In 2014, the President's Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies analyzed terrorism cases from 2001 on, and determined that the NSA's bulk collection of phone records "was not essential to preventing attacks."
Follow the money. Do that and you'll find the legacy Imaginary Property gatekeepers (the labels) and the DEA's "War on Drugs" making best use of it. Obama's administration's known this for a year now. What's taking so long?
I'm sure they'll get around to using it to find terrorists any day now. It's just the haystack keeps on getting bigger and there's all these IP pirates and druggies we need to sort out first. Why? It's where the money is! We gotta keep the prisons profitable, and Hollywood pays the bills too ("gets us re-elected").
Yeah, pull the other one. With these guys in control, who needs enemies? Why do these people keep on getting re-elected?
Re: Re: Re: What would it take to immediately take the ball away from Elsevier?
I don't understand why universities haven't yet banded together to do this.
Because they will still need to pay the academic publisher for access to existing papers, and that is a big lever that these publishers wield over the universities.
Yeah, it's the same problem as moving to Open Source software. The initial cost is expensive and disruptive short term. Explaining you'll make up that cost big time on the other side doesn't seem to fly for short term profit addicts.
If you don't think Europe has a really big immigration problem, then you are not paying attention.
So I've heard. At the same time, a lot of people are saying politicians are blowing that problem way up (fear-mongering) out of all proportion to its actual significance to the rest of the population.
Who's right? I tend to discount the opinions of self-serving fear-mongers. You?
Do we want to remove ISIS from the internet, or do we want to expand internet surveillance capabilities in order to better track ISIS on the internet?
Yes. Welcome to the magic of big (as in, lack of checks and balances and supervision) gov't.
After all, the FBI's busy mfgr-ing terrorist plots, the CIA's protecting Afghan heroin growers (fueling Russia's heroin epidemic, you know) and fomenting coups in eastern Europe, and the NSA's busy shredding the 4th amendment. Surely we've got enough people sitting around looking for things to do, why not shred the 1st amendment too while we're at it? That stupid constitution is gettin' on 2.5 centuries old, ffs. Does anybody really still need or want it? It doesn't seem so.
Why blame cognitive dissonance when stupidity is a perfectly good explanation?
Thank goodness we still have freedom of speech, because that allows grandstanding fools to be seen as to what they are. Censorship hides stupidity and foolishness just as much as it hides whatever fools and idiots don't want to see.
How does someone like this make it past the candidate nomination meeting? Where'd all the ruck making journalists go? Why aren't this guy's antics front page news exposes?
Thanks Karl, Mike, TD and all the rest. Sometimes I wonder if we're the only sane people left on the planet.
Re: What would it take to immediately take the ball away from Elsevier?
... since all the research behind the papers, and thus the papers themselves, are paid for out of taxpayer money, that that means the government or governments could presumably pass a law stating that ALL such papers, going back to the start of the collection, are hereby declared open-access and that they MUST BE made publicly available to whoever has need of them.
I don't understand why universities haven't yet banded together to do this. It would be a sweet revenue stream that would fund their students' research and/or university operations. They could charge a tenth of what Elsevier is skimming off just to enrich third party investors, and still make enough to have plenty left over to fund their students' research.
Letting Elsevier get away with this seems the silliest way possible, or else somebody's a getting sweet unearned free ride for the lousiest return imaginable.
The reason that we require miners to use the API is so that we can meet their needs AND ALSO the needs of our human users who can continue to read, search and download articles and not have their service interrupted in any way.
As a data center sysadmin with ca. thirty years in the trenches, this is bullshit. She's a corporate liar. I'd discount anything she says as corporate PR BS. Elsevier lost the moral high ground long ago, but they're desperate to not learn they're morally and ethically bankrupt. There's too much money at stake for them to acknowledge the facts of reality. She's been told to say this and has no idea what she's talking about. She's saying it because her employer told her to.
What is really at stake here is control.
Yes. The corporate bottom line depends on their not accepting the truth of the situation. Elsevier's shareholders should be ashamed for consorting with the likes of this. Some people can ignore anything as long as it's to their financial benefit.
the will of the people is supposed to rule even if ignorant and deluded, not the system attempting to guarantee order and good gov't
... you have encapsulated precisely the arrogant and aristocratic mindset that is going to be the ruination of this great country.
I have no idea what you mean by that. I'll agree I overstated a bit. Democracy shouldn't be a tyranny of the majority. Besides that, you're making no point I can see or understand.
I think the more relevant question here is how did someone who thinks public opinion should have no say in government decisions ever get into a position of power?
Blame your public education civics classes. They're not teaching the nuts and bolts truths of how democracy should work. They're teaching how to be good little compliant taxpaying citizens and consumers.
What I think you want, though, is for drivers to be better at adhering to the traffic laws rather than red light cameras as such.
I really, really wish we would just make it harder to get a driver's licence. I wish we would force people to pass an intensive defensive, safe driver's course before allowing them on the road. A few tons of metal and plastic hurtling down the road in the company of others doing the same is fscking dangerous !@#$, but this's seldom brought home to prospective drivers. Who cares if you can parallel park? Can you be trusted to stay in your lane and watch three cars ahead of you, and know when to pull over and take a break?
it's always been this way, but now we see the various governments realizing they no longer need to pretend to serve the people.
It's always been this way under kings, princes and tyrants. Democracy was supposed to fix that. Some people are slow learners and think getting elected makes them rulers instead of caretakers. We need to educate these people not to do that. Or we'll kill them when they do. Smiple [sic].
Re: "Democracy" Is Two Sheep Voting To Have A Wolf For Dinner
This is what happens when you let noname ideas capture the so-called "popular" vote. This is why we need Checks and Balances, in the form of certain accredited responsible groups to keep these ordinary riff-raff citizens from getting out of control ...
I have no idea what any of that signifies. Who's the "accredited responsible groups"? FBI/NSA/DEA or KKK?
You may know what you're writing about and it may even make sense, but it's pretty hard to tell from here what you're even saying.
So his next step will be to get his buddies in the state legislature to introduce legislation to "fix" this problem.
If he insists on escalating this confrontation, we can do him one better. He can meet up with Brutus and his buddies ("Sic semper tyrannis!") or we can re-introduce him to Mr. Guillotine.
We invented democracy to get away from this stupidity. If we're going to accept the need for gov't., we need people to run the ship of state, but that was never intended to mean they get to say where that ship goes. We do, not our nominal rulers, because that doesn't work for anyone, the rulers or the ruled.
It's really annoying that these people are such slow learners. We've got to find a fix for this or we could end up killing each other for centuries. We've all got far better things to do than that. Life's too short to put up with crap like this, and nobody should have to.
... making it pretty clear that they don't see their position as servants of the public ...
Well no, not servants but shepherds of the flock. They believe the public is ignorant and deluded, while they know better what's good for them, and they have the electorate to back them up. This is what they were elected to do, they believe.
It's a clash of philosophies with neither side seeing the other's downside arguments. Happily in this case, the tyrants have been shown the door and now have to try to understand why they lost this argument. They lost because the will of the people is supposed to rule even if ignorant and deluded, not the system attempting to guarantee order and good gov't.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: 'danger' is in the eyes of the beholder
Not donating his organs doesn't hurt him, as he will already be dead.
You forget the real impetus behind donating. It's "doing good", or possibly being known to have done good (reputation mgmt. :-). He loses out on that having done good by preferring instead to penalize others for not doing good. That's shallow at best. Not only that, but he's tarring whole populations (eg. Jews), and I'm pretty sure there's a lot of diametrically opposite viewpoints within the Jewish population. No population of individuals is monolithic.
I suppose this discussion could devolve into a discussion of game theory, and perhaps it should.
Re: Advertisers are like whining children in a supermarket
Advertisers are like whining children in a supermarket. The difference is that children stop whining.
Advertising doesn't have to be like whining children (anywhere). Our problem with advertising is they dumb their message down hoping it'll hit common denominator level; not pissing off too many while still attempting to hammer their message through five inch thick skulls. They fail miserably at both. European ads used to be offered up as the right way to do it (I don't know if this is still true). I remember going to theaters to see movies which were compilations of the year's best European ads, and they were quite entertaining. I'd watch John Cleese hawking boner pills any day.
On your second point, no they don't. They just grow up to be adult whiners, as this story demonstrates. FFS, NFL is crap any way you get it. The ads just make it even crappier. Complaining about how the NFL chooses (deigns) to feed your foolish addiction is the worst sort of whining. Kick the habit already. Find something better to do, whether that's play a cd or dvd, read a book, or chat with the wife and kids. All would be a far better thing to spend your time on than professional sports programming. They all suck all over in multitudinous ways.
... the Supreme Court is all about ideology, and "stacking the deck" ...
Politicians have been attempting to stack that deck at least as far back as FDR. This isn't a new thing.
... it shouldn't surprise us that partisan politics is the overriding factor in deciding who gets to sit on the court.
Especially when all mainstream media perpetuates it so strongly. You always hear the binary liberal vs. conservative spin when reading stories reporting on the court's decisions. It's almost like the law is a bit player in the drama.
Re: Re: Re: Re: 'danger' is in the eyes of the beholder
Not having the option to refuse my organs going to a non-organ donor (even if it's because they're religiously against it, even if they're Jewish) is probably what made me decide I do not want to be an organ donor.
So, in order to stick it to a tiny minority of non-donors, you're willing to also refuse it for all others. I believe that's called, "cutting off your nose in order to spite your face."
Now with the Internet and blogs there are many ways to spread information. You can start your own blog, you can use your own social media account, or you can submit it to someone else who has a blog or a combination of things.
I think it's telling, and refreshing even, that you didn't even consider taking a grievance to an elected representative, as who could possibly believe they might be interested in fixing this injustice?
Soon perhaps, the bastards are going to be begging and bribing us to vote for them. Good. Do go gently into that dark night, useless electoral twats. A pox on your houses.
I totally could have played this off like I was some kind of yacht king as opposed to someone who occasionally makes typo mistakes.
As my former mentor (editing a newsletter) told me, "You can't catch 'em all." Proofread (consciously, eyes open, expand contractions; do they work?), and you're absolved of the ones you don't catch.
Besides, in the 21st century with the majority of posters fat-fingering on cellphones instead of keyboards, it's pointless complaining about typos. They're fighting damned-autocorrect, et al. Typos? Ptheh.
At least you're not in Detroit (though I hear Kingston's nice).
On the post: What's The Evidence Mass Surveillance Works? Not Much
Follow the money.
Follow the money. Do that and you'll find the legacy Imaginary Property gatekeepers (the labels) and the DEA's "War on Drugs" making best use of it. Obama's administration's known this for a year now. What's taking so long?
I'm sure they'll get around to using it to find terrorists any day now. It's just the haystack keeps on getting bigger and there's all these IP pirates and druggies we need to sort out first. Why? It's where the money is! We gotta keep the prisons profitable, and Hollywood pays the bills too ("gets us re-elected").
Yeah, pull the other one. With these guys in control, who needs enemies? Why do these people keep on getting re-elected?
On the post: Elsevier Says Downloading And Content-Mining Licensed Copies Of Research Papers 'Could Be Considered' Stealing
Re: Re: Re: What would it take to immediately take the ball away from Elsevier?
Yeah, it's the same problem as moving to Open Source software. The initial cost is expensive and disruptive short term. Explaining you'll make up that cost big time on the other side doesn't seem to fly for short term profit addicts.
On the post: Rep. Barton Demands The FCC Filter ISIS From The Internet
Re:
So I've heard. At the same time, a lot of people are saying politicians are blowing that problem way up (fear-mongering) out of all proportion to its actual significance to the rest of the population.
Who's right? I tend to discount the opinions of self-serving fear-mongers. You?
On the post: Rep. Barton Demands The FCC Filter ISIS From The Internet
Re:
Yes. Welcome to the magic of big (as in, lack of checks and balances and supervision) gov't.
After all, the FBI's busy mfgr-ing terrorist plots, the CIA's protecting Afghan heroin growers (fueling Russia's heroin epidemic, you know) and fomenting coups in eastern Europe, and the NSA's busy shredding the 4th amendment. Surely we've got enough people sitting around looking for things to do, why not shred the 1st amendment too while we're at it? That stupid constitution is gettin' on 2.5 centuries old, ffs. Does anybody really still need or want it? It doesn't seem so.
On the post: Rep. Barton Demands The FCC Filter ISIS From The Internet
Re: Re:
Thank goodness we still have freedom of speech, because that allows grandstanding fools to be seen as to what they are. Censorship hides stupidity and foolishness just as much as it hides whatever fools and idiots don't want to see.
How does someone like this make it past the candidate nomination meeting? Where'd all the ruck making journalists go? Why aren't this guy's antics front page news exposes?
Thanks Karl, Mike, TD and all the rest. Sometimes I wonder if we're the only sane people left on the planet.
On the post: Elsevier Says Downloading And Content-Mining Licensed Copies Of Research Papers 'Could Be Considered' Stealing
Re: What would it take to immediately take the ball away from Elsevier?
I don't understand why universities haven't yet banded together to do this. It would be a sweet revenue stream that would fund their students' research and/or university operations. They could charge a tenth of what Elsevier is skimming off just to enrich third party investors, and still make enough to have plenty left over to fund their students' research.
Letting Elsevier get away with this seems the silliest way possible, or else somebody's a getting sweet unearned free ride for the lousiest return imaginable.
On the post: Elsevier Says Downloading And Content-Mining Licensed Copies Of Research Papers 'Could Be Considered' Stealing
As a data center sysadmin with ca. thirty years in the trenches, this is bullshit. She's a corporate liar. I'd discount anything she says as corporate PR BS. Elsevier lost the moral high ground long ago, but they're desperate to not learn they're morally and ethically bankrupt. There's too much money at stake for them to acknowledge the facts of reality. She's been told to say this and has no idea what she's talking about. She's saying it because her employer told her to.
Yes. The corporate bottom line depends on their not accepting the truth of the situation. Elsevier's shareholders should be ashamed for consorting with the likes of this. Some people can ignore anything as long as it's to their financial benefit.
On the post: Missouri Court Upholds Right Of Citizens To 'Vote' Traffic Enforcement Cameras Out Of 'Office'
Re:
I have no idea what you mean by that. I'll agree I overstated a bit. Democracy shouldn't be a tyranny of the majority. Besides that, you're making no point I can see or understand.
On the post: Missouri Court Upholds Right Of Citizens To 'Vote' Traffic Enforcement Cameras Out Of 'Office'
Re:
Blame your public education civics classes. They're not teaching the nuts and bolts truths of how democracy should work. They're teaching how to be good little compliant taxpaying citizens and consumers.
On the post: Missouri Court Upholds Right Of Citizens To 'Vote' Traffic Enforcement Cameras Out Of 'Office'
Re: Re: So....
I really, really wish we would just make it harder to get a driver's licence. I wish we would force people to pass an intensive defensive, safe driver's course before allowing them on the road. A few tons of metal and plastic hurtling down the road in the company of others doing the same is fscking dangerous !@#$, but this's seldom brought home to prospective drivers. Who cares if you can parallel park? Can you be trusted to stay in your lane and watch three cars ahead of you, and know when to pull over and take a break?
On the post: Missouri Court Upholds Right Of Citizens To 'Vote' Traffic Enforcement Cameras Out Of 'Office'
Re:
It's always been this way under kings, princes and tyrants. Democracy was supposed to fix that. Some people are slow learners and think getting elected makes them rulers instead of caretakers. We need to educate these people not to do that. Or we'll kill them when they do. Smiple [sic].
On the post: Missouri Court Upholds Right Of Citizens To 'Vote' Traffic Enforcement Cameras Out Of 'Office'
Re: "Democracy" Is Two Sheep Voting To Have A Wolf For Dinner
I have no idea what any of that signifies. Who's the "accredited responsible groups"? FBI/NSA/DEA or KKK?
You may know what you're writing about and it may even make sense, but it's pretty hard to tell from here what you're even saying.
On the post: Missouri Court Upholds Right Of Citizens To 'Vote' Traffic Enforcement Cameras Out Of 'Office'
Re: Re: Re: 'Representative government'? What's that?
If he insists on escalating this confrontation, we can do him one better. He can meet up with Brutus and his buddies ("Sic semper tyrannis!") or we can re-introduce him to Mr. Guillotine.
We invented democracy to get away from this stupidity. If we're going to accept the need for gov't., we need people to run the ship of state, but that was never intended to mean they get to say where that ship goes. We do, not our nominal rulers, because that doesn't work for anyone, the rulers or the ruled.
It's really annoying that these people are such slow learners. We've got to find a fix for this or we could end up killing each other for centuries. We've all got far better things to do than that. Life's too short to put up with crap like this, and nobody should have to.
On the post: Missouri Court Upholds Right Of Citizens To 'Vote' Traffic Enforcement Cameras Out Of 'Office'
Re: 'Representative government'? What's that?
Well no, not servants but shepherds of the flock. They believe the public is ignorant and deluded, while they know better what's good for them, and they have the electorate to back them up. This is what they were elected to do, they believe.
It's a clash of philosophies with neither side seeing the other's downside arguments. Happily in this case, the tyrants have been shown the door and now have to try to understand why they lost this argument. They lost because the will of the people is supposed to rule even if ignorant and deluded, not the system attempting to guarantee order and good gov't.
On the post: Thou Shall Not Browse: Comcast Refuses Service Call To Chicago Church Out Of Fear
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: 'danger' is in the eyes of the beholder
You forget the real impetus behind donating. It's "doing good", or possibly being known to have done good (reputation mgmt. :-). He loses out on that having done good by preferring instead to penalize others for not doing good. That's shallow at best. Not only that, but he's tarring whole populations (eg. Jews), and I'm pretty sure there's a lot of diametrically opposite viewpoints within the Jewish population. No population of individuals is monolithic.
I suppose this discussion could devolve into a discussion of game theory, and perhaps it should.
On the post: Advertising Is Content: The Threat To Streaming Sports Posed By A Tiny Advertisement Inventory
Re: Advertisers are like whining children in a supermarket
On your second point, no they don't. They just grow up to be adult whiners, as this story demonstrates. FFS, NFL is crap any way you get it. The ads just make it even crappier. Complaining about how the NFL chooses (deigns) to feed your foolish addiction is the worst sort of whining. Kick the habit already. Find something better to do, whether that's play a cd or dvd, read a book, or chat with the wife and kids. All would be a far better thing to spend your time on than professional sports programming. They all suck all over in multitudinous ways.
On the post: Supreme Court Turns Down Opportunity To Straighten Out Cell Site Location Information Mess
Re: Re: Re: more libertarians needed
Politicians have been attempting to stack that deck at least as far back as FDR. This isn't a new thing.
Especially when all mainstream media perpetuates it so strongly. You always hear the binary liberal vs. conservative spin when reading stories reporting on the court's decisions. It's almost like the law is a bit player in the drama.
On the post: Thou Shall Not Browse: Comcast Refuses Service Call To Chicago Church Out Of Fear
Re: Re: Re: Re: 'danger' is in the eyes of the beholder
So, in order to stick it to a tiny minority of non-donors, you're willing to also refuse it for all others. I believe that's called, "cutting off your nose in order to spite your face."
On the post: Thou Shall Not Browse: Comcast Refuses Service Call To Chicago Church Out Of Fear
Re: Re: Re: Dear preacher-man...
I think it's telling, and refreshing even, that you didn't even consider taking a grievance to an elected representative, as who could possibly believe they might be interested in fixing this injustice?
Soon perhaps, the bastards are going to be begging and bribing us to vote for them. Good. Do go gently into that dark night, useless electoral twats. A pox on your houses.
On the post: Thou Shall Not Browse: Comcast Refuses Service Call To Chicago Church Out Of Fear
Re: Re: Re: GrammarDude
As my former mentor (editing a newsletter) told me, "You can't catch 'em all." Proofread (consciously, eyes open, expand contractions; do they work?), and you're absolved of the ones you don't catch.
Besides, in the 21st century with the majority of posters fat-fingering on cellphones instead of keyboards, it's pointless complaining about typos. They're fighting damned-autocorrect, et al. Typos? Ptheh.
At least you're not in Detroit (though I hear Kingston's nice).
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