Don't knock this as Homer Simpson level work, beer has shaped history for thousands of years. From the Pilgrims landing at Plymouth Rock to the establishment of trade routes beer has always had it's place.
The idea of beer as somehow being sinful is a bit like the diamond ring, it's essentially a modern invention. Monks in Europe brewed beer for centuries as a bonafide way to make money for the monastery to live on. Any number of religions have brewed and used beer for their religious purposes all over the world, it is literally a mark of civilization. When water was historically often filthy and unfit to drink, it's use as a stock drink for the masses wasn't anything to mess about with. When the colonies were established beer was one of the first priorities for the colonists.
The Recording and movie industries have spent decades trying to make an erasable Internet. In their fruitless endeavor they have been joined by countless embarrassed companies, politicians and countries. There is no such thing as an erasable Internet, and there never will be. The Internet isn't a single entity, it is an ecosystem made up of billions of parts with vastly different political, religious and personal views. None of which takes into account the crazy people, the Internet is full of crazy people, and you can't reason with them.
The article might as well be titled, Could we get rid of the tides if we didn't have a moon?
The root of the issue goes back to he had income that he did not report. It was the lifestyle and assets he had which proved that he had income beyond his means. Without any conceivable legal means to use to show as proof to justify the lifestyle and assets he had he was nailed for the tax evasion charges. The point very much stands as I made it.
If he mined them the block chain would provide that information in a heartbeat as it records it's entire history. If he has a pristine block chain than he could argue that they were mined and not from the proceeds of the crime.
I think the odds of that are very low though for two reasons. The first is that he used a program to tumble all the bitcoins together to make tracking for law enforcement more difficult. The problem is that by doing this he knowingly put his bitcoins into a money laundering operation and for that alone he would lose them. It's like knowingly investing otherwise good money in a drug deal before the feds bust it up, your money is gone even if you had nothing to do with the deal itself.
The second reason is that if they were indeed pristine from mining he would have immediately raised that to make a claim so that he could get access to them to help pay for his legal defense. He's facing decades in prison at best, if he could cut years off of that by using them to hire better legal counsel and experts he would in a heartbeat.
They are extremely volatile price wise, on this we agree.
Hypothetically speaking if they were pristine and purely an investment that went up, would that count as income before they were sold? I do know enough to know that such a claim could easily be proven by looking at the block chain to see if they were pristine bitcoins that had never been traded. It would be interesting to hear from a tax expert on that question as a number of slashdotters will have mined them back in the day and have sat on them.
If he got them in trade and didn't report the income than he has significant legal problems that would be no different than getting income from a foreign currency and not reporting it. With that bitcoin wallet being recently reported as being worth around $100 million dollars were talking significant money laundering charges and tax evasion charges if those coins weren't pristine.
Even if he somehow could get out of the drug dealer and murder for hire charges he would still have the problem of proving how he legitimately got the money and why he didn't pay taxes on it. Penalties for failing to report tens of millions of dollars in income could easily put him in prison for a decades and would still result in the loss of the bitcoins because he can't prove any legitimate means why which he got them.
He admitted an entirely new set of felonies around taxes just to try to claim the bitcoins back. Again, he is one of the biggest idiots that the Internet has ever known.
That's the rub, in claiming them he has admitted a massive tax fraud that could put him behind bars in prison for just as many years. Since the bitcoins are a product of tax fraud they could be seized on that basis alone. They won't give the bitcoins back though, because he could turn them over to third parties and use them to do things like put out hits on witnesses - the thing that they shut down his operation for in the first place.
Remember it was taxes that did Al Capone in, everything else he had a handle on, he just couldn't prove how he got his money through any means that was honest.
My opinion that the less than Dread Pirate Roberts is a massive idiot has now been reinforced in a way I never would have imagined. The demand is tantamount to the drug lord demanding the feds return the hundred million dollars that could only have come from selling 100 kilos of cocaine many times over.
He hasn't got any possible legal pretense to justifying having the money and all it's going to do is prove his guilt. This idiot ought to look at the cartels and organized crime worldwide where they pointedly have this process called laundering money so that they can have at least have a pretense of legitimacy for their claims. No jury in the world is going to buy that this guy made tens of millions of dollars day trading bitcoin without a paper trail.
I haven't seen a single thing about the silk road operation that did anything other than prove the man was an idiot from inception through the present day. Why the hell are people defending this guy, just because he ran a trading site for drugs? The people who were deluded into thinking they were safe on silk road are being arrested, the intelligence gained was an incredible coup and likely the only reason it lasted as long as it did until the guy started trying to trade bitcoins for murder.
If you want to defend legalizing drugs, than make your argument for that, but don't defend one of the biggest idiots the Internet has ever seen.
One of the problems with that is that the rural poor in places like California and Illinois aren't being taken care of now. Resources tend to be spent almost exclusively on urban areas as it is. The entire purpose of having states was to have an area with people where the state represented the people of that given region.
In a place like Illinois the government effectively represents only 10% of the area of the state at best. The population in the other 90% of the state have different political needs than Chicago and it's closer suburbs. Those people simply aren't being represented, and therefore their state needs to be split to give them the representation that they deserve.
Whereas travel was once very much an issue, today it isn't the political issue that it used to be. States are intended to represent all of their constituents and not simply those in the big city. Cities absolutely depend on the country side that surrounds them, something that the forefathers knew was the case. They wanted to make sure that the people of the country were not excluded from the political process by a few big cities as that effectively created two classes of citizens, those with representation and those without. Considering that this affected everything from the law of the land to taxes it was considered a pretty big consideration.
This is hardly an idea without precedent would better serve the needs of the constituents while be very much in the spirit of the Constitution. Virginia, New York and Massachusetts split and gave us a handful of other states. When states become two politically oriented in one direction for only a given geographical ares while ignoring the wishes and values of the other states they can and should split.
The Constitution was designed to balance the power of the people so that you didn't have any one area with too large of an influence over the others. It was then designed to ensure all areas would have equal representation in the Senate. It was one of the most careful balances of power ever crafted and has served as a model for countless other governments ever since.
When people feel the need to systematically disregard the political views of a given portion of their constituency they no longer deserve to have that constituency as they no longer represent their needs. California, Texas, New York, Illinois and a couple of other states have long areas on both the left and the right that have systematically ignored large portions of their population for many years.
Before science gets hot and bothered about the loss of data scientists need to do something about the quality of the data they produce to begin with. Frankly given the complete lack of quality controls that a lot of scientists use the loss of their data is probably for the best. Depending on the field as much as 60% of all scientific research cannot even be reproduced. Work that cannot be reproduced by another team is far from isolated to one field either:
Depending on the study that means that either the data has been fabricated by unethical scientists, or the data has been misrepresnted for political purposes. Studies are often improperly interpreted by failing to take into account sound statistical modeling and noise is reported as science. In some fields politics have effectively taken over (e.g. social sciences) and standards are used that would never be tolerated in other scientific fields.
The very culture of science that demands quantity over quality needs to change as the rat race that inspires junk science to begin with. I can't think of any other field where those kinds of failure rates about the reproducibility of your work would do anything other than get you fired for fraud and destroy your career. I like science, I have since I was a young child, but the junk were getting labeled as science doesn't deserve the label.
Seriously, do you know anything about Obama that wasn't put out by MoveOn or the Democrats?
Obama selected a vice president who was the most **AA friendly Senator that the US has ever had in it's history. He picked former **AA lobbyists and put them in key leadership positions at the Justice Department.
Both SOPA and TPP were conceived and attempted entirely under his watch. Obama did far more with the **AA's than he ever did with things like cranking up Bush's NSA initiatives. I'm no fan of Bush, but he never tried pulling anything on the scale of SOPA. He was also very in your face about what he did and sure as hell didn't go around doing things like negotiating treaties that take away rights in secret when he knew they would be so unpalatable to the public. I'm an Independent, not a Democrat and I can't stand white washing history.
DRM is probably the single greatest driver of privacy that their is. It has never particurlarly been very good at stopping people from accessing content. What is has been good at is creating artificial barriers that allow for greater market segmentation. It does things like allow for different regions for DVD's and Blu Ray's or making photoshop so expensive in Australia it used to cheaper to fly to America, buy a copy and fly back. DRM just has to be enough to make something clearly illegal and frustrate most users.
It gives an excuse to force people to provide marketing information to be able to use a product that they paid cash for. It creates a market in file trading from unusable media is used to justify the greatest land grab of civil rights in history (Trans Pacific Partnership AKA SOPA 2). DRM is an excuse to change the very concept of "I own that' to "I lease that".
You pair that with laws that will put people who break it into prison and now you have a society that is firmly in the grip of IP based companies. Throw in the patent wall that makes an upstart like Compaq all but impossible nowadays and you have an oligarchy that can effectively never be challenged due to insurmountable legal costs. You can't go around them with DRM or you go to prison, you can't fight it in court because it's a treaty and you can't beat them as a competitor. As long as they don't become a monopoly they are untouchable for decades at best.
Just remember that Obama was the president that drove the greatest takeaway of civil rights in history...
This is exactly the kind of issue that should be talked about. I use more than one streaming service and now know not to even bother trying Spotify. This is the market in action, make sure you tell as many people as you can.
Panspermia is the concept of taking one in a trillion odds of a shot hitting the target and firing that shot a trillion times. I'm not particularly advocating for it, but it has at least some basis in plausibility.
We know that rocks from others planets can and do get shot out by meteor impacts on a routine basis as some have landed on Earth. We know that these impacts shoot out large quantities of rocks at a time into space at random directions. We also know that gravitational currents can help objects naturally move between planets.
We also know that bacteria can survive being left in outer space for years at a time. We know that the interior of a meteorite does not particularly heat up upon re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere. We know that bacteria are found inside of rocks inside the Earth when we look for them.
Now I'm not going to get into life (bacteria etc) evolving and everything that goes with it. I'm certainly not saying that Panspermia has any evidence of having ever occurred. I'm simply saying that the idea of Panspermia has at least some plausibility as a delivery mechanism for bacteria like life that had already evolved on it's own.
If we ever meet any life that evolved from back then we shall microbes to them as microbes are to us. A curiosity to be studied, and shelved, dissected and put on display.
Your wrong about WMD, the development of the nuclear bomb led the the greatest age of relative calm between wars that man has ever known. The atomic bomb was so effective that it ended WWII without the loss of millions of soldiers from both sides and millions of Japanese civilians. MAD was also the one thing that kept the cold war from going hot. It stopped the Soviets from continuing their takeover of nation states after WWII. It kept the Americans from invading Cuba and sparking WWIII.
Conventional weapons killed tens of millions of people at a world wide scale. Nuclear weapons stopped that and help wars to much small regional conflicts. The death tolls reflect the success of the nuclear weapon as the greatest peace making device the world has ever seen.
It should be well made, Microsoft has been in the hardware business for about 30 years by now. Once upon a time they sold memory and logic boards for computers (they actually started as a Unix shop), things like mice have been getting sold for over 20 years and I've had good luck using their keyboards for over a decade. Their latest mice haven't does as well for me as I would like, but I they actually have a fairly good track record with making hardware (except for the xbox 360).
Out do nothing congress is finally doing something useful. These are the kinds of questions we should be asking before problems start to occur and while there are chances to try to introduce standards. It's like the Toyota sudden acceleration thing, everyone assumed it was careless people until someone did a proper audit and discovered a complete lack of industry best practices that everyone assumed had been in place.
Document the issues so that it is clear you are aware and tried to do something about them. Bring them up verbally to your boss - without being obnoxious about it. Once you've done those than you need to the hardest thing of all which is to let it go. If you make too big of a deal about it you will be seen as a troublemaker. If you do nothing you will be seen as complicit or incompetent if there is a violation.
Now in certain industries you may have requirements (possibly enforced by law) that require you do to more. Most of the time that isn't the case and you have to let it go and move on with other things. Often times disasters are the only way that people higher up the food chain can and will learn.
I recall when Nimda was making it's rounds in 2000. I was aware of the worm, had the patches downloaded, instructions printed and had requested permission to patch servers. Permission was denied. I asked again, it was denied again. I had awareness of the issue, my statement of the severity and denial all in writing.
I watched a fortune 25 company go down for 2 days and lose $100 million dollars and countless workers get sent home when their facilities were rendered useless. As a result an inflexible policy was changed and any number of people were fired or disciplined. Because I had documented everything I was just about the one person nobody faulted.
I'm no fan of Neo Nazi's, but this strikes me as crossing over to the realm of thought crimes and criminalizing unpleasant people. Look at what they are trying to do, identify music as being wrong and identify a group of people as being wrong. Now take this same technology and remember that it can be used on other groups. What about using this technology to identify gangbangers that like gangsta rape or hackers since we know that they like techno?
The stereotypes are bunk of course and many people listen to music of multiple genres. From heavy metal bands that are classically trained and influenced (Metallica S&M etc) and so on. The whole thing stinks of trying to outlaw certain types of people simply based on who they self identify as. Society should stick with outlawing behaviors and stop being so judgmental of others. Slipper slope over here...
You need to show how much of your time is being spent on stuff is help desk, desktop support and so on. You then need to document your cost that is being spent on these activities each week in terms of salary plus benefits (HR can get this for you, typically 1.5 times salary). You then need to document your opportunity cost for those things that you aren't working on that the business needs (systems that support business functions).
If you can do this than you can show how your company is spending by using programmers as help desk staff. It likely won't take very many hours a week of help desk time to justify paying for a couple help desk staff. The biggest thing is the opportunity cost to the business in terms of what you aren't working on during those hours. If the numbers don't add up than it doesn't justify to hire your staff, if they do than it does.
Okay, I'm going to try and explain it to you step by step because you are talking about things that are completely unrelated. I never said anything about the pay that tenured professors make, nor did I talk about the drain that the professors make on the resources of the institution.
What I talked about was the disproportionate level of power that is seated in the hands of tenured professors. Tenured professors have an attitude of entitlement that they do not have to answer to anyone, most especially the world outside of academia. Tenured professors then create an ivory tower that is disconnected from the real world because they do not need to have any connection to it.
The result is that degree programs often do not have any connection to the outside world and programs are created that do not serve the public or private sector and therefore do not serve their students. In parts of Europe the problem is so bad that many companies won't touch a graduate without two years of unpaid free labor just to show that they have gained some actual real world knowledge.
In other fields departments do nothing but churn out students for degrees that have little or no prospects for a job as certain fields simply have far fewer positions than degrees are granted for each year. The net result is that those students are forced by a job market that does not have enough jobs for their field to become the proverbial PhD at a fast food job while they compete for a too few positions with all of their previous classmates.
Words like best practices, ITIL, industry, government, the private world are answered with "that's not how we do things around here" - and it doesn't matter what the subject is. I have seen this attitude up close and personal with tenured professors routinely doing things that would get them fired in any other setting that didn't have anything to do with free speech.
All of this has absolutely nothing to do with the ultra-wealthy (whom I do not care for and am not defending) or the business world and everything to do with the Ivory Tower and it's disconnect from the real world.
The fact that a few professors (the chosen few that run each department, choose the curriculum and set the tone for everyone that serves beneath them) have tenure does not change anything about what I have said. If anything all it does is concentrate power in the hands of fewer and fewer people ensuring that they have even greater sway over everything.
I have seen professorships that are low paid, with PhD's that work for less than what they could make in fast food when you factor in the number of hours. This is common in academia from my conversations with people in other institutions when I worked in the environment.
The fact that you have a large number of overly qualified people chasing far too many paying positions only enforces my point about the disconnect between the real world and academia. The problem has been created by a system in which there fields in which there are effectively no jobs due to over-saturation of the market. The result is that if you want to have any chance of having your degree actually be used in your professional career you must work at one of these jobs and compete where you can easily have 100 like qualified people in identical situations per job. If those kinds of numbers were being used at a vocational school the Federal Government would shut the program down for being unsuitable. It's a pyramid much like a multi-level marketing scheme, only your working with students, teaching positions and the very rare tenured position at the top.
There is nothing ignorant about my post, I saw students at my University realize with horror the uselessness of some their degrees for years. I watched academics fight for positions and saw everything that I described to you from a position as an administrator. I also have sheer statistics in terms of millions of workers that are underemployed, out of work or working in a field that does not match their degree. You can easily Google the statistics, the number in the millions.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't knock this as Homer Simpson level work, beer has shaped history for thousands of years. From the Pilgrims landing at Plymouth Rock to the establishment of trade routes beer has always had it's place.
The idea of beer as somehow being sinful is a bit like the diamond ring, it's essentially a modern invention. Monks in Europe brewed beer for centuries as a bonafide way to make money for the monastery to live on. Any number of religions have brewed and used beer for their religious purposes all over the world, it is literally a mark of civilization. When water was historically often filthy and unfit to drink, it's use as a stock drink for the masses wasn't anything to mess about with. When the colonies were established beer was one of the first priorities for the colonists.
The Recording and movie industries have spent decades trying to make an erasable Internet. In their fruitless endeavor they have been joined by countless embarrassed companies, politicians and countries. There is no such thing as an erasable Internet, and there never will be. The Internet isn't a single entity, it is an ecosystem made up of billions of parts with vastly different political, religious and personal views. None of which takes into account the crazy people, the Internet is full of crazy people, and you can't reason with them.
The article might as well be titled, Could we get rid of the tides if we didn't have a moon?
The root of the issue goes back to he had income that he did not report. It was the lifestyle and assets he had which proved that he had income beyond his means. Without any conceivable legal means to use to show as proof to justify the lifestyle and assets he had he was nailed for the tax evasion charges. The point very much stands as I made it.
If he mined them the block chain would provide that information in a heartbeat as it records it's entire history. If he has a pristine block chain than he could argue that they were mined and not from the proceeds of the crime.
I think the odds of that are very low though for two reasons. The first is that he used a program to tumble all the bitcoins together to make tracking for law enforcement more difficult. The problem is that by doing this he knowingly put his bitcoins into a money laundering operation and for that alone he would lose them. It's like knowingly investing otherwise good money in a drug deal before the feds bust it up, your money is gone even if you had nothing to do with the deal itself.
The second reason is that if they were indeed pristine from mining he would have immediately raised that to make a claim so that he could get access to them to help pay for his legal defense. He's facing decades in prison at best, if he could cut years off of that by using them to hire better legal counsel and experts he would in a heartbeat.
They are extremely volatile price wise, on this we agree.
Hypothetically speaking if they were pristine and purely an investment that went up, would that count as income before they were sold? I do know enough to know that such a claim could easily be proven by looking at the block chain to see if they were pristine bitcoins that had never been traded. It would be interesting to hear from a tax expert on that question as a number of slashdotters will have mined them back in the day and have sat on them.
If he got them in trade and didn't report the income than he has significant legal problems that would be no different than getting income from a foreign currency and not reporting it. With that bitcoin wallet being recently reported as being worth around $100 million dollars were talking significant money laundering charges and tax evasion charges if those coins weren't pristine.
Your an idiot without any idea of how the law works. So let me point you in the right direction with some links that didn't come from wikipedia.
http://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/forfeiture
http://www.mackinac.org/1274
http://www.fbi.gov/stats-services/publications/law-enforcement-bulletin/april-2012/money-laundering-and-asset-forfeiture
http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/investigate/white_collar/asset-forfeiture
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=19&cad=rja&ved=0CHcQFjAIOAo&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.drugpolicy.org%2FdocUploads%2FAsset_Forfeiture_Briefing.pdf&ei=y6e5UofjNeGqyAGxxoHABQ&usg=AFQjCNH69cfy5T2Ayp8TL9L38XZJ4VPCcw&sig2=g3-gNZLWLpcJMyhtBipLCg
But hey, it's not like there isn't precedent going back centuries for doing this.
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424053111903480904576512253265073870
Even if he somehow could get out of the drug dealer and murder for hire charges he would still have the problem of proving how he legitimately got the money and why he didn't pay taxes on it. Penalties for failing to report tens of millions of dollars in income could easily put him in prison for a decades and would still result in the loss of the bitcoins because he can't prove any legitimate means why which he got them.
He admitted an entirely new set of felonies around taxes just to try to claim the bitcoins back. Again, he is one of the biggest idiots that the Internet has ever known.
That's the rub, in claiming them he has admitted a massive tax fraud that could put him behind bars in prison for just as many years. Since the bitcoins are a product of tax fraud they could be seized on that basis alone. They won't give the bitcoins back though, because he could turn them over to third parties and use them to do things like put out hits on witnesses - the thing that they shut down his operation for in the first place.
Remember it was taxes that did Al Capone in, everything else he had a handle on, he just couldn't prove how he got his money through any means that was honest.
My opinion that the less than Dread Pirate Roberts is a massive idiot has now been reinforced in a way I never would have imagined. The demand is tantamount to the drug lord demanding the feds return the hundred million dollars that could only have come from selling 100 kilos of cocaine many times over.
He hasn't got any possible legal pretense to justifying having the money and all it's going to do is prove his guilt. This idiot ought to look at the cartels and organized crime worldwide where they pointedly have this process called laundering money so that they can have at least have a pretense of legitimacy for their claims. No jury in the world is going to buy that this guy made tens of millions of dollars day trading bitcoin without a paper trail.
I haven't seen a single thing about the silk road operation that did anything other than prove the man was an idiot from inception through the present day. Why the hell are people defending this guy, just because he ran a trading site for drugs? The people who were deluded into thinking they were safe on silk road are being arrested, the intelligence gained was an incredible coup and likely the only reason it lasted as long as it did until the guy started trying to trade bitcoins for murder.
If you want to defend legalizing drugs, than make your argument for that, but don't defend one of the biggest idiots the Internet has ever seen.
One of the problems with that is that the rural poor in places like California and Illinois aren't being taken care of now. Resources tend to be spent almost exclusively on urban areas as it is. The entire purpose of having states was to have an area with people where the state represented the people of that given region.
In a place like Illinois the government effectively represents only 10% of the area of the state at best. The population in the other 90% of the state have different political needs than Chicago and it's closer suburbs. Those people simply aren't being represented, and therefore their state needs to be split to give them the representation that they deserve.
Whereas travel was once very much an issue, today it isn't the political issue that it used to be. States are intended to represent all of their constituents and not simply those in the big city. Cities absolutely depend on the country side that surrounds them, something that the forefathers knew was the case. They wanted to make sure that the people of the country were not excluded from the political process by a few big cities as that effectively created two classes of citizens, those with representation and those without. Considering that this affected everything from the law of the land to taxes it was considered a pretty big consideration.
This is hardly an idea without precedent would better serve the needs of the constituents while be very much in the spirit of the Constitution. Virginia, New York and Massachusetts split and gave us a handful of other states. When states become two politically oriented in one direction for only a given geographical ares while ignoring the wishes and values of the other states they can and should split.
The Constitution was designed to balance the power of the people so that you didn't have any one area with too large of an influence over the others. It was then designed to ensure all areas would have equal representation in the Senate. It was one of the most careful balances of power ever crafted and has served as a model for countless other governments ever since.
When people feel the need to systematically disregard the political views of a given portion of their constituency they no longer deserve to have that constituency as they no longer represent their needs. California, Texas, New York, Illinois and a couple of other states have long areas on both the left and the right that have systematically ignored large portions of their population for many years.
Before science gets hot and bothered about the loss of data scientists need to do something about the quality of the data they produce to begin with. Frankly given the complete lack of quality controls that a lot of scientists use the loss of their data is probably for the best. Depending on the field as much as 60% of all scientific research cannot even be reproduced. Work that cannot be reproduced by another team is far from isolated to one field either:
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052970203764804577059841672541590
http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-05/half-cancer-scientists-have-been-unable-reproduce-studies-survey-finds
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2012/08/reproducing_scientific_studies_a_good_housekeeping_seal_of_approval_.html
https://www.xsede.org/gateways-for-open-science
http://www.eusci.org.uk/articles/data-doesnt-lie-scientists-do
Depending on the study that means that either the data has been fabricated by unethical scientists, or the data has been misrepresnted for political purposes. Studies are often improperly interpreted by failing to take into account sound statistical modeling and noise is reported as science. In some fields politics have effectively taken over (e.g. social sciences) and standards are used that would never be tolerated in other scientific fields.
The very culture of science that demands quantity over quality needs to change as the rat race that inspires junk science to begin with. I can't think of any other field where those kinds of failure rates about the reproducibility of your work would do anything other than get you fired for fraud and destroy your career. I like science, I have since I was a young child, but the junk were getting labeled as science doesn't deserve the label.
Seriously, do you know anything about Obama that wasn't put out by MoveOn or the Democrats?
Obama selected a vice president who was the most **AA friendly Senator that the US has ever had in it's history. He picked former **AA lobbyists and put them in key leadership positions at the Justice Department.
Both SOPA and TPP were conceived and attempted entirely under his watch. Obama did far more with the **AA's than he ever did with things like cranking up Bush's NSA initiatives. I'm no fan of Bush, but he never tried pulling anything on the scale of SOPA. He was also very in your face about what he did and sure as hell didn't go around doing things like negotiating treaties that take away rights in secret when he knew they would be so unpalatable to the public. I'm an Independent, not a Democrat and I can't stand white washing history.
DRM is probably the single greatest driver of privacy that their is. It has never particurlarly been very good at stopping people from accessing content. What is has been good at is creating artificial barriers that allow for greater market segmentation. It does things like allow for different regions for DVD's and Blu Ray's or making photoshop so expensive in Australia it used to cheaper to fly to America, buy a copy and fly back. DRM just has to be enough to make something clearly illegal and frustrate most users.
It gives an excuse to force people to provide marketing information to be able to use a product that they paid cash for. It creates a market in file trading from unusable media is used to justify the greatest land grab of civil rights in history (Trans Pacific Partnership AKA SOPA 2). DRM is an excuse to change the very concept of "I own that' to "I lease that".
You pair that with laws that will put people who break it into prison and now you have a society that is firmly in the grip of IP based companies. Throw in the patent wall that makes an upstart like Compaq all but impossible nowadays and you have an oligarchy that can effectively never be challenged due to insurmountable legal costs. You can't go around them with DRM or you go to prison, you can't fight it in court because it's a treaty and you can't beat them as a competitor. As long as they don't become a monopoly they are untouchable for decades at best.
Just remember that Obama was the president that drove the greatest takeaway of civil rights in history...
This is exactly the kind of issue that should be talked about. I use more than one streaming service and now know not to even bother trying Spotify. This is the market in action, make sure you tell as many people as you can.
Panspermia is the concept of taking one in a trillion odds of a shot hitting the target and firing that shot a trillion times. I'm not particularly advocating for it, but it has at least some basis in plausibility.
We know that rocks from others planets can and do get shot out by meteor impacts on a routine basis as some have landed on Earth. We know that these impacts shoot out large quantities of rocks at a time into space at random directions. We also know that gravitational currents can help objects naturally move between planets.
We also know that bacteria can survive being left in outer space for years at a time. We know that the interior of a meteorite does not particularly heat up upon re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere. We know that bacteria are found inside of rocks inside the Earth when we look for them.
Now I'm not going to get into life (bacteria etc) evolving and everything that goes with it. I'm certainly not saying that Panspermia has any evidence of having ever occurred. I'm simply saying that the idea of Panspermia has at least some plausibility as a delivery mechanism for bacteria like life that had already evolved on it's own.
If we ever meet any life that evolved from back then we shall microbes to them as microbes are to us. A curiosity to be studied, and shelved, dissected and put on display.
Your wrong about WMD, the development of the nuclear bomb led the the greatest age of relative calm between wars that man has ever known. The atomic bomb was so effective that it ended WWII without the loss of millions of soldiers from both sides and millions of Japanese civilians. MAD was also the one thing that kept the cold war from going hot. It stopped the Soviets from continuing their takeover of nation states after WWII. It kept the Americans from invading Cuba and sparking WWIII.
Conventional weapons killed tens of millions of people at a world wide scale. Nuclear weapons stopped that and help wars to much small regional conflicts. The death tolls reflect the success of the nuclear weapon as the greatest peace making device the world has ever seen.
It should be well made, Microsoft has been in the hardware business for about 30 years by now. Once upon a time they sold memory and logic boards for computers (they actually started as a Unix shop), things like mice have been getting sold for over 20 years and I've had good luck using their keyboards for over a decade. Their latest mice haven't does as well for me as I would like, but I they actually have a fairly good track record with making hardware (except for the xbox 360).
Every once in a while a post comes along that needs attached to the story instead of the comment section. Editors, this is just such a post.
Out do nothing congress is finally doing something useful. These are the kinds of questions we should be asking before problems start to occur and while there are chances to try to introduce standards. It's like the Toyota sudden acceleration thing, everyone assumed it was careless people until someone did a proper audit and discovered a complete lack of industry best practices that everyone assumed had been in place.
Document the issues so that it is clear you are aware and tried to do something about them. Bring them up verbally to your boss - without being obnoxious about it. Once you've done those than you need to the hardest thing of all which is to let it go. If you make too big of a deal about it you will be seen as a troublemaker. If you do nothing you will be seen as complicit or incompetent if there is a violation.
Now in certain industries you may have requirements (possibly enforced by law) that require you do to more. Most of the time that isn't the case and you have to let it go and move on with other things. Often times disasters are the only way that people higher up the food chain can and will learn.
I recall when Nimda was making it's rounds in 2000. I was aware of the worm, had the patches downloaded, instructions printed and had requested permission to patch servers. Permission was denied. I asked again, it was denied again. I had awareness of the issue, my statement of the severity and denial all in writing.
I watched a fortune 25 company go down for 2 days and lose $100 million dollars and countless workers get sent home when their facilities were rendered useless. As a result an inflexible policy was changed and any number of people were fired or disciplined. Because I had documented everything I was just about the one person nobody faulted.
I'm no fan of Neo Nazi's, but this strikes me as crossing over to the realm of thought crimes and criminalizing unpleasant people. Look at what they are trying to do, identify music as being wrong and identify a group of people as being wrong. Now take this same technology and remember that it can be used on other groups. What about using this technology to identify gangbangers that like gangsta rape or hackers since we know that they like techno?
The stereotypes are bunk of course and many people listen to music of multiple genres. From heavy metal bands that are classically trained and influenced (Metallica S&M etc) and so on. The whole thing stinks of trying to outlaw certain types of people simply based on who they self identify as. Society should stick with outlawing behaviors and stop being so judgmental of others. Slipper slope over here...
You need to show how much of your time is being spent on stuff is help desk, desktop support and so on. You then need to document your cost that is being spent on these activities each week in terms of salary plus benefits (HR can get this for you, typically 1.5 times salary). You then need to document your opportunity cost for those things that you aren't working on that the business needs (systems that support business functions).
If you can do this than you can show how your company is spending by using programmers as help desk staff. It likely won't take very many hours a week of help desk time to justify paying for a couple help desk staff. The biggest thing is the opportunity cost to the business in terms of what you aren't working on during those hours. If the numbers don't add up than it doesn't justify to hire your staff, if they do than it does.
Okay, I'm going to try and explain it to you step by step because you are talking about things that are completely unrelated. I never said anything about the pay that tenured professors make, nor did I talk about the drain that the professors make on the resources of the institution.
What I talked about was the disproportionate level of power that is seated in the hands of tenured professors. Tenured professors have an attitude of entitlement that they do not have to answer to anyone, most especially the world outside of academia. Tenured professors then create an ivory tower that is disconnected from the real world because they do not need to have any connection to it.
The result is that degree programs often do not have any connection to the outside world and programs are created that do not serve the public or private sector and therefore do not serve their students. In parts of Europe the problem is so bad that many companies won't touch a graduate without two years of unpaid free labor just to show that they have gained some actual real world knowledge.
In other fields departments do nothing but churn out students for degrees that have little or no prospects for a job as certain fields simply have far fewer positions than degrees are granted for each year. The net result is that those students are forced by a job market that does not have enough jobs for their field to become the proverbial PhD at a fast food job while they compete for a too few positions with all of their previous classmates.
Words like best practices, ITIL, industry, government, the private world are answered with "that's not how we do things around here" - and it doesn't matter what the subject is. I have seen this attitude up close and personal with tenured professors routinely doing things that would get them fired in any other setting that didn't have anything to do with free speech.
All of this has absolutely nothing to do with the ultra-wealthy (whom I do not care for and am not defending) or the business world and everything to do with the Ivory Tower and it's disconnect from the real world.
The fact that a few professors (the chosen few that run each department, choose the curriculum and set the tone for everyone that serves beneath them) have tenure does not change anything about what I have said. If anything all it does is concentrate power in the hands of fewer and fewer people ensuring that they have even greater sway over everything.
I have seen professorships that are low paid, with PhD's that work for less than what they could make in fast food when you factor in the number of hours. This is common in academia from my conversations with people in other institutions when I worked in the environment.
The fact that you have a large number of overly qualified people chasing far too many paying positions only enforces my point about the disconnect between the real world and academia. The problem has been created by a system in which there fields in which there are effectively no jobs due to over-saturation of the market. The result is that if you want to have any chance of having your degree actually be used in your professional career you must work at one of these jobs and compete where you can easily have 100 like qualified people in identical situations per job. If those kinds of numbers were being used at a vocational school the Federal Government would shut the program down for being unsuitable. It's a pyramid much like a multi-level marketing scheme, only your working with students, teaching positions and the very rare tenured position at the top.
There is nothing ignorant about my post, I saw students at my University realize with horror the uselessness of some their degrees for years. I watched academics fight for positions and saw everything that I described to you from a position as an administrator. I also have sheer statistics in terms of millions of workers that are underemployed, out of work or working in a field that does not match their degree. You can easily Google the statistics, the number in the millions.