Rioters in England cause millions of dollars worth of damage in 2011. 3000 arrested.

Bankers in England cause billions of dollars worth of damage in 2008. Zero arrested.

This is what passes for justice these days.

"God Hates Fags" -- Protected Speech
"Bong Hits for Jesus" -- Not Protected Speech

What the fuck is wrong with this country?

It used to be that metamoderation was just that, moderation of moderation. I haven't metamoderated in a while, but something has gone horribly wrong. When I go to metamod today, none of the comments are moderated. All I see is "Score: 1". What use is it for me to judge whether a comment has been moderated appropriately , when there's no moderation applied?

Just another reason Slashdot 2.0 sucks.

A government exists to protect it's citizens. Any government that doesn't, doesn't deserve to exist. Let's look at the US government.

In 2004 crime in the US cost its victims almost 16 billion dollars. [cite(pdf, table 82)]

The criminals behind the current financial crisis have cost the US *trillions* of dollars. Clearly, theft, fraud, and all other property crimes are insignificant in the face of this disaster, and our government did nothing to stop it, and is holding no one accountable. They have utterly failed in their responsibility to protect us.

The WTC attacks on 9/11/01 killed nearly 3000 Americans and caused losses reaching 1.7 trillion dollars in the stock market. [cite]
In response, Bush went to war with Iraq. This war has killed over 4500 Americans and will cost over 3.5 trillion dollars. [cite(pdf, p.1)] Not only did the US government fail to protect us, they harmed us worse than Bin Laden did.

Let's keep going. In 2007, 775,138 people were arrested for marijuana possession. In contrast, 597,447 were arrested for *all violent crimes combined. [cite]. As you can see, the US government victimizes more of its citizens than it protects.

So what's left to justify the existence of this government? Majority rule perhaps? Well, Barack Obama got 62.98 million votes in 2008. The voting age population in 2008 was 230,117,876.[cite] That's 27% of our population that voted for this president. That can in no way be interpreted as a mandate to rule.

From all these facts and figures, one conclusion is clear. The US government has no claim to legitimacy whatsoever.

Re:Bullshit (Score:2)
by girlintraining (1395911) Foe of a Friend on Wednesday December 17, @05:23PM (#26153681)

>If you go see the shuttle up close and your first thought is that it has a bad paint job, maybe you should just stick to playing with dolls.

Or maybe you should be less of a douchebag. The fact that something is an engineering marvel doesn't mean much to some people, but that doesn't mean that lessens the impact it has for them. Who hasn't looked up at a bird in the sky and wanted to journey? Who hasn't seen the stars and wished upon them? When I look at the shuttle, I don't see an engineering marvel. I see the realization of over twenty thousand years of human beings dreaming of having their own wings and flying through the heavens. And you know what -- I think I'm allowed to say it does have a bad paint job, and I could care less about the mechanical guts of it. That's not why it's beautiful.

Tanks, bombers, subs, and all that jazz you like--You can love them if you want, call them awesome. They're not special to me, they're just made so some people can kill other people. I'll stick with my dolls, and if you don't mind terribly, I'll be doing it in that badly painted bird over there that was built with hopes and dreams, instead of fears and insecurities.
--
All difficult things have their origin in that which is easy, and great things in that which is small. ~ Lao Tzu

I'll add to this as ideas come to me.

There shall be a right to trial by jury in all cases.

Abolish sovereign immunity.

Restitution must be made to innocent people falsely accused, if no charges are filed, or if a person is found innocent the state must bear their legal fees, lost wages, etc. Similarly, those who sue and lose should bear the costs to the defendent.

The punishment for legal negligence should be equivalent to the potential damage caused by the negligence. If a prosecutor neglects to produce exculpatory evidence during discovery, then he should get the same penalty that the defendant would have gotten.

There should be something akin to habeas corpus for evidence.

The president gets 2 weeks vacation per year, as do congressmen.

Congressmen must show up for work, i.e. they must be present to vote unless they're on vacation.

Congressmen must read and understand every bill they vote for. Perhaps bills should be read aloud before a vote, or maybe there should be a quiz.

Probable cause should be just that, probable. If any judge issues warrants, or officer makes arrests, and these warrants or arrests lead to convictions in less than 50% of cases they must lose their authority to issue warrants or make arrests.

Given the widespread practice of 'testilying', it shall be presumed reasonable to doubt any testimony given by a police officer. Everything an officer does while on duty must be recorded.

All jurors should be informed of their responsibility to nullify unjust laws.

Passing a law that is found unconstitutional will result in impeachment.

No corporate personhood.

No victim, no crime. If there is no actual, specific, individual victim, no crime has occurred.

For my future reference:
http://lwn.net/Articles/259710/

I wrote something in my journal the other day about the new NSP, and it seems to be gone. Wonder if I just forgot to hit post? Anyway, will replace soon.

"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross."
-- Sinclair Lewis

"No people ever recognize their dictator in advance. He never stands for election on the platform of dictatorship. He always represents himself as the instrument [of] the Incorporated National Will. . . . When our dictator turns up you can depend on it that he will be one of the boys, and he will stand for everything traditionally American. And nobody will ever say 'Heil' to him, nor will they call him 'Fuhrer' or 'Duce.' But they will greet him with one great big, universal, democratic, sheeplike bleat of 'O.K., Chief! Fix it like you wanna, Chief! Oh Kaaaay!'"
---Dorothy Thompson, 1935

"What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security . . .".
---They Thought They Were Free, Milton Mayer, 1955

"We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine and remember that we are not descended from fearful men. Not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate, and to defend causes that were for the moment unpopular. This is not time for men who oppose Sen. McCarthy's methods to keep silent, or for those who approve. We can deny our heritage and our history, but we cannot escape responsibility for the result."
-- Edward R. Murrow

"The junior Senator from Wisconsin has caused alarm and dismay amongst our allies abroad, and given considerable comfort to our enemies. And whose fault is that? Not really his. He didn't create this situation of fear, he merely exploited it, and rather successfully. Cassius was right: 'The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves'".
-- Edward R. Murrow

From roystgnr:

"...there's obviously still a gap between the amount of passion you've spent learning about both subjects and the amount you spend speaking about them. Calm down, take a deep breath, and back slowly away from the Caps Lock key..."

We need Republicans.

We need people who will tell business's side of the story, who will make us stop and think about radical social initiatives, people who will balance our national checkbook. That's what we need, that's what the Republican Party used to be about, but it's not what we've been getting for a generation.

Dwight Eisenhower was a great example of a traditional Republican. He believed in strong national defense but looked suspiciously at military adventures: he campaigned against Communism and also against intervention in the Korean War.

He also campaigned against corruption in government. He pushed for government money to be spent on projects with a real return, creating the Interstate Highway System, but still fought to contain the deficit as the Cold War expanded.

Republicans used to fight for their country. Bob Dole has spent sixty years in pain from an arm maimed in World War II. The first George Bush flew patrol torpedo bombers in combat, the most dangerous job in the Navy. He won the Distinguished Flying Cross for completing a mission before ejecting from a shot-up airplane. Nixon, a Quaker, could have been a conscientious objector but served in the South Pacific.

Republicanism used to mean conservatism, and one of the things it conserved was our nation's land and water. The Environmental Protection Agency was an initiative of Republican President Nixon (yes, that Nixon).

Republicans of history knew that they governed for all Americans and worked for the general welfare. Eisenhower presided over an increase in the minimum wage. Nixon tried to pass legislation for a guaranteed annual income.

Republicans were friends of business, but never captives of it. Eisenhower's cabinet was mostly millionaire businessmen, but he warned the country that someday we might be threatened by the corrupting influence of a "military-industrial complex" . He'd never heard of Halliburton but saw the risk.

Republicans then respected the law and the judiciary. When Little Rock's schools defied a court order to desegregate, Eisenhower reluctantly but firmly ordered in the Army to compel them at gunpoint.

Republicans then honored the Constitution and resisted tampering with it. One major conservative group was called Americans for Constitutional Action. In 1964 Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater declared "Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice" . Things have changed since then.

In 1999 Republican candidate George W. Bush said "There ought to be limits to freedom" . In 2001 his Attorney General told Congress that people who want to preserve liberty "only aid the terrorists".

Eisenhower would have led the charge to investigate Halliburton, but when a representative of the people questioned Halliburton's no-bid contracts in 2004 the Republican Vice President said, on the Senate floor, "Fuck yourself".

What happened to the Republican Party, and where are the real Republicans now that we need them?

Form has trampled and triumphed over substance since television entrenched itself in our lives during the 60s and 70s. That's hurt our politics. Before television, the Republicans ran a candidate who had led Allied forces to victory in World War II. In 1968 they could still field a man who was a Navy veteran and first in his high school class. By 1980 the Republican candidate was an actor.

Weakness attracts predators, and when a president is easy to manipulate then the manipulators flock in. Incurious minds are at the mercy of their inner circle of advisors. In the shadows, party bosses grow rich, and then make sure the party never endorses someone with the character to oppose them. A party containing brilliant and accomplished men pushes Dan Quayles to the top.

What happened to the real Republicans? They seem to be Democrats now. President Clinton's welfare reform bill was a lot like Nixon's, only stricter. Our last budget surplus was under a Democratic president. Returning Iraq vets who run for office almost always choose to run on the Democratic ticket.

Today's Republican Party, with its obsessive control and blatant corruption, has become more like Democratic Mayor Daley's Chicago of the 60s.

Maybe, though, the problem is simply that the Republican Party has had power for too long and only knows how to seek more power. Barry Goldwater warned about that, too. He said "Those who seek absolute power, even though they seek it to do what they regard as good, are simply demanding the right to enforce their own version of heaven on earth. And let me remind you, they are the very ones who always create the most hellish tyrannies. Absolute power does corrupt, and those who seek it must be suspect and must be opposed" .

Yes, it works, but it's not easy
(Score:5, Interesting)
by Animats (122034) on Friday September 29, @11:50AM (#16249347)
(http://www.animats.com)

The main reason program verification didn't catch on was that it was hopeless for C and C++. The semantics of those languages were so messy that formalizing them was nearly hopeless.

Java and C#, however, are good enough. (So were Pascal, Modula, and Ada.)

Here's the manual for the Pascal-F verifier [animats.com], a system written by a team I headed back in the early 1980s. This was a proprietary system done internally for Ford Motor Company. Take a look at the example real time engine control program beginning on page 155. It was painfully slow back then; it took 45 minutes of VAX 11/780 time (1 MIPS) to verify that program from a cold start. Today, it would take about a second.

What's being proved in that example? First, that there are no subscripts out of range or arithmetic overflows. Second, that all loops terminate. (Yes, you can prove that for most useful programs; the halting problem applies only to pathological programs.) Third, that the following constraints hold:

        * fuelpumpon implies (tickssincespark (1000*ms)); if fuel pump is on, spark must occur within 1 sec.
        * (enginespeed rpm(1)) implies (not fuelpumpon); fuel pump must be disabled if the engine is not rotating
        * cylssincespark = 1; a spark must be issued for each cylinder pulse

Useful stuff, the conditions needed to keep the engine running.

This is "design by contract" with teeth. Each function is checked to insure that it always satisfies its exit conditions if its entry conditions are satisfied by the caller, and that the function doesn't overflow, subscript out of range, or fail to terminate. Each call is checked to insure that its entry conditions are always satisfied. The end result is a guarantee that those properties hold for the whole program.

This is a very valuable check. It insures that caller and callee are in agreement on how to call each function. That's the cause of a huge number of software bugs - the caller made some incorrect assumption about the function being called, or the function didn't check for something which it needed to check. Both of those can be statically machine checked.

It's not easy to get a program through formal verification with a verifier like that one. The verifier does almost all the work on easy sections of code, but where correctness depends on anything non-trivial, you have to work with the theorem prover to get the proofs through. This isn't easy. The DEC Java checker and Microsoft's Spec# checker aren't as hard-line.

Not sure how much I agree, but this guy has his grip sunk into at least part of the truth.

Re:For those lawyers out there
(Score:5, Insightful)
by Shihar (153932) on Monday September 25, @10:51PM (#16195925)
>So this is why 2 american presidential candidates were arrested trying to gain entry to the 2004 debates?

The green and Badnark got arrested for trespassing. You can get yourself arrested too without much trouble; that doesn't make this Soviet America. You can't even put the US and a solid half of the world nations on the same scale when it comes to political freedom. Suggesting that you can simply shows deep ignorance about the state of the rest of the world.

>oh please!.. the 2 reigning parties have essentially made it impossible for new parties to form.

I don't disagree in the slightest. You miss the larger point though which we shall get to in just a moment.

ross perot had 2 billion dollars at his disposal. Unless everyone else has that kind of money no.. the system does not work, and how dare you try to pretend otherwise

Ahh, now we are getting closer to the "problem" with American politics...

>And this is why the majority of americans dont vote.. they know it's essentially communist china here with a little potpurri on the grungier and more totalitarian aspects.

And this is where the point flies right over your head. The Americans could have made Ross Perot president if they wanted to. Nazi storm troopers didn't drag Perot off in handcuffs. No evil corporate death squads showed up to prevent people from voting. Americans just didn't vote for him. They could have and they didn't. End of story.

Ask yourself why Ross Perot did so well. To give you a little history, this man for a brief time actually was LEADING in the polls. He only started to get trounced after his somewhat defective personality was brought to light by his public appearances. Ross Perot almost won because of marketing. Don't get me wrong, he had a message too, but what made him different from the Greens and Libertarians that loose each year is that not only was his message centrist enough to appeal (lets face it, the Greens and the Libertarians are extremist), but he had enough money drive his message like a spike through every single American's head.

This is the heart and the root of the problem with American democracy. Americans are too fucking lazy to learn about politics. You need to practically beat the American public in voting. You need to blast the airwaves and the TVs. You need to shove your message down their throat and send out armies of volunteers. The problem isn't that the poor oppressed masses of Americans don't have an alternative. They do have an alternative; they just either don't know about it because they don't bother to look. Even when they do have the alternative (as was the case with Perot), they further fail to not just vote for the alternative, but the majority simply fail to vote. The Americans are not the poor oppressed people whose will have been broken as you make them out to be. They are just flat out lazy and/or stupid. America's lack of choice is American's fault. Pure and simple.

If Americans were not so complicate and easily swayed by corporate sponsored political marketing campaigns, corporations would have no power. If Americans spent 5 minutes on the Internet, found an alternative, then voted for the alternative, the democins and republicrats would be out within a week. The Gestapo isn't going to stop them from voting or rig the election. No one is going to be sent to the Gulag for failing to vote for one of the two established parties. If they simply voted differently, the established parties would vanish.

Any political failures in the American political system are not the fault of evil corporations and politicians. The blame lies completely and ONLY on the shoulders of the voting (and more importantly) non-voting public. The failures of our political system stem directly from a failure to exercise the political power that all Americans over the age of 18 have.

So can it with the inane talk of revolutions and evil corporations. If you think the system is so corrupt, do this one simple thing and you don't need to bother with the guns, the mass protests, and the riots to change the system. Simply get 25% of all the Americans who can vote to vote for one "alternative" candidate. They don't need to arm themselves. They don't need to quit work. They don't need to risk their life and liberty in a peaceful or violently struggle. They need to take just one fucking hour out of their day every 2 years and vote. You don't even need to achieve a majority. Since less then 50% of Americans vote, you actually only need 25% of the voting population to agree. In fact, you need even less if you can leech from people who currently vote democrat and republican.

If you can't accomplish the simple feat of getting a quarter of the population to vote differently, then the problem isn't in the corrupt political system. The problem is SQUARLY on the shoulders of the American people. We let this political system get built and we could sweep it out by simply spending 1 hour every 2 years voting.

So, excuse me while I laugh my ass off at the idea of an American revolution. If you can't even a quarter of the people to waste a messily hour voting for one alternative candidate, you are fucking delusional if you think you are going to get people to roll up their polo shirt sleeves and start a revolution.

The only thing wrong with the American democracy is that it relies on Americans to run it.

Re:Laptop?
(Score:5, Funny)
by OldManAndTheC++ (723450) Alter Relationship on Sunday September 24, @12:46AM (#16173087)

>they aren't designed to be used on laps or any other surface

Drat. Now I'll have to go shopping for a surface-less table. Perhaps "Klein Bottles-R-Us" has what I need...