Well done for seeing ahead. We used to have a certain level of "herd anonymity". The pure information sorting power of today's computers has largely stripped that away. If what I've read is accurate, the NSA is capable of monitoring literally every telephone conversation on the continent (and probably more). That's not to say they look closely at all of them, but I'm sure somebody's peeking at people who have no idea they're even on anybody's radar.
Not a perfect solution, but it might be possible to legally obfuscate one's license plate when parked. I've seen cops in my community slowly driving up and down the rows in a couple of local mall parking lots. There's no question they're scanning plate numbers. I'm sure the day will come when they have scanners mounted everywhere there's a light pole, but for right now the cops in my area need to actually drive around to do their data harvesting.
All excellent points. The cretin you are addressing with this doesn't seem to understand anything that involves considering not just what's happening in front of one's face, but what can reasonably be extrapolated from it.
You said it better than I would have! It's like they've got somebody working there whose sole job is to find ways to make sensible people hate them even more.
You're wasting your time on this guy. He's one of those people with a one-track mind who can't see anything beyond what's three inches in front of his nose. I'd call him an idiot, but that would both insult idiots and underrate his monomania.
They have exactly the same reason to be interested in you as the US intelligence community...that is to say, no reason today. Tomorrow? Well, some of us, at least, aspire to become more influential in the future than we are now.
I'm normally pretty contemptuous of the snide, know-it-all geektards who infest places like Linux help forums. You go there for help when you're just starting out with some kind of software, and you get sneered at and disparaged for asking simple questions.
But this is a bit different. If you're computer savvy enough to know why you need a VPN, you already know enough to figure out why some are better than others. Even few minutes of research should tell you what you need to look for in the policies and practices of any VPN you're thinking of entering a relationship with.
What you see right up front should tell you that some of the free ones, especially if they're owned by the Chinese (who seem dedicated to making Big Brother look like a Libertarian), are a bad, bad idea. They're probably worse than nothing at all, actually, because like a leaky condom, they're just going to give you a false sense of security while you're getting screwed.
I can think of a couple of problems with just that exactly, but I really like the concept. A few tweaks and I think it would be a lovely addition to any security conscious individual's smart phone.
There's a relatively easy, straightforward solution to the piracy problem, but manufacturers are too greedy to consider it. Simply don't release a game at all until a pre-defined number of paid orders has been received. Deal with updates in a similar fashion. Nobody gets that great new weapon until enough people have bucked up for it.
Step two would be a free release with a few not-too-annoying nags built in to encourage people to pay. Stay under the threshold where average gamers decide it's worth pirating rather than playing the slightly disadvantaged legal/free version, or buying the game outright.
These people need to learn that the days when putting a game on the market was a ticket to perpetual royalties is well and truly over.
When going into an environment where it might be helpful not to have information on one's phone fall into the wrong hands, a phone that would lobotomize itself if certain conditions weren't met would be very nice to have.
If there isn't already an app for that, there should be.
You should learn to read more carefully. I specifically did not say "telling the truth", and that's for a reason. Israeli intelligence already has a voice stress analyzer that's pretty good at picking up on lies. I mentioned something quite different: whether or not a news reader is comfortable with what they're telling you. And I can stand by that with plenty of evidence on my side to back me up.
When we communicate, we pick up a lot of information about the other person through body language, including, to some extent, whether they're comfortable with what they're saying. Not today or tomorrow, but in the not-too-distant future, I suspect it will be possible to analyze video of a person (like a news reader) and determine with a reasonable degree of accuracy whether they actually believe what they're telling you.
Of course, if your only source of information is a glorified cartoon whose every word, gesture and twitch is controlled by its owner, you can be lied to on a level that surely has totalitarians drooling like a hungry dog at a barbecue.
"Profuse thanks to you Westerners. We have now stolen everything we need. So now we will enact legislation to ensure you pay a hefty price if you try to steal any of it back."
Did you even bother to read the article you linked to?
It says this: "It comes after NASA satellites provided the first direct evidence the ozone hole had shrunk in January, a finding welcomed by Dr Jon Shanklin, one of the meteorologists who first discovered the ozone hole, as a 'definite good news story'.
And this: "However, in a new paper published in the journal Nature, an international team of scientists report an unexpected finding of CFC-11, one of the major ozone-depleting chemicals.
"The rate of this substance's decline in the atmosphere has slowed by approximately 50 per cent since 2012."
So in other words, the ozone layer is still recovering, just like the story says, and CFC's continue to decline, though not as fast as projected. There is no "disparity", apparent or real.
If there's an element of exerting power and control involved as well as sex, then it makes perfect sense. Is there a better way to prove your absolute and complete dominance over a reasonably attractive female employee...maybe one with a husband or boyfriend...than to tell her to lie down and spread or watch her career go to hell?
If you're that kind of scumbag, you're going to do this every time you think you have a chance of getting away with it.
Sometimes "the hand that feeds you" is also the one trying to get a finger up your fanny. If enough employees object, Google will actually have to reform its corporate culture to bring it more in line with the part of its original (now quietly emended) mission statement that said, "Don't be evil".
In Europe, employees have a lot more tools at their disposal to fight back against employers who act the way you describe. In North America, they'd be toast. In Europe, they have a fighting chance.
Applaud all you want. You've obviously never spent so much as a moment thinking about how much legal firepower even a couple of million dollars would bring to bear on a relatively open/shut case of sexual harassment.
It's obviously not your money on the line, or you'd be seriously pissed off that Google didn't go to war...which would have been a hell of a lot cheaper.
Wow...a forced blowjob AND $90 million. When Google says they take a "hard line" on sexual misconduct, I wonder if they mean what we're supposed to think they mean.
I understand members of the American public are justifiably outraged by the presence in the United States of some particularly heinous scofflaws. Apparently these evil people have managed to anger tens of thousands of upstanding American citizens, who have reported them to ICE repeatedly.
Chinga-Sue Madray, ICE is coming for you! Afooku Sosumi, there will be nowhere for you to hide! Sookma Har-Dwon, soon you will regret slipping into America!
You have been warned. Govern yourselves accordingly!
So some prick in marketing decided it looks bad if Apple actually admits there were some security problems with its OS, even though they were dealt with promptly and competently after Project Zero found them. Having been in that kind of meeting before, I could probably write a near-verbatim transcript of the little bastard's remarks even without having been in the room to hear them.
Said prick should be fired on the spot "pour encourager les autres", because the Project Zero people are 100% right about how users look at updates. If they know there's a security issue, they'll probably install it in a timely manner, or at least be especially alert for problems. If there isn't a warning, basic user experience, no matter what operating system they use, has proved time and again it's sensible to wait for a while after an update is rolled out to see whether problems emerge in a week or two that weren't immediately obvious.
There's one thing plastics do really, really well, even in small doses. Especially in fetal and juvenile mammals, they act like female hormones when they break down.
The fact that they're now found everywhere in the environment and there has been no serious effort to control this situation should be a lot more than just a mild cause for concern.
Slashdot Mirror
Well done for seeing ahead. We used to have a certain level of "herd anonymity". The pure information sorting power of today's computers has largely stripped that away. If what I've read is accurate, the NSA is capable of monitoring literally every telephone conversation on the continent (and probably more). That's not to say they look closely at all of them, but I'm sure somebody's peeking at people who have no idea they're even on anybody's radar.
Not a perfect solution, but it might be possible to legally obfuscate one's license plate when parked. I've seen cops in my community slowly driving up and down the rows in a couple of local mall parking lots. There's no question they're scanning plate numbers. I'm sure the day will come when they have scanners mounted everywhere there's a light pole, but for right now the cops in my area need to actually drive around to do their data harvesting.
All excellent points. The cretin you are addressing with this doesn't seem to understand anything that involves considering not just what's happening in front of one's face, but what can reasonably be extrapolated from it.
You said it better than I would have! It's like they've got somebody working there whose sole job is to find ways to make sensible people hate them even more.
Yet another reason to keep Win10 off every machine I own or otherwise control.
Hey, there, Microsoft: Fuck you hard, fuck you deep...fuck you with something that has jagged, rusty serrations on it.
You're wasting your time on this guy. He's one of those people with a one-track mind who can't see anything beyond what's three inches in front of his nose. I'd call him an idiot, but that would both insult idiots and underrate his monomania.
They have exactly the same reason to be interested in you as the US intelligence community...that is to say, no reason today. Tomorrow? Well, some of us, at least, aspire to become more influential in the future than we are now.
I'm normally pretty contemptuous of the snide, know-it-all geektards who infest places like Linux help forums. You go there for help when you're just starting out with some kind of software, and you get sneered at and disparaged for asking simple questions.
But this is a bit different. If you're computer savvy enough to know why you need a VPN, you already know enough to figure out why some are better than others. Even few minutes of research should tell you what you need to look for in the policies and practices of any VPN you're thinking of entering a relationship with.
What you see right up front should tell you that some of the free ones, especially if they're owned by the Chinese (who seem dedicated to making Big Brother look like a Libertarian), are a bad, bad idea. They're probably worse than nothing at all, actually, because like a leaky condom, they're just going to give you a false sense of security while you're getting screwed.
I can think of a couple of problems with just that exactly, but I really like the concept. A few tweaks and I think it would be a lovely addition to any security conscious individual's smart phone.
There's a relatively easy, straightforward solution to the piracy problem, but manufacturers are too greedy to consider it. Simply don't release a game at all until a pre-defined number of paid orders has been received. Deal with updates in a similar fashion. Nobody gets that great new weapon until enough people have bucked up for it.
Step two would be a free release with a few not-too-annoying nags built in to encourage people to pay. Stay under the threshold where average gamers decide it's worth pirating rather than playing the slightly disadvantaged legal/free version, or buying the game outright.
These people need to learn that the days when putting a game on the market was a ticket to perpetual royalties is well and truly over.
When going into an environment where it might be helpful not to have information on one's phone fall into the wrong hands, a phone that would lobotomize itself if certain conditions weren't met would be very nice to have.
If there isn't already an app for that, there should be.
And so the "arms race" begins.
As a Canadian, I certainly see where you're coming from on this.
You should learn to read more carefully. I specifically did not say "telling the truth", and that's for a reason. Israeli intelligence already has a voice stress analyzer that's pretty good at picking up on lies. I mentioned something quite different: whether or not a news reader is comfortable with what they're telling you. And I can stand by that with plenty of evidence on my side to back me up.
When we communicate, we pick up a lot of information about the other person through body language, including, to some extent, whether they're comfortable with what they're saying. Not today or tomorrow, but in the not-too-distant future, I suspect it will be possible to analyze video of a person (like a news reader) and determine with a reasonable degree of accuracy whether they actually believe what they're telling you.
Of course, if your only source of information is a glorified cartoon whose every word, gesture and twitch is controlled by its owner, you can be lied to on a level that surely has totalitarians drooling like a hungry dog at a barbecue.
You won't find me disagreeing with that.
"Profuse thanks to you Westerners. We have now stolen everything we need. So now we will enact legislation to ensure you pay a hefty price if you try to steal any of it back."
Did you even bother to read the article you linked to?
It says this: "It comes after NASA satellites provided the first direct evidence the ozone hole had shrunk in January, a finding welcomed by Dr Jon Shanklin, one of the meteorologists who first discovered the ozone hole, as a 'definite good news story'.
And this: "However, in a new paper published in the journal Nature, an international team of scientists report an unexpected finding of CFC-11, one of the major ozone-depleting chemicals.
"The rate of this substance's decline in the atmosphere has slowed by approximately 50 per cent since 2012."
So in other words, the ozone layer is still recovering, just like the story says, and CFC's continue to decline, though not as fast as projected. There is no "disparity", apparent or real.
If there's an element of exerting power and control involved as well as sex, then it makes perfect sense. Is there a better way to prove your absolute and complete dominance over a reasonably attractive female employee...maybe one with a husband or boyfriend...than to tell her to lie down and spread or watch her career go to hell?
If you're that kind of scumbag, you're going to do this every time you think you have a chance of getting away with it.
Sometimes "the hand that feeds you" is also the one trying to get a finger up your fanny. If enough employees object, Google will actually have to reform its corporate culture to bring it more in line with the part of its original (now quietly emended) mission statement that said, "Don't be evil".
In Europe, employees have a lot more tools at their disposal to fight back against employers who act the way you describe. In North America, they'd be toast. In Europe, they have a fighting chance.
Applaud all you want. You've obviously never spent so much as a moment thinking about how much legal firepower even a couple of million dollars would bring to bear on a relatively open/shut case of sexual harassment.
It's obviously not your money on the line, or you'd be seriously pissed off that Google didn't go to war...which would have been a hell of a lot cheaper.
Wow...a forced blowjob AND $90 million. When Google says they take a "hard line" on sexual misconduct, I wonder if they mean what we're supposed to think they mean.
I understand members of the American public are justifiably outraged by the presence in the United States of some particularly heinous scofflaws. Apparently these evil people have managed to anger tens of thousands of upstanding American citizens, who have reported them to ICE repeatedly.
Chinga-Sue Madray, ICE is coming for you! Afooku Sosumi, there will be nowhere for you to hide! Sookma Har-Dwon, soon you will regret slipping into America!
You have been warned. Govern yourselves accordingly!
So some prick in marketing decided it looks bad if Apple actually admits there were some security problems with its OS, even though they were dealt with promptly and competently after Project Zero found them. Having been in that kind of meeting before, I could probably write a near-verbatim transcript of the little bastard's remarks even without having been in the room to hear them.
Said prick should be fired on the spot "pour encourager les autres", because the Project Zero people are 100% right about how users look at updates. If they know there's a security issue, they'll probably install it in a timely manner, or at least be especially alert for problems. If there isn't a warning, basic user experience, no matter what operating system they use, has proved time and again it's sensible to wait for a while after an update is rolled out to see whether problems emerge in a week or two that weren't immediately obvious.
There's one thing plastics do really, really well, even in small doses. Especially in fetal and juvenile mammals, they act like female hormones when they break down.
The fact that they're now found everywhere in the environment and there has been no serious effort to control this situation should be a lot more than just a mild cause for concern.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3222987/