flyinRyan

Playing the martyr card hasn't worked for Manning. The US general public still doesn't care. Snowden would be sacrificing himself for literally nothing. The best thing he can do is keep all this in the news as long as possible.

A lot of false information was published about Chavez but he was one of the few people who stopped a US-based coup in his country [1].

[1] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/03/09/nytc-m09.html

>Russia, as a country that stands against abuse of the powerless by the powerful?

It's perfectly possible to be a gross violator of human rights and then later (or even simultaneously) defend human rights.

That's nothing more than the illusion of security. Nearly anyone using open source is using a distro. Do you imagine distro maintainers would willingly go to jail rather than putting in backdoors in the binaries they release?

What are you talking about? Open-source doesn't protect against backdoors even theoretically. Think about it. Have you read every line of every piece of software you run? Would you understand it all if you did? Even if you read the source code, did you actually compile it all from scratch or did you use a binary (like virtually every single OSS user on earth)? Are you certain that the compiler you used wasn't compromised? How exactly?

We do have problems indeed. And as long as people continue to get bogged down with the silly "Democrat/Republican" song and dance, the issues can't be addressed. The parties are practically the same thing (see: Bush Jr. vs Obama) so seeing one side as a friend and the other as an enemy is just a straw man boxing match.

A businessman will do those things, yes. A rich might generally won't (statistically speaking) beyond what ever business they already have, if any.

If there were backdoors in the distributed Redhat code, how many people would even be able to know this? And that's if the code were blatantly obvious if you were allowed to see what was actually compiled. If the compiler itself is compromised then it would be possible that no one at Redhat would know.

Good. Big companies are the only thing in the US with even the remotest of hopes of stopping or slowing this down. And they're not going to bother unless it's actually costing them money.

So I hope it hurts them, I hope it makes them and all the other companies bleed until they do something.

They're not skating on thin ice, they fell through some time ago. I'd also call the way they claim to bypass checks and balances by "storing" instead of "reading" data (assuming that's even true which seems unlikely).

And the NSA might not have sent anyone to the gulag but the Obama administration has gone after whistle-blowers at an unprecedented level. Hard to imagine the NSA wasn't helping them out some.

>could there be a case where the parties in a conversation are legitimate suspects?

It doesn't matter if they are. No one expects coffee shops to put microphones at every table on the off chance that a terrorist plot is planned there (how many mob hits could have been prevented back in the day).

We shouldn't accept the government listening in on digital communication just because it's easy.

This is probably the most important point in the whole thread. Honestly, the debate about whether the new X-box will spy on you or not is irrelevant. In fact, it would be even better if there were a massive boycott and Microsoft weren't even guilty. They'd be in the position of knowing it isn't true and having no way to prove it. I'm sure they'd have a very large interest in getting things like PRISM shut down at that point.

How can you call it a "fear-mongering assertion" given everything that's been revealed recently? It's certainly well within the realm of possibility even if some might find it unlikely.

The answer is clearly, and obviously: no you can't trust CPUs, memory, compilers, disassemblers, microcode or anything else.

The better question is: what is being done to address this? What can be done (are you going to trust an "open source" CPU producer who swears they have no back doors?)?

Taxing on profit isn't going to work because how much profit you make can be adjusted due to creative bookkeeping.

OMG, that's brilliant! Now I just need a couple of hundred million and I could buy Walmart!

Income is not simpler, as you can change around how people are compensated, which is exactly what's happened for the better part of a century at least [1]. But if you own a garage full of Ferraris, then you own a garage full of Ferraris. The only problem at that point would be foreign held wealth.

[1] One of the reasons the US got into the health care mess they have now was companies taking over the payment of health insurance instead of giving a salary increase. Workers liked this because it effectively meant they paid less taxes.

I can't imagine how anyone would imagine Republicans are anti-poor. It's not like they've spent decades demonizing them or anything [1].

[1] http://edition.cnn.com/2012/01/23/politics/weflare-queen

The issues are pretty clear cut, the issue is you're getting bogged down by political party labels that have little meaning. If someone performs a bunch deregulation that's not a "left" position no matter what party they claim to be in.

This isn't something you need to believe or not believe. The stats are in, decades of trickle down have not had the intended effect and various sources have shown this.

It's a pretty well supported fact that lessening the tax burden on the mega rich doesn't cause them to go opening businesses and it's surprising people ever believed such nonsense. Why would a rich person take a risk on a new business venture when the a fund can provide a steady, predictable return year after year with very little downside?

Oh please, trickle down has never worked and the Republicans have always known this [1].

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/12/business/12scene.html?_r=0

You're the one going political here. What he stated is a well known fact about the Republicans whether you chose to acknowledge it or not.

Good thing we've got BI then, so we're no longer slaves to making any move at all because it might cost someone a shit minimum wage job.

>But taxing high salaries is "regressive", just as much as taxing corporations, taxing consumers

I disagree here. For this to hold, executives would have to strive to keep their pay where it is. But this simply isn't realistic. Executive pay has exploded beyond belief in the last half century, it's completely unprecedented.

There is no reason to allow individuals to siphon off so much capital, and no benefit to it. Standard of living with $1B is no different than $10B (which is why after Steve Jobs hit $6B he stopped bothering with making any more money).

>we also voted to ban minarets for instance, which definitely wasn't very rationally based

Of course it was. The law itself was stupid, but it highlighted a real issue. Notice that after that vote France, Sweden and a few others looked at the Muslim integration problem (i.e. a large portion of the Islamic community simply don't) as well.

There is an issue here that needs to be addressed, it was just the way they chose to do it was silly but the people didn't let that stop them from using it to voice their opinion.

This is always the fear that if we raise taxes 1% all the people with money will hop on a plane and leave us, but it hasn't happened. Where would they go exactly? There are places that are a lot cheaper, tax-wise than the US right now.

>The BI's natural "lobbying organzation" is the entire public...

I think you're misunderstanding the nature of lobby and power in the United States. It doesn't matter the size of your lobby, only the size of their wallet. An entire public who are only getting BI are going to have virtually no financial power to wield.

Also, your speculation ignores the fact that the "red states" are also the largest benefactors of welfare. It wouldn't surprise me at all to see a large percentage of the public saying that they themselves should be getting less BI because it's "socialism" or some such nonsense.

Given the abuses we've seen throughout history (not just now), why on earth would I want the government to be able to know exactly where I am at any given time? If they think I've committed some crime let them use the normal protocols. Otherwise they need to fuck off.

Are you sure about that? They had a big rewrite some years back and got rid of much of it.

Nonsense. That quote comes from Common Lisp, it was just hopelessly bastardized by some perl people (like everything else in that language :P).