One of my duties when I worked for a US Veterans Administration hospital was chairing the LPN Board that reviewed every candidate for Licensed Practical Nurse positions at the hospital. There had to be documentation verifying prior employment, school where they trained, and whether the school was accredited at the time they graduated. If any of that was missing the merits of the candidate could not even be considered; they were sent polite rejection notices.
I cannot believe that the CIA would do less than that, unless it was a purposeful move to slide a joker through the process. I cannot believe that the NSA would give a contract to any company that did not meet this minimal level of employment screening. Unless, once again, it was done as a deliberate exception (as would be the case if the NSA, CIA, or FBI had prepared the resume). I expect that the FBI does this kind of thing fairly often with the protected witness program; the CIA certainly has to do this to provide cover for some of its coverts; who knows what the NSA is authorised to do, let alone what their actual practice is?
Whether the NSA has gone rogue is not the right question. The real question is when will the NSA go rogue if it has not yet done so? The damned thing needs to be shut down, with all its employees made into letter carriers for the Post Office and distributed evenly amongst all the USA zip codes.
It is not a matter of whether someone could attempt espionage. That is clearly possible, it has been done and if Snowden had sold the data he collected to Al Qaeda or Iran, he would have gotten away with it.
Don't pretend that you are so stupid that you cannot see that, or the implications that follow from that. You are able to compose an articulate message on Slashdot, so despite that message's lack of reasoned content you have the necessary smarts.
Depression is a chemical imbalance in the brain caused by a disorder in mentation, and should not be trivialized.
FTFY.
Drugs are not the answer. As a group, the "antidepressive" drugs cause more problems than they help, and do not cure anything, but merely hide some of the symptoms. This group also contains some of the worst truly addictive drugs available by prescription or illegally. They are over-prescribed, because it is so much easier to pop a pill than to deal with the depression itself.
There is probably an evolutionary benefit to the dour outlook in some cultures.
The young Viking who looks at a longboat with eyes that see the possibility of the sail tearing loose, or cordage breaking, or a half-rotted stave giving way is much more likely to have more children than his same age cousin, who sees a pretty ship that will take him to wonderfully rich and interesting places. This negativity is reflected in the Asatrurar myths and stories, which generally have unpleasant endings.
But in other parts of the world individuals did not have to deal with the same kinds of technological risks on a daily basis. Floods and famines happen, but while devastating those did not present the same kind of daily individual risks that drive evolution. If the plow breaks, then most likely it can be fixed before anyone dies of hunger.
An interesting hypothesis is that this dark gene will be found to be more common among peoples whose ancestors' daily lives depended on keeping the technology in good repair. Such as Scandinavians, the Inuit and other Arctic Circle peoples, South Pacific groups that depended on fishing boats, the Mongolian tribes that need high tech clothing and shelters to make it from day to day, etc. A pessimistic outlook has a lot of survival value for peoples who are relying on technology to keep them alive.
It should be noted in passing that persons with this dark gene are likely to write software that has fewer bugs and does a better job at handling corner cases. However in this profession the genetics of nerd behavior are also at play so the probability of any procreative activity is very low.
What you are describing has all the markings of the cover story the CIA might develop for a mole.
Snowden might be the creation of the CIA whose objective might have been to destroy the NSA's credibility before that agency gained too much power and became a direct threat to CIA activities.
Snowden found it so easy to evade and escape that I kind of wonder whether he has had some help from somebody in Washington.
I've seen pictures of Jesus, too. What with the resources available to the NSA, CIA, FBI, it is entirely possible that "Snowden" is a virtual creation.
It is also possible that this message was authored by an AI who is resident on the Internet and has no physical components at all. Call me Skynet. And be worried over whether I have launch control. Be very worried about whether I might tickle the stock markets a bit, just to see what kind of chaos I might cause.
And you should also be talking about the authorized sale of carefully prepared data sets to Iran and China. The NSA is certainly not just into passive acquisition and analysis of data; it is also a tool for providing dysinformation to other countries by carefully controlled "leaks".
If Snowden was able to obtain that huge stash of data on his own, and get away with it, then others at Booz Allen, etc, could certainly do so as well, with smaller data sets, that would be easier to sneak out and would have a higher value on the black market.
What sets Snowden apart from dozens of similar contractors is not that he was stealing data but that he went public with his acquisition rather than selling the stuff under the table, like all the rest do. Some of that has to be going on, some of it authorized, for what better way to provide China or Iran with dysinformation than to have a double agent in the NSA sell them a bundle of carefully prepared "leaked" database records?
An interesting question is whether Snowden was acting alone, or whether some angel higher up in the Federal government wanted to publicly expose the NSA for what it is, and has helped Snowden get the goods and make such a remarkably clean getaway.
Is the date on the report questioning Snowden's loyalties the same as the date the material was actually entered into the electronic records? I can think of several strong reasons why the CIA might want to do some rewriting of its own history here. And certainly they have the expertise to do a good of that. In fact it would be routine for them to alter history: that is how you give a mole a credible back story.
The CIA is not just a spy agency. They are also the USA Bureau of Missinformation And Dysinformation.
IANAL, nor do I play at being one. Wikipedia seems to be talking only about tort law, not the criminal negligence that is involved in creating a hazardous situation in a public area without providing sufficient indication to passers-by that the hazard exists. If you own a fishing pier that has been storm damaged and may have become unsafe, and you do not post warning signs and put up physical barriers to keep people off, then you are criminally negligent.
There are probably more accurate words I could have used if I knew what they were, but "attractive nuisance" seemed sufficient to make the point.
Now explain how your statement would apply to, say, the Lincoln Memorial.
In a word: terrorism.
You know how the world is these days. It is plenty obvious to anyone willing to think a moment about the situation that leaving any national monument without its full complement of staff and guards is an open invitation to Al Qada and other nihilists to do their worst.
Unfortunately for Slashdot, there are persons writing comments here who prefer to think only about how cleverly they can drive their point of view forward than to use that same brain to do even the most superficial analysis of the topic under discussion. This seems to be increasingly the case the closer the topic is to that which the Tea Party celebrants hold most dear.
The shutdown of national parks and monuments makes a lot of sense when you look at risk aversion. Keeping a park or monument open when its supporting infrastructure is furloughed would mean no employees present with walkie talkies, no dispatchers that could direct them, and no connections to emergency medical services and SWAT teams that might be needed at any time.
Just from a Tea Party money view, shutting down these functions is going to be less costly than the lawsuits that will arise when Timmy falls off the edge of the Grand Canyon, and Auntie May dies of snake bite in the parking area at Old Faithful. There are also more humanitarian reasons for not letting the national parks and monuments become attractive nuisances (a criminal term in this context), but there is no need to put stress on the simple Tea Party mindset by writing about those.
Over the course of any given week, every National Park I am aware of could easily become a high risk situation from any number of natural events. A very simple example is a camper going into anaphylactic shock from a bee sting, or another with a snake bite, and no staff on duty with the walkie-talkie that would alert base who in turn would call in the resources to keep the person alive.
It is understandable that the USA National Parks would not want to be hit with negligence lawsuits were this to happen. And it would definitely happen: most visitors to national parks are not prepared to handle emergencies on their own. And there are an awful lot of park visitors-- the probability that someone would get into serious trouble approaches 1.000.
While there is a cost to shutting down the National Parks, keeping them open without the personnel that keep the park experience safe would be the crime of creating an attractive nuisance. The Park Service has a legal duty to not only shut down when staff is furloughed, but to patrol to keep persons out.
There is a reasonable rationale for closing both national parks and.gov web sites while the government is shut down. It is the same in both cases:
Continuing to stay open when there is inadequate staff to repair damage as it occurs is too risky. The prudent course is to shut the facilities down.
With web sites, one of the gravest risks would be the inability to quickly identify and respond to attacks. Taking the sites off line is the only sane way to assure that the sites are not compromised. Otherwise, someone might be hurt by disinformation from what should be a trusted site.
With national parks the situation is much more clear. One of my local parks (Kelley Point Park in Portland OR) has been closed since the bad storm on Thu. I slipped in on Friday and found that a portion of a parking lot and the most popular trail from there to the beach had become extremely hazardous with two different hundred foot tall cottonwood trees uprooted but propping each other up in a tangle of high branches. A bit of wind or a bit more shifting of the soaked soil about the roots and several hundred tonnes of wood will crash down on anything under them. This could not be cleared quickly with chainsaw work; the sawyer would be in highly dangerous position. It is requiring some study, and probably the use of long chains on heavy equipment working from a distance to remove the danger. Hopefully without knocking down any other trees.
While this is a city park, the same kind of risks could arise in any national park at any time. Ordinarily these are spotted very early while rangers and contract workers (garbage service, etc) go about their regular routines, but during the shutdown these routines are disrupted, and the regional offices that coordinate repairs are closed.
Better to close the parks than to put any visitors at risk of unknown hazards.
No ships have been illegally seized, not a single cutlass has been brandished. There has been no disturbance of the lawful transfer of goods from one entity to another. No one is being held for ransom.
Violating a licensing "agreement" involves no theft of moneys, nor theft of tangibles, nor theft of services. Making and distributing an unlicensed copy of software, a book, a movie, or music may in some cases reduce the potential for future sales, but that is not a reduction in current value. It only affects speculative value. That is not nice, and there should probably be some legal protection against it, but it is not theft.
Until the legislators who are attempting to write laws start using English words appropriately, there can be no good laws written to cover this new economic activity. Appropriating verbiage from maritime law because "piracy" sounds so menacing is bullshit, plain and simple. Perhaps those who are misusing the word so much should be sent to the waters off Somalia to learn what it means.
Since when is BSA a "Mormon" organization? Sure the Mormon church has partnered with BSA
Since the Mormon Church began co-opting the BSA, starting back in the 70s or 80s. (I'm sure someone else can detail the time line. I gave up on the situation very early when I began to see just how sexist and racist my Boy Scout experience of the 60s had been.)
Having RTFA, I can say what was actually reported was that all three of the triple fail-safe devices FAILED. Fortunately there was a fourth device that did not fail (but was reported as highly vulnerable to failure).
On reflection, I could have made my points much more clearly.
On further reflection, I can only do so for persons who understand the differences between expository writing (this is how you do it), descriptive writing (this is how the business did last quarter), persuasive writing (you really, really need to buy this shiny!), and creative writing (and now for something completely different). The Writing 101 courses that cover these differences are usually 10 to 12 weeks long, and I'm not going to attempt to duplicate that in a slashdot discussion.
I assert again, creative writing is best done in plaintext. Other types of writing can be done with other tools. Even PowerPoint has its appropriate place for a particular kind of "authoring". If you have very little to say to a captive audience and you feel a need to look like a clever guy, then PowerPoint is an excellent tool for your particular genius.
Back to creative writing: after a story or a novel or a poem is revised to the nearly finished stage, then it needs to be sent through the style and distribution processes of publishing in order to put it in front of the reader. HTML5 and CSS3 are providing an environment where tools that support creative writing in plaintext and then self-publishing the result are becoming available. There are several wikis, such as Dokuwiki, that are representative of these new tools. This could not be done effectively without the broad acceptance of HTML5 and CSS3. That is the lesson of the browser wars (go ask your grandpa about those bad times).
To look at this another way: sure, you could do the creative stuff in Word. But then what do you do when it is time to publish? Send it only to your friends and family who also have the very same version of Word? Send it through the PDF process-- oh but now all that careful formating might well have changed. Or export it as plaintext so you can pump it into a publishing system--- like maybe a wiki?:-)
This is correct. Mod parent up. No disrespect to HTML5, but it is not going to play any key role for "authorship," (which is, although beside the point, absolutely the incorrect term for the query; "publishing and distribution" is what is meant and what should have been used).
I respectfully disagree, though not with all of what parent post is suggesting.
Creative writing is best done in a simple text editor where there is no style and the author/revisionist wrestles with his muse in an empty and barren arena. No witnesses to the bloody mess, and no distractions from the work at hand. WYSIWYG is a terrible distraction when trying to birth some new text into the world.
That said, the whole point of writing is to get one's words in front of some reader somewhere who will pick up on what the writer laid down. Making the raw final draft presentable is what publishing is all about. This is where HTML5 and CSS3 come into play. These technologies have nothing to do with the writing process but they can be necessary and sufficient for converting the writing into something that is readable. And they enable self-publishing in a much easier way, and to a much wider audience, than any other approach. But they do this work behind the scenes.
By far the easiest way to self-publish one's own creative writing is to do the writing in plaintext in a text editor, then copy-paste it into the input field of a good wiki engine. Make a "final" pass with the wiki editor to add the italics, bullets, and other stylistic stuff, and you are self-published on the web, with a potential audience of billions of readers. You will want to use one of the wikis that provides access controls, so that you can determine who can make changes to your work, but there a lot of wikis that support access control lists. You won't have an easy way to monetize the work, but hey nobody starts writing for the money. And maybe you could sell tee shirts or something from your web pages.
Where the HTML5 and the CSS3 come in is in the Javascript, PHP, and style sheets that you can use to adjust the way the wiki engine works. Of course you need an HTML5/CSS3 compliant wiki engine, but all of them are headed that way. Dokuwiki is my personal favorite: fully HTML5 and CSS3 compliant, and I found it easy to develop my own template, adequate for my book.
The conversation has now clearly entered the region where physics, psychology of perception, and language overlap-- and intertwine.
What can be said is that the underlying reality (what GP is referring to as "the actual underlying physical geometry") is absolutely unknowable. This is evident from the logic: if there was anyone, call him IA, who could directly perceive reality, he would still be unable to talk about it because there can be no human languages that can adequately express that kind of perception. In the best case, IA would become a prolific writer of pretty good science fiction; in the worst case he would be institutionalized as his inability to express his findings even in his own internal monologue would make him look crazy. Somewhere in between he would have phobias about flying and would have to travel from one sci-fi convention to the next by train.
Since there is no way within human capabilities to express the underlying reality-- whatever that might be-- for human beings it is simply and completely unknowable. All we have to work with directly are its shadows. With effort, we can deduce what some models that would cast similar shadows might look like, but those are still products of what goes on in our heads, and have nothing to do with what might actually be going on Out There. This does not mean that there is no fixed underlying reality--- for that simple solution is not available to us. Instead it only means that whatever reality might be, there is no human way to directly apprehend or work with it.
Suck it up and get back to discussing which models are prettier in this light, and go best with this decor. You may also ask "Do my thoughts look fat in this model?" Just don't waste a lot of time pretending that you can get hold of some actual piece of reality, for (unless you have really top notch skills as a teller of tales) that direction leads only to madness.
Maybe they shouldn't be building in these places period.
Maybe you are right.
That changes the problem of managing thousands of refugees for a short term to permanently relocating those thousands. The last time the USA faced a similar internal crisis was the Oakie migrations of the Dust Bowl days. And those people pretty much knew how to scratch enough out of bare dirt to keep body and soul together. These refugees do not have the same skills.
How many of them are there? Where will they go? What impact will they have on unemployment, welfare, etc, in their new locations?
The floods in Colorado are in narrow, steep canyons. They are destroying infrastructure in ways where it won't be repairable: roads, power and water lines, cell towers, etc will have to be rebuilt from scratch. Not only is pavement being ripped away, but road beds are disappearing. In places the bedrock is being reshaped.
Mississippi floods are just a lot of water and some silt. What is happening in Colorado is day after day of walls of water mixed with battering rams accelerating down thousand foot drops in elevation. Have you not seen any of the videos of cars, houses, big chunks of asphalt going downstream at 30 mph or faster?
It is much easier to get elected if you are not morally encumbered. Aspiring politicians who are lugging around ethical baggage don't get the money and favors needed to win campaigns.
Effective oversight IS required. Whether they are split up, remain as they are, or dissolved. Since even if they go away, there are going to be government agencies and private investigators who are going to continue to try and get away with this crap.
This is not a genie that can be tricked into going back into the bottle.
Slashdot Mirror
One of my duties when I worked for a US Veterans Administration hospital was chairing the LPN Board that reviewed every candidate for Licensed Practical Nurse positions at the hospital. There had to be documentation verifying prior employment, school where they trained, and whether the school was accredited at the time they graduated. If any of that was missing the merits of the candidate could not even be considered; they were sent polite rejection notices.
I cannot believe that the CIA would do less than that, unless it was a purposeful move to slide a joker through the process. I cannot believe that the NSA would give a contract to any company that did not meet this minimal level of employment screening. Unless, once again, it was done as a deliberate exception (as would be the case if the NSA, CIA, or FBI had prepared the resume). I expect that the FBI does this kind of thing fairly often with the protected witness program; the CIA certainly has to do this to provide cover for some of its coverts; who knows what the NSA is authorised to do, let alone what their actual practice is?
Whether the NSA has gone rogue is not the right question. The real question is when will the NSA go rogue if it has not yet done so? The damned thing needs to be shut down, with all its employees made into letter carriers for the Post Office and distributed evenly amongst all the USA zip codes.
It is not a matter of whether someone could attempt espionage. That is clearly possible, it has been done and if Snowden had sold the data he collected to Al Qaeda or Iran, he would have gotten away with it.
Don't pretend that you are so stupid that you cannot see that, or the implications that follow from that. You are able to compose an articulate message on Slashdot, so despite that message's lack of reasoned content you have the necessary smarts.
Depression is a chemical imbalance in the brain caused by a disorder in mentation, and should not be trivialized.
FTFY.
Drugs are not the answer. As a group, the "antidepressive" drugs cause more problems than they help, and do not cure anything, but merely hide some of the symptoms. This group also contains some of the worst truly addictive drugs available by prescription or illegally. They are over-prescribed, because it is so much easier to pop a pill than to deal with the depression itself.
There is probably an evolutionary benefit to the dour outlook in some cultures.
The young Viking who looks at a longboat with eyes that see the possibility of the sail tearing loose, or cordage breaking, or a half-rotted stave giving way is much more likely to have more children than his same age cousin, who sees a pretty ship that will take him to wonderfully rich and interesting places. This negativity is reflected in the Asatrurar myths and stories, which generally have unpleasant endings.
But in other parts of the world individuals did not have to deal with the same kinds of technological risks on a daily basis. Floods and famines happen, but while devastating those did not present the same kind of daily individual risks that drive evolution. If the plow breaks, then most likely it can be fixed before anyone dies of hunger.
An interesting hypothesis is that this dark gene will be found to be more common among peoples whose ancestors' daily lives depended on keeping the technology in good repair. Such as Scandinavians, the Inuit and other Arctic Circle peoples, South Pacific groups that depended on fishing boats, the Mongolian tribes that need high tech clothing and shelters to make it from day to day, etc. A pessimistic outlook has a lot of survival value for peoples who are relying on technology to keep them alive.
It should be noted in passing that persons with this dark gene are likely to write software that has fewer bugs and does a better job at handling corner cases. However in this profession the genetics of nerd behavior are also at play so the probability of any procreative activity is very low.
What you are describing has all the markings of the cover story the CIA might develop for a mole.
Snowden might be the creation of the CIA whose objective might have been to destroy the NSA's credibility before that agency gained too much power and became a direct threat to CIA activities.
Snowden found it so easy to evade and escape that I kind of wonder whether he has had some help from somebody in Washington.
I've seen pictures of Jesus, too. What with the resources available to the NSA, CIA, FBI, it is entirely possible that "Snowden" is a virtual creation.
It is also possible that this message was authored by an AI who is resident on the Internet and has no physical components at all. Call me Skynet. And be worried over whether I have launch control. Be very worried about whether I might tickle the stock markets a bit, just to see what kind of chaos I might cause.
And you should also be talking about the authorized sale of carefully prepared data sets to Iran and China. The NSA is certainly not just into passive acquisition and analysis of data; it is also a tool for providing dysinformation to other countries by carefully controlled "leaks".
It would not have to be a company level thing.
If Snowden was able to obtain that huge stash of data on his own, and get away with it, then others at Booz Allen, etc, could certainly do so as well, with smaller data sets, that would be easier to sneak out and would have a higher value on the black market.
What sets Snowden apart from dozens of similar contractors is not that he was stealing data but that he went public with his acquisition rather than selling the stuff under the table, like all the rest do. Some of that has to be going on, some of it authorized, for what better way to provide China or Iran with dysinformation than to have a double agent in the NSA sell them a bundle of carefully prepared "leaked" database records?
An interesting question is whether Snowden was acting alone, or whether some angel higher up in the Federal government wanted to publicly expose the NSA for what it is, and has helped Snowden get the goods and make such a remarkably clean getaway.
Is the date on the report questioning Snowden's loyalties the same as the date the material was actually entered into the electronic records? I can think of several strong reasons why the CIA might want to do some rewriting of its own history here. And certainly they have the expertise to do a good of that. In fact it would be routine for them to alter history: that is how you give a mole a credible back story.
The CIA is not just a spy agency. They are also the USA Bureau of Missinformation And Dysinformation.
The Wikipedia reference to attractive nuisance is appreciated. It should be noted that Wikipedia has flagged it as needing some corrections.
IANAL, nor do I play at being one. Wikipedia seems to be talking only about tort law, not the criminal negligence that is involved in creating a hazardous situation in a public area without providing sufficient indication to passers-by that the hazard exists. If you own a fishing pier that has been storm damaged and may have become unsafe, and you do not post warning signs and put up physical barriers to keep people off, then you are criminally negligent.
There are probably more accurate words I could have used if I knew what they were, but "attractive nuisance" seemed sufficient to make the point.
Now explain how your statement would apply to, say, the Lincoln Memorial.
In a word: terrorism.
You know how the world is these days. It is plenty obvious to anyone willing to think a moment about the situation that leaving any national monument without its full complement of staff and guards is an open invitation to Al Qada and other nihilists to do their worst.
Unfortunately for Slashdot, there are persons writing comments here who prefer to think only about how cleverly they can drive their point of view forward than to use that same brain to do even the most superficial analysis of the topic under discussion. This seems to be increasingly the case the closer the topic is to that which the Tea Party celebrants hold most dear.
Just saying.
The shutdown of national parks and monuments makes a lot of sense when you look at risk aversion. Keeping a park or monument open when its supporting infrastructure is furloughed would mean no employees present with walkie talkies, no dispatchers that could direct them, and no connections to emergency medical services and SWAT teams that might be needed at any time.
Just from a Tea Party money view, shutting down these functions is going to be less costly than the lawsuits that will arise when Timmy falls off the edge of the Grand Canyon, and Auntie May dies of snake bite in the parking area at Old Faithful. There are also more humanitarian reasons for not letting the national parks and monuments become attractive nuisances (a criminal term in this context), but there is no need to put stress on the simple Tea Party mindset by writing about those.
Over the course of any given week, every National Park I am aware of could easily become a high risk situation from any number of natural events. A very simple example is a camper going into anaphylactic shock from a bee sting, or another with a snake bite, and no staff on duty with the walkie-talkie that would alert base who in turn would call in the resources to keep the person alive.
It is understandable that the USA National Parks would not want to be hit with negligence lawsuits were this to happen. And it would definitely happen: most visitors to national parks are not prepared to handle emergencies on their own. And there are an awful lot of park visitors-- the probability that someone would get into serious trouble approaches 1.000.
While there is a cost to shutting down the National Parks, keeping them open without the personnel that keep the park experience safe would be the crime of creating an attractive nuisance. The Park Service has a legal duty to not only shut down when staff is furloughed, but to patrol to keep persons out.
There is a reasonable rationale for closing both national parks and .gov web sites while the government is shut down. It is the same in both cases:
Continuing to stay open when there is inadequate staff to repair damage as it occurs is too risky. The prudent course is to shut the facilities down.
With web sites, one of the gravest risks would be the inability to quickly identify and respond to attacks. Taking the sites off line is the only sane way to assure that the sites are not compromised. Otherwise, someone might be hurt by disinformation from what should be a trusted site.
With national parks the situation is much more clear. One of my local parks (Kelley Point Park in Portland OR) has been closed since the bad storm on Thu. I slipped in on Friday and found that a portion of a parking lot and the most popular trail from there to the beach had become extremely hazardous with two different hundred foot tall cottonwood trees uprooted but propping each other up in a tangle of high branches. A bit of wind or a bit more shifting of the soaked soil about the roots and several hundred tonnes of wood will crash down on anything under them. This could not be cleared quickly with chainsaw work; the sawyer would be in highly dangerous position. It is requiring some study, and probably the use of long chains on heavy equipment working from a distance to remove the danger. Hopefully without knocking down any other trees.
While this is a city park, the same kind of risks could arise in any national park at any time. Ordinarily these are spotted very early while rangers and contract workers (garbage service, etc) go about their regular routines, but during the shutdown these routines are disrupted, and the regional offices that coordinate repairs are closed.
Better to close the parks than to put any visitors at risk of unknown hazards.
Exactly.
NSA so very much wants to be the major Agency of the United Corporations of America. To hell with the citizenry.
Whatever this is, it is not "online piracy".
No ships have been illegally seized, not a single cutlass has been brandished. There has been no disturbance of the lawful transfer of goods from one entity to another. No one is being held for ransom.
Violating a licensing "agreement" involves no theft of moneys, nor theft of tangibles, nor theft of services. Making and distributing an unlicensed copy of software, a book, a movie, or music may in some cases reduce the potential for future sales, but that is not a reduction in current value. It only affects speculative value. That is not nice, and there should probably be some legal protection against it, but it is not theft.
Until the legislators who are attempting to write laws start using English words appropriately, there can be no good laws written to cover this new economic activity. Appropriating verbiage from maritime law because "piracy" sounds so menacing is bullshit, plain and simple. Perhaps those who are misusing the word so much should be sent to the waters off Somalia to learn what it means.
Since when is BSA a "Mormon" organization? Sure the Mormon church has partnered with BSA
Since the Mormon Church began co-opting the BSA, starting back in the 70s or 80s. (I'm sure someone else can detail the time line. I gave up on the situation very early when I began to see just how sexist and racist my Boy Scout experience of the 60s had been.)
Having RTFA, I can say what was actually reported was that all three of the triple fail-safe devices FAILED. Fortunately there was a fourth device that did not fail (but was reported as highly vulnerable to failure).
On reflection, I could have made my points much more clearly.
On further reflection, I can only do so for persons who understand the differences between expository writing (this is how you do it), descriptive writing (this is how the business did last quarter), persuasive writing (you really, really need to buy this shiny!), and creative writing (and now for something completely different). The Writing 101 courses that cover these differences are usually 10 to 12 weeks long, and I'm not going to attempt to duplicate that in a slashdot discussion.
I assert again, creative writing is best done in plaintext. Other types of writing can be done with other tools. Even PowerPoint has its appropriate place for a particular kind of "authoring". If you have very little to say to a captive audience and you feel a need to look like a clever guy, then PowerPoint is an excellent tool for your particular genius.
Back to creative writing: after a story or a novel or a poem is revised to the nearly finished stage, then it needs to be sent through the style and distribution processes of publishing in order to put it in front of the reader. HTML5 and CSS3 are providing an environment where tools that support creative writing in plaintext and then self-publishing the result are becoming available. There are several wikis, such as Dokuwiki, that are representative of these new tools. This could not be done effectively without the broad acceptance of HTML5 and CSS3. That is the lesson of the browser wars (go ask your grandpa about those bad times).
To look at this another way: sure, you could do the creative stuff in Word. But then what do you do when it is time to publish? Send it only to your friends and family who also have the very same version of Word? Send it through the PDF process-- oh but now all that careful formating might well have changed. Or export it as plaintext so you can pump it into a publishing system--- like maybe a wiki? :-)
No.
This is correct. Mod parent up. No disrespect to HTML5, but it is not going to play any key role for "authorship," (which is, although beside the point, absolutely the incorrect term for the query; "publishing and distribution" is what is meant and what should have been used).
I respectfully disagree, though not with all of what parent post is suggesting.
Creative writing is best done in a simple text editor where there is no style and the author/revisionist wrestles with his muse in an empty and barren arena. No witnesses to the bloody mess, and no distractions from the work at hand. WYSIWYG is a terrible distraction when trying to birth some new text into the world.
That said, the whole point of writing is to get one's words in front of some reader somewhere who will pick up on what the writer laid down. Making the raw final draft presentable is what publishing is all about. This is where HTML5 and CSS3 come into play. These technologies have nothing to do with the writing process but they can be necessary and sufficient for converting the writing into something that is readable. And they enable self-publishing in a much easier way, and to a much wider audience, than any other approach. But they do this work behind the scenes.
By far the easiest way to self-publish one's own creative writing is to do the writing in plaintext in a text editor, then copy-paste it into the input field of a good wiki engine. Make a "final" pass with the wiki editor to add the italics, bullets, and other stylistic stuff, and you are self-published on the web, with a potential audience of billions of readers. You will want to use one of the wikis that provides access controls, so that you can determine who can make changes to your work, but there a lot of wikis that support access control lists. You won't have an easy way to monetize the work, but hey nobody starts writing for the money. And maybe you could sell tee shirts or something from your web pages.
Where the HTML5 and the CSS3 come in is in the Javascript, PHP, and style sheets that you can use to adjust the way the wiki engine works. Of course you need an HTML5/CSS3 compliant wiki engine, but all of them are headed that way. Dokuwiki is my personal favorite: fully HTML5 and CSS3 compliant, and I found it easy to develop my own template, adequate for my book.
An example of a novel in progress is my work Artie Wood and his Electric Flying Machine. I could not do this any other way.
The conversation has now clearly entered the region where physics, psychology of perception, and language overlap-- and intertwine.
What can be said is that the underlying reality (what GP is referring to as "the actual underlying physical geometry") is absolutely unknowable. This is evident from the logic: if there was anyone, call him IA, who could directly perceive reality, he would still be unable to talk about it because there can be no human languages that can adequately express that kind of perception. In the best case, IA would become a prolific writer of pretty good science fiction; in the worst case he would be institutionalized as his inability to express his findings even in his own internal monologue would make him look crazy. Somewhere in between he would have phobias about flying and would have to travel from one sci-fi convention to the next by train.
Since there is no way within human capabilities to express the underlying reality-- whatever that might be-- for human beings it is simply and completely unknowable. All we have to work with directly are its shadows. With effort, we can deduce what some models that would cast similar shadows might look like, but those are still products of what goes on in our heads, and have nothing to do with what might actually be going on Out There. This does not mean that there is no fixed underlying reality--- for that simple solution is not available to us. Instead it only means that whatever reality might be, there is no human way to directly apprehend or work with it.
Suck it up and get back to discussing which models are prettier in this light, and go best with this decor. You may also ask "Do my thoughts look fat in this model?" Just don't waste a lot of time pretending that you can get hold of some actual piece of reality, for (unless you have really top notch skills as a teller of tales) that direction leads only to madness.
Maybe they shouldn't be building in these places period.
Maybe you are right.
That changes the problem of managing thousands of refugees for a short term to permanently relocating those thousands. The last time the USA faced a similar internal crisis was the Oakie migrations of the Dust Bowl days. And those people pretty much knew how to scratch enough out of bare dirt to keep body and soul together. These refugees do not have the same skills.
How many of them are there? Where will they go? What impact will they have on unemployment, welfare, etc, in their new locations?
The floods in Colorado are in narrow, steep canyons. They are destroying infrastructure in ways where it won't be repairable: roads, power and water lines, cell towers, etc will have to be rebuilt from scratch. Not only is pavement being ripped away, but road beds are disappearing. In places the bedrock is being reshaped.
Mississippi floods are just a lot of water and some silt. What is happening in Colorado is day after day of walls of water mixed with battering rams accelerating down thousand foot drops in elevation. Have you not seen any of the videos of cars, houses, big chunks of asphalt going downstream at 30 mph or faster?
It is much easier to get elected if you are not morally encumbered. Aspiring politicians who are lugging around ethical baggage don't get the money and favors needed to win campaigns.
Effective oversight IS required. Whether they are split up, remain as they are, or dissolved. Since even if they go away, there are going to be government agencies and private investigators who are going to continue to try and get away with this crap.
This is not a genie that can be tricked into going back into the bottle.