http://xkcd.com/763/

It never really jumped out at me until seeing it in italics, but does anyone else find it scary that a nation claiming to be the leader of the free world, has, in it's foremost legal document, the words "shall not be questioned."?

The agenda seems to be exposing corruption, something a lack of transparency has a big role in promoting. As much of a fan as I am of Wikileaks, Anonymous on most days, there are legitimate reasons to keep certain pieces of information from the public. Wikileaks seams to have a good understanding of this idea, and it seems like at least some members of Anonymous may be exercising the same kind of discretion.

As an interesting aside, at least in the US, the only information that actually should be hidden falls under 'Classified'. The DoD has eight different reasons they can call information classified, which cover every legitimate use case for keeping information from the public. If someone says it's classified, there's probably a good reason you shouldn't know, if someone says it's a "State Secret", they're trying to hide something embarrassing or illegal.

http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2010-09-01/

Am I the only one who's thinking that someone needs to be asking some senior management at the USPTO about that 80% failure rate?

A selfish man who had others die for him

That's kind of a trite and glib statement, and one we've heard a lot. When I was in the military I heard people say quite often "If Osama thinks strapping a bomb to your chest to kill infidels is such a good idea, why doesn't he do it?" The answer to that is simply, the same reason George W. Bush didn't grab an M-16 and head to Fallujah.

Two words: Due Process.

http://www.warresisters.org/pages/piechart.htm

The above link suggest 54% of the federal budget is military. Haven't done a lot of due diligence so I don't know how accurate their estimate is but based on a quick glance of the US Military budget wiki, the federal military budget is definitely more than 20%, and it's most likely between the two. You can decide for yourself where you think it falls.

I don't think that such is accidental, it's marketing. As we all know, there are legitimate reasons to shape traffic, i.e. VOIP is far more sensitive to latency that FTP. By calling everything an application they're hoping to confuse the legitimate traffic shaping described above with the crap that they're describing here. Technocrats aren't likely to fall for it but it will be very useful in confusing those with a vague understanding of the issues.

Modded funny but the scary part it how right you are. Slap a new label on something and most people won't notice that there's not difference.

Along said lines the KGB (Komitet gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti) translated comes pretty close to Department of Homeland Security.

...in the business world, things are accomplished but two relatively unimportant but equally arrogant groups: Business managers, who play golf and think they know everything, and IT Professionals, who read Slashdot and also think they know everything. These are there stories....

Except that would constitute a contract of adhesion (a contract that allows for no negotiation), which nullifies the contract in many, if not most states.

No, his example makes perfect sense. The complaint isn't the fact that his car has not football dispenser, but the fact that the manufacturer has designed his car to prevent the installation of a football dispenser and the manufacturer has successfully lobbied Congress for laws that say no person may manufacture tools for the purpose of install a football dispenser into your car.

Few people here are suggesting the media companies should provide the tools for our fair use, but we have every right to bitch, and exercise civil disobedience to their efforts to deprive us of our fair use.

The Department of Defense's official definition of terrorism:

The calculated use of unlawful violence or threat of unlawful violence to inculcate fear; intended to coerce or to intimidate governments or societies in the pursuit of goals that are generally political, religious, or ideological.

Based on the above definition the entire Revolutionary War is a textbook example of terrorism. The violence being used was definitely seen as unlawful by the crown, and the goal was to coerce England to relinquish control of the colonies. You could make arguments that the intent in the Revolutionary War wasn't to 'inculcate fear' but the same argument could be made of 9/11, all targets attacked caused significant military and economic damage.

My larger point is that terrorism is a BS term that isn't particularly useful in honest discourse. No government ever considers violence against it to be lawful, almost any large scale act of violence have goals that are political, religious, or ideological, and any party engaging in violence is generally hopeful that the threat of such will bring about it's goal without the actual exercise of violence.

Terrorism was a very effective way to 'persuade' Britain that the US colonies should no longer be ruled by the British, so I don't know that it takes a stupid engineer to believe violence is an effective tool to create change. In the words of Robert Heinlein, violence has settled more issues in history than has any other factor.