. From there there was a federal espionage indictment. He then had to flee the country and the USA has gone to extraordinary lengths putting pressure on countries to isolate him. The media has been mainly complicit. And after all that is approval rating has dropped a mere 5 points.

That's the story.

Submitter here and I'm afraid I'm going to have to outright disagree with you. I just don't see your events lining up with this recent drop in support. You're talking about months old efforts to discredit him that seemed to have little effect on his popularity. If you read the HuffPo article you'll see:

Much of the drop in support for Snowden's actions since the earlier poll appears to have taken place among Republicans, who were divided, 37 percent to 37 percent, on whether Snowden did the right thing in the previous poll, but in the latest poll said by a 44 percent to 29 percent margin that he did the wrong thing.

As fallout from his revelations ruin our foreign relations I think you'll see a lot of conservatives switch positions. This is simply a more plausible explanation. US as a power player in world politics and economics is simply higher on some people's agendas then their own damned privacy.

Submission + - According to YouGov Poll, Snowden Support Declining Among Americans (yougov.com)

eldavojohn writes: A recent poll from the YouGov consisting of one thousand responses shows that Snowden's support among Americans has shifted. Now, according to the poll, more Americans think he did the wrong thing rather than the right thing when asked 'Based on what you’ve heard, do think Snowden’s leak of top-secret information about government surveillance programs to the media was the right thing to do or the wrong thing to do?' The results and breakdown can be found in this PDF. Without getting into racial or political breakdowns, the results now show that 38% say he did the wrong thing, 33% say he did the right thing and 29% remain undecided about the results of his actions. Instead of charging the populace into action Snowden may be facing apathy at best and public disapproval at worst.

Comment Oh! "Borrowing" Some UI Stuff, Huh? (Score 5, Insightful) 158

I see this happen sometimes and it can usually be traced back to someone "borrowing" someone else's work on the UI side of things (CSS, JavaScript, HTML, etc) as a starting point and then never altering the important things.

Instead, it belonged to Eric Mueller, who owns the domain themepark.com, which he uses for his web design firm.

Given Zynga's code of ethics (or lack thereof), I would wager this e-mail found its way into "their" product by way of their mission statement which probably transcends game ideas into directly taking web designs that are, by definition, available to anyone with an HTTP connection. Stay classy, Zynga.

Comment Two More Strategies (Score 1) 296

Then when the lie is outed, you try to soften it some by saying it was a mistake, an erroor, or I misspoke.

Don't overlook the other responses like one of the authors of the Patriot Act, Jim Sensenbrenner's response:

As the author of the Patriot Act, I am extremely troubled by the FBI’s interpretation of this legislation. While I believe the Patriot Act appropriately balanced national security concerns and civil rights, I have always worried about potential abuses. The Bureau’s broad application for phone records was made under the so-called business records provision of the Act. I do not believe the broadly drafted FISA order is consistent with the requirements of the Patriot Act. Seizing phone records of millions of innocent people is excessive and un-American.

Oh, so now instead of taking responsibility as the author of that which has threatened your constituents it's the fault of those who interpreted the law incorrectly. Surely, then, you will go after those who interpreted the law incorrectly for breaking the spirit of the law? No? You don't say ...

Or perhaps you'd like to hear George W. Bush's take on his responsibility for his administration allowing the Patriot Act to be passed:

Asked about an NSA program that tracks people's Internet activity, Bush said, "I put that program in place to protect the country. One of the certainties was that civil liberties were guaranteed."

So, we have another slam dunk certainty that civil liberties were guaranteed and as long as you keep saying that, it's true in your own little reality that no one else shares with you! Thank god those were guaranteed, right? RIGHT?

Comment In Windows 8 64 Bit As Defined by Tom's Hardware (Score 3, Insightful) 326

Neat test but I think the summary could at least clarify that the test system is Windows 8 64 Bit. It doesn't really mean a whole lot to me when I'm running a 64 bit distribution of GNU/Linux. Also the tests are selected by Tom's Hardware as a suite ... some of these tests are fairly meaningless to me and I feel like something like cold start time should be more heavily weighted than, say, hardware acceleration performance. The wait time on start up affects everyone and is unavoidable where hardware acceleration is nice but also not something I focus on. Also, why is a topic like "security" included in a "performance" test? I think standards compliance and security should be separated out to their own scores.

Is anyone reading this actually using Windows 8?

Comment Re:You Don't Know What You're Talking About (Score 1) 1073

I am having trouble understanding your post. The parts you quoting appear basically unrelated to your responses.

Basically your post demonstrates a failed understanding that there are many marriage laws at the federal level. To say "Good! The US should stay out of it." makes about as much sense as saying "We should have no federal laws regarding marriage." This includes laws like federal tax laws being applied to married couples.

To recap, the federal government had to weigh in one way or another because they had a large amount of legislation that refers to "marriage." And the opposing sides in this issue actually view either ruling as the federal government sticking its nose in people's personal business. The anti-gay marriage crowd saw DOMA as the status quo and will likely view this overturning of DOMA as the federal government getting involved with dictating what is and isn't a marriage. Conversely the status quo was unacceptable to a small group.

Ethically this is a black and white issue and DOMA should have been overturned. But saying the federal government should butt out is not so cut and dried. Your post seemed to say it's just a marriage certificate and "News flash: gay couples live as married couples whether you like it or not." This is completely the wrong way to look at this, they were not receiving the same benefits as heterosexual married couples and saying "gay couples live as married couples" shows you don't understand the significance of DOMA being overturned. Now surviving spouse benefits will apply to one member of a gay couple same as it would to a member of a heterosexual couple. And that's just one of many things that heterosexual couples were enjoying that homosexual couples could not.

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