bwaldrep

It's a bit hyperbolic to say a civil war or one party rule is required. We've successfully amended it 27 times, 6 of those after 1950.

Ideally we'd see less of "judges rule without interpreting it strictly," which would help garner popular support for future amendments.

Remember O man that thou art dust, and to dust thou shalt return.

Our work is important, but is not the only source of purpose, meaning, or identity.

The claim being responded to was that there is no evidence that "growing with chemicals" has increased crop yields. Evidence was provided that crop yields have increased as the industry has switched to "growing with chemicals." The percentage of those yields ultimately going to livestock is unrelated.

The issue with finding a "happy medium" in one segment of the market is that investment capital will immediately start to flow towards other segments of the market without such constraints.

In your example where TVs are a lifesaving drug, you could argue that we should find a happy medium where TV manufacturers are only making 3-4k in profit. In the short term this would increase the accessibility of TVs, saving lives. In the long term this would cripple future investment in better TVs, reducing lives saved in the future.

Investment is distributed in response to expectation of future returns. If you want more lifesaving drugs you should incentivize their creation, not penalize the field relative to less important pursuits.

Some people will pursue medical research (or invest in it) for its own sake out of an admirable desire to help others. Many more will work for whoever will pay the most, or invest in whatever business has the most potential for profit. You don't have to admire those people, but it's not rational to actively push them away from fields where their work could benefit others.

I don't think such an admission necessarily follows. It has always been possible for determined criminals to invest enough time and caution to make their communications prohibitively expensive to intercept. The vast majority do not do so. Everyone (criminals included!) have to make decisions about the tradeoffs in time, effort, and convenience they're willing to make for security. Changing the default level of security enabled out of the box on commercial devices changes that calculus. It's possible to simultaneously believe that the FBI should not surveil normal citizens all the time, criminals do have the ability to secure their communications to an arbitrary degree if they make the effort, and the default level of security your iPhone provides should be less than "requires nation-state level resources in order to comply with a lawful search warrant."

From US v Miller as cited in Smith v Maryland:

"The depositor takes the risk, in revealing his affairs to another, that the information will be conveyed by that person to the Government. . . . This Court has held repeatedly that the Fourth Amendment does not prohibit the obtaining of information revealed to a third party and conveyed by him to Government authorities, even if the information is revealed on the assumption that it will be used only for a limited purpose and the confidence placed in the third party will not be betrayed."

US v Miller: http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=1505272929564347...

Smith v Maryland: http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=3033726127475530...

An alternate view of Zimbardo's prison study: http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=3025

That was not the question. The question was if Manning specifically released ANY evidence of unconstitutional activity. The answer seems to be no.

They discuss this in the paper. In the event of a medical emergency the pod will proceed to the destination as normal, and paramedics can be waiting at the end. In the absolute worst case you are looking at ~30 minutes before you can get to medical attention. That's not obviously worse than the time it would take a plane to descend from cruising altitude to the nearest airport, land, and taxi to a gate.

Sure, you are free to discuss what circumstances and latitude people bound by the UCMJ should have to speak their mind. You might be able to argue that the portions of Manning's leak that show evidence of wrongdoing were justified. That does not change the fact that he recklessly leaked hundreds of thousands of other classified documents, and is therefore guilty of espionage.

My point about Manning waiving his rights was primarily in response to this quote from the parent post:

> Government employees who blow the whistle on war crimes, other abuses and government incompetence should be protected under the First Amendment.

Waving the First Amendment around is meaningless when the affected parties have agreed to not reveal classified information and waive their rights as citizens. Arguing that the First Amendment broadly trumps the UCMJ and classification leads to nonsense. As you said, doing so obviously doesn't work. You can make a case that leaks are justified under some circumstances. That case does not involve appealing to the First Amendment.

> Information must always be free --- non-disclosure contracts never take precedence over the First Amendment.

This belief is very naive and unrealistic. There are some kinds of information that should obviously not be free. Credit card numbers, PINs, SSNs, identities of confidential informants, etc. In order for society to function there will be secrets. What we need is a healthy debate over what secrets should be allowed, how they should be kept, and how responsible oversight should be administered without publicly divulging everything. Statements like "information must always be free" provide nothing but straw men for those in favor of minimal oversight to knock down. Making such assertions is counterproductive.

Thank you for clarifying. While I still disagree, I can respect your opinion.

By volunteering to join the military and obtain security clearance, Manning waived his First Amendment right to disclose anything he saw fit. If he only broke the law to reveal evidence of government wrongdoing, then there might be a case that he was just a whistleblower. However, leaking hundreds of thousands of additional classified documents that demonstrate no government wrongdoing is indefensible.

While some may believe that the incriminating leaks were excusable, the rest of his behavior should not be forgotten. Honing in on one aspect of Manning's actions does not justify making him a martyr or painting this trial as purely an assault on the First Amendment.

Again with the sweeping characterizations. Why do you assume that every single person in the armed forces is corrupt?

As someone with a brother and several close friends in the military, this attitude is disheartening. You are free to believe that the leadership or even large swaths of the military is corrupt, but you cannot honestly state that no one is putting themselves in front of bullets for your rights. I have personally met several who repeatedly face bullets and IEDs because of their belief that they are protecting the rights and safety of civilians back home. You may believe their actions are naive or misguided, but that doesn't mean that they are all mindless drones motivated by purely selfish reasons.

As of now your survey has less than 50 responses, and is heavily skewed towards young males. Right now it looks like barely 20 people have said it is "flat-out wrong." How are you concluding that "almost nobody supports it" based on a sample this small?

Thanks. There seems to be no public evidence that the grandson deserved death. The white house's official stance is that someone else was being targeted and he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Gibb's quote "he should have a more responsible father," is pretty horrible. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/24/robert-gibbs-anwar-...

The author of the article makes it sound like the whole family were innocent american tourists, that the father was targeted without cause, and the grandson was specifically targeted. While the killing of the father may not have been legal, and the killing of the grandson appears to have been a horrible tragedy, the author's account of the situation is wildly misleading.

No explanations given by the author. Here is some general background on the father: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anwar_al-Awlaki

Edit: Note I am not defending the killing of the grandson by any means. However, I did notice that the father was tried in a court in Yemen, and the judge ordered him to be apprehended "dead or alive." http://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2010/11/08/Cleric-say... I was just surprised that people are so suspicious of any claim that the father was anything other than an ordinary citizen minding his own business, yet accept the narrative presented in the original article at face value.

eksith asked for evidence that the father was a "bad dude." I provided some. It is perfectly fine to argue that this isn't justification for death, but that wasn't briancaw's point. This merely seems to indicate that the narrator might not be providing the most balanced perspective.

I am confused. If there are no claims or evidence supporting the usage of the term "paramilitary thugs," then why bring it up at all? "Trying to get some terminology inserted into the discussion" is worthless (and arguably harmful) if there is no justification for such inflammatory terminology.

Sorry to nitpick, but these two quotes stuck out at me:

> "I bet you a pile of cash not one of those self-righteous a--holes would even think about adopting a non-white kid someone found in the subway."

Having known several families from the religious right who have done exactly this, I would be happy to accept your pile of cash. There, now we can let my anecdotal evidence cancel out the hasty generalization.

> "This country will be far better off when we start to seriously pull away from fanatical religiously-motivated phobias, discrimination and down-right bigotry."

While this may be true, one should not take it as an excuse to indulge in non-religiously-motivated bigotry.

Working fine in Chrome on Mint here.

UofC fourth-year CS major here. While the department is still heavily focused on theory, over the last three years it has greatly improved its offerings as far as practical hacking goes. In the last two years alone several new systems faculty have been hired and the student hacker rso has grown dramatically. http://hack.uchicago.edu

No one is giving Facebook a free pass. We currently have no evidence whatsoever of a bug. On the other hand, we do know that wall posts could not be commented on pre-2009. Informal conversations were carried out with quick exchanges of wall posts. The whole conversation could be viewed with the "wall-to-wall" link. We used Facebook in a different way back then, and the conversations reflect that. If you have email notifications confirming that a private message is now public then please let us know. So far every person to check their records has found that there was no bug, they merely forgot how Facebook used to be.

According to one Facebook employee, private messages are stored on an entirely different system (MYSQL vs HBase). This seems perfectly reasonable, and precludes the possibility of a bad SQL query leaking private messages. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4567009

Screenshot of old Facebook: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4566962

Not true. This is the source of all the confusion. Originally you couldn't like or comment on wall posts. Conversations were individual posts on each other's walls. You could click the "wall-to-wall" link to view the whole conversation.

This system gave conversations a different feel, and is now causing people to confuse them with private messages.

Edit: see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4566956

For example:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/28/opinion/for-the-herds-sake...

http://danamccaffery.com/openletter.html

No, it's not the question. Vaccines don't cause autism. This has been established beyond doubt. Further speculation about a link between the two is nothing other than dangerous.

http://arstechnica.com/science/2010/02/the-lancet-retracts-p...

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna...

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn7076

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ajmg.a.31846/full

http://www.health.ny.gov/prevention/immunization/vaccine_saf...

There is no evidence that the huge impact was caused by these subtle changes. It is far more likely that the even gender split was obtained by the ticket quotas omitted in the original post. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4282226