Personally, I welcome the change, because it will give me one more reason to tell people to install Open Office. Who knows? This may have been the work of a sinister OSS advocate within Microsoft out to drive more people away from MS Software.
It's one person's attempt to explore the stupidity that is Yahoo Answers. The truth is intelligent, well researched answers get you banned, while mindless drivel gets you a "Best Answer" rating real quick.
There's a lot of research that suggests that it's actually our ultra-sterile environments that are causing all the allergies. Immune systems designed to fight off parasites and bacteria are instead turning on our own bodies.
For example, some folks are deliberately infesting their bodies with relatively benign intestinal parasites as a way to gain relief from allergies, and it's effective. The histamines that attack our sinuses are intended to attack parasites. Give them a parasite to attack and the nasal allergy symptoms go away.
Vaccines are being scapegoated despite a lack of evidence. Remember that correlation does not equal causation. The evidence points to the lack of kids making mud pies and playing outdoors as a more likely cause than vaccines.
In this case it'll be the _kids_ who die because they didn't get their shots.
My kids however WILL get their shots, which means while the kids of misinformed, ignorant morons are dying of measles, my kids will be be in school, walking around immune to the diseases decimating their classmates.
"Hacker" used to be a cool term indicating someone who was exploring the world around them, probing the limits of their environment. Then Hollywood got hold of the term and now it just means "A person who does things on a computer that's either illegal, or I think SHOULD be illegal."
Soon, "Bricked" won't mean a machine damaged beyond repair but anything that makes it annoying to use the machine. Spyware will be referred to as "Bricking" your computer because it makes it run slower. Soon, most people will use the term with no knowledge of it's origin. Some will go so far as to openly mock "Those nerds" for making up random, over the top phrases for a computer that's just running poorly.
I think C. S. Lewis gave the most eloquent discussion of the phenomenon when talking about how the term "Gentleman" was "Ruined for anything useful" in the first section of "Mere Christianity."
The real story here is that the US Postal service is trying to pressure Netflix into changing their envelope design. This means Netflix is shipping so many movies that a flimsy envelope has gotten the attention of the US Postal service and is annoying the heck out of them. A sturdier envelope would no doubt be more expensive, but the odds are that Netflix will just do whichever is cheaper: Pay the extra fee or cough up the extra cash for new envelopes.
The fact that a Blockbuster shill is trying to spin this as some devastating catastrophe for Netflix is just proof of how desperate Blockbuster is, and how badly they're getting nailed by Netflix.
You argue that an uber programmer can increase the productivity of average programmers. A real world example of this would be high level programming languages. Groups of Uber programmers wrote C++, Perl, Visual Basic and the like, and because of it, the average programmers don't have to write everything in Assembly.
Can you imagine the state of IT if everything was written in Assembly???
While I've never served in the military myself, I have seen a good deal of the ribbing that goes on. At my last job, two of my bosses were former Navy, and they spent a good deal of time ragging on the Marines and the Army.
Of course it wasn't all fun and games. A lot of it was pretty harsh, and while the older guy was clearly joking, the younger of the two had some real hostility issues with the Marines.
There was a thread on this at digg.com a day or two ago. It's not that they're withholding the exploits. What they claim to be doing is creating Zombie PCs to build a Darknet for "Black Hats" to communicate.
In other words, the SOBs are selling exploit code to organized crime.
We're dealing with punks who need a good long stay in a Federal Penitentiary.
I'm sure there are also plenty of criminals who would LOVE to get their hands on "over 30" unpatched vulnerabilities in a piece of software whose users are largely technologically inclined, smug about feeling more secure and likely to control some rather beefy servers.
These morons could just as easily be disappeared by a criminal element. As a matter of fact, criminals are probably more likely to actually kidnap and torture these guys.
US forces use some rather nasty torture techniques, but to the best of my knowledge, the CIA doesn't put extremities into deli slicers and run them until the subject talks.
You know, there are folks out there who would call what these hackers are doing an act of terrorism.
They are deliberately creating a network for criminals to use for communication purposes, and doping so by stealing computing power from others.
It's theft, it's immoral and these jackasses should, at the very least be locked up on conspiracy charges.
The egotistical little bastards do NOT have the right to commandeer my computer for some kind of secret club for pimply faced assholes to trade exploits and horse porn.
You can bring up all the pre FISA examples you want. None of it changes the fact that, under current law, the NSA wiretaps and the AT&T data collection were both illegal. WWII isn't really relevant, because it was long before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978.
I'm puzzled at your insistence that the NSA doesn't need wiretaps, as FISA specifically outlines when they do and do not need wiretaps.
"Under the program, the NSA conducts surveillance on phone calls placed between a party in the United States and a party in a foreign country, without FISA court authorization, which critics assert (and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales acknowledged[5]) is outlawed by the text of FISA"
I recommend doing some research. If you want to defend the Bush administration, you really should be using accurate information. The White House itself admits that what they did is outlawed by FISA. Bush's contention is that as President, he should have more power than FISA grants.
The really amusing thing is, most of the Republicans in office now were there during the Clinton administration, and they most of them cried bloody murder when Clinton wanted to amend FISA so the warrants could be procured up to 72 hours after the wiretap was placed.
To be blunt, I was pretty pissed at that move myself, as it was a nasty power grab that should not have been permitted to stand.
You might want to look up FISA. The moment the wiretap involves citizens, lawfully admitted permanent resident aliens, or corporations incorporated in the US, a warrant requirement is invoked.
The Bush Administration is in trouble for two reasons.
First, there are wiretaps that were placed, that meet the criteria for a FISA warrant. These warrants were never procured.
Second, in the AT&T information gathering, data about American Citizens was sent to the NSA without a warrant.
If the law had been followed and warrants procured, none of this would have been an issue. People would have been pissed about the AT&T debacle, but at least it would have been legal if ominous.
The key piece of information here, is that US Citizens were among the parties being spied upon, yet no warrant was procured.
So yes, there are times when even the NSA needs to get a warrant, and they've been ignoring that requirement.
You continue to miss the point and argue against a straw man.
This isn't about if the wiretaps should be taking place. No one disagrees with wiretaps to listen to the conversations of potential terrorists.
This is about oversight. This is about accountability. This is about the simple process of getting a damn warrant, something they can do AFTER the wiretap is in place.
The "But, but we need to spy on the terrorists!" line is old, tired and pathetic. Of COURSE we need to spy on th terrorists. No one is trying to block that. We just want the government to get a damn warrant.
As of the "This is only overseas calls anyway" argument, that too is bunk. There are US citizens involved in a lot of the calls we know have been monitored, and we only have the administration's word that They're only spying on "terrorists." Even if you set aside suspicions about the administration's honesty, it's clear the NSA and similar organizations just aren't good enough at processing all that data to have clue one about who is and is not a terrorist.
Do you REALLY trust the government so much, that you're willing to cede all accountability, to let them do whatever they want without a paper trail? I'm sorry, but history has shown that human beings abuse that kind of power once they get it, and they never let it go.
What part of Needing a Warrant do you NOT understand? Why is the need for a warrant something you're so eager to piss away? DO you understand that warrantless searches were one of the things the Revolutionaries were pissed off about when they started the Revolution in the first place??? Do you know ANY of the history behind WHY we require warrants?
As for the whole "It has to be renewed every year" nonsense, all it takes is one rider in one bill to remove that Sunset clause. We saw that happen with The Patriot Act.
This is about requiring a warrant if you want to tap a phone conversation, something the Feds can do retroactively. In other words, they can place the tap and THEN get a warrant.
Do you WANT the government to track all phone conversations without any oversight or accountability? What makes you think the government can be trusted to not abuse that power? Hell, FBI files were used by those in power to attack political opponents during the McCarthy era. Are you honestly so naive, so blinded by unreasoning Faith in the republicans to think something like that couldn't happen again?
Slashdot Mirror
Personally, I welcome the change, because it will give me one more reason to tell people to install Open Office. Who knows? This may have been the work of a sinister OSS advocate within Microsoft out to drive more people away from MS Software.
You might want to read the site:
http://yahooanswerssucks.blogspot.com/
It's one person's attempt to explore the stupidity that is Yahoo Answers. The truth is intelligent, well researched answers get you banned, while mindless drivel gets you a "Best Answer" rating real quick.
"I wonder if I should turn it back on, so I can at least keep tabs on it."
That assumes they're already showing you everything that's being collected.
You don't have to install anything, Beacons is basically a data sharing API for sites to feed data back to Facebook.
Crap, I didn't think of that.
There's a lot of research that suggests that it's actually our ultra-sterile environments that are causing all the allergies. Immune systems designed to fight off parasites and bacteria are instead turning on our own bodies.
For example, some folks are deliberately infesting their bodies with relatively benign intestinal parasites as a way to gain relief from allergies, and it's effective. The histamines that attack our sinuses are intended to attack parasites. Give them a parasite to attack and the nasal allergy symptoms go away.
Slate had a great article about the topic entitled: "Why Americans should ingest more excrement." at http://www.slate.com/id/2175569/pagenum/all/
Vaccines are being scapegoated despite a lack of evidence. Remember that correlation does not equal causation. The evidence points to the lack of kids making mud pies and playing outdoors as a more likely cause than vaccines.
Uhm, actually CATCHING th Flu is one of the known possible side effects of the vaccine.
If you have kids, are you going to get them vaccinated for measles?
In this case it'll be the _kids_ who die because they didn't get their shots.
My kids however WILL get their shots, which means while the kids of misinformed, ignorant morons are dying of measles, my kids will be be in school, walking around immune to the diseases decimating their classmates.
It'll probably give them a God Complex.
So how does one get started as a game industry "I'll give you lots of stars" game shill anyway? What does it pay? Can I do it part time?
"Hacker" used to be a cool term indicating someone who was exploring the world around them, probing the limits of their environment. Then Hollywood got hold of the term and now it just means "A person who does things on a computer that's either illegal, or I think SHOULD be illegal."
Soon, "Bricked" won't mean a machine damaged beyond repair but anything that makes it annoying to use the machine. Spyware will be referred to as "Bricking" your computer because it makes it run slower. Soon, most people will use the term with no knowledge of it's origin. Some will go so far as to openly mock "Those nerds" for making up random, over the top phrases for a computer that's just running poorly.
I think C. S. Lewis gave the most eloquent discussion of the phenomenon when talking about how the term "Gentleman" was "Ruined for anything useful" in the first section of "Mere Christianity."
The real story here is that the US Postal service is trying to pressure Netflix into changing their envelope design. This means Netflix is shipping so many movies that a flimsy envelope has gotten the attention of the US Postal service and is annoying the heck out of them. A sturdier envelope would no doubt be more expensive, but the odds are that Netflix will just do whichever is cheaper: Pay the extra fee or cough up the extra cash for new envelopes.
The fact that a Blockbuster shill is trying to spin this as some devastating catastrophe for Netflix is just proof of how desperate Blockbuster is, and how badly they're getting nailed by Netflix.
You argue that an uber programmer can increase the productivity of average programmers. A real world example of this would be high level programming languages. Groups of Uber programmers wrote C++, Perl, Visual Basic and the like, and because of it, the average programmers don't have to write everything in Assembly.
Can you imagine the state of IT if everything was written in Assembly???
Shhhhhh!
Don't give them ideas.
the problem is, they don't realize the massive hardware costs that would be involved.
What's more if they did understand the expense and barriers of such a plan, they wouldn't care.
While I've never served in the military myself, I have seen a good deal of the ribbing that goes on. At my last job, two of my bosses were former Navy, and they spent a good deal of time ragging on the Marines and the Army.
Of course it wasn't all fun and games. A lot of it was pretty harsh, and while the older guy was clearly joking, the younger of the two had some real hostility issues with the Marines.
What will they be giving away next? A remastered copy of Ishtar?
*shudder*
There was a thread on this at digg.com a day or two ago. It's not that they're withholding the exploits. What they claim to be doing is creating Zombie PCs to build a Darknet for "Black Hats" to communicate.
In other words, the SOBs are selling exploit code to organized crime.
We're dealing with punks who need a good long stay in a Federal Penitentiary.
I'm sure there are also plenty of criminals who would LOVE to get their hands on "over 30" unpatched vulnerabilities in a piece of software whose users are largely technologically inclined, smug about feeling more secure and likely to control some rather beefy servers.
These morons could just as easily be disappeared by a criminal element. As a matter of fact, criminals are probably more likely to actually kidnap and torture these guys.
US forces use some rather nasty torture techniques, but to the best of my knowledge, the CIA doesn't put extremities into deli slicers and run them until the subject talks.
You know, there are folks out there who would call what these hackers are doing an act of terrorism.
They are deliberately creating a network for criminals to use for communication purposes, and doping so by stealing computing power from others.
It's theft, it's immoral and these jackasses should, at the very least be locked up on conspiracy charges.
The egotistical little bastards do NOT have the right to commandeer my computer for some kind of secret club for pimply faced assholes to trade exploits and horse porn.
A few months ago I saw an interview with Jamie, in which he said that he had been approached to do Mythbusters as a solo gig.
He said, "I started to think about it, and realized, 'Hey, I'm pretty boring.'"
So he said he'd do it of Adam was his co-host.
However well they do or do not get along on the set, they KNOW they make a great on air pairing.
You can bring up all the pre FISA examples you want. None of it changes the fact that, under current law, the NSA wiretaps and the AT&T data collection were both illegal. WWII isn't really relevant, because it was long before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978.
_ Surveillance_Act
e illance_controversy
I'm puzzled at your insistence that the NSA doesn't need wiretaps, as FISA specifically outlines when they do and do not need wiretaps.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Intelligence
The article above doesn't discuss the NSA specifically, but one of the points of the debate is that the warrant restrictions in FISA apply to the NSA.
You can read more about the controversy here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_warrantless_surv
"Under the program, the NSA conducts surveillance on phone calls placed between a party in the United States and a party in a foreign country, without FISA court authorization, which critics assert (and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales acknowledged[5]) is outlawed by the text of FISA"
I recommend doing some research. If you want to defend the Bush administration, you really should be using accurate information. The White House itself admits that what they did is outlawed by FISA. Bush's contention is that as President, he should have more power than FISA grants.
The really amusing thing is, most of the Republicans in office now were there during the Clinton administration, and they most of them cried bloody murder when Clinton wanted to amend FISA so the warrants could be procured up to 72 hours after the wiretap was placed.
To be blunt, I was pretty pissed at that move myself, as it was a nasty power grab that should not have been permitted to stand.
You might want to look up FISA. The moment the wiretap involves citizens, lawfully admitted permanent resident aliens, or corporations incorporated in the US, a warrant requirement is invoked.
The Bush Administration is in trouble for two reasons.
First, there are wiretaps that were placed, that meet the criteria for a FISA warrant. These warrants were never procured.
Second, in the AT&T information gathering, data about American Citizens was sent to the NSA without a warrant.
If the law had been followed and warrants procured, none of this would have been an issue. People would have been pissed about the AT&T debacle, but at least it would have been legal if ominous.
The key piece of information here, is that US Citizens were among the parties being spied upon, yet no warrant was procured.
So yes, there are times when even the NSA needs to get a warrant, and they've been ignoring that requirement.
You continue to miss the point and argue against a straw man.
This isn't about if the wiretaps should be taking place. No one disagrees with wiretaps to listen to the conversations of potential terrorists.
This is about oversight. This is about accountability. This is about the simple process of getting a damn warrant, something they can do AFTER the wiretap is in place.
The "But, but we need to spy on the terrorists!" line is old, tired and pathetic. Of COURSE we need to spy on th terrorists. No one is trying to block that. We just want the government to get a damn warrant.
As of the "This is only overseas calls anyway" argument, that too is bunk. There are US citizens involved in a lot of the calls we know have been monitored, and we only have the administration's word that They're only spying on "terrorists." Even if you set aside suspicions about the administration's honesty, it's clear the NSA and similar organizations just aren't good enough at processing all that data to have clue one about who is and is not a terrorist.
Do you REALLY trust the government so much, that you're willing to cede all accountability, to let them do whatever they want without a paper trail? I'm sorry, but history has shown that human beings abuse that kind of power once they get it, and they never let it go.
What part of Needing a Warrant do you NOT understand? Why is the need for a warrant something you're so eager to piss away? DO you understand that warrantless searches were one of the things the Revolutionaries were pissed off about when they started the Revolution in the first place??? Do you know ANY of the history behind WHY we require warrants?
As for the whole "It has to be renewed every year" nonsense, all it takes is one rider in one bill to remove that Sunset clause. We saw that happen with The Patriot Act.
This is about requiring a warrant if you want to tap a phone conversation, something the Feds can do retroactively. In other words, they can place the tap and THEN get a warrant.
Do you WANT the government to track all phone conversations without any oversight or accountability? What makes you think the government can be trusted to not abuse that power? Hell, FBI files were used by those in power to attack political opponents during the McCarthy era. Are you honestly so naive, so blinded by unreasoning Faith in the republicans to think something like that couldn't happen again?
He's not insane.
He's just a coward who would rather live in a police state than have any freedom or rights if it meant those rights might make someone want him dead.
He's more concerned for his own hide than anything else. No moral or ethical arguments will sway him. Cowards are like that.
"Live Free or Die."