That is not true. When you work for a military contractor you would be amazed at the amount of classified information which is available on the shared drives.
No--it is not directly available to the internet, but how many exploits does it take to hijack a browser and gain a command prompt or a vector to the injection of bytecode? How about hijack a browser and progressively insert holes in the compromised system until a backdoor can be opened? Sure, going to www.military-contractor.com and trying to force a way from their web server to their firewall to the internal network is difficult (though still not impossible), it is much easier to lace the 'net with booby traps. Think joke sites, humor sites, sites with flashplayer or java games or comics or even seemingly legitimate business presentations. How many exploits have we seen in codecs for music, even?
Classified information may not exist on systems you think are accessed from the internet--but classified information sure as heck exists on the drives shared to systems which are used as clients to the internet. There really is no difference once the fiber (or copper) is connected.
It is somewhat humorous. The government and large corporations have been paying nothing but lip service to security for years, in the interest of advancing various personal agendas and profit driven ventures. For them to now be taking military funds and directing it at security development is somewhat pointless now.
The only logical answer is that it is yet another boondoggle, just a way for various people in key positions to advance personal agendas and promote themselves and their particular private consulting service. More fat pigs feeding at the taxpayer funded feeding trough that runs between Washington DC and Wall Street.
Take a good hard look at the state of information security today. All of that information which all of those various organizations gather about you, and store on file, is all available with little more than a hardware hack.
Except that, no matter which legal attorneys you have, your employer will most certainly have more. If you could afford more attorneys than your employer then why would you need or want to work for them anyway? If you had that much free capital of your own then, likely, you would pursue your hobby in your own time and be free of the restrictions of the corporate world.
In any termination case the terminated employee is bound to lose unless they qualify to a very specific set of conditions. If the terminated employee was part of a massive layoff then, likely, the employer would have covered the severance package with a severance contract (or whatever they call it)--employer's know full well the impact of a class action lawsuit representing more than a handful of terminated employees. Any other wrongful termination case hinges, near exclusively, on some sort of discrimination. Discrimination is a legal area which is very specifically defined: the terminated employee must be able to show that the discrimination was based upon race, age, sex, religion, veteran status or disability. If none of those apply then the employers often win by default or, if they are pressed hard enough (again, if you have enough money to afford the legal muscle to press a corporate employer, then you likely weren't going to be working for them to begin with), they will invoke the employee agreement which most often contains some form of a definition of "at will employment".
In the case where attending a rally results in an employee being sacked the order to sack the employee will not be executed the day after the rally or even the day after the CEO decides to sack the employee. The employee will gradually be placed in progressively more demanding, less rewarding, catch-22 style situations. They will, over the course of two or three months, lose the support of their managers who, likely, will place demands on them to do things that are designed to fail and then write them up for their failures. It's a steady process of railroading the employee. If the employee confronts the managers about the railroading they will be labelled as aggressive, abusive, insubordinate, and all of the proper managerial reprimand paperwork will be filed with the human resources office.
Even being anonymous is no protection as an employees opinions and points of view are drawn out in typical daily socializing with coworkers. Opinions which don't pander to the herd mentality of the common employment workplace are seen as threats by the management and the same above system of railroading applies. It is even somewhat debatable if this is a deliberate SOP style procedure or if it is just another fulfillment of the herd mentality. It could be entirely a behavioral response--like HIV. HIV is a warning from cells that they are malfunctioning and it is an insidious message to the immune system to begin sacking t-cells. The lymphocytes which perform the sacking, though, are often unable to distinguish between those cells which are directly producing HIV and uninfected t-cells. The result is AIDS when the immune system begins the wholesale sacking of any t-cells who happened to attend the undesirable conference or express the undesirable opinions. It does not matter to the lymphocytes if the destruction of the t-cells weakens the entire body. The lymphocytes do not want to hear about a better way to do things, or how they are doing their job the wrong way, or how the uninfected t-cells are really and truly on their side if they would just think about it. The conditioned response is,"There's something here that we have been told not to like, you look like it, and now you're dead, too."
In most cases anonymity is a method of abuse. People may argue that they remain anonymous because they fear a backlash but, if they feared a backlash, then they already acknowledge that whatever they are about to say or do is extremely unpopular to begin with. You cannot fight a herd mentality even if the herd is wrong--and remaining anonymous won't lend any additional credibility. Anonymity is, by far, used by people who wish to be the agents of abuse but want to retain the facade of being a good, upstanding, kind, moral person when they are in the general public.
Think of the issue from the point of view of someone who has no interest in the technical aspects of a computer. They see the entire desktop amalgamation--display, keyboard, mouse, and box of chips--as the computer. Now consider the first time that the computer, as a whole, caused them anxiety or stress: for most people when a document was lost, or when the system failed to boot, or when the system began malfunctioning. That anxiety was not caused, most frequently, by the CPU, or the motherboard, or by the memory, or the monitor, or the mouse. The source of the anxiety was something that happened with the hard drive. In their struggle to appear to know more about the computer they have managed to identify that there is a significant component called the hard drive. It's a default setting. If the word they are looking for is not the entire computer then, by default, it must be the hard drive.
People do know the difference between the radio and the engine of a car because, for many people, the radio is every bit as important as the engine and, should the radio go out, it would cause them just as much anxiety as the engine going out.
Another poster mentioned 'modem box'. Those people, obviously, have had their largest and most stressful experience with the computer when the modem was no longer working properly. Blame that one on AOL.
What if you're at home using a take-home work laptop to connect to the VPN and using a seperate home computer which you own privately to surf pr0n? Especially with the prevalence of wireless broadcast within a home--what prevents your employer from sniffing all of your private home traffic? If you have gone so far as to keep the pr0n system on a hard line (most take-home work laptops have wireless NICs so, even if the work laptop is technically on the hard line, the wireless NIC could still be available for sniffing), how many and what kinds of packets are sent out in broadcast? I used to watch tcpdump, ethereal, and others quite often and, even on hardwired connections, it was usually somewhat easy to see from one system when another system was surfing pr0n if they were connected to the same in home router. If wireless was being used then, well, you might as well have a repeater.
Do you trust your employer not to sniff all the packets it can? Do you trust that the take-home work laptop doesn't log and save particular packets or headers even when not attached to the VPN and then transmit a saved log when you connect to your work VPN? Maybe for smaller employers this might not be much of an issue but for anyone working in a gargantuan corporate entity--who knows what lurks beneath your windows processes?
Heck, now that the Linux OS has become so enormous, who knows what lurks even on usual Linux systems?
These patents do not cover only the gene sequence. These patents often are related to the methods by which the gene sequence was identified within the particular culture of cells from which it was taken. The patent may also cover the methods by which those cells were cultured or the methods by which those cells were derived from other cell lines. The patents also may cover the methods by which this particular sequence may be used to identify other tissues containing cells which, by matching this sequence, will match the cell line from which the sequence is derived--thereby solidifying the position of the inventors if a diagnostic test were to ever be developed. For example, in a question of a patient population with multiple cancers, or with multiple different forms of the cancer in question (breast cancer), are those patients viable candidates for treatment with a pharmaceutical which was developed specifically to target the cancer which is characterized by the DNA sequence given in this particular patent? We wouldn't want to develop a pharmaceutical to treat cancers characterized by sequence ABC and then give that pharmaceutical to patients with a similar cancer displaying sequence CBD.
These are all very logical reasons why these patents exist. If you know how the industry works, though, none of them really hold any water in true practice. Patents are nothing but resume boosters for scientists and the patents rarely, if ever, actually monetarily benefit any of the named inventors except for the lead investigator(s). If you are socially and financially well-connected to begin with then your patent may help you. If not then the patent is the legal paperwork by which the company or group you worked for can use to cut you out of all profits. In most companies a large number of patents will translate into a significant salary increase or a promotion for the lead investigators but translates into little more than a token fee (usually around a dollar, or a single option of stock, or something similar) in exchange for which the employee signs away all rights to claim ownership of their own work.
No. They are not required to. This will still happen. Those who are able to afford significant legal representation may have a chance at defeating the tracking. In most jurisdictions the process of obtaining a warrant for GPS tracking may become like the federal use of warrantless wiretaps--it'll be pipelined and rubber stamped with little or no real oversight.
Unless they choose to, or accidentally, slip and end up prosecuting someone who has hidden support or funding. Then it becomes a media circus. That's all it really is. Bread and circuses.
Well, have it your way then *snobbish wave of the hand* you can go be homeless and then you won't even have your own bathroom to clean up in when someone poisons you.
You can either have the debt that we give you, and be a wage/salary slave, or you can be homeless. It makes no difference to us.
Re:I don't think they could create 100k profiles/d
on
Yahoo CAPTCHA Hacked
·
· Score: -1
Get a couple of dialup connections with a large service like AOL all bound together with a few cable connections, a few DSL, and maybe even a higher class connection served off of a some rooted server in some vast pool someplace, or a box stuffed in a closet in the back of an IT department for some grocery store or home security/surveillance company (where in the world are you going to find someone with access to T-1 or better? let your imagination roam)... in a VPN, set the dialup connections to redial and get a new IP every 45+/-17, with random disconnect periods, and using a rotating list of anonymous proxies, proxy through DNS, heck you can practically encapsulate any protocol in any other by now, and it's really not that difficult. It does explain why those who have access to social networks with large blocks of available IP addresses are significantly more capable of effecting the largest attacks, and why those people control a not insignificant amount of power within the less law-abiding circles. It also explains why network security, and avoiding being tracked, is much easier for a person participating in such a group. Cookie mining and account profiling simply aren't significant concerns of theirs. Even a rudimentary VPN with three participating members (human) grants significant capability/secrecy over what a single person with a single IP has.
Possibility #1: A rival patent troll who is exposing (to an outsider) what is actually common practice among patent attornies. In this scenario it's no different from McD's vs. BK, Coke vs. Pepsi, or any political campaign trail. Except that, as the article states Niro's position (and I tend to agree), that unless someone is working for a massive regime change in the government then posting anonymously is nothing more than veil of plausibility deniability for deliberately harassing and defaming someone.
A right to free speech is not necessarily a right to anonymity, and anonymity has very few true legitimate uses. While I staunchly request that the government abide by its limited roles (which it doesn't, nevermind that for a moment), I do mostly believe in "if you're doing nothing wrong then you have nothing to hide."
Possibility #2: A rival patent attorney who sees Niro's clients as spending resources on litigating current patents rather than retaining his services to accumulate new ones. Same analysis applies.
Possibility #3: A jealous family member of one of Niro or one of Niro's partners who wants to see them go down in flames. Same analysis applies.
In a perfect world the government would play within the rules. In a perfect world, if you're doing nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide. It's quite easy to see that the only real usefulness of anonymity is to criticize an organized power-wielding entity (eg. government). Using anonymity to attack someone is no better than maliciously spreading rumors--even if there is any grain of truth to them.
Ask yourselves: If the blogger would shed their anonymity, what do they stand to gain? They profess to want no popularity for themselves. Wouldn't it be easy enough for them to refuse any gifts or interviews if there were to be any popularity? Of course it would. The "I'm posting anonymously because I'm completely selfless" is a coverup, and one so thin that anyone with any measure of life experience should be able to see through.
Unless Niro's law firm represents a group of known gangsters, killers, and extortionists. I didn't see any mention of homicide or brutal beatings in TFA, so I must assume it's just run of the mill backstabbing.
I had left my employer in December and, after several months of sending out resumes, had received hardly a telephone call in return. One day an obvious phishing scam showed up as a response to my Monster resume. I say it was obviously a phishing scam because it was obvious to me. The e-mail sender didn't match the address in the headers, nor was it the name which was signed at the bottom of the e-mail. A website was provided which traced to Estonia or Latvia or something like that. The website was, supposedly, for an investment and entreprenurial organization and had a page listing their executive officers and presidents. All other links from the main page, however, were 404 or blank under construction.
For lack of anything better to do--I still had a month worth of rent saved--I replied to the e-mail and was surprised as all hell when a check arrived in the mail, addressed by hand (very neat handwriting), for ten thousand dollars. It was drawn on an account with a local bank. I thought that this was suspicious. Overseas investment and entreprenurial group just happens to have an account with a bank local to the area in which I was living and the offer just happens to show up when I'm down to my last month's rent after leaving my previous employer. Just coincidence, right? Well, I'm all about giving people the benefit of the doubt, it could happen, you just never know, so I took the check to the bank.
I informed the bank that I was performing a consulting service with a new client with whom I had never before done business. They asked what I planned to do with the check. If the check is good I'd like to start an account. If the check is bad then you (the bank) have all of the information that you need to track down the people who sent it to me. The check, of course, was drawn on an account that, according to the bank manager, "exists but is flagged". I left.
two days later there was a news story about a couple robbing a bank branch, for the same bank, in a town about an hour away.
Just coincidence, I'm sure. But, you just never know who those HR folks talk to when you've called a manager's bluff on a game of chicken, especially HR in a military subcontrator in a town which has been almost wholly subsidized by military money for several generations... You just never know.
People have not evolved to effectively multitask. In the last hundred thousand years society has structured itself so that a person works on a task, completes, then moves to the next. Multitasking really is a concept which, while it may have been primitively present in busy offices, wasn't really quantified to the level that it is now until computer processing introduced it. Most people, in general, still don't multitask well. They're still in the Windows 3.1 era of multitasking where they need to wait for definite breakpoints in their tasks to switch. Probably the earliest form of effective multitasking was a wife who was good in the kitchen. Can she cook a Thanksgiving Day meal for 20 relatives in one day without burning or spillng anything? If so then she's multitasking well. Most people would get stuck on the biscuits and forget to start the cranberry sauce until 15 minutes before turkey is done... and then what do you do? Because you can't let the turkey get cold just because you forgot to prep the cranberry sauce, and now that the biscuits are started the turkey will get cold if you don't baste it, or it'll burn if you ignore it. Better learn your job, woman!
Besides, it's not like HR actually has a measure of multitasking prowess. If you have six degrees and twelve letters of recommendation from people earning $millions, then you're a good multitasker. If you claim to be a good multitasker but you don't have the social connections to sing your praises on paper, then you're obviously a liar and a suspect for administrative discipline.
Screw the subjective hoops and hurdles. Do you have an opportunity for me or not?
Suppose you are a social planner and have a limited supply of apples
This is the great fallacy that has been exploited over the citizenry for hundreds of years. There is no shortage of apples. Repeat: there is no shortage of apples.
There is no shortage of money. There is no shortage of oil. There is no shortage of electricity. There is no shortage of housing, even mid-quality housing. There is more a shortage of slums and efficiency dwellings than there is of midquality one and two bedroom apartment units. I have sat in downtown San Diego for months, in the same spot every night, and watched the windows on the enormous condominium builings at the west end of the Gaslamp: nearly half are unoccupied for months at a time! Pfizer is hiring daily, they have entire floors with entire open laboratory rooms--six or seven lab bays in each--there is no shortage of available space or positions. Startups come and go on a yearly basis and the people that create them don't even particularly care whether or not they're profitable because the profit is simply in creating the business entity itself. There is no shortage of employment! There is no shortage of wealth. There is no shortage of steel. There is no shortage of paper. There is no shortage of cheese or ravioli or biscuits. There is no shortage of bagels. There is no shortage of grain or flour or spam, but neither is there a shortage of steak, eggs, or lobster! There is no shortage of water.
Material shortage was conquered by civilization when we began to aggregate into societies of more than two dozen able-bodied members (for a total unit of about sixty members). What we do not know, and what is culled out of our early education, is that things truly are this simple. Every argument from the politicians, from the corporate overlords, from the bean counters, from the accountants and investors and bank managers and insurance moguls and sweatshop owners, hinges on the fallacious assumption of impending doom on all of society if you (not they) don't get up at 3 AM and work until 9 PM.
Say it again. Say it until you're blue in the face. Say it until people finally start facing reality: there is no shortage.
Or, we could charge for the apples. And we could raise the price until supply is equal to demand.
The common misrepresentation of the supply/demand/pricing system should be quite evident here. There is no shortage of apples, supply is far greater than demand, and price is completely arbitrary. Those who play the shortage game like to tout "if demand goes up then price goes up!" but they never reveal that supply is now, has always been, and, except for rare catastrophic events (which are easily recoverable with today's trade infrastructure), always will be plentiful. Those who are caught in the shortage game like to rationalize their misery,"price went up, so either demand went up or supply went down", and then they'll search endlessly for news snippets to support their vaporous claim (never checking the actual numbers for correlation), because it's much easier to buy into the lie than it is to point the finger back at those who are manipulating the perceived shortage.
The perceived shortage, as you've so cleverly pointed out using the supply/demand/pricing system, is what drives the wheels of profit, the opportunities for skim, the levels of embedded fraud and exploitation and greed. As long as you (not they) perceive for their to be a shortage then you will always work that extra hour, you will always pay that extra dollar, you will always go that extra mile (and how many extra miles can one person go every year? It seems there's a shortage of extra miles, too!) to get what you feel is something just a little bit better than your neighbor. Your rat race mentality, fostered by their shortage preaching, is what fuels the system which allows them to skim more from you, and everyone else alongside you caught up in the same rat race mentality, until you die--worn out and was
Up until that point I felt alone and isolated, physically and emotionally
At Bioanalytical Systems, Inc., after I had just finished six months of stellar work on the Hoffman-LaRoche neuraminidase inhibitor Phase III clinical trial PK study work, the management decided to railroad me out the door (my record was too spotless, my performance was too perfect, my manager called me "Magic Fingers" because my assays almost never failed--even if another analyst had failed the same batch of specimens two or three times, if there was a batch of specimens which were on "last chance"--meaning there was only enough specifmen left for one more assay--it was entrusted to me, I was too highly skilled compared to my coworkers, I was obviously due a large salary increase and the company didn't want to hold up their end of the bargain). In order to railroad me out the door they put me on an analytical assay which had a historically known horrible failure rate, a horribly unreliable solid phase pH controlled extraction (we're talking microgram assay with a 10% tolerance window running across 3 cm/1 gram packed silica gel cartridges pulled by unregulated house vacuum) and then held me personally accountable when the assay standards or QC samples failed (2/6 failing QCs or more than 3 failing standard cal points meant an entire failed batch assay). After several weeks of this brutal beating, of course, I began to become unhappy, disgruntled, exasperated. I remember very clearly at the HR meeting where I was being terminated that the HR rep was sure to pound this into my skull: "You feel isolated, you feel alone, you feel like you cannot get along with your coworkers" as if she were a hypnotist or psychologist trying to plant that sentiment deep in my head.
When I worked for Abbott Laboratories, at a time when the management was constantly (daily/weekly) beating me up and holding me accountable for the outcomes of systems which were far past my level of control (I was a research associate being held accountable, in my official yearly performance goals, for the introduction of a novel pharmaceutical into Drug Discovery Candidate--or the business segment just before Phase I clinical trial), I finally reached a point where I began (verbally) hitting my aggressors back every time they saw fit to corner, provoke, and abuse me. This led, of course, to a meeting with the Human Resources Representative.
HR Rep: "Your management tells me that you feel isolated, that you feel alone, that you don't connect well with your coworkers." Me (inwardly): "Which is utter and complete bullshit since they are the ones who are isolating me, they are the ones who are ridiculing me with offtopic verbal jabs and cut-downs on a regular basis, they are the ones who are provoking me continually and then blaming me when I exhibit exasperation or frustration with my coworkers."
For twenty minutes the HR reps' spiel was defined, hinged on, the premise that I felt "alone and isolated", and all other conclusions about my performance relied on my feelings of isolation and aloneness, as opposed to the (more accurate) possibility that my decreased work performance was a result of the unreasonable demands and the shear antagonistic and intimidating behavior that my management was immersing me in.
Look up the definition of "scapegoat". It's a ten thousand year old playground game.
Don't think for a second that humans, especially those in management positions, don't know how to push someone into suicide. It's as simple as studying cell mechanisms. Herdsman, probably as early as ten thousand years ago, probably figured out that if they ignored/beat/harassed a particular sheep long enough that the sheep would eventually wander off, willingly, and allow itself to be eaten by a grue or wolf. It is arguable that the Hebrew culture even knows the environmental stresses necessary for a human woman to autonomously conceive (the implication being that women can always self-conceive, but it's just easier to attain t
There is a reason why a cop can't simply walk in your house and start looking around That's a common misconception. A cop can and, unless you happen to have your own personal armada of lawyers paid on staff, there's nothing you can do about it. I didn't have my ID on me, the officer detained me indefinitely until I could produce it, when I began displaying aggravation at indefinite public detention he had his partner secure me (cuffed, on my knees) while he entered my apartment to search for my ID. Even if the door had been locked I have no question that the officer would've fished my keys out of my pocket while I was cuffed on the ground.
There is a reason why a presidents powers are spelled out and terms are limited Except that Gonzales gave the nod of assent that we're in a time of war whenever the President feels like it.
There is a reason why we elect officials and are not simply told who are representatives will be Except that, in a modern day election scenario, the funding and political/media connections required to support a comprehensive campaign limit the set of candidates to a very limited circle of long time friends who all have the same money/power hungry attributes anyway.
THERE IS A REASON WHY OUR CONSTITUTION WAS CREATED. To prevent the British government from abusing the citizenry the way the US government currently does?
Oh wait. I just read the next line of your comment. We're on exactly the same page.
Imagine just walking down the street, a cop sees you, maybe he's having a bad day, maybe you roughly match the description of a wanted criminal, he approaches you and asks for you national ID. You don't have it though, because you were just going for a walk. Next thing you know, you're heading down town, handcuffed in the back of a crown vic. ... Yes, it's a paranoid delusion. Sadly it's not. It's happened to me. When I lost my temper over the abuse of power and began demanding that the officer observe the most basic concept of rights (eg. not be detained indefinitely on the sidewalk just for his personal chat) he cuffed me and sent me for a 3-day psyche eval, and the city put the bill for the ambulance transport on my credit record. There's also the issue of prospective employers, when going through the standard background check, inquiring,"What's this?" Try pursuing a professional career after explaining that to the hiring HR rep. On the job advancement opportunity, if you get hired, just went to zero, for life.
Five years later, it's still there, and there isn't an attorney alive who will bother with the case pro bono, they've all said,"For a $5000 retainer fee I can begin looking into the relevant laws."
if the government (state and/or federal) is going to take a quarter of my paycheck We'll be taking a lot more than that, matey, except we'll be taking the rest when you're not watching so carefully.
And really... how carefully is everyone watching if the only tax they generally perceive to be paying is the tax that's brutally outlined on a regular paystub? Like it would be impossible, or nothing short of a boogeyman conspiracy, for the greatest percentage of taxes to be paid (siphoned) in a less than obvious manner?
But the administrators have no jurisdiction over what goes on outside of school. What rock did you live under in high school? In the US, for the vast majority of public schools, students are required to sign a behavorial code of conduct when participating in any extra-curricular activity. The federal government, in recent years, has passed a law that no federal (and maybe state) student aid will be given to anyone with a drug related conviction (even misdemeanor).
I didn't read TFA, but if the teens were posting pictures of illegal activity to a public website, then it's quite likely that they didn't read the forms they've filled out (eg. extracurricular activity consent or FAFSA).
Even if it is used an excuse to be an enormous boondoggle (ie. most of the budget and allocations end up lining the pockets of the upper management while the scientists play MacGuyver with duct tape, bubblegum, and paperclips), I've always liked space exploration. Opportunity and Spirit are the most enjoyable successes that I've seen since the Hubble. I hope they make it another four years--with adequate funding (that trickles down to the actual front-line scientists).
Some people talk about having used BBSs in the past. I guess this is a neat way to figure out who actually did.
Those who actually did use BBSs with any regularity saw this coming. Multiple personas in multiple places, with different data sets and information in each, who would've thought? Managing this information in an effective manner is a built in skill that some people have, from experience, from using multiple BBS systems--either with or without the same handle on each.
Now it's going to turn into a media and social attribute. Do you use ABC or XYZ or GHJ? All the people in this crowd use XYZ, that crowd uses GHJ, those people use ABC. Users of ABC are XY% more likely to buy upgraded memberships, so ABC will get the more flashy ads on TV and more corporate favoritism, it's stocks will push a little higher, blah blah blah.
But I don't want to use ABC or XYZ or GHJ because I already do this in my head, and I like my system better. Oh, you don't use any of those services? Well, why not? You must be antisocial, you must be a "rebel", you must not know how to "fit in", you must be an anti-capitalist, an anti-patriot, a conspiracy theorist, or a privacy nut because you don't use any of these things.
But I don't use _YOUR_ software services because I already do it in my head, in my brain hardware, and I like my system better.
Well, what's your system then? What's so good about your system in your head? Can your system do $#^&@#* THIS!!! $%&*$%&$* ? No, see. Your system in your head sucks. You think your system does $%&$*%$ THAT $%&#*$&# better than ABC or even GHJ? I assure you, you don't manage $%&$*%$@& THIS !&$*#$&*# half as well as even XYZ. Your system sucks, you suck, and you're a privacy nut. Or... alternatively... What's your idea? Oh yeah? Keep telling me more about it. Tell me more. Tell me more. Uh-huh. Okay. Thank you. Gotta go!
they're a godsend defence against asshat admins who casually consider the banstick a valid way to win an argument. I've met far more than my fair share of said asshat admins. I've always taken the moral high road on such occasions. Once the ban is in place I _could_ go and use a proxy, I _could_ go investigate Tor, I _could_ try to reset my place in the DHCP pool, I could try creating a thousand sock-puppet accounts, I _could_ go through the trouble of deliberately modifying my writing and vocabulary style... but why would I want to? The last action I saw was an asshat admin using a banstick like a baby uses a rattle-toy. 'Nuff said.
There's a Slashdot cabal, too. The Slashdot cabal is heavily stocked with moderators, network admins, and Slashdot personnel. I'm on their sh_t-list. It's no different from anywhere else.
In computer programming, if the task is broken down properly, just about anything can be accomplished in less than fifteen functions. If the code base requires any more than that then there are a few things getting in the way: cruft and delay. Cruft is built in the hardware standards which allow you to move the right variables in the less than fifteen functions. Delay is built in to the hardware capabilities and how that information is controlled throughout the vendors. Cruft and delay are profitable.
If the federal government adhered to the ninth and tenth amendments then the actions of the federal government would be limited to international negotiations and bureaucratic housekeeping. By limiting their actions in this Constitutional way they have no excuse to dig in our pockets for more money. In this scenario it is reasonable to have the president placed in office with a vote of an electoral college. If the government were properly limited his position is to look over the proceedings of other great men beneath him performing international negotiations and bureaucratic housekeeping.
Political cruft and decay is the software tax you pay.
Slashdot Mirror
That is not true. When you work for a military contractor you would be amazed at the amount of classified information which is available on the shared drives.
No--it is not directly available to the internet, but how many exploits does it take to hijack a browser and gain a command prompt or a vector to the injection of bytecode? How about hijack a browser and progressively insert holes in the compromised system until a backdoor can be opened? Sure, going to www.military-contractor.com and trying to force a way from their web server to their firewall to the internal network is difficult (though still not impossible), it is much easier to lace the 'net with booby traps. Think joke sites, humor sites, sites with flashplayer or java games or comics or even seemingly legitimate business presentations. How many exploits have we seen in codecs for music, even?
Classified information may not exist on systems you think are accessed from the internet--but classified information sure as heck exists on the drives shared to systems which are used as clients to the internet. There really is no difference once the fiber (or copper) is connected.
It is somewhat humorous. The government and large corporations have been paying nothing but lip service to security for years, in the interest of advancing various personal agendas and profit driven ventures. For them to now be taking military funds and directing it at security development is somewhat pointless now.
The only logical answer is that it is yet another boondoggle, just a way for various people in key positions to advance personal agendas and promote themselves and their particular private consulting service. More fat pigs feeding at the taxpayer funded feeding trough that runs between Washington DC and Wall Street.
Take a good hard look at the state of information security today. All of that information which all of those various organizations gather about you, and store on file, is all available with little more than a hardware hack.
Except that, no matter which legal attorneys you have, your employer will most certainly have more. If you could afford more attorneys than your employer then why would you need or want to work for them anyway? If you had that much free capital of your own then, likely, you would pursue your hobby in your own time and be free of the restrictions of the corporate world.
In any termination case the terminated employee is bound to lose unless they qualify to a very specific set of conditions. If the terminated employee was part of a massive layoff then, likely, the employer would have covered the severance package with a severance contract (or whatever they call it)--employer's know full well the impact of a class action lawsuit representing more than a handful of terminated employees. Any other wrongful termination case hinges, near exclusively, on some sort of discrimination. Discrimination is a legal area which is very specifically defined: the terminated employee must be able to show that the discrimination was based upon race, age, sex, religion, veteran status or disability. If none of those apply then the employers often win by default or, if they are pressed hard enough (again, if you have enough money to afford the legal muscle to press a corporate employer, then you likely weren't going to be working for them to begin with), they will invoke the employee agreement which most often contains some form of a definition of "at will employment".
In the case where attending a rally results in an employee being sacked the order to sack the employee will not be executed the day after the rally or even the day after the CEO decides to sack the employee. The employee will gradually be placed in progressively more demanding, less rewarding, catch-22 style situations. They will, over the course of two or three months, lose the support of their managers who, likely, will place demands on them to do things that are designed to fail and then write them up for their failures. It's a steady process of railroading the employee. If the employee confronts the managers about the railroading they will be labelled as aggressive, abusive, insubordinate, and all of the proper managerial reprimand paperwork will be filed with the human resources office.
Even being anonymous is no protection as an employees opinions and points of view are drawn out in typical daily socializing with coworkers. Opinions which don't pander to the herd mentality of the common employment workplace are seen as threats by the management and the same above system of railroading applies. It is even somewhat debatable if this is a deliberate SOP style procedure or if it is just another fulfillment of the herd mentality. It could be entirely a behavioral response--like HIV. HIV is a warning from cells that they are malfunctioning and it is an insidious message to the immune system to begin sacking t-cells. The lymphocytes which perform the sacking, though, are often unable to distinguish between those cells which are directly producing HIV and uninfected t-cells. The result is AIDS when the immune system begins the wholesale sacking of any t-cells who happened to attend the undesirable conference or express the undesirable opinions. It does not matter to the lymphocytes if the destruction of the t-cells weakens the entire body. The lymphocytes do not want to hear about a better way to do things, or how they are doing their job the wrong way, or how the uninfected t-cells are really and truly on their side if they would just think about it. The conditioned response is,"There's something here that we have been told not to like, you look like it, and now you're dead, too."
In most cases anonymity is a method of abuse. People may argue that they remain anonymous because they fear a backlash but, if they feared a backlash, then they already acknowledge that whatever they are about to say or do is extremely unpopular to begin with. You cannot fight a herd mentality even if the herd is wrong--and remaining anonymous won't lend any additional credibility. Anonymity is, by far, used by people who wish to be the agents of abuse but want to retain the facade of being a good, upstanding, kind, moral person when they are in the general public.
Think of the issue from the point of view of someone who has no interest in the technical aspects of a computer. They see the entire desktop amalgamation--display, keyboard, mouse, and box of chips--as the computer. Now consider the first time that the computer, as a whole, caused them anxiety or stress: for most people when a document was lost, or when the system failed to boot, or when the system began malfunctioning. That anxiety was not caused, most frequently, by the CPU, or the motherboard, or by the memory, or the monitor, or the mouse. The source of the anxiety was something that happened with the hard drive. In their struggle to appear to know more about the computer they have managed to identify that there is a significant component called the hard drive. It's a default setting. If the word they are looking for is not the entire computer then, by default, it must be the hard drive.
People do know the difference between the radio and the engine of a car because, for many people, the radio is every bit as important as the engine and, should the radio go out, it would cause them just as much anxiety as the engine going out.
Another poster mentioned 'modem box'. Those people, obviously, have had their largest and most stressful experience with the computer when the modem was no longer working properly. Blame that one on AOL.
Not that this would ever really happen, but...
What if you're at home using a take-home work laptop to connect to the VPN and using a seperate home computer which you own privately to surf pr0n? Especially with the prevalence of wireless broadcast within a home--what prevents your employer from sniffing all of your private home traffic? If you have gone so far as to keep the pr0n system on a hard line (most take-home work laptops have wireless NICs so, even if the work laptop is technically on the hard line, the wireless NIC could still be available for sniffing), how many and what kinds of packets are sent out in broadcast? I used to watch tcpdump, ethereal, and others quite often and, even on hardwired connections, it was usually somewhat easy to see from one system when another system was surfing pr0n if they were connected to the same in home router. If wireless was being used then, well, you might as well have a repeater.
Do you trust your employer not to sniff all the packets it can? Do you trust that the take-home work laptop doesn't log and save particular packets or headers even when not attached to the VPN and then transmit a saved log when you connect to your work VPN? Maybe for smaller employers this might not be much of an issue but for anyone working in a gargantuan corporate entity--who knows what lurks beneath your windows processes?
Heck, now that the Linux OS has become so enormous, who knows what lurks even on usual Linux systems?
These patents do not cover only the gene sequence. These patents often are related to the methods by which the gene sequence was identified within the particular culture of cells from which it was taken. The patent may also cover the methods by which those cells were cultured or the methods by which those cells were derived from other cell lines. The patents also may cover the methods by which this particular sequence may be used to identify other tissues containing cells which, by matching this sequence, will match the cell line from which the sequence is derived--thereby solidifying the position of the inventors if a diagnostic test were to ever be developed. For example, in a question of a patient population with multiple cancers, or with multiple different forms of the cancer in question (breast cancer), are those patients viable candidates for treatment with a pharmaceutical which was developed specifically to target the cancer which is characterized by the DNA sequence given in this particular patent? We wouldn't want to develop a pharmaceutical to treat cancers characterized by sequence ABC and then give that pharmaceutical to patients with a similar cancer displaying sequence CBD.
These are all very logical reasons why these patents exist. If you know how the industry works, though, none of them really hold any water in true practice. Patents are nothing but resume boosters for scientists and the patents rarely, if ever, actually monetarily benefit any of the named inventors except for the lead investigator(s). If you are socially and financially well-connected to begin with then your patent may help you. If not then the patent is the legal paperwork by which the company or group you worked for can use to cut you out of all profits. In most companies a large number of patents will translate into a significant salary increase or a promotion for the lead investigators but translates into little more than a token fee (usually around a dollar, or a single option of stock, or something similar) in exchange for which the employee signs away all rights to claim ownership of their own work.
No. They are not required to. This will still happen. Those who are able to afford significant legal representation may have a chance at defeating the tracking. In most jurisdictions the process of obtaining a warrant for GPS tracking may become like the federal use of warrantless wiretaps--it'll be pipelined and rubber stamped with little or no real oversight.
Unless they choose to, or accidentally, slip and end up prosecuting someone who has hidden support or funding. Then it becomes a media circus. That's all it really is. Bread and circuses.
You must be new here.
O RLY?
Well, have it your way then *snobbish wave of the hand* you can go be homeless and then you won't even have your own bathroom to clean up in when someone poisons you.
You can either have the debt that we give you, and be a wage/salary slave, or you can be homeless. It makes no difference to us.
Get a couple of dialup connections with a large service like AOL all bound together with a few cable connections, a few DSL, and maybe even a higher class connection served off of a some rooted server in some vast pool someplace, or a box stuffed in a closet in the back of an IT department for some grocery store or home security/surveillance company (where in the world are you going to find someone with access to T-1 or better? let your imagination roam)... in a VPN, set the dialup connections to redial and get a new IP every 45+/-17, with random disconnect periods, and using a rotating list of anonymous proxies, proxy through DNS, heck you can practically encapsulate any protocol in any other by now, and it's really not that difficult. It does explain why those who have access to social networks with large blocks of available IP addresses are significantly more capable of effecting the largest attacks, and why those people control a not insignificant amount of power within the less law-abiding circles. It also explains why network security, and avoiding being tracked, is much easier for a person participating in such a group. Cookie mining and account profiling simply aren't significant concerns of theirs. Even a rudimentary VPN with three participating members (human) grants significant capability/secrecy over what a single person with a single IP has.
Possibility #1: A rival patent troll who is exposing (to an outsider) what is actually common practice among patent attornies. In this scenario it's no different from McD's vs. BK, Coke vs. Pepsi, or any political campaign trail. Except that, as the article states Niro's position (and I tend to agree), that unless someone is working for a massive regime change in the government then posting anonymously is nothing more than veil of plausibility deniability for deliberately harassing and defaming someone.
A right to free speech is not necessarily a right to anonymity, and anonymity has very few true legitimate uses. While I staunchly request that the government abide by its limited roles (which it doesn't, nevermind that for a moment), I do mostly believe in "if you're doing nothing wrong then you have nothing to hide."
Possibility #2: A rival patent attorney who sees Niro's clients as spending resources on litigating current patents rather than retaining his services to accumulate new ones. Same analysis applies.
Possibility #3: A jealous family member of one of Niro or one of Niro's partners who wants to see them go down in flames. Same analysis applies.
In a perfect world the government would play within the rules. In a perfect world, if you're doing nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide. It's quite easy to see that the only real usefulness of anonymity is to criticize an organized power-wielding entity (eg. government). Using anonymity to attack someone is no better than maliciously spreading rumors--even if there is any grain of truth to them.
Ask yourselves: If the blogger would shed their anonymity, what do they stand to gain? They profess to want no popularity for themselves. Wouldn't it be easy enough for them to refuse any gifts or interviews if there were to be any popularity? Of course it would. The "I'm posting anonymously because I'm completely selfless" is a coverup, and one so thin that anyone with any measure of life experience should be able to see through.
Unless Niro's law firm represents a group of known gangsters, killers, and extortionists. I didn't see any mention of homicide or brutal beatings in TFA, so I must assume it's just run of the mill backstabbing.
I had left my employer in December and, after several months of sending out resumes, had received hardly a telephone call in return. One day an obvious phishing scam showed up as a response to my Monster resume. I say it was obviously a phishing scam because it was obvious to me. The e-mail sender didn't match the address in the headers, nor was it the name which was signed at the bottom of the e-mail. A website was provided which traced to Estonia or Latvia or something like that. The website was, supposedly, for an investment and entreprenurial organization and had a page listing their executive officers and presidents. All other links from the main page, however, were 404 or blank under construction.
For lack of anything better to do--I still had a month worth of rent saved--I replied to the e-mail and was surprised as all hell when a check arrived in the mail, addressed by hand (very neat handwriting), for ten thousand dollars. It was drawn on an account with a local bank. I thought that this was suspicious. Overseas investment and entreprenurial group just happens to have an account with a bank local to the area in which I was living and the offer just happens to show up when I'm down to my last month's rent after leaving my previous employer. Just coincidence, right? Well, I'm all about giving people the benefit of the doubt, it could happen, you just never know, so I took the check to the bank.
I informed the bank that I was performing a consulting service with a new client with whom I had never before done business. They asked what I planned to do with the check. If the check is good I'd like to start an account. If the check is bad then you (the bank) have all of the information that you need to track down the people who sent it to me. The check, of course, was drawn on an account that, according to the bank manager, "exists but is flagged". I left.
two days later there was a news story about a couple robbing a bank branch, for the same bank, in a town about an hour away.
Just coincidence, I'm sure. But, you just never know who those HR folks talk to when you've called a manager's bluff on a game of chicken, especially HR in a military subcontrator in a town which has been almost wholly subsidized by military money for several generations... You just never know.
I think you've hit the mark.
People have not evolved to effectively multitask. In the last hundred thousand years society has structured itself so that a person works on a task, completes, then moves to the next. Multitasking really is a concept which, while it may have been primitively present in busy offices, wasn't really quantified to the level that it is now until computer processing introduced it. Most people, in general, still don't multitask well. They're still in the Windows 3.1 era of multitasking where they need to wait for definite breakpoints in their tasks to switch. Probably the earliest form of effective multitasking was a wife who was good in the kitchen. Can she cook a Thanksgiving Day meal for 20 relatives in one day without burning or spillng anything? If so then she's multitasking well. Most people would get stuck on the biscuits and forget to start the cranberry sauce until 15 minutes before turkey is done... and then what do you do? Because you can't let the turkey get cold just because you forgot to prep the cranberry sauce, and now that the biscuits are started the turkey will get cold if you don't baste it, or it'll burn if you ignore it. Better learn your job, woman!
Besides, it's not like HR actually has a measure of multitasking prowess. If you have six degrees and twelve letters of recommendation from people earning $millions, then you're a good multitasker. If you claim to be a good multitasker but you don't have the social connections to sing your praises on paper, then you're obviously a liar and a suspect for administrative discipline.
Screw the subjective hoops and hurdles. Do you have an opportunity for me or not?
Suppose you are a social planner and have a limited supply of apples
This is the great fallacy that has been exploited over the citizenry for hundreds of years. There is no shortage of apples. Repeat: there is no shortage of apples.
There is no shortage of money. There is no shortage of oil. There is no shortage of electricity. There is no shortage of housing, even mid-quality housing. There is more a shortage of slums and efficiency dwellings than there is of midquality one and two bedroom apartment units. I have sat in downtown San Diego for months, in the same spot every night, and watched the windows on the enormous condominium builings at the west end of the Gaslamp: nearly half are unoccupied for months at a time! Pfizer is hiring daily, they have entire floors with entire open laboratory rooms--six or seven lab bays in each--there is no shortage of available space or positions. Startups come and go on a yearly basis and the people that create them don't even particularly care whether or not they're profitable because the profit is simply in creating the business entity itself. There is no shortage of employment! There is no shortage of wealth. There is no shortage of steel. There is no shortage of paper. There is no shortage of cheese or ravioli or biscuits. There is no shortage of bagels. There is no shortage of grain or flour or spam, but neither is there a shortage of steak, eggs, or lobster! There is no shortage of water.
Material shortage was conquered by civilization when we began to aggregate into societies of more than two dozen able-bodied members (for a total unit of about sixty members). What we do not know, and what is culled out of our early education, is that things truly are this simple. Every argument from the politicians, from the corporate overlords, from the bean counters, from the accountants and investors and bank managers and insurance moguls and sweatshop owners, hinges on the fallacious assumption of impending doom on all of society if you (not they) don't get up at 3 AM and work until 9 PM.
Say it again. Say it until you're blue in the face. Say it until people finally start facing reality: there is no shortage.
Or, we could charge for the apples. And we could raise the price until supply is equal to demand.
The common misrepresentation of the supply/demand/pricing system should be quite evident here. There is no shortage of apples, supply is far greater than demand, and price is completely arbitrary. Those who play the shortage game like to tout "if demand goes up then price goes up!" but they never reveal that supply is now, has always been, and, except for rare catastrophic events (which are easily recoverable with today's trade infrastructure), always will be plentiful. Those who are caught in the shortage game like to rationalize their misery,"price went up, so either demand went up or supply went down", and then they'll search endlessly for news snippets to support their vaporous claim (never checking the actual numbers for correlation), because it's much easier to buy into the lie than it is to point the finger back at those who are manipulating the perceived shortage.
The perceived shortage, as you've so cleverly pointed out using the supply/demand/pricing system, is what drives the wheels of profit, the opportunities for skim, the levels of embedded fraud and exploitation and greed. As long as you (not they) perceive for their to be a shortage then you will always work that extra hour, you will always pay that extra dollar, you will always go that extra mile (and how many extra miles can one person go every year? It seems there's a shortage of extra miles, too!) to get what you feel is something just a little bit better than your neighbor. Your rat race mentality, fostered by their shortage preaching, is what fuels the system which allows them to skim more from you, and everyone else alongside you caught up in the same rat race mentality, until you die--worn out and was
Up until that point I felt alone and isolated, physically and emotionally
At Bioanalytical Systems, Inc., after I had just finished six months of stellar work on the Hoffman-LaRoche neuraminidase inhibitor Phase III clinical trial PK study work, the management decided to railroad me out the door (my record was too spotless, my performance was too perfect, my manager called me "Magic Fingers" because my assays almost never failed--even if another analyst had failed the same batch of specimens two or three times, if there was a batch of specimens which were on "last chance"--meaning there was only enough specifmen left for one more assay--it was entrusted to me, I was too highly skilled compared to my coworkers, I was obviously due a large salary increase and the company didn't want to hold up their end of the bargain). In order to railroad me out the door they put me on an analytical assay which had a historically known horrible failure rate, a horribly unreliable solid phase pH controlled extraction (we're talking microgram assay with a 10% tolerance window running across 3 cm/1 gram packed silica gel cartridges pulled by unregulated house vacuum) and then held me personally accountable when the assay standards or QC samples failed (2/6 failing QCs or more than 3 failing standard cal points meant an entire failed batch assay). After several weeks of this brutal beating, of course, I began to become unhappy, disgruntled, exasperated. I remember very clearly at the HR meeting where I was being terminated that the HR rep was sure to pound this into my skull: "You feel isolated, you feel alone, you feel like you cannot get along with your coworkers" as if she were a hypnotist or psychologist trying to plant that sentiment deep in my head.
When I worked for Abbott Laboratories, at a time when the management was constantly (daily/weekly) beating me up and holding me accountable for the outcomes of systems which were far past my level of control (I was a research associate being held accountable, in my official yearly performance goals, for the introduction of a novel pharmaceutical into Drug Discovery Candidate--or the business segment just before Phase I clinical trial), I finally reached a point where I began (verbally) hitting my aggressors back every time they saw fit to corner, provoke, and abuse me. This led, of course, to a meeting with the Human Resources Representative.
HR Rep: "Your management tells me that you feel isolated, that you feel alone, that you don't connect well with your coworkers."
Me (inwardly): "Which is utter and complete bullshit since they are the ones who are isolating me, they are the ones who are ridiculing me with offtopic verbal jabs and cut-downs on a regular basis, they are the ones who are provoking me continually and then blaming me when I exhibit exasperation or frustration with my coworkers."
For twenty minutes the HR reps' spiel was defined, hinged on, the premise that I felt "alone and isolated", and all other conclusions about my performance relied on my feelings of isolation and aloneness, as opposed to the (more accurate) possibility that my decreased work performance was a result of the unreasonable demands and the shear antagonistic and intimidating behavior that my management was immersing me in.
Look up the definition of "scapegoat". It's a ten thousand year old playground game.
Don't think for a second that humans, especially those in management positions, don't know how to push someone into suicide. It's as simple as studying cell mechanisms. Herdsman, probably as early as ten thousand years ago, probably figured out that if they ignored/beat/harassed a particular sheep long enough that the sheep would eventually wander off, willingly, and allow itself to be eaten by a grue or wolf. It is arguable that the Hebrew culture even knows the environmental stresses necessary for a human woman to autonomously conceive (the implication being that women can always self-conceive, but it's just easier to attain t
Oh wait. I just read the next line of your comment. We're on exactly the same page.
Yes, it's a paranoid delusion. Sadly it's not. It's happened to me. When I lost my temper over the abuse of power and began demanding that the officer observe the most basic concept of rights (eg. not be detained indefinitely on the sidewalk just for his personal chat) he cuffed me and sent me for a 3-day psyche eval, and the city put the bill for the ambulance transport on my credit record. There's also the issue of prospective employers, when going through the standard background check, inquiring,"What's this?" Try pursuing a professional career after explaining that to the hiring HR rep. On the job advancement opportunity, if you get hired, just went to zero, for life.
Five years later, it's still there, and there isn't an attorney alive who will bother with the case pro bono, they've all said,"For a $5000 retainer fee I can begin looking into the relevant laws."
And really... how carefully is everyone watching if the only tax they generally perceive to be paying is the tax that's brutally outlined on a regular paystub? Like it would be impossible, or nothing short of a boogeyman conspiracy, for the greatest percentage of taxes to be paid (siphoned) in a less than obvious manner?
I didn't read TFA, but if the teens were posting pictures of illegal activity to a public website, then it's quite likely that they didn't read the forms they've filled out (eg. extracurricular activity consent or FAFSA).
Even if it is used an excuse to be an enormous boondoggle (ie. most of the budget and allocations end up lining the pockets of the upper management while the scientists play MacGuyver with duct tape, bubblegum, and paperclips), I've always liked space exploration. Opportunity and Spirit are the most enjoyable successes that I've seen since the Hubble. I hope they make it another four years--with adequate funding (that trickles down to the actual front-line scientists).
Some people talk about having used BBSs in the past. I guess this is a neat way to figure out who actually did.
Those who actually did use BBSs with any regularity saw this coming. Multiple personas in multiple places, with different data sets and information in each, who would've thought? Managing this information in an effective manner is a built in skill that some people have, from experience, from using multiple BBS systems--either with or without the same handle on each.
Now it's going to turn into a media and social attribute. Do you use ABC or XYZ or GHJ? All the people in this crowd use XYZ, that crowd uses GHJ, those people use ABC. Users of ABC are XY% more likely to buy upgraded memberships, so ABC will get the more flashy ads on TV and more corporate favoritism, it's stocks will push a little higher, blah blah blah.
But I don't want to use ABC or XYZ or GHJ because I already do this in my head, and I like my system better. Oh, you don't use any of those services? Well, why not? You must be antisocial, you must be a "rebel", you must not know how to "fit in", you must be an anti-capitalist, an anti-patriot, a conspiracy theorist, or a privacy nut because you don't use any of these things.
But I don't use _YOUR_ software services because I already do it in my head, in my brain hardware, and I like my system better.
Well, what's your system then? What's so good about your system in your head? Can your system do $#^&@#* THIS!!! $%&*$%&$* ? No, see. Your system in your head sucks. You think your system does $%&$*%$ THAT $%&#*$&# better than ABC or even GHJ? I assure you, you don't manage $%&$*%$@& THIS !&$*#$&*# half as well as even XYZ. Your system sucks, you suck, and you're a privacy nut. Or... alternatively... What's your idea? Oh yeah? Keep telling me more about it. Tell me more. Tell me more. Uh-huh. Okay. Thank you. Gotta go!
Not entirely.
There's a Slashdot cabal, too. The Slashdot cabal is heavily stocked with moderators, network admins, and Slashdot personnel. I'm on their sh_t-list. It's no different from anywhere else.
In computer programming, if the task is broken down properly, just about anything can be accomplished in less than fifteen functions. If the code base requires any more than that then there are a few things getting in the way: cruft and delay. Cruft is built in the hardware standards which allow you to move the right variables in the less than fifteen functions. Delay is built in to the hardware capabilities and how that information is controlled throughout the vendors. Cruft and delay are profitable.
If the federal government adhered to the ninth and tenth amendments then the actions of the federal government would be limited to international negotiations and bureaucratic housekeeping. By limiting their actions in this Constitutional way they have no excuse to dig in our pockets for more money. In this scenario it is reasonable to have the president placed in office with a vote of an electoral college. If the government were properly limited his position is to look over the proceedings of other great men beneath him performing international negotiations and bureaucratic housekeeping.
Political cruft and decay is the software tax you pay.