IsThisObvious

So you honestly believe that if someone kidnapped the Duke of Cambridge's newborn son, it wouldn't be international news, because "it happens too often"?

I routinely get stories about single families in China who have had their kids kidnapped for organ theft, even if it's not all of them. I find it HIGHLY unlikely that an international celebrities child would be kidnapped without it being major news.

You're going to have to do better than bald assertion for me to be convinced of that.

Many humans "thrive" in conditions that are illegal to put humans in to.

I don't really see your point, since it doesn't even remotely talk about the relative rates of the two populations or compare what would happen with humans to what would happen without for any of the species.

It seems to be contentless objection to what I said, despite the fact that humans are known to greatly increase the prevalence of all of those species, many of which seem to be getting by just fine for many of their members.

> What was targeted was the hosting provider that was hosting 95% of child pornography in the deep web, and that hosting provider also happened to host Tormail and a bunch of other non child pornography websites.

What the government did was the equivalent of show up at the houses of everyone who used a particular post office and forcibly finger print them because that post office routed 95% of the child porn magazines in the US (regardless of what percentage of their traffic that actually was, which you don't even mention besides 'there were other sites, too').

That would be a clear abuse of powers, as is this.

The child's parents were, a fact you seem to be ignoring in your analysis; I expect we'd see international headlines at the kidnapping of Michael Jackson's child or the kidnapping of the new son of the Duke of Cambridge.

Do you really contend that we wouldn't?

Some other species: things like raccoons, crows, cows, pigeons, rats, mice, dogs, house cats, etc are all likely to thrive.

Michael Jackson's death drew a worldwide audience.

> We're already seeing the first stages.

Can you support this?

We're not seeing any mass deaths which are sufficient to even slow the population growth rate, and instead, seem to simply be seeing more statistically unlikely events as the population grows larger - which is what we would expect.

> I doubt having a line drawn that says you're not an adult until you're 18 years old, and until then you're still a child will keep working in this century. It worked when social dynamics between teenagers and adults were different.

I'm not sure it ever really "worked", and seems to be an idea that is less than 100 years old. If it's failing already, I'm not sure we can count the couple generations it happened to it "working".

How is paying me money any different if my only option if I quit was live on the streets and starve?

Maybe the answer is to have a program that adds low scale random noise to as many images as it can before upload to the internet.

It would be easy enough to make a one-click batch process, and would help provide cover noise for real communication channels.

I agree with what you said, just wanted to add an aside about privileges:

You can set up a situation where a team has shared access to a particular folder, and install the necessary programming tools there.

ie, set PREFIX to /projects/MYPROJECT or similar, and then grant access to that directory to everyone on the project team.

I say Ballmer is a bad CEO because of the stack ranking employee evaluations and the rampant smothering of prototype technologies that later turned out to be valuable in favor of "core" technologies - you know, the two behaviors that are absolutely toxic for a tech company.

I pay for Tumblr by providing information they use for various purposes. Information has value, and is being exchanged for a service.

> Obviously we worry about more things in this society than body counts, like civil liberties and the liberty to live our lives out of the shadow of bombers.

Yes, all it really takes to stop the terror of terrorism is to not play along by being scared of attacks.

It would take a 9/11 every month to cause as many deaths as gun violence... which we don't use the NSA approach to, because we realize that would massively destroy civil liberties.

If drastic measures aren't requires - if we can just shrug off as "freedom isn't free", "you need to let some bad things happen to ensure freedom", etc a 10x number of deaths - we're probably taking drastically the wrong approach by using the NSA style surveillance to battle terrorism.

This is literally us gutting out country on behalf of the terrorists - something they could never have hoped to achieve by force - because we're afraid and can't handle something dramatic happening now and then without loosing our heads.

That's childish and cowardly, as a society.

> Mind you, I am not defending the NSA strategy, I don't know if it is justifiable, I am just saying that Greenwald doesn't make any effort to let some opposing views to be presented.

Here's some fun statistics:

There are about 30,000 gun related deaths a year in the United States (19000 suicide, 11000 murders).

There are about another 30,000 vehicle related deaths a year in the United States.

There are about 3,000 people who died in the 9/11 attacks - the deadliest act of terrorism perpetrated against the United States.

Are you saying that we should use the massive spying apparatus - including invading cellphone calls and emails - to stop even one third of murders? How about stop one sixth of suicides before they happen?

Because that would save more Americans than stopping a 9/11 scale attack every year would do - which is more than the NSA is claimed to have done.

In reality, it would take 10 9/11 scale attacks on the US each and every year to rival the number of deaths caused by guns.

Do you support using the government spy apparatus to stop these gun deaths? If not, why support something that isn't appropriate for a /larger/ problem to solve a small one?

I think most Americans panicked when they felt attacked, and became total cowards - as did their leadership at the time.

The correct response to terrorism is simply to shrug it off and ignore it (or at least limit yourself to prudent measures) - the deaths, strictly speaking, are a statistical blip on the radar - but the damage you can do to your civil liberties and society at large can last decades and impact generations of an entire nation.

tl;dr: America got sucker punched, and just like a bitch, got all fearful and cowardly about how it acted. The NSA spying is a sign of that fear and cowardice (possibly being used to nefarious ends by people exploiting it).