Both pure capitalism, and pure communism work great... *in theory*. In practice, you find out that when people are not 'like minded' ('hive minded'), things work out much more messily. The people who suffer the higher level of scrutiny will come to know it. Secrets don't stay secret. And you don't have to be convicted of a crime, to have your livelyhood, and abiity to help provide for and protect your family extremely compromised. It is not the "non-misuse" of these systems that is most worrying (even though I do find it patently objectionable). It is the innevitable, and so vast it's almost unquantifiable temptation to abuse these systems for financial and other predatory gain (the prey being those without equivalent access to the systems), that will lead to their extreme abuse. Think the SS, or the Stasi. The end of the road is a 24/7 camera aimed at your bed, and your involuntary choice to have faith that such a system will be used to the benefit of you or humanity, and not as a tool for its sale into cyberslavery.

residential citizens are almost universally prohibited from running servers via terms of service and lack of competing alternatives with equivalent bandwidth rates and better terms of service. This is the blueprint for how a dictatorship can control the internet. Star topology. Centralized Services and tap points. Distributed encrypted communication like that of pgp/gpg combined with smtp node servers including your local workstation (a system familiar to old geeks) is simply not an option in a dictatorship, because, strong encryption is pretty strong.

best 4 score 0 post thread I've read ever probably. Lets enjoy this spectacle while it lasts. I for one, will pray that things get more better than worse. I say the three of us form a fake betting pool for fun, speculating on when the next spectacle will be, that involves the govt engaging in slurping mic and camvideo data from mobile phones when they are not making calls. We can make a seperate pool for when the next spectacle after that happens, and it is discovered that they have been slurping the same sensor data while the phone is allegedly 'off' (soft-off reprogrammed to be a black-screen, silent audio and leds app).

Good thing there is a good corn crop each year (here in my home state where I've been openly growing cannabis for the last 18 months or so). We'll never run out of popcorn.

you sound a little like the Ayn Randian Libertarian I was 20 years ago. I suggest you pay a little more attention to the intimacy that our relatively recent history with outright slavery, and subtler forms of exploiting those who in various large subsets of humanity, have had their freedom of speech severely curtailed with no recourse to any effective system of justice.

Not only do I think your final sentence borders on silly (that the person you are replying to is the 'root cause' of these woes), but I think you are generally wrong. Having social safety nets in place, amongst a system that is almost unavoidably quite leisse-fair predatory (predatory in the sense that some of the winners are completely content winning while directly profiting from some of the losers that they are clearly, directly, stifling the free speech or other rights of)- ... is a good idea.

Now, I do believe that charity should generally be voluntary. But giving a person shelter, food, and clothing, rather than watching them waste away in the elements, is not only a pleasant thing to do, but also overall net profitable to everyone who failed to see the better wisdom of putting forth the effort necessary to have those safety nets sufficiently in place that there is no demand for a governmental safety net.

While it might be logical and judicial to impeach Obama for this, in a colorblind way, I think we need to remember that his is the first non-white male leader of a nation with a relatively recent history of slavery against a large portion of his racial heritage.

But your general point, that the justice system has become farcical due to the unpunished justice of the prior administration, is spot on.

I myself therapeutically grow cannabis in the Free State of Kansas.

umm... https dude

this

we are not crazy. They are misleading us, and it gets insane when they feel so guilty that have to resort to these tactics.

I think the standard answer is- get a job, work hard, get trust (misplaced or not), power, and money, then get access to the systems that are ripe for abuse. Then you will face a moral dilemna. On the one hand you could abuse those systems to gain more power and money. On the other hand you could pretend that they don't exist. On the other other hand, you could become an NSA whistleblower, and wonder what they will do to your wife and kids at GITMO. It's a toughey.

Only if your intent was to mislead spectators of this debate. Since clearly these "militants" would actually be fighting _against_ the subset of "militants" that the U.S. forces were fighting against.

So for the purposes of this discussion, *NO*, the people in group B would not be called "militants" because at least superficially, they are specifically the kind of resident native that our government at least claims to be interested in protecting, not executing.

Or perhaps I'm too intoxicated to be trying to parse your sentence. But the general idea is that there are some "militants" in foreign countries whose goal is to slaughter as many civilian US citizens as possible. And there are some "militants" whose goal is stay in their home and raise their families, and wish to harm no US citizen blindly (now, they may have a personal beef with somebody, but they aren't out to kill citizens due to their specific citizenship). And from where I'm standing, it seems like your comment was meant to somehow confuse the two groups. Probably your just a semantic troll. But we are talking about killing people, via remote control, who bore the unfortune of having parents who fucked in a part of the world that decades later happened to become very dangerous for people that stubbornly just want to live in the land they were born in. And the more of those we kill, and literally propogandistically write off as "militants", the more dozens of people will fantasize about suicide missions killing the appeasing populace of the country that accidentally droned their family member to bits, for being the wrong gender, and age, and skin color, in the wrong geographic region that happened to be their homeland, at the wrong time. Or so it seems to me.

Former FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski has had since September 2012 to respond to my complaint about GoogleFiber joining the "any kind of server prohibited to residential ISP internet users". His administration at the FCC refused to give me in all this time, a single sentence explaining to me whether they agreed with any or all of my complaint that started as a sub-1000 character 2000F complaint, and evolved to a 53 page small font dead tree document delivered by the office of my state's Attorney General asking them to take the issue back over. That was back in 2012 as well. I still wait for a single sentence suggesting whether or not network neutrality can be thought of bidirectionally, in the naturally as-designed symmetric InternetProtocol(v6 in this case), as giving consumers a right to provide their own independent (of any mandated corporate or government service affiliation) service via servers connected to their "neutral" residential internet jack.

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3643919&cid=43438341

Insightful? No. Bush('s administration) tortured and otherwise intimidated enough people that he was never held accountable for war crimes. "Within the law", no, I live in a different mental universe than you.

I currently have an outstanding 53 page complaint with the FCC about how GoogleFiber's ISP terms of services seem disturbingly like a network-neutrality-hypocrisy-of-the-first-order attempt to prevent ordinary citizens from being able to deploy home-hosted services that are functional competitors to gmail. But Dave Schroeder, the Navy Information Warfare Officer who posts here, is still naive enough to think that this issue isn't about taking citizens servers and the empowerment that they manifest away from them.

http://cloudsession.com/dawg/downloads/misc/kag-draft-2k121007.pdf
http://cloudsession.com/dawg/downloads/misc/kag-draft-2k121007.txt

Not exactly. Every android and iOS phone is nearly as bad. People who are able to doublethink have remained aware of this for the past decade. I mean seriously, use the android tricorder app and look how sensitive those accelerometers are. The thing can measure my fucking pulserate as I read webpages. I only own one because I'm the type that is so far gone they've already written their all-american orwellian self published scifi novel.

You're glib answer to the "your papers please" question is historically equivalent to "don't like showing your papers? don't leave your own property".

These human rights violaters need to to be stopped. There should have been outrage when yahoo turned over email account information to China, a government known for massacring it's own citizens when they engaged in peaceful demonstration for democracy (in '89, as the doubelethinking chinese know it). There should have been outrage, when Google boosted it's profits and entrenched its market share and destroyed it's competition by partnering with the Chinese government to filter their internet-worldview of any dangerous reference to "Tiananmen Square" that otherwise had statistically significant results via Google's pagerank algorithm.

You are right, the government is still scared shitless of us (not much different than any other time in history when radicals threatened the established dominance of the white-male of the species).

The problem is that the powers of persuasion that technology has enabled for the government are so horrifying, that we are beginning to finally see defectors like this. It gives me some hope.

"poisoning the well" is the name of the information warfare theory you are describing. Yes.

I think someone erred and the first line should read something like "Forbes journalists writes..." rather than "jahard writes". Unless of course user jahard is the same person as the Forbes reporter, in which case disregard. But being the penultimate Google "Hater", I figured I'd take the time to spill some of that deserved hate on /., if appropriate.