Beware of people whose only marketable skills are their supposed loyalty and their ability to equivocate the following of rules to the letter. The ones who actually followed rules to the letter would have died long ago in the shower from lack of common sense.
There's no suspension of constitutional rights here. Fourth Amendment protects you against unreasonable search. Historically, border searches (then primarily to detect contraband) have been practiced since the founding of the Republic, and are deemed reasonable by long historical precedent and public good. As this has always been the case, there's no actual erosion.
You should read about Writs of assistance, which rather tie into this.given how many reports there have been of searches conducted well beyond the borders and over similar logic--smuggling, although of people today. You also seem to be glossing over the point that the courts are directly acknowledging that the searches aren't reasonable in what seems heavily a sign of equivocation on their part to justify the searches--that is, they acknowledge they're not "reasonable" but then counter that the search is okay because "hunches" can be fruitful. This rather falls much further into the category of what's an acceptable level of search for people detained. To that end, it quite clearly seems unreasonable by any definition to allow unilateral mass copying of all data on laptops or any other device.
I do agree that it may well be overly broad and should be narrowed down, but it would require a constitutional amendment to codify that arbitrary searches at the border are not "reasonable". It is not something that SCOTUS can strike down, because the precedent is overwhelmingly in favor of it.
I don't know. We've already got a Fourth Amendment that doesn't qualify "at the border" as some sort of exception. And we've consistently read the Fourth Amendment in all sorts of broad ways well outside the scope of the original intention--mostly because a lot of the people who wrote the Constitution were hypocrites by any reasonable standard. Honestly, if we tomorrow had an Amendment that clarified the point that "at the border the Fourth Amendment applies", I don't doubt that in fifty years we'd just redefine what "at the border" means in such a fashion to be again having this debate. No, the simple truth is that this whole scenario is such a flagrant violation of a person being secure in their effects that we should on principle alone interpret the Fourth Amendment to not allow such things, regardless of how narrow in scope its original intent was. Because honestly, the founders didn't have one concrete idea of what they wanted on most things and even the ones who did were more than willing to make an exception for themselves.
So, short of a whole rewrite of the Constitution to "reset" the interpretation, we're always going to be arguing interpretation. And it's really absurd to argue "deemed reasonable by long historical precedent and public good" or "English Common Law" when the whole Constitution was enacted precisely to rely more upon Statute and not "historical precedent" which the colonists felt were so bad to have to revolt and start a whole separate country over. And if worst comes to worst and the Statute become too absurd, then one can fall upon the meaning behind the Declaration of Independence and excise yourself from absurd Statutes. None of that, though, justifies stomaching this bullshit.
It's not surprising the Catholics can create a big controversy that government actually listens to, while the Quakers cannot.
It also has a lot to do with most Quakers not *wanting* to make a big controversy because they believe it a private, personal matter. Honestly, the whole idea of it is absurd because of the thousand things that health insurance covers, it's not like "The Pill" is the one big morally questionable aspect. No, it's just the "icky" sex-related one that the Catholics are fighting to stop because anything that promotes the ability to have sex or any other kind of worldly pleasure without consequence greatly diminishes their control. The fact that the Church doesn't have nearly the control they think they do...and it's not like "The Pill" is only available through health insurance.
In short, it's more attention whoring than anything wrapped into some self-absorbed desire to dictate to others how society should work. Well, if the Catholics or Quakers or whoever are that opposed to it, they can seclude themselves from society or move to another country. And I say this is as a former Quaker, who recognizes most Quakers really only make a fuss when they're asked to directly harm others or the like. This discussion would be wholly different if the nuns or whoever were being forced to shove "The Pill" literally down people's throats.
'The report said that a reasonable suspicion standard is inadvisable because it could lead to litigation
...
Unlike now, where there's litigation precisely because there isn't a reasonable suspicion standard. Okay, yea, I know, it'll head off future litigation. But, then, is that a good thing in itself? Because if it is, we should just shut down the Judiciary Branch and be done with it.
... and the forced divulgence of national security information,
...
That's some great logic there. If we have some sort of standard of reasonable suspicion for anything related to national security, then indirectly national security information will be divulge. Isn't this the same logic that requires those on the inside to "neither confirm nor deny" everything? And if it's not talking about the indirect form, well, the last decade has shown just how little any part of the federal government has been "forced" to do anything national security wise, even if a court order demanded it. Honestly, no matter how you interpret it it sounds like the court is giving extra-legal blessing to all the "national security" activities the federal government has done/is doing/will do because there's already standards for national security information containment during court proceedings, which apparently they aren't willing to accept as actually good enough.
... and would prevent border officers from acting on inchoate "hunches," a method that it says has sometimes proved fruitful.'
And firing at people on inchoate "hunches" has sometimes proved fruitful in killing drug lords and murderers. Should we legally allow border officers to do that too? Yep, the borders really are a Constitution free zone. There also apparently a human decency free zone. Really, this sort of ruling would make me want to not be a border officer at all. At least the executioner, as bloody as his hands might be, can have some faith that a lengthy process was taken to determine the guilt of the person they kill. With this? It's a free-for-all, with out apparently any reasonable restrictions. Because being reasonable might allow the bad guys to win.
Granted, the last time I checked linux makes the memory space of every process for any uid available to any other process running under the same uid (unless you're using SELinux). It is just that big unixy trust-everything-local attitude.
Actually, what makes it worse than that is that (1) there are suid X clients which makes for an obvious privilege escalation attack vector though the X server and (2) the X server itself is root which makes the X server a big target. The fact that the presentation spoke repeatedly about how nasty GLX was is only funny to me in a dark way because of just how insecure GPUs seem anyways as they suffer even worse from the "unixy" trust-everything-local attitude. So, while I'd love to hear that he succeeds in his GLX clean ups, I only think that clears one bug hurdle while still leaving (a) OpenGL drivers and (b) potentially hardware GPU memory protection limitations. Screen scrapping at the kernel level seems worse if nothing else because it doesn't require nearly the level of sophistication in actually discovering which window holds what object and then try to grab or trap for passwords or whatever that way.
However, until we close the gap of by web browser being able to read my mail directory or modify my
.bashrc, I think that X11 vulnerabilities are just the tip of the iceburg.
Strictly speaking, we already have that capability in SELinux or in AppArmor. The reason it's not really heavily implemented is because you might want your web browser to be able to save a file in your mail directory or overwrite your local
Piracy is tricky.
Granted.
People who produce content do have some right to keep other people from stealing it.
Define "stealing" in this context. Because "stealing" patents by utilizing the underlying ideas in more or less spelled out ways in a patent application are the basis of most industries in their foundations. It's only much later is there any real recognition of patents, generally, as companies (and people) feel a need to create artificial barriers of entry to preempt competition.
Now, the case in point is copyright, and certainly there's a much greater view of respect for that field precisely because it is, in theory, supposed to be of a much more narrow scope. But, we're so far down that rabbit hole--the very definition of a derivative work has become so warped and the time span for a copyright to last has grown so large--that the respect for copyright at all has really had a falling out.
It is very difficult to track down individual pirates, so most get away and reasonable fines are not a deterrent. This leads to a sort of reverse-lottery where lots of people take a chance at disastrous penalties.
Which is the problem, full stop. If reasonable fines are not a deterrent, well, they're simple not a deterrent. Sometimes justice and punishment aren't a deterrent. That's life. Strive to correct this in some way only makes the situation worse. I mean, by the logic stated, jay walking should carry perhaps 20 years or even a death sentence. That's absurd.
Part of the problem is that the public is very split on what is reasonable.
A more major part is that those writing the laws are being effectively bribed with money from copyright holders into writing laws beneficial to copyright holders. So, that there is a "split on what is reasonable" is true. But, we live in a democracy, and I'm quite certain that way more than 90% of people are not in the "fine a person into oblivion". Hell, ever time you see a story showing the vast majority of a nation are committing piracy, it's a good sign you should rethink your laws to decriminalize it more, not try to crack down harder on it. That doesn't inherently mean that content creators won't be paid at all--although they may have to come to terms with the idea that even fewer will make a living wage from it. But, it may mean devising another system than copyright to facilitate it.
Some people are happy with any arrangement that industry wants because the purchase is voluntary
Piracy is voluntary too, between two consenting people to copy some bit of data. The rub is of course that it's piracy that's the issue, not whether people are somehow obtaining content from the industry directly without paying.
It would be interesting to see a survey of opinions on this and see how well public opinion matches the law.
See above. I'd say Napster was a good effective opinion poll of a sort. I am wary, though, of how any survey may be stacked one way or another to distort the message people wish to express. After all, most people may feel guilty about piracy, but that doesn't mean they feel they should be punished for it. Self-guilt happens in lots of circumstances which are clearly entirely victim-less, so it's important to not extrapolate unwarrantedly even if surveys did suggest that some sort of fine or whatever would be appropriate.
Yes, XP needs to die, because it is made to deal with threats from 2000-2001, with added security patches strapped on as the need arose. Windows 7 and newer help address this issue.
Help address this issue..except not really.
That MS has chosen to not push more updates for Windows XP is the only real major thing hindering (b), but that speaks relatively little of XP. The only other major, possibly, beef is the hassle of installing so many incremental security patches. That's a major reason, of course, for Service Packs and slipstreaming.
Nah, really, the only place XP needs to "die" is in that hardware has continued to evolve and XP has been left out of a lot of developments, in large part because fundamentally some things didn't exist when XP was released. That Windows 7/8 already exists and supports said hardware as part of a new system...then XP can "die" when you switch to a new system inherently. But, that still leaves plenty of years for fully functional hardware to keep using XP for a long while.
It reminds me of a funny statement from Woz in "Accidental Empires" about how he couldn't wait for Moore's Law to reach its limit, so hardware would stop changing and schools could afford to spend the money on hardware that'd be around for 10-20 years like most other equipment. Ignoring that the actual time scale has shifted so much because of how cheap computers, not the PCs envisioned, have gotten, the mindset that old software shouldn't reasonably be supported for 10-20 years does sort of kill a lot of good ideas when it comes to reasonably using computer hardware. I guess there's always a long-term support contract with IBM and Linux...
Or, you know, they could have just enforced the sanctions, which would have probably be ineffective towards their intended goal--to end apartheid. And even if they did succeed and Mandela did get elected by a democratic vote, well that's democracy for you. Perhaps that's a "worse" government in your view. In any case, my post wasn't to cast aspersions upon Mandela or his movement. It was to point out that there was a false dichotomy being presented. There were a lot of additional options available.
If the US were to have actually overthrown the South African government, I'm fairly confident they wouldn't have allowed Mandela or his movement to take power. But, you see, that was also a major point of my post which you seemed to miss too. Simply put, Reagan had no problems with apartheid per se. You could argue it was a strategic move to not rock the boat--why overthrow one pro-capitalist government just to probably have to quickly overthrow the next pro-communist (not really a given, but seen as a strong possibility) government. Notice I never mentioned democracy in any of the above because Reagan didn't care about that either.
So, what we're really left with is a government who was repeatedly willing to be policeman to the world but only to further US interests. And human rights were clearly not a US interest as far as Reagan went. Take from that what you want. It certainly has basically nothing to do with "evil" Mandela.
More ink has been spilled and time spent on the subject of ethics in engineering and practical sciences than any discipline save medicine. And yet it does not solve the problem and will not solve the problem because that is not where the problem lies.
What do engineers and practical sciences do? Solve and engineer practical solutions. The answer, of course, is Gort. But, then, perhaps we need a better grasp on what the question is.
ANC/Mandela supported economic nationalism. He was honored by the Soviet Union for his pro-communist affiliations.
... Mandela was anti-capitalist. Not as in, "bmajik says so", but as in, Mandela says so.
And? Mandela could have been Satan incarnate. That doesn't justify vetoing anti-apartheid sanctions.
In 61-62 he participated in a _bombing campaign_ to put pressure on the apartheid government.
I like how you sandwich that in the above. It's as if you believe that Mandela was a one dimensional man with specific intentions involving communism. Meanwhile, if he had staged non-violent sanctions, would that have been okay? Because Reagan wasn't even willing to push or enforce for that. And if he managed it, Reagan would have likely called for his own _bombing campaign_.
Reagan and Thatcher were hesitant to cut off South Africa not because they gave a shit about Mandela or because they loved sticking it to black people; they saw SA as a pawn in the cold war. They didn't want a bunch of African Nationalist Parties starting communist and Russia-aligned states all over the untapped African continent.
So, they don't give a shit about Mandela, but it's because of Mandela they weren't willing to piss off the South African government as it could possibly lead to Mandela gaining power... Funny. It also goes against the long-held truth that America has consistently in the past (a) pushed sanctions and (b) simultaneously provided support for a pro-nationalist pawn in the country to form a coup. The only reason Mandela wasn't chosen is he was anti-capitalist. And odds are good no other pro-capitalist was chosen because the South African government was good enough for Reagan as a useful pro-capitalist pawn.
To Manela's credit, while he advocated for nationalizing of banks, gold production, other mining, and the abolition of private property, he didn't enact these policies when he eventually took control of the government. He was smart enough to understand that SA badly needed foreign investment, and nationalizing industry and destroying property doesn't get you investors.
I like how you mixed "nationalizing industry and destroying property". Perhaps if you said "destroying capital" it'd mean something. In fact, nationalizing industry can spur foreign investment if done correctly. The hard part is, of course, convincing foreign investors that you're only going to nationalize those resources that were unreasonably sold to foreign investors in the past. That's the real destroyer, the destroyer of confidence. And there's no real simple way to fix that problem, no matter how unjust a previous government was with previous contracts or grants. The closest thing is to have a slow transition and a strong political party to see it through. The only alternative is to just let things stand and hope that either inequity fixes itself or you can use taxes or something similar to mold the system to solve the problems. In short, there's no simple solutions, and as you state, Mandela was wise to not engage in coarse action.
Mandela is a mixed bag. As terrorists go, he was a pretty pleasant one -- MK (the militant wing he was part of) only attacked infrastructure at night, hoping to minimize civilian losses.
Certainly better than the US government's own various bombing campaigns.
But, he was willing to resort to violence to bring about a communist revolution in Africa.
As above, being peaceful wouldn't have meant the US would have responded in kind.
You think Reagan and Thatcher were against that? You're right.
As you hinted above, Reagan and Thatcher were against any potentially Soviet Union puppet because Reagan and Thatcher wanted to be the puppet masters. You had to be the US or the Soviet's puppet. So, you were right in a way. The US didn't care about Mandela as a person or whether the black people were being killed or not. All they cared about was retaining their puppet and doing nothing to help a potential Soviet puppet. And if Mandela had risen to power, even under a democracy and non-violent means, then the US would violently overthrow that regime and put in its place a democracy or theocracy or aristocracy or whatever it took to have their puppet.
You see, as much as you can potentially condemn Mandela for what he did or might have been, you overlook that Mandela wasn't *the* guaranteed new leader of South Africa. Reagan and ilk were not interested in rocking the boat that was the apartheid South African government because they were uninterested in the foreign policy risk. In essence, the people of South Africa or even the rest of the world didn't matter. All that mattered was the political game. One could argue that such show of strength was necessary, but Carter didn't cause WW3.
The whole notion that any of it was necessary seems as much absurd in hindsight as Mandela creating a communism regime just for the Soviet Union. That's the only point where I'd at least begin to tolerate Reagan's concerns at the time. But even that doesn't justify vetoing sanctions or refusal to enforce them. It only explains why they wouldn't have supported Mandela. Well, the US never had to. And perhaps because they didn't is precisely why Mandela and others like him are so well liked. The US is great at picking losers, perhaps?
I concur very strongly to this. It's funny most of all because the study, if anything, hints less that people are bad at choosing passwords (since given enough password space, a lot of "bad" passwords are inherently obscure by length) as that input constraints result in those "bad" passwords actually becoming bad. But as much as xkcd points it out, I don't think the suggestion of simply four words is enough (or more precisely, I think the entropy numbers are off if one presumes such pass phrases become common and based on dictionary words). The real point would be, of course, that the reason bank pins are so secure is because they can't be brute forced. At that point, it's most often a moot point and the only real issue is sites storing unsalted, unhashed passwords and being hackable.
To wit, the weakest link in the chain is in fact the computer element, not than the human element--baring the pedantic point that all the software is human made.
The alternative is wasting billions of $ on privately created programs that don't do what they should--the exact amount might be lower, but it'd still be in the billions. The real question is, has any government or other organization made OSS payroll systems that are readily modifiable to complex rules? If there was just one decent one, how much would it cost to modify it to work on even some of the more esoteric rule sets? Because once you get to that point, every one of those "billions of $ wasted on programs that don't do what they should" because a rather clear case of fraud or malfeasance. Perhaps that wouldn't really change anything. But, if you one is pessimistic enough to believe that, then the discussion of the waste is all a moot point anyways, as nothing any of us says or does will matter, so arguing over it is itself a waste of your and my time.
How would that not be spending tax dollars to compete with private industry?
Compared to the US Army committing theft--BSA terms--of at least $50 million on the private sector, only to later begrudgingly pay some sort of settlement on the part they accidentally outed themselves on? At least direct open source software development could be some sort of honorable route. Btw, why aren't we also hearing about dishonorable discharges and criminal trials leading to prison terms? Because I'm pretty sure anyone else in the same boat--not companies, because they're apparently treated the same with the lack of jail time for officials--would be extradited if necessary and threatened with long jail terms.
What kind of an ass backwards priority system does this poster have?
Probably the kind that says "don't reinvent the wheel" and doesn't suffer too much from "not invented here" syndrome to see the value of open source software and how tax money can be better spent in a more open, transparent system? That it might have a negative effect on the private industry is just a natural side effect of them not sufficiently covering a niche. What next? Are you going to bitch that the US Army doesn't outsource its troops to private contractors and how their in-house work and how it is utilized competes too much with private industry?
Take money away from honest citizens at gun point and give this money to their competition?
99.9999% of people aren't "their competition". And if you're in an industry that can be readily subsumed as a duty of a governmental department, you're inherently on thin ice when it comes to long-term stability of your business. The only major argument you could have is that what the US Army needs isn't per se under the envelope of their duty and should be outsourced to someone. But, that argument calls upon the construction of a federal governmental IT department to construct a lot of the software that can and would be used by federal, state, and local governance over a lot of areas. Why? Precisely because even a horribly budgeted $50 million to have developed the software instead of buying it out from a private company would put the government in a better position: they'd have the software source and in-house developers knowledgeable enough to make requested modifications they particularly want without worrying about a middle-man company that may choose to be wholly uncooperative.
How is this even remotely ethical?
Well, the other major alternative would be to not buy software at all nor pirate it. Because once you starting how it's somehow unethical to take the more cost effective approach because it might deter the private sector, all bets are off on even involving yourself in that sector of the economy. Oh, you're okay with it so long as it involves a company sucking on the government's teet, right? Nothing like that sweet, sweet corporate welfare.
PS - I love the quote in the article: '"Piracy is theft, clean and simple," remarked vice-president Joe Biden at the time [in 2010].' Where's your moral outrage upon that?
Note that I also am not advocating that the US is "Christian" or should be.
Not that I was saying you were, but the majority of Americans profess to be Christians. And I honestly think that exposing the "ugly" truth on just how many people are "supposedly" Christian is probably the best way to avoid either (a) uniting people under a banner as an excuse to persecute others and (b) to avoid internal conflict and purges when people feel out un-"Christian" a lot of people are. Note: I say all this with the presumption that at least the devote are Christian in their own mind--ie, it isn't just a claim to avoid scrutiny--and yet the difference in beliefs is so wide that plenty of people would claim other Christians aren't "true" Christians, which seems to be the foundation of a lot of intra-religion abuse.
Personally, I don't think the government and religion should be crossed. It's a little more questionable when laws based on morality come in to the picture, but I tend to be very much against "moral" laws that can't demonstrate harm to someone other than the person doing it. Religion and politics do not mix well because those who seek power will abuse religion to get what they want. I elude to that in another one of my posts and this is also where much of the infighting has come from.
There is certainly truth to this to some extent, but the other ugly truth is that there are those in power who are so self-righteous in their cause that they believe it is necessary to engage in purgings, from excommunication to banishment to outright death, to avoid somehow tainting "their" religion or otherwise leading "the flock" down the wrong path. Ie, they come to their own justifications upon what is necessary, even if to do such acts is clearly counter to the word of God.
There is no Biblical basis (new testament anyway) for violent acts against someone for being a heretic, so therefore the only way to come to that conclusion is that it is an erosion of your power base and therefore a threat to be attacked.
While that can certainly be true, one need not be a hypocrite to expound upon beliefs that one does not follow. You see, in their own eyes there is "the higher virtue"--see the 0th law in Asimov's 3 laws of robotics for a similar idea--that can be used to justify the "self-sacrifice" of damnation for the greater good. Now, that doesn't mean that the person can't also be doing it for their own power mongering. It's just not as clear as arguing that the two are truly separate and it's all for show.
You even see this today with the "Christian" politicians who fear-monger up followers by saying all sorts of bad things will happen if they don't get their way.
The "best" kind are the ones who seem to believe bad things will happen anyways, eg Job. Certainly, I can't recall hearing them stop for a second to expound upon all the praise now that they're elected or that things are going good and the evidence is all the gay marriages or something.
Ah, but you see, I'm a physicist and I don't really believe in effects without causes.
So I take it you don't believe in the Big Bang? Or is it turtles all the way down?
There is nothing in the definition that suggests that altruism is causeless or random. Altruism is defined to be the performance of good or self-sacrificing acts without the specific cause of some expectation of reward. To quote further:
Well, beyond the fact that you're not actually quoting the link you gave...the notion of self-sacrifice without some expectation of reward is precisely the point being challenged by the article: that a lot of activities spur a reward that, at least subconsciously is expected. Hence it's not a random act nor is it causeless--it's based upon past such behavior causing one to belief that future events will unfold a certain way. That is, after all, what expectations are all about. And hence to lack expectation is to either have no history to base upon, a history that proves a lack of reward, or to have some specific intent to act without a cause. So, perhaps not all altruism need be causeless, but most people have enough experience to see that (a) comparable circumstances operate similarly and so direct experience in one matter need not exist to form an expectation and (b) that generally the lack of reward for an act is a sign it's a "bad" act. But, I'd admit there's leeway in there. Never the less, a large part of the issue is just how much the subconscious plays a part in one's expectations.
According to your definition, only if I decide to give $100 to Unicef if I flip a coin and it comes up heads, then flip the coin (and it comes up heads) is it random, or causally linked to a truly unpredictable event, and hence "altruism".
Nope because then the coin flip caused you to give money to Unicef.
[Large winded speech about the body is physical and there's random (that's non-cause but also not intent) or reasoned (and hence has a cause)]
Out of curiosity, did you reason out every word you use? Or do you propose using "sort of things with puppies" instead of "sort of things with kittens" was a quantum fluctuation? Or would you recognize that humans have yet to reach the point of complete self-analysis and that when people speak of "intent" and "thought", they may all originate physically but it's currently impossible (I tend to believe simply impossible) to specify a cause for them all. That it is in some level "random" doesn't take away from intent because, as you argue, you believe you have reason in a physical universe that is founded on randomness. Obviously if you make a distinction at that level, you can make a distinction with altruism.
So no, I don't think altruism is selfless action without cause, any more than random acts of violence are random or my decision to reply to your reply is random, although it is altruistic enough -- I get no direct benefit from you changing your mind, I get only the satisfaction of knowing that I've helped you (perhaps) towards a better/deeper perception of the nature of good and evil.
Is good or evil more random? j/k
It's a bit scary -- and both socially and scientifically pointless -- to assert that it is basically random, without cause. If you really want to understand altruism, study the Prisoner's Dilemma, the game Diplomacy, watch the movie Hunger Games.
I'd suggest you watch Battle Royale. It's more entertaining.
A sociopath is basically an individual that lacks the altruistic conditioning necessary to survive in our society, and the societal superorganism has its own rules for identifying and punishing those individuals as they are a profound threat to it.
They make them CEOs of companies and pay them millions of dollars?
HELP!!!! I'm being held prisoner in /usr/games/lib!
