You crackpot tinfoil hat-wearing kooks imagine all sorts of bizarro world stuff: the Bildeburgers, Skull and Bones, One-world elite conspiracies straight from the imagination of Dan Brown. I mean, how crazy do you have to be to think that every prosecutor in the US is conspiring with the DEA and the NSA, and that this has been going on for years without anyone noticing? You know what else? If you don't want to go to jail for drug smuggling, don't smuggle drugs!
What's that? The gov't admits it? I see. Well you know, nobody made the drug smugglers use a cell phone. There has never been any privacy expectation for business records! That's between the phone company and the gov't. These programs are lawful and they have been approved by every single congressman. They all agree unanimously. Don't like it? Get a different phone company!
The gov't needs this to protect our children from terrerrerrorism. Do you know how many terror attacks there would have been if they weren't working to keep us safe? No! Because they can't tell you; that would compromise the operations! The truth is that the vast majority of gov't agents are honest hard working people trying to keep your children safe. They should be celebrated as heroes. These disclosures only serve to harm the Motherland^H^H^H Homeland security. Now we'll have to just spend more taxes for new secret programs to replace the ones revealed by treacherous commie spies! /s
I'd give you an upvote, but I've been so nice to you already. Do you really deserve it, they way you've treated me? I'm just a copper after all. I wouldn't know one end of an ID from the other. You'll have to take it up with our supervisor.
It's a poke in the eye directed at those statists and others who for years have been beating up on anyone who publicly acknowledged the possibility of any gov't conspiracy; usually by making comparisons to absurd examples, then sometimes claiming such things are normal or just, and or making false or illogical justifications.
There are real conspiracy theorists out there who are batsh*t crazy, it is quite difficult to tell which ones are actually reasonable. The illogical fallacious arguments are spewed from both sides of the debate.
Also, its possible to be a statist who is disgusted with the government's behavior; its not black and white as the libertarians would try to convince everyone is the case (the NSA is spying us...and we have to pay taxes!). Ya, some of us are pragmatic.
So without a better alternative, we are free to shake our finger at the gov without advocating violent revolution or even deep systematic change. The devil you know...
Of course, living in China gives me quite a different perspective on it all. The US could definitely do much worse, and it is important to stop going in that direction.
>There are real conspiracy theorists out there who are batsh_t crazy,
Yeah, but that doesn't mean they all are.
> it is quite difficult to tell which ones are actually reasonable.
Isn't that the truth. I used to work with a fellow who was absolutely paranoid about gov't surveillance. Some people might think he was a lunatic off his medication if you got him started talking about it. He was an Air Force avionics tech in the 1970's. Everything he ever told me about gov't surveillance has turned out to be true.
> The illogical fallacious arguments are spewed from both sides of the debate.
That happens at the extents of every political faction. Look at the debate surrounding Abortion/Gay Marriage/Drugs/Welfare
>Also, its possible to be a statist who is disgusted with the government's behavior;
I never considered that. I should have though. I can see no reason why someone who would identify as a Statist would be any different than a person from any other political faction. We're all people.
> its not black and white as the libertarians would try to convince everyone is the case (the NSA is spying us...and we have to pay taxes!). Ya, some of us are pragmatic.
I'd be a Libertarian if I thought it could work. And be fair, there are a lot of different folks in that particular faction too. IMO, those Johnny-come-lately post Koch Bros. Libertarians don't really count.
>So without a better alternative, we are free to shake our finger at the gov without advocating violent revolution or even deep systematic change. The devil you know...
I'm not sure what you're getting at.
>Of course, living in China gives me quite a different perspective on it all.
It does give one a different perspective. I lived there in '08 & '09 (though not full time).
>The US could definitely do much worse, and it is important to stop going in that direction.
I have a feeling it could be a _lot_ worse in the US, but that's no reason to accept the status quo. IMO acceptance of the status quo practically guarantees a pretty terrible outcome.
Are you sure? I'm happy to be corrected if I am missing something. I'll admit I don't know the origin of this convention; but I don't understand how the caret code for "End Transmission Block" makes more sense than the one for "Backspace".
The Backspace key had the same scan code as Control-H, so ^H is what you would see when you typed Backspace on a misconfigured TTY (instead of it deleting the previous character).
Control-W is what you use to delete the previous word (Edit: word, not character), so ^W is what you would have seen on TTYs/Editors that didn't support that command.
Control-W for ‘delete word’ entered Unix in BSD 4.x, along with changing to ^U for line erase (Bell Labs used ^X), ^R for refresh (consensus has reverted to ^L), and ^T for status (which Linux annoyingly still doesn't have). These came from Tenex / TOPS-20, which also had a fancy command completion scheme whose vestiges can be seen in ftp(1) as well as Cicso gear.
Job control (with ^Z and ^Y) entered at the same time. At least Linux/SysV saw the usefulness of that....
Ah, excellent! Good to know that it is more ubiquitous than I suspected.
(The lack of ^T on Linux really annoys me too. What is worse is that it isn't just a matter of the line discipline sending SIGINFO for ^T... because Linux doesn't have SIGINFO at all. Means you can't even really hack up a pty wrapper program that emulates it, unless you are willing to have everything use a different signal in lieu of SIGINFO...)
You crackpot tinfoil hat-wearing kooks imagine all sorts of bizarro world stuff: the Bildeburgers, Skull and Bones, One-world elite conspiracies straight from the imagination of Dan Brown. I mean, how crazy do you have to be to think that every prosecutor in the US is conspiring with the DEA and the NSA, and that this has been going on for years without anyone noticing? You know what else? If you don't want to go to jail for drug smuggling, don't smuggle drugs!
What's that? The gov't admits it? I see. Well you know, nobody made the drug smugglers use a cell phone. There has never been any privacy expectation for business records! That's between the phone company and the gov't. These programs are lawful and they have been approved by every single congressman. They all agree unanimously. Don't like it? Get a different phone company!
The gov't needs this to protect our children from terrerrerrorism. Do you know how many terror attacks there would have been if they weren't working to keep us safe? No! Because they can't tell you; that would compromise the operations! The truth is that the vast majority of gov't agents are honest hard working people trying to keep your children safe. They should be celebrated as heroes. These disclosures only serve to harm the Motherland^H^H^H Homeland security. Now we'll have to just spend more taxes for new secret programs to replace the ones revealed by treacherous commie spies! /s