I'm not sure if this fellow intended to be funny or serious. But when I read this story that was the first thought that went through my mind. Such stupid are not worthy of remaining in the gene pool. But this is not an act of me judging others, but a recognition of the reality of evolution. If such ignorant people wish to make such deadly decisions about their own well-being, so be it. Perhaps some members of this church will be candidates of the next Darwin Awards. I'd like to see that!
I am an inveterate letter writer. I dislike sending e-mail to friends, preferring to commit my thoughts and comments to paper. It seems that this is the most secure form of communication available since I can take steps to ensure that the recipient knows that the envelope was not steamed open in transit. That leaves the photos the postal service has been taking of the front and back of every envelope going through the mail , and I can even sabotage that a bit by using phone a phony name and return address and an alias for the recipient. Even the letters I write to and receive from my correspondents in jails and prisons are more secure than my electronic communication. While everything I send and receive has been read first by the jail or prison staff, they're not going to be particularly interested in my political and religious ramblings. They're far more interested in things that affect the security of the jail or prison and the inmates, gang activity, and things of an obvious criminal nature. So, bring on the snail mail!
Keep in mind that the rules of thumb used in the Wikipedia and elsewhere as examples of the boundary that should not be crossed when using copyrighted material according to "fair use" are conservative. The theory is that if you use these rules you're highly unlikely to be sued (except by copyright trolls who ought to be hunted down and disemboweled alive by real trolls). An author can probably get away with using more. ANY use of copyrighted material runs the risk of an infringement lawsuit. But then producing and published ANYTHING runs that risk. How many performers and/or song writers been sued stealing bits of others songs because they seem familiar?
I should be eating coffee beans, popping them out, and the looking for them in my shit. It's about as much fun as cleaning my cat's litterbox but far more profitable. There is a Starbucks nearby. Perhaps I could sell it to them. It's gotta be better than the swill they sell.
To quote one of my favorite movie characters, "The shit is about to hit the fan and I want to be here to see it." (Dr. Lazarus in "Outland" in case you're curious.)
The publication of this court ruling is going to make it much easier for a federal judge and subsequent appellate judges to slam the NSA down hard. I'm not certain about the law on this but it might also make it possible to send certain NSA officials to prison. My prediction: Heads at the NSA are about to roll and I will not be surprised if one of them is Gen. Alexander. Because he is a serving general and this shit happened on active duty, he could be courtmartialed, be stripped of rank, and lose his pension, a just punishment I believe for such a grave violation of the people's civil rights.
Unfortunately, the heads will not be literally be rolling on the floor, and perhaps that's a good thing. It's nice to contemplate, however. It would have made one hell of a great game of pool on a diabolical billiard table. General Alexander's head would be the cue ball. Some people more evil than myself might possess the belief that a certain other person's head should be the 8-ball but I'm not one of them. But it's hilarious to visualize!
I really wonder if the British authorities really understand what they are doing. They detained a person who is very important to a reporter who just happens to have the keys to gigabytes of intelligence secrets belonging to their closest ally, an ally they really do not want to get too angry at them. This reporter can fuck both of them over by letting go some juicy bits. Blackmail against a superpower and a former superpower is a dangerous game but for the moment, the good guys hold all the cards. Do they, does the American intelligence community, really understand that they are playing with fire?
Uh, I beg to differ with you. While Apple did kill its Xserve line of rack-mounted computers, it indeed still markets server computers. Apple offers a server configuration of the Mac Mini. Mac Minis may not have been designed to be servers, they make great servers, can be rack-mounted with a bit of third-party equipment, and they are much, much cheaper than purpose-built servers. You get more bang for the buck. Apple also pushes the Mac Pro as a server despite its size and lack of pizza-box shape.
As several people have already noted here, this story is essentially a lie, or at least an exaggeration. Linux (for all intents and purposes) *IS* Unix without the trademark. That is one of the reasons why Linux grew to be so popular. A large number of people wanted a Unix but didn't want to pay for it. Just because the operating systems that can legally be called Unix are shrinking in usage (with the notable exception of MacOS and it's close cousin iOS) does not mean that Unix is dead. Unix and that which would be called a Unix in a trademark-free world is alive and well and is exploding exponentially. It's in every pad computer, e-book readers, most smart phones, my Sony Blu-Ray player, airliner entertainment systems, and many, many other places I can't think of at the moment.
When traveling internationally don't carry anything that can be confiscated. I've already decided that the next time I travel internationally (something I don't do often) to never carry anything electronic. I keep a diary but only on paper and I will mail it and anything else I've written ahead. It's not that I write anything worthy of government scrutiny or that they would pay particular attention to me but an American has few civil rights in the United States when crossing an international border, including the international no-man's-land in an airport and I do not trust the government. I've seen too much of it's bad behavior and had enough personal experience with it to never trust it again.
If this is an attempt by WikiLeaks to blackmail the U.S. government into backing off it would only be effective if the decryption key was quietly given to the government so they could verify that these files are legitimate and not a compilation of their favorite MP3s. However, I suspect this will be counterproductive. The government is going to strike back and strike hard. I wonder what they're going to do. I have some ideas.
It would be interesting if all this data is finally unlocked and accessible and we find out that this is the NSA's collective porn collection, something gathered in addition to all of the world's e-mails and phone calls and text messages.
My uncle worked in IT for an oil company. When the time for layoffs came, he ALWAYS first laid off the dead wood. There were no exceptions. After all, these are opportunities to make the company sturdier without screwing up morale more than layoffs already do.
Cisco has been in a kind of layoff mode for quite a while, on and off. I'm a Cisco stock holder and I know that layoffs can raise the stock price in the short term, but in the long term they often are not good. but I think it's time to dump it. I'm getting rather tired of it.
When I was in high school what I needed was "a good teacher" to help me over the rough bits of language. But as I got older I find I have very little trouble understanding Shakespeare when I have a good dictionary at hand to help me with the words, and that, my friends, is the only electronic help anyone needs.
The first thing this will be used for is going to be porn, not Shakespeare.
Hey, it's not "either-or".
HAMLET to OPHELIA: Lady, shall I lie in your lap? OPHELIA: No, my lord. HAMLET: I mean, my head upon your lap? OPHELIA: Ay, my lord. HAMLET: Do you think I meant CoUNTry matters? OPHELIA: I think nothing, my lord. HAMLET: That's a fair thought to lie between maids' legs.
--.nosig
Oh yes! There is lots of this porn of a sort in Shakespeare. Henry V comes to mind now, the scene between Katherine and her nurse that is spoken entirely in French. The nurse says that she knows some English and proceeds to amaze Katherine with her terribly mispronounced English words for various common body parts and items. When she gets to the part where Katherine asks her nurse for the word for the article of clothing she is wearing the nurse says "gown" but pronounces it like the French word for that thing that starts with a C, ends in a T, means "pussy", and is NOT a cat.
I guess the book-burning hyper-Christian book banners didn't read Shakespeare to understand that The Bard's plays can contain content that is quite vile by their standards. Hell, Romeo and Juliet contains teenaged sex. I guess Shakespeare is less crude than any ordinary romance novel.
Shakespeare, as a master of the language, loved to twist it in anyway he could for effect. He would have thoroughly enjoyed George Carlin's line from "The Seven Things You Can't Say on Television": "It's okay to prick your finger but never finger your pr*ck."
(Those of you here who are too young to know about "Mister Rogers Neighborhood" need to move along.)
I can imagine Mister Rogers saying in response to the claim of the insurance companies. "This is bullshit. This is what it looks like. Can you say 'bullshit', children? Good. I knew you could."
not fucking one of the steps is to ACTUALLY STOP DRINKING! and half of the steps are practically just setting up that it's not their fault if they drink!
here's my two step program. 1) stop drinking. 2) try to fill the time with something to make things feel as fun as when drinking.
step two is hard, because, hey, drinking is highly enjoyable.
With all due respect, my friend, you have no idea what you are talking about, as well as everyone else who so blindly and blithely modded this fellow's alleged wisdom up so many times. I know something about Twelve Step programs because I've worked the steps for several years.
Addiction is real; it is a coping mechanism used by the brain and makes physical changes in its wiring. There are some people who simply put cannot stop drinking because of the physical and mental pain caused by needing a drink. No amount of willpower is sufficient to overcome it. The same can be said about drug addicts, pornography addicts (this place is almost certainly filled with them), gambling addicts, and compulsive eaters (both eating too much and not enough). They way to eliminate these pains is to eliminate the thing that is causing the pain. The way to do that in a nutshell is to live a life of complete humility and honesty, not self-centered, willing to be of service to others, to accept life as it is and on its terms and not yours, and to clean up all the wreckage in your life and start anew by identifying it, sharing it with another person so that it's no longer a secret, and then apologizing to those who your screwed, cheated, or worse, and offer to make amends for it all, and then continuing to do so when similar behavior inevitably happens again.
If some of this sounds like Buddhism that's because there are a lot of parallels.
Correct me if I'm wrong but you are not allowed to patent mathematical processes. "Elliptic curve cryptography" sure sounds like a "mathematical process" to me and a pack of especially smart and vicious patent lawyers should be able to blast RIM and Blackberry away in short order (by patent litigation standards which is aeons long). Sounds like a job for Amazon whose entire business model, the one they make money on anyway, depends upon the integrity of SSL which depends upon Diffie-Hellman and RSA for key exchange, if my flawed memory serves. Gotta blow the dust off my SSL book....
This guy definitely has too much time on his hands. But given that this fellow seems to have this incredible obsession, how did he managed to find the time to have sex to even have a son to put in a bedroom that the poor kid can't even use except for sleeping.
Why reawaken the horrible and traumatic memories of school? Well, unless you were like me who was always good at math. In my case, I would object to news stories containing more references to bullying and teasing. But I've forgiven my childhood bullies of all that. It was easy to do and I've since and I've forgotten most of it. Forgetting it was just as easy as forgetting where I buried their bodies after I took my revenge. *muahahahaha* Ok, I'll take my pills now.
Well, it's scary enough to make me want to turn off Javascript (unless I'm running Firefox—and I'm not—and can't turn it off). But Javascript provides to web pages features and abilities that I'd rather like to keep. For example, I love AJAX and how it allows a sufficiently sophisticated browser to do something like what Google did with Gmail. When I first saw Gmail my jaw dropped. "WOW!" I knew then that the thick client's life was limited. But as things get more and more nasty I'm wondering if perhaps the thick clients are not a safer approach for some applications.
Uh, well, sort of. I think the majority of what was Prussia I think is occupied by Poland and Russia. The Germans living in these areas either fled the mass rape, murder, and pillage of the Red Army or, if they had the balls to stay, were forcibly expelled to Germany in an earlier version of ethnic cleansing after the war ended.
He gave aid and comfort to the enemy but not the enemy the government was thinking of when they tried to hang that charge on him. Based upon what the NSA and some of the other three-letter agencies do, it's obvious that they think we are the enemy, especially now that so many of us are so upset with what they were doing. WE THE PEOPLE are the enemy that he aided.
On a somewhat more serious note, as to his alleged espionage what enemy did he give information to? The United States is at war with no country. The last declaration of war was issued by the Congress in 1941. So, who is the enemy? Furthermore, how can giving classified material to a foreign national or somehow facilitating its dissemination to a foreign national (in this case embodied by Julian Assange and Wikileaks) be espionage when that foreign national is a citizen of a friendly power (Australia), an ally for nearly a century? Ironically, what Edward Snowden in revealing that the NSA had cracked the Chinese communications system makes him far more guilty of espionage. But even then, we are not at war with China, neither hot nor cold. We have diplomatic relations with them, citizens of both countries are allowed to freely travel to and from both countries with a tourist visa which is easy to get. If we were in a cold war with them like we were with the Soviet Union I might think differently but there are few signs of them.
Slashdot Mirror
Think of it as evolution in action.
I'm not sure if this fellow intended to be funny or serious. But when I read this story that was the first thought that went through my mind. Such stupid are not worthy of remaining in the gene pool. But this is not an act of me judging others, but a recognition of the reality of evolution. If such ignorant people wish to make such deadly decisions about their own well-being, so be it. Perhaps some members of this church will be candidates of the next Darwin Awards. I'd like to see that!
I am an inveterate letter writer. I dislike sending e-mail to friends, preferring to commit my thoughts and comments to paper. It seems that this is the most secure form of communication available since I can take steps to ensure that the recipient knows that the envelope was not steamed open in transit. That leaves the photos the postal service has been taking of the front and back of every envelope going through the mail , and I can even sabotage that a bit by using phone a phony name and return address and an alias for the recipient. Even the letters I write to and receive from my correspondents in jails and prisons are more secure than my electronic communication. While everything I send and receive has been read first by the jail or prison staff, they're not going to be particularly interested in my political and religious ramblings. They're far more interested in things that affect the security of the jail or prison and the inmates, gang activity, and things of an obvious criminal nature. So, bring on the snail mail!
Keep in mind that the rules of thumb used in the Wikipedia and elsewhere as examples of the boundary that should not be crossed when using copyrighted material according to "fair use" are conservative. The theory is that if you use these rules you're highly unlikely to be sued (except by copyright trolls who ought to be hunted down and disemboweled alive by real trolls). An author can probably get away with using more. ANY use of copyrighted material runs the risk of an infringement lawsuit. But then producing and published ANYTHING runs that risk. How many performers and/or song writers been sued stealing bits of others songs because they seem familiar?
I should be eating coffee beans, popping them out, and the looking for them in my shit. It's about as much fun as cleaning my cat's litterbox but far more profitable. There is a Starbucks nearby. Perhaps I could sell it to them. It's gotta be better than the swill they sell.
To quote one of my favorite movie characters, "The shit is about to hit the fan and I want to be here to see it." (Dr. Lazarus in "Outland" in case you're curious.)
The publication of this court ruling is going to make it much easier for a federal judge and subsequent appellate judges to slam the NSA down hard. I'm not certain about the law on this but it might also make it possible to send certain NSA officials to prison. My prediction: Heads at the NSA are about to roll and I will not be surprised if one of them is Gen. Alexander. Because he is a serving general and this shit happened on active duty, he could be courtmartialed, be stripped of rank, and lose his pension, a just punishment I believe for such a grave violation of the people's civil rights.
Unfortunately, the heads will not be literally be rolling on the floor, and perhaps that's a good thing. It's nice to contemplate, however. It would have made one hell of a great game of pool on a diabolical billiard table. General Alexander's head would be the cue ball. Some people more evil than myself might possess the belief that a certain other person's head should be the 8-ball but I'm not one of them. But it's hilarious to visualize!
Fuck the NSA. Fuck the USA. Fuck the UK. Fuck all these fascist pigs.
Fuck them. Fuck their families. Fuck their dogs.
Blow them up in their cars. Blow them up on the street. Blow up their datacenters.
Fuck this human waste.
Hmmm.... the stealth drones are coming for you now, dude!
I really wonder if the British authorities really understand what they are doing. They detained a person who is very important to a reporter who just happens to have the keys to gigabytes of intelligence secrets belonging to their closest ally, an ally they really do not want to get too angry at them. This reporter can fuck both of them over by letting go some juicy bits. Blackmail against a superpower and a former superpower is a dangerous game but for the moment, the good guys hold all the cards. Do they, does the American intelligence community, really understand that they are playing with fire?
Uh, I beg to differ with you. While Apple did kill its Xserve line of rack-mounted computers, it indeed still markets server computers. Apple offers a server configuration of the Mac Mini. Mac Minis may not have been designed to be servers, they make great servers, can be rack-mounted with a bit of third-party equipment, and they are much, much cheaper than purpose-built servers. You get more bang for the buck. Apple also pushes the Mac Pro as a server despite its size and lack of pizza-box shape.
As several people have already noted here, this story is essentially a lie, or at least an exaggeration. Linux (for all intents and purposes) *IS* Unix without the trademark. That is one of the reasons why Linux grew to be so popular. A large number of people wanted a Unix but didn't want to pay for it. Just because the operating systems that can legally be called Unix are shrinking in usage (with the notable exception of MacOS and it's close cousin iOS) does not mean that Unix is dead. Unix and that which would be called a Unix in a trademark-free world is alive and well and is exploding exponentially. It's in every pad computer, e-book readers, most smart phones, my Sony Blu-Ray player, airliner entertainment systems, and many, many other places I can't think of at the moment.
When traveling internationally don't carry anything that can be confiscated. I've already decided that the next time I travel internationally (something I don't do often) to never carry anything electronic. I keep a diary but only on paper and I will mail it and anything else I've written ahead. It's not that I write anything worthy of government scrutiny or that they would pay particular attention to me but an American has few civil rights in the United States when crossing an international border, including the international no-man's-land in an airport and I do not trust the government. I've seen too much of it's bad behavior and had enough personal experience with it to never trust it again.
If this is an attempt by WikiLeaks to blackmail the U.S. government into backing off it would only be effective if the decryption key was quietly given to the government so they could verify that these files are legitimate and not a compilation of their favorite MP3s. However, I suspect this will be counterproductive. The government is going to strike back and strike hard. I wonder what they're going to do. I have some ideas.
It would be interesting if all this data is finally unlocked and accessible and we find out that this is the NSA's collective porn collection, something gathered in addition to all of the world's e-mails and phone calls and text messages.
My uncle worked in IT for an oil company. When the time for layoffs came, he ALWAYS first laid off the dead wood. There were no exceptions. After all, these are opportunities to make the company sturdier without screwing up morale more than layoffs already do.
Cisco has been in a kind of layoff mode for quite a while, on and off. I'm a Cisco stock holder and I know that layoffs can raise the stock price in the short term, but in the long term they often are not good. but I think it's time to dump it. I'm getting rather tired of it.
When I was in high school what I needed was "a good teacher" to help me over the rough bits of language. But as I got older I find I have very little trouble understanding Shakespeare when I have a good dictionary at hand to help me with the words, and that, my friends, is the only electronic help anyone needs.
Hey, it's not "either-or".
-- .nosig
Oh yes! There is lots of this porn of a sort in Shakespeare. Henry V comes to mind now, the scene between Katherine and her nurse that is spoken entirely in French. The nurse says that she knows some English and proceeds to amaze Katherine with her terribly mispronounced English words for various common body parts and items. When she gets to the part where Katherine asks her nurse for the word for the article of clothing she is wearing the nurse says "gown" but pronounces it like the French word for that thing that starts with a C, ends in a T, means "pussy", and is NOT a cat.
I guess the book-burning hyper-Christian book banners didn't read Shakespeare to understand that The Bard's plays can contain content that is quite vile by their standards. Hell, Romeo and Juliet contains teenaged sex. I guess Shakespeare is less crude than any ordinary romance novel.
Shakespeare, as a master of the language, loved to twist it in anyway he could for effect. He would have thoroughly enjoyed George Carlin's line from "The Seven Things You Can't Say on Television": "It's okay to prick your finger but never finger your pr*ck."
(Those of you here who are too young to know about "Mister Rogers Neighborhood" need to move along.)
I can imagine Mister Rogers saying in response to the claim of the insurance companies. "This is bullshit. This is what it looks like. Can you say 'bullshit', children? Good. I knew you could."
not fucking one of the steps is to ACTUALLY STOP DRINKING! and half of the steps are practically just setting up that it's not their fault if they drink!
here's my two step program.
1) stop drinking.
2) try to fill the time with something to make things feel as fun as when drinking.
step two is hard, because, hey, drinking is highly enjoyable.
With all due respect, my friend, you have no idea what you are talking about, as well as everyone else who so blindly and blithely modded this fellow's alleged wisdom up so many times. I know something about Twelve Step programs because I've worked the steps for several years.
Addiction is real; it is a coping mechanism used by the brain and makes physical changes in its wiring. There are some people who simply put cannot stop drinking because of the physical and mental pain caused by needing a drink. No amount of willpower is sufficient to overcome it. The same can be said about drug addicts, pornography addicts (this place is almost certainly filled with them), gambling addicts, and compulsive eaters (both eating too much and not enough). They way to eliminate these pains is to eliminate the thing that is causing the pain. The way to do that in a nutshell is to live a life of complete humility and honesty, not self-centered, willing to be of service to others, to accept life as it is and on its terms and not yours, and to clean up all the wreckage in your life and start anew by identifying it, sharing it with another person so that it's no longer a secret, and then apologizing to those who your screwed, cheated, or worse, and offer to make amends for it all, and then continuing to do so when similar behavior inevitably happens again.
If some of this sounds like Buddhism that's because there are a lot of parallels.
Correct me if I'm wrong but you are not allowed to patent mathematical processes. "Elliptic curve cryptography" sure sounds like a "mathematical process" to me and a pack of especially smart and vicious patent lawyers should be able to blast RIM and Blackberry away in short order (by patent litigation standards which is aeons long). Sounds like a job for Amazon whose entire business model, the one they make money on anyway, depends upon the integrity of SSL which depends upon Diffie-Hellman and RSA for key exchange, if my flawed memory serves. Gotta blow the dust off my SSL book....
This guy definitely has too much time on his hands. But given that this fellow seems to have this incredible obsession, how did he managed to find the time to have sex to even have a son to put in a bedroom that the poor kid can't even use except for sleeping.
Why reawaken the horrible and traumatic memories of school? Well, unless you were like me who was always good at math. In my case, I would object to news stories containing more references to bullying and teasing. But I've forgiven my childhood bullies of all that. It was easy to do and I've since and I've forgotten most of it. Forgetting it was just as easy as forgetting where I buried their bodies after I took my revenge. *muahahahaha* Ok, I'll take my pills now.
Well, it's scary enough to make me want to turn off Javascript (unless I'm running Firefox—and I'm not—and can't turn it off). But Javascript provides to web pages features and abilities that I'd rather like to keep. For example, I love AJAX and how it allows a sufficiently sophisticated browser to do something like what Google did with Gmail. When I first saw Gmail my jaw dropped. "WOW!" I knew then that the thick client's life was limited. But as things get more and more nasty I'm wondering if perhaps the thick clients are not a safer approach for some applications.
Depends upon the religious wackos who have established sharia law.
Uh, well, sort of. I think the majority of what was Prussia I think is occupied by Poland and Russia. The Germans living in these areas either fled the mass rape, murder, and pillage of the Red Army or, if they had the balls to stay, were forcibly expelled to Germany in an earlier version of ethnic cleansing after the war ended.
He gave aid and comfort to the enemy but not the enemy the government was thinking of when they tried to hang that charge on him. Based upon what the NSA and some of the other three-letter agencies do, it's obvious that they think we are the enemy, especially now that so many of us are so upset with what they were doing. WE THE PEOPLE are the enemy that he aided.
On a somewhat more serious note, as to his alleged espionage what enemy did he give information to? The United States is at war with no country. The last declaration of war was issued by the Congress in 1941. So, who is the enemy? Furthermore, how can giving classified material to a foreign national or somehow facilitating its dissemination to a foreign national (in this case embodied by Julian Assange and Wikileaks) be espionage when that foreign national is a citizen of a friendly power (Australia), an ally for nearly a century? Ironically, what Edward Snowden in revealing that the NSA had cracked the Chinese communications system makes him far more guilty of espionage. But even then, we are not at war with China, neither hot nor cold. We have diplomatic relations with them, citizens of both countries are allowed to freely travel to and from both countries with a tourist visa which is easy to get. If we were in a cold war with them like we were with the Soviet Union I might think differently but there are few signs of them.
I smell an appeal in the works.