One problem with your idea... everyones brain is completely different. When actual scientists do this they do multiple high resolution MRIs of the patients brain and study them for months before trying anything. Then they apply very tightly controlled current to tiny areas of the brain. What these people are doing is just as likely to turn on the "homicidal rage" part of their brains as it is anything else.
You will NEVER get a deal on alien ware or DELL. Their markup prices have always be nutz, and on top of that they slap so much bloated crap onto the PC your windows instillation is virtually worthless and you end up having to pirate a plain copy wipe the drive and start over anyway. You're better off going to newegg and getting some randomly slapped together PC they have... you're just as likely to have compatibility issues either way and at least newegg will literally let you return anything within 30 days. Something I've tested dozens of times personally.
But see, this is exactly the problem. You CAN'T own code. It doesn't really exist. So they invented this licensing scheme to make money off of it, and convinced the idiots in Washington that this was the only way it could be. Now our entire government is convinced that "production" is something that is meant for poor people that don't live here need to do... and the designs and procedures used in that production are where the actual value is. Which is exactly ass-backward. Labor is valuable, and better designs and procedures allow you to make that labor more valuable. Ideas should be free, you labor should not be. How you pay for the labor that goes into those ideas is a big question, and an important one... but the solution we seem to have come up with has to be about the stupidest idea humanity has ever had.
You don't seem to understand. They can and do track everyone, and it's stored. They don't need to know whats all in there... just like any database. It's all logged for the time when it's needed. Suddenly this "tnk1" guy says some stuff they don't like on slashdot. So they run a query... got his IP address, ok, cross reference that, name and address... plus every ISP he's ever had, along with every DHCP request he's made... we now have every IP he's ever had over time in chronological order. Now query IP hits from those against site lists we have that are included in our "Embarrassing" list. Publish to public website... Now he's too busy dealing with his divorce to post on slashdot.
I could write the SQL to do such a request in a few hours. And it would be reusable for anyone I wanted to use it for. This is the kind of shit they will pull if they have these kind of records.
What? No... You're completely wrong. I don't even know where to start. Not even radiation can escape a blackhole. The radiation blackholes cause, is hawking radiation. Hawking radiation is rather simple, the theory is that the universe is a constant froth of matter/antimatter being created in pairs. Most of the time these pairs collide and destroy each other immediately. On the event horizon of a black hole however, it's possible for the pairs to be come into being with 1 of the particles inside the event horizon and the other outside. So one escapes while the other is trapped. Since the trapped particle is the opposite of the free particle, it's "As if" the black hole emitted radiation, because the particle trapped has the negative effect on the blackhole that the escaping particle has. But it was NOT emitted. After BILLIONS of years this effect can eventually cause the blackhole to, for lack of a better word, evaporate. But this is not because it's giving off any radiation. Blackholes can not, nor will they ever, give off any type of radiation or matter. And the effect of Hawking radiation is so slow that the singularities will be the last things that exist in this universe for a very, very, very long time after all of our stars have run out of fuel.
Lastly, blackholes warp space and time. By the time matter passes the blackholes event horizon it's been torn to elementary particles by gravity. But even those elementary particles never reach the singularity. The warping of space-time is so great that time slows to nearly the point of stopping. They are in a perpetual free-fall towards the singularity but will never arrive. If you were falling backwards into a blackhole, and somehow had some magical device that allowed you to survive the decent, you would watch the end of time before your eyes. Granted it would be warped into a single point of light that would just snuff out, but you get the idea.
they have an $80 billion per year budget. That's $255 for every Man woman and child living in this country. They certainly can track every single one of us. Especially considering the Majority of US Citizens aren't even old enough to use a phone or the internet yet.
But the NSA says it's just collecting the metadata on communications, not the actual communications. So while encrypting the message in your email may prevent them from (easily) reading your email, they still see that you sent or received an email and who it was coming or going to.
You're forgetting: They are lying. They lied before each leak, and after were proven liers. Now they claim to have told congress "The least untruthful" thing they could. You think they are finally telling the truth now? lol
The interns where I work have more perks, do less work, can leave any time they want, have unfettered access to just about anyone in the company AND get paid... often more than I do. They don't get benefits like heath insurance though... so there's that.
I lived next to a very large nuclear power plant for about 15 years. About the only problem is causes was the warm water from its exhaust caused plants to flourish in that part of the lake. But since my father and I liked fishing it was a great spot. Fish spawned there and their was plenty of cover.
Did it cause problems? Environmental damage? No... Do I have cancer? no... Would I be worried if they built one near my home? I'd review the plans, and as long as it wasn't some design from the 1950s I'd be cool with it. If they were building a coal plant near me, I'd be out in the streets with picket signs the next day.
What they do most likely have, is a tap point on Facebook's and Google's networks
You're way over-thinking this. The NSA just sends their DBA's over to google with fake credentials. They get hired based on their stellar work history. Then they create accounts with full access to Googles APIs and hand them over to the NSA. The NSA can run any query they want against googles data. They can even CHANGE it. It would be a trivial thing to do and would only be noticed if the traffic was excessive. I doubt there's any query that Google would even bat an eyelash at given their size.
David Drummond got it completely wrong. He's either openly lieing or an idiot. The NSA doesn't have to let Google know they are taking data from them. If the NSA thinks they have the legal authority, they'll just plant their own DBAs at google, give themselves API access and run whatever queries they want against their data anytime they want. It's not like Google could tell given the amount of transactions they're likely seeing in a day. Likely the only reason Google ever sees a FISA request is because the data needs to be used in court.
There is an active and concerted effort to play down what's actually happened here. Remember that the united states spends 80 BILLION dollars on intelligence a year. They have several data centers that dwarf even Google in size. They pull more power than most large cities to run them. Do you really think this is limited to a few thousand or even hundred thousand data requests per year? The feds have access to all the data... from every large company... they are storing it, querying it, and likely doing all of this without a court order. Our government is completely out of control, this has to stop, and it's up to them to prove they've limited their surveillance, it's not up to us to trust them.
Microsoft IS a media distribution company. One of the largest in the world in fact. The primary Television app in the world right now is Media room: http://www.microsoft.com/mediaroom/you/ AT&T Uverse uses it, more and more cable providers are using it. Set-top boxes all over use it and they are starting to build the software into TVs. It may very well be that Microsoft doesn't need to worry about the PS4 at all, because if the XB1 hooks directly up to your cable provider and can stream all the movies/shows/games without ever having to go to the store they could easily win the console war based on ease of use.
I'm reading these questions and they are completely misleading:
"Should the government be able to monitor emails if it prevents future terrorist attacks?"
How much more misleading could it get? At the very least it should read:
"Should the government be able to read YOUR emails in an attempt to find terrorist activity?"
or better yet:
"Would you give up your constitutional rights and the rights of your children and grandchildren to change your chances of dieing in terrorist attack from 1 in 20 million to 1 in 20.1 million?"
It doesn't matter if a majority thinks it's ok. It violates my constitutional rights, so it's illegal. That's what the constitution is for, to prevent the idiot masses from doing shit like this. And lets not forget, as long as we're allowing the NSA to do crap like this, we can't trust ANYTHING we hear in the media.
Thank you. I've signed and gotten everyone I know to sign. If you give a shit about this country you should to. Don't get me wrong, I'm not under any delusions about him actually getting pardoned... But maybe we can keep him out of a noose.
First, your IT Manager doesn't have to have any technical skills to be competent in his job. Some of the best managers I've had have had no technical skills. They just need to know how to manage, know when people are being strait with them, know who to fire and who to hire... oh, and stay out of my way.
Second, stay out of it. You're not doing yourself any favors by talking shit about your manager. Your job, believe it or not, is to make your manager happy. Make him look good, and he'll make you look good. If upper management wants to get rid of him, they will, and your input will likely not matter at all to them. If they decide to keep him however, they'll be sure to tell him he has a subordination problem in his department and he needs to deal with you. If you do get a new manager, again, your job is to keep him happy, make him look good. I've learned this the hard way... you don't have to.
If you continue on the path you seem to be on, you're likely going to be viewed as a drama queen and shown the door the next time they need to thin the herd.
It is not possible to be a "Law abiding citizen" in a country where there is a law for everything and ignorance of the law is no excuse. It's illegal for me to put the wrong kind of trash in the wrong container outside my home. They're now talking about putting sensors in my trashcans to detect their contents. I'm not kidding.
I agree that "Player of Games" is great. It'd be a good starting book to. The primary character is at somewhat political odds with the culture... think of him as an old school conservative in the midst of a bunch of hippies. So he routinely argues with different characters about the culture which gives you a really good idea of how their political system works.
Surface Detail is good to, but I rarely recommend that as a first book because... well... it's really depressing. "Use of Weapons" is the same way... great book but tragic.
Basically the books are loosely in chronological order. Many of them are almost impossible to tell where in the timeline they are. "Against a Dark Background" is about a civilization in an orphaned solar system outside of our galaxy... so they have no contact with any of the other books at all. "Consider Phlebas" takes place during the Iridian War (sp?) which is hundreds of years in the past for the rest of the books. The other books may refer to the war, but none of the particular events or characters in the book. The outcome of war is clear even at the beginning of the book (which is one of the ironys of the war) so you're not even spoiling that.
The basic point of the culture series that I got is that despite technological advances, despite political superiority/stability, despite the end to medical problems, lifes big problems are still problems. That is, people, personalities... etc... So each book is really about people in the end. Each has its own point to make, and does not need to borrow from the others. Occasionally he'll mention some large event that happened in another book (like the war) but the point of the books aren't the large events, they are the small and seemingly unimportant decisions of individuals at points in time that seem to make all the difference at that time, but have no real effect over the eons.
You can read them in any order. I'm not even sure that I read them in the correct order. The man was a genius, and wrote some of the best SciFi of our time.
Which is precisely the problem. We have a legitimate issue with pollution and climate change, but then we have assholes like Al Gore profiting off the whole mess and turning it into a political issue. Al Gore should have realized that he would turn the debate into a left verses right issue and kept his stupid mouth shut... if he really wanted to make a difference he should have secretly funded some non-profit to get some politically neutral members of the scientific community to spread the word.
Slashdot Mirror
One problem with your idea... everyones brain is completely different. When actual scientists do this they do multiple high resolution MRIs of the patients brain and study them for months before trying anything. Then they apply very tightly controlled current to tiny areas of the brain. What these people are doing is just as likely to turn on the "homicidal rage" part of their brains as it is anything else.
All the furry sex was a lot creepier than the wire-head garbage. Those books were terrible.
You will NEVER get a deal on alien ware or DELL. Their markup prices have always be nutz, and on top of that they slap so much bloated crap onto the PC your windows instillation is virtually worthless and you end up having to pirate a plain copy wipe the drive and start over anyway. You're better off going to newegg and getting some randomly slapped together PC they have... you're just as likely to have compatibility issues either way and at least newegg will literally let you return anything within 30 days. Something I've tested dozens of times personally.
But see, this is exactly the problem. You CAN'T own code. It doesn't really exist. So they invented this licensing scheme to make money off of it, and convinced the idiots in Washington that this was the only way it could be. Now our entire government is convinced that "production" is something that is meant for poor people that don't live here need to do... and the designs and procedures used in that production are where the actual value is. Which is exactly ass-backward. Labor is valuable, and better designs and procedures allow you to make that labor more valuable. Ideas should be free, you labor should not be. How you pay for the labor that goes into those ideas is a big question, and an important one... but the solution we seem to have come up with has to be about the stupidest idea humanity has ever had.
You don't seem to understand. They can and do track everyone, and it's stored. They don't need to know whats all in there... just like any database. It's all logged for the time when it's needed. Suddenly this "tnk1" guy says some stuff they don't like on slashdot. So they run a query... got his IP address, ok, cross reference that, name and address... plus every ISP he's ever had, along with every DHCP request he's made... we now have every IP he's ever had over time in chronological order. Now query IP hits from those against site lists we have that are included in our "Embarrassing" list. Publish to public website... Now he's too busy dealing with his divorce to post on slashdot.
I could write the SQL to do such a request in a few hours. And it would be reusable for anyone I wanted to use it for. This is the kind of shit they will pull if they have these kind of records.
What? No... You're completely wrong. I don't even know where to start. Not even radiation can escape a blackhole. The radiation blackholes cause, is hawking radiation. Hawking radiation is rather simple, the theory is that the universe is a constant froth of matter/antimatter being created in pairs. Most of the time these pairs collide and destroy each other immediately. On the event horizon of a black hole however, it's possible for the pairs to be come into being with 1 of the particles inside the event horizon and the other outside. So one escapes while the other is trapped. Since the trapped particle is the opposite of the free particle, it's "As if" the black hole emitted radiation, because the particle trapped has the negative effect on the blackhole that the escaping particle has. But it was NOT emitted. After BILLIONS of years this effect can eventually cause the blackhole to, for lack of a better word, evaporate. But this is not because it's giving off any radiation. Blackholes can not, nor will they ever, give off any type of radiation or matter. And the effect of Hawking radiation is so slow that the singularities will be the last things that exist in this universe for a very, very, very long time after all of our stars have run out of fuel.
Lastly, blackholes warp space and time. By the time matter passes the blackholes event horizon it's been torn to elementary particles by gravity. But even those elementary particles never reach the singularity. The warping of space-time is so great that time slows to nearly the point of stopping. They are in a perpetual free-fall towards the singularity but will never arrive. If you were falling backwards into a blackhole, and somehow had some magical device that allowed you to survive the decent, you would watch the end of time before your eyes. Granted it would be warped into a single point of light that would just snuff out, but you get the idea.
How the hell is the NSA supposed to keep track of all those people?!?!
they have an $80 billion per year budget. That's $255 for every Man woman and child living in this country. They certainly can track every single one of us. Especially considering the Majority of US Citizens aren't even old enough to use a phone or the internet yet.
But the NSA says it's just collecting the metadata on communications, not the actual communications. So while encrypting the message in your email may prevent them from (easily) reading your email, they still see that you sent or received an email and who it was coming or going to.
You're forgetting: They are lying. They lied before each leak, and after were proven liers. Now they claim to have told congress "The least untruthful" thing they could. You think they are finally telling the truth now? lol
The interns where I work have more perks, do less work, can leave any time they want, have unfettered access to just about anyone in the company AND get paid... often more than I do. They don't get benefits like heath insurance though... so there's that.
I lived next to a very large nuclear power plant for about 15 years. About the only problem is causes was the warm water from its exhaust caused plants to flourish in that part of the lake. But since my father and I liked fishing it was a great spot. Fish spawned there and their was plenty of cover.
Did it cause problems? Environmental damage? No...
Do I have cancer? no...
Would I be worried if they built one near my home? I'd review the plans, and as long as it wasn't some design from the 1950s I'd be cool with it.
If they were building a coal plant near me, I'd be out in the streets with picket signs the next day.
When the guy on the security team works for the NSA as well? Yes, he'll say exactly that.
What they do most likely have, is a tap point on Facebook's and Google's networks
You're way over-thinking this. The NSA just sends their DBA's over to google with fake credentials. They get hired based on their stellar work history. Then they create accounts with full access to Googles APIs and hand them over to the NSA. The NSA can run any query they want against googles data. They can even CHANGE it. It would be a trivial thing to do and would only be noticed if the traffic was excessive. I doubt there's any query that Google would even bat an eyelash at given their size.
David Drummond got it just right.
David Drummond got it completely wrong. He's either openly lieing or an idiot. The NSA doesn't have to let Google know they are taking data from them. If the NSA thinks they have the legal authority, they'll just plant their own DBAs at google, give themselves API access and run whatever queries they want against their data anytime they want. It's not like Google could tell given the amount of transactions they're likely seeing in a day. Likely the only reason Google ever sees a FISA request is because the data needs to be used in court.
There is an active and concerted effort to play down what's actually happened here. Remember that the united states spends 80 BILLION dollars on intelligence a year. They have several data centers that dwarf even Google in size. They pull more power than most large cities to run them. Do you really think this is limited to a few thousand or even hundred thousand data requests per year? The feds have access to all the data... from every large company... they are storing it, querying it, and likely doing all of this without a court order. Our government is completely out of control, this has to stop, and it's up to them to prove they've limited their surveillance, it's not up to us to trust them.
Microsoft IS a media distribution company. One of the largest in the world in fact. The primary Television app in the world right now is Media room: http://www.microsoft.com/mediaroom/you/
AT&T Uverse uses it, more and more cable providers are using it. Set-top boxes all over use it and they are starting to build the software into TVs. It may very well be that Microsoft doesn't need to worry about the PS4 at all, because if the XB1 hooks directly up to your cable provider and can stream all the movies/shows/games without ever having to go to the store they could easily win the console war based on ease of use.
I'm reading these questions and they are completely misleading:
"Should the government be able to monitor emails if it prevents future terrorist attacks?"
How much more misleading could it get? At the very least it should read:
"Should the government be able to read YOUR emails in an attempt to find terrorist activity?"
or better yet:
"Would you give up your constitutional rights and the rights of your children and grandchildren to change your chances of dieing in terrorist attack from 1 in 20 million to 1 in 20.1 million?"
It doesn't matter if a majority thinks it's ok. It violates my constitutional rights, so it's illegal. That's what the constitution is for, to prevent the idiot masses from doing shit like this. And lets not forget, as long as we're allowing the NSA to do crap like this, we can't trust ANYTHING we hear in the media.
Thank you. I've signed and gotten everyone I know to sign. If you give a shit about this country you should to. Don't get me wrong, I'm not under any delusions about him actually getting pardoned... But maybe we can keep him out of a noose.
First, your IT Manager doesn't have to have any technical skills to be competent in his job. Some of the best managers I've had have had no technical skills. They just need to know how to manage, know when people are being strait with them, know who to fire and who to hire... oh, and stay out of my way.
Second, stay out of it. You're not doing yourself any favors by talking shit about your manager. Your job, believe it or not, is to make your manager happy. Make him look good, and he'll make you look good. If upper management wants to get rid of him, they will, and your input will likely not matter at all to them. If they decide to keep him however, they'll be sure to tell him he has a subordination problem in his department and he needs to deal with you. If you do get a new manager, again, your job is to keep him happy, make him look good. I've learned this the hard way... you don't have to.
If you continue on the path you seem to be on, you're likely going to be viewed as a drama queen and shown the door the next time they need to thin the herd.
Good luck.
It is not possible to be a "Law abiding citizen" in a country where there is a law for everything and ignorance of the law is no excuse. It's illegal for me to put the wrong kind of trash in the wrong container outside my home. They're now talking about putting sensors in my trashcans to detect their contents. I'm not kidding.
I agree that "Player of Games" is great. It'd be a good starting book to. The primary character is at somewhat political odds with the culture... think of him as an old school conservative in the midst of a bunch of hippies. So he routinely argues with different characters about the culture which gives you a really good idea of how their political system works.
Surface Detail is good to, but I rarely recommend that as a first book because... well... it's really depressing. "Use of Weapons" is the same way... great book but tragic.
Basically the books are loosely in chronological order. Many of them are almost impossible to tell where in the timeline they are. "Against a Dark Background" is about a civilization in an orphaned solar system outside of our galaxy... so they have no contact with any of the other books at all. "Consider Phlebas" takes place during the Iridian War (sp?) which is hundreds of years in the past for the rest of the books. The other books may refer to the war, but none of the particular events or characters in the book. The outcome of war is clear even at the beginning of the book (which is one of the ironys of the war) so you're not even spoiling that.
The basic point of the culture series that I got is that despite technological advances, despite political superiority/stability, despite the end to medical problems, lifes big problems are still problems. That is, people, personalities... etc... So each book is really about people in the end. Each has its own point to make, and does not need to borrow from the others. Occasionally he'll mention some large event that happened in another book (like the war) but the point of the books aren't the large events, they are the small and seemingly unimportant decisions of individuals at points in time that seem to make all the difference at that time, but have no real effect over the eons.
You can read them in any order. I'm not even sure that I read them in the correct order. The man was a genius, and wrote some of the best SciFi of our time.
Which is precisely the problem. We have a legitimate issue with pollution and climate change, but then we have assholes like Al Gore profiting off the whole mess and turning it into a political issue. Al Gore should have realized that he would turn the debate into a left verses right issue and kept his stupid mouth shut... if he really wanted to make a difference he should have secretly funded some non-profit to get some politically neutral members of the scientific community to spread the word.
Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.
That's sufficiently vague enough to hang him. Keep in mind that our executive branch has nothing but contempt for the judicial branch.
Wrong? No.
Illegal, Yes.
Be careful, Mr. Snowden, they're going to be after you...
Going to be after you? He's likely already in custody.