Are we even sure that Global Climate Change is something that we need to stop?
Yes.
If this is all part of a cycle (all signs point to yes)
Liar. Reports of "decreasing" temperature, at the tail end of the hottest decade ever, do not imply that the fluctuations in average temperature during the past decade are merely cyclical, natural variations. They are certainly not. Although annual mean temperatures do naturally oscillate just as surely as daily weather fluctuates noticeably in most locations [not so much around the poles and the most barren deserts, but mostly...], if you check the data on noaa.gov and other sites that compare recent years and decades to the average over the past 150 years, instead of cherry-picking comparisons only against 1998 and others among the top-10 hottest years, you'll see quickly and unarguably that more recent oscillations are about a progressively higher median. That is because of the greenhouse effect and it is proven.
CO2 insulates by inhibiting infrared radiation. Infrared wavelength photons correspond to the quantity of energy-per-atom responsible for the atomic oscillation known commonly as "heat." Industrial-scale petroleum and coal combustion have dramatically increased the atmospheric concentration of CO2. Q.E.D.: CO2 pollution is directly responsible for global warming... unless you can explain where the additional heat goes when it is not radiated, because of CO2.
Are cars and mankind contributing to the change in climate? Yes.
Great detective work. Wanna cookie?
Has the earth been going through a similar climate change every few thousand years for as long as we can tell? Also yes.
Liar-liar-pants on fire! I thought that Exxon-Mobil fired all you shills. Are you working pro bono now or being paid under the table?
If Megan Meier had merely lost sleep, or suffered from panic attacks, or cut herself as a result of the harassment she endured from Lori Drew, would Drew have been convicted? Or even arrested?
Quiz: How long can you go without sleep, before going clinically, permanently insane? Sleep is an absolutely necessary biological function, and one can die from its lack, as sure as one can die without food, hydration or adequate ambient temperature. People also die from cuts, and the fact that some people survive them or perform them so frequently under distress that to you the activity appears "recreational" does not excuse or mitigate the intentional inflicting of suffering on another: torture.
These perverse incentives -- "rewarding" Megan Meier for her suicide by vicariously exacting her revenge on Lori Drew...
What an utterly despicable, fatuous excuse for ethical reasoning! If Megan Meier considered "These perverse incentives" even comparable to the incentive of life as a direct result of Lori Drew's actions, which is indisputable and Lori Drew's self-stated intent, Lori Drew had at that time deprived Megan Meier of the unalienable, Constitutional right to pursuit of her own happiness, and Lori Drew is from that moment forward guilty of a felony. Her accomplices are her ISP and the social networking site, who were unwitting and, until proven guilty, presumed unwilling, thus they are not prosecutable but still an indispensable accessory to the conspiracy, satisfying the condition "two or more persons" in the Civil Rights Statutes, without putting the ISP or social networking site in moral or legal jeopardy.
Perhaps the story should not have been covered at all, or anywhere near as much as it was. (I realize I may be contributing to the problem here, but my penance is that I'm calling for less coverage in the future, and I would never be writing about this if the mainstream media hadn't covered it so extensively.) What about all the other people who committed suicide during the same year, also as a result of vicious harassment, but with the only difference being that their suicides did not involve the Internet?
That is your only remotely interesting point, and it so closely mimics the Slashdot meme about patents, "add 'with a computer' to a pompous description of any obvious and non-novel device, idea, or process, and you have yourself a shiny new patent!" as to render even that interest nearly imperceptible. Yes, Internet-related stories obviously get disproportionate coverage. You noticed, want a cookie? More importantly, which you completely missed or ignored, crimes committed using the Internet are seen as necessitating their own statutes rather than prosecution under existing ones, which are generally written in platform-independent language. Lori Drew misrepresented herself. She forged her identity, and initiated romantic relations with a minor under that false identity, and prosecutors had trouble finding an applicable statute to successfully prosecute her. That's the real "WTF" story here, not your macabre question of whether people so viciously harassed that the prospect of revenge rivals or exceeds their will to live, have a bit more or less legal standing, posthumously.
Great, now all sarcasm is funny, no matter how unoriginal or obvious. If you don't find it funny, the "joke"-teller just diagnoses you demented. Wonderful. In the era of Will Farrell and Adam Corolla, even lower standards for sarcastic "humor" are exactly what has been missing from the entertainment industry, and now they're being smuggled into medicine, as well.
Researchers began studying the role of sarcasm in detecting FTD, because it requires a patient to spot discrepancies between a person's words and the tone of their voice, Hodges said.
I wonder how they separated the demented patients from the ones who are merely tone deaf. In the diagnosed-Alzheimer's group, we should assume some have varying degrees of hearing loss as well, but that their diagnosis is less likely to be a spurious result of their hearing loss. Because shouting five times a day for lunch would be as reliable for diagnosing Alzheimer's as asking five times a day for lunch, in a normal voice. An Alzheimer's diagnosis does not seem likely to be confused with hearing problems, even though they are likely to be coincident in many cases, just because of advanced age. In the suspected-dementia group, however, controlling for hearing loss would seem to be absolutely necessary, especially because they are proposing to diagnose dementia on an ability that relies directly on tone detection. Nothing in the article says the researchers didn't do that, it just doesn't say anything about it at all.
1.5 pages is a respectable length for an abstract, not a summary of a funded scientific study, of pretty much any research topic. Slashdot science articles are generally fascinating, but ultimately, unsatisfying without access to the original. Not that I'd always go to the trouble of reading through the entire thing, but often I'd want to Ctrl+F for at least one string to see whether the research included _____.
I didn't think to check until I was in the parking lot, but the coin dispenser definitely spit out three pennies when it owed me four. Admittedly, I normally leave my pennies, or throw them in the parking lot if given to me by a human, but in this case the discrepancy stood out like a sore thumb. My total bill was $x.21 and I paid an integer number of dollars so obviously I was owed $0.79 worth of coins, and after I took my three quarters (better than pennies in that they're occasionally useful for parking, at least) the wrong number of pennies was conspicuous enough that I did a double-take. Sure enough, three coppers where there should have been four. True story.
Also, a common argument against using open source software in "Fortune 1000" and lesser-numbered corporatist Ponzi schemes, and in favor of using proprietary software, especially Microsoft software and Windows-only compatible software by any house, is the "need for a neck to wring" if ^B^B when something goes wrong. The identical argument, applied to voting, obviously favors paper ballots and human counters over any and all automation schemes and devices.
The trouble, of course, is what it means to "intercept". If "intercept" simply means "passes through any equipment even if the meaningful, contextual content of excluded traffic is never read, analyzed, searched, or stored in any way", then yes, all traffic under such provisions is being "intercepted". Except that's not what intercepted means in a legal context. By that same logic, since any telephone company has the technical capability to tap any phone number for a law enforcement entity, they are, in effect, "tapping" all of them.
That is not the same logic at all. The difference between passing communications on phone company wires, and recording communications in NSA data warehouses for possible later analysis, just in case, is obvious and pertinent.
Sure, you can argue that this is government equipment, and that you don't know what it's doing.
No, you can't see what it's doing, nor can any court (save, perhaps, FISC); that would disable the entire notion of secret foreign intelligence collection (which does not require, and never has required, court oversight when US Persons are not involved). That's where Congressional intelligence oversight comes in, and that's the whole purpose of it being there. Intelligence is a difficult balance in a free and open society.
What's difficult to balance? Al Qaida didn't just learn that we'd like to intercept their phone calls because the New York Times ran a story that the NSA, under the direction of the Bush administration, was breaking federal law. Just what tactical advantage to terrorists supposedly obtain, when my government respects my Fourth Amendment rights? All 20 of the 9-11 hijackers, including the one who missed his taxi or whatever, did arouse sufficient reasonable suspicion to be under surveillance, proving that in order to stop terrorists the government does not need more surveillance power. We need better people conducting and analyzing the surveillance.
Intelligence is a difficult balance in a free and open society. But, believe it or not, the primary mission and purpose of the United States' foreign intelligence apparatus is just that -- foreign intelligence, albeit updated to have some semblance of relevance in the world of the Internet.
The problem is that the majority of Americans believe in authoritarian government. They might disagree as to some details of policy that this government should enact, but just about everybody agrees that it shouldn't be up to people to run their own lives.
A lot of us had pretty vague ideas about how a lot of things, including government, ought to work. I'm optimistic about the likelihood of general understanding and appreciation of civics to improve at an accelerated pace, once the alcoholic in the Oval Office is replaced by the Constitutional law scholar.
I'm not sure your business critical data is the real risk.
Normally, that structure implies that you believe the opposite, an assumption that I do not believe is reasonable. Consider the Bush administration's recent, blatant preferential treatment toward businesses which, paraphrasing Michael Moore, acquire money purely by already having money, producing nothing. Contrast Bernanke's and Paulson's, "emergency relief" largesse to the financial professions against their absolute refusal to loan 1/10th what AIG has already received, to save 3 million automobile manufacturing and sales jobs, except with funds already allocated specifically to reduce CO2 pollution, despite the fact that the alleged justification for Henry Paulson's "Troubled Asset Relief Program" was to keep the credit available to businesses, to meet payrolls. Confronted with the facts that TARP funds are being used for mergers, not loans, and three prominent companies are in danger of missing payrolls and other expenses without those loans, Bush and Co. responded with indifference and malice. Without claiming certainty, it's certainly reasonable to be concerned that such preference for un-productive, dishonest companies is now policy throughout the Executive Branch. Worse, using NSA methods, clearances and technological resources, only a few accomplices would be needed, at certain undisclosed locations within some agencies. We already know the administration has done far worse.
So, for all the conspiracy theory fanatics out there. It comes down to the all-mighty dollar, not some nefarious deed
So, in your mind, dollars rule out nefarious deeds. that'sstupid.
... to spy on your daily surfing and email habits....unless of course your are a child predator, drug dealer, human trafficker, organized crime-lord, etc.
Yes, well, the problem is that to be accurate you would have to also let "etc" = 100% legal statuses including political opponent, personal rival, and superior inventor, especially in a field with government-sponsored monopolies like telecomms and passenger transportation. Yes, government-sponsored monopolies, in the form of exclusive telecomms franchises and direct subsidies to oil companies, and farm corporations to burn food, are all highly suspicious as possible real motives for the blatantly criminal activities of the FBI and NSA, in the name of "Homeland Security." So who are you, that you claim to know that only criminals are subject to NSA spying? That is certainly not true. And in case you complain that Rachel Maddow is liberal, yes she is, she believes in liberty. And if you don't, emigrate to Saudi Arabia. Liberty is patriotic and searches and seizures without a warrant are not. The abuses by the NSA are not a concoction or an exaggeration from "liberal" MSNBC, the Associated Press carried the same story and Newsweek has yet another scoop. You cannot even send a bit across the publicly owned Internet anymore without the NSA committing surveillance crime against you. You'd have to be a neo-con conspiracy nut to believe any of Alberto Gonzales's arguments that NSA has any legal grounds to exist.
I'm glad my spurious capitalization-based joke was noticed. It would have been more literally accurate to capitalize the second occurrence of the string "gates" in that sentence but traditionally a punch line comes closer to the end. Sorry for the confusion. To answer your question, I'd say Gates is an enabler of the barbarians more than either their controller or puppet.
There are a lot of programs that are a much bigger waste of taxpayer money that should be looked at first.
"It's not the greatest evil on Earth" is not a valid defense. The relevant question is not "Does something else even more wasteful exist?" but simply, "Are farm subsidies a net benefit or a net loss to those paying them, the taxpayers?" The answer is "Yes, farm subsidies are unquestionably a waste of our money." The exceptional cases will gladly be paid what they're worth, by the free market, and as you admit the viable farms can be insured according to well-established actuarial equations.
But what about the millions that go to independent farmers who make less than $30-40k/yr that would go bankrupt after a bad year without these subsidies? That is the unfortunate reality with cost of seed and chemicals these days...companies like Monsanto jacking the prices to astronomical levels. In the 90's an average bag of seed corn was $50....it's expected that in the next two years, it will be $500. When you consider you need a couple dozen bags for a small 40-acre field, that adds up really quick.
I'd guess one could afford at least enough education to make a living as a plumber or a locksmith or an auto mechanic for the market value of a 40-acre field. If that looks cold, consider that most of us don't have 40 acres to sell, then you'll understand why I despise farmers who do have even that "small" amount of land, and still presume to receive Welfare, euphemistically re-branded to portray them as heroic, patriotic defenders of the fatherland for Christ's sake. They're just charity cases and if their communities won't bail them out they're just bums.
I don't see anything in the referenced article about using the public internet for transmission of military data. He is talking about the public internet as a target for offensive action by an enemy with the intention of damaging the country and forcing a surrender, or at least achieving military advantage, by economic means.
If true, that means you did not watch the interview, on which the text on TechCrunch is mere commentary, and irrelevant without the interview. About 1:50 in that interview, he refers to the "military part of the Internet" [emphasis mine] and before that, the first thing he says to Charlie's question about "cyberspace" is "I like to think about it in terms of, um, any of the other domains that we have to conduct operations in." He goes on to explicitly conflate commerce, transportation, and his concept of a "domain" of military operations, as all dependent on the same Internet. Admittedly, censorship is not overtly advocated in this interview, but that dependence he cited as the reason for military cyber monitoring was also invoked by former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales in defense of NSA's illegal wiretapping of US citizens without warrants. "When the President does it, it's not illegal" is a Nixonian fallacy worthy of impeachment and imprisonment, and the military use of the public infrastructure can plainly be seen to be pulling the public toward military dictatorship under the Bush administration.
Chilton talks about DDoS as "kind of clogging circuits." Assuming he knows what he's talking about in more professional terms than those he chooses to use for Charlie Rose's audience, I disagree with the implicit premise that discussion using such "dumbed down" vocabulary is valuable. That only gives uninformed persons the illusion of understanding, which is more dangerous than leaving them ignorant. At least when I talk over morons heads, they correctly understand the fact that they are ignorant.
Neither is General Chilton, or he would not be talking with a straight face about using the public Internet for secured transmission of military data. He's a fucking idiot if he believes what he's saying and you should not take him seriously just because of his uniform. You're a voter and a taxpayer, right? Don't trust him, treat him as an employee.
... but I would think that one could argue that once certain technologies got up to a decent level to allow for things like network cards, long distance communications, encryption, personal computers, etc... something like the internet would be inevitable.
Yes. What was not inevitable is that military personnel would choose to use publicly available, privately-owned hardware on basically an "honor system" set of customs to transmit mission-critical data. Truly, the barbarians are not only at the gates, they have sauntered lazily through unguarded gates, and now the barbarians control the Gates. DARPANET was based on sensible use of redundancy. Once it was available to the public it ceased to be a sensible thing for the military to use, but somebody decided that instead of a discreet military network, what the United States really needed was a diffuse military-industrial complex, blurring into academia, commerce, and eventually all of public life. Now, even responsible military officers trying only to do their jobs but encumbered by duties and procedures that constrain them to depend on the www, are routinely whining to us that they must infringe on our unalienable rights to free speech and security against unreasonable searches and seizures, in order merely to effectively protect our lives and the so-called "liberties" that in fact we don't have. This infrastructure is not our enemy, the military's infantile dependence upon it, is. But until they're weaned onto their own, physically separate DoD.net, we're all effectively under martial law. Al Gore was an idiot to voluntarily take any "credit" for the worldwide web.
The problem is that it isn't clear who has the remit for comprehensive defense of the internet.
What horse shit! One does not comprehensively defend an open network. For applications requiring military-grade comprehensive defense, one makes a physically separate closed network. VPN doesn't cut it and never will, by any name.
only difference being the medical ones are frequently in Latin
& consistent & unique & platform-independent & portable &c.
IT is not having growing pains, it is having birthing pains. Whether it's still being born or giving birth to something better I cannot say, but hopefully the latter of course.
It's actually impressive, but based on the headline I was expecting a fully SMS-controlled robot. Relative to that, the real story was a let-down. Bad headline, good story.
The corporate open-source business model that relies solely on support and service revenue streams is failing to meet the expectations of investors
... would have been correct, but would have violated the one taboo of his corporate audience. It would have admitted the free market superiority of the independent contractor business model.
The people paying had no understanding of what portion of their needs are already available in the public domain. The people being paid had no motive to educate their marks. Salesmen are just conmen who haven't been convicted yet.
I'm convinced that open peer review is more conducive to production and maintenance of secure software than any proprietary development model that prohibits examination of source code, but this isn't my primary reason for preferring Linux. As a tool, it's better because what I learn this year about the kernel, the shell, and using both, will not be tossed out like the Windows NT kernel. Linus allows modifications to the kernel as necessary and beneficial, but as a general rule, now that I don't use Windows, what I learn about how to use this computing tool is more analogous to learning about science and less analogous to trying to keep current on clothing fashions. Although the sum of things to know about both science & Unix-based software expands even while my own knowledge expands, what I know now is still true tomorrow. A major change to the Linux kernel is not quite as rare as a major change to Newtonian mechanics, but it's just an analogy anyway. My second reason for preferring to use Linux is that it encourages more Austrian school, pure laissez-faire capitalism by setting software authors in direct competition. Corporatist programmers for Microsoft & friends still compete on "outcomes" but their work is hidden from public view so their quality of work is less often directly compared to one another. Under a corporatist, patent & copyright based software development model, a programmer competes once to be hired, and that's based on reading a résumé, rarely one's code. Mediocre people frequently describe academic work as "competitive" as if colleges have a static number of As and Bs to award, but that's bullshit. Professors only grade on a curve when it's beneficial to the class average and you all know it. From the point of hiring onward, any competition to produce the best software is filtered through the marketing departments. Linux allows programmers to work as independent contractors in theory, and to compete head-to-head. In practice, collaboration is still necessary and beneficial for many major projects and hiring agencies still have a role, but anti-competitive corporate entities have less power to group programmers into a few camps or to stifle innovation by depleting the pool of competitors, because open source licensing prohibits taking away any programmer's right to compete against another by producing demonstrably better code.
It just occurred to me, while reading your "critique" of/. pro-Linux bias, that I cannot recall ever seeing the string "w00t!" sans "quotes." Its popular usage seems to be exclusively to attribute it to somebody else, usually collective and vaguely-defined. Also typical is the unconsciously self-damning insult of the people who use "this site" which inevitably includes the speaker.
The thing is that this site is a Linux-centric religious institute, so obviously you'll easily and frequently hear "Upgrade myth busted", "Linux to dominate world in 2009" and "w00t!".
Except for you, right?
I wanted to compare the number of Google hits for "w00t!" with & without "quotes" but I guess my regex-fu is weak. I haven't been able to prevent Google from dropping the "quotes" from the string to search so I don't have the data I want to compare. What I did find is that the most popular "woot"-containing page as measured by Google is is obviously selling things, from the preview text:
Welcome to Woot. Skip straight to the product or let us know if anything on our site can be improved to further meet your accessibility needs....
The next three pages are from dictionary/wiki sites, and after that, fewer sites use the string "w00t!" as defined, than are about "w00t!" and its recent victory in the fierce "Word of the Year" competition, which according to the "standards" in place at Reuters, qualifies as "news."
Obviously I haven't made an air-tight case that "w00t!" has only ever been used as trash-talk, attributed falsely to others, but if you can figure out the Google machine you can see for yourself that it's more often used ironically and in stories about the word itself, than in the supposed "definition" as as exclamation of some sort. And considering the comment to which I'm replying, which cites zero evidence for your sweeping claim that "this site is a Linux-centric religious institute, so obviously" it's equally obvious that I've exceeded your standards of evidence already. "To cut a long story short" you've attributed "w00t!" and other trash talk to everybody else who uses this site, instead of finding some facts that support your opinion that
The truth is that MicroSoft isn't all bad
nor your prediction that
but at the end of the day I do believe people will skip Vista to some degree (ME anyone?) only to hop on board at the next iteration again.
nor your opinion:
not necessarily bad for the market or the consumers.
Why argue ad hominem unless no facts exist which support your assertions?
Again, the phone companies didn't get duped. They knew the government was spying on US citizens, and that they needed a warrant for that. Whatever they were promised, they knew what was going on.
It doesn't matter, the law says that the government presents them with the authorization, they act, they get immunity. It's really quite simple. It is not the phone company's job to validate the legal papers the government gives them in accordance with the law.
So, you accept "just following orders" as a defense. I don't. Don't you recall one of their competitors refusing, and publicizing their refusal, to comply with illegal wiretaps? Do you see how that contradicts your modified "innocent bystander" argument -- really more of an "innocent accomplice" argument, which is just as ridiculous as the words themselves suggest.
Also, although it might be literally true that "it is not the phone company's job to validate the legal papers the government gives them in accordance with the law" many judges still frown on taking actions, knowing that they assist a criminal to commit a crime. Being an "accessory" generally carries less culpability than initiating the crime, and I think most people, including most judges, would be pretty sympathetic to the "dude, it's the fscking NSA" argument. Or, "the first couple dozen seemed legit, but eventually I started noticing that they disproportionately named movie stars and prominent political opponents of the Bush administration, but by then I already felt like an accomplice and just hoped it would blow over when the War On Terror (TM) was won." I just don't want to assume they were acting in good faith because I really don't know, and I don't want to let everybody off the hook at Verizon if the snooping into Obama's records is how they typically treat their customers. You know, I've met cubicle people before and I haven't found them per se to be more ethical than normal people. And the current article suggests they aren't adequately supervised.
Your attempting to impose that which while it might be what you think is a good idea, isn't what the law states. The law says they have to comply unless there is some hardship it will be creating. With immunity from prosecution, that wouldn't exist.
Don't assume too much. Opposing blanket immunity means nothing more than wanting to know the facts before they're pardoned, or found "not guilty." Without immunity, I don't believe you or I know that Verizon or any other telecomm would be found guilty. But I want to know what they've been up to, and a subpoena has a way of making information available that is generally not available otherwise. At least, the probability is low that the certainty of your statements is based on first hand knowledge, but I don't know. I've been assuming your nick is ironic, but for all I know, you're W himself. He's [You've?] been on "limited duty" lately, which is probably a good thing, but what's Cheney doing to stay active in his golden years?
My opinion regarding military outsourcing and ownership is that if it's developed internally by the military, it should be shared with taxpayers as long as it's not a national security issue. It's the military. I have to assume that being the military, they'd want to have every advantage possible over any other military. So I would think that for the most important pieces, they'll do the R&D...
The extent of outsourcing to Blackwater and Halliburton and KBR, and whatever are their current spin-offs' aliases don't fill me with confidence in that assumption.
I don't claim that the telecomms' were given responsibility in any statute prior to the FISA bill which now singles telecomms out for immunity. First and foremost is to define the NSA's authority to conduct a wiretap without a warrant, and that limited authority excludes United States persons, absolutely.
And it does present the position that the government, through an act of legislation, did create a situation that allowed taps to be ordered without a warrant.
... unless such surveillance may involve the acquisition of communications of any United States person.
If we need to learn anything from the failure to apprehend 9-11 conspirators before the event, it's that planning of a terrorist crime does not go undetected by the FBI. The Bureau was just too incompetent to act effectively on the information they had. It was literally a lack of intelligence, not the euphemistic "intelligence failure" that's blamed for run of the mill stupidity. They don't need more powers, they need to hire better people.
Slashdot Mirror
Are we even sure that Global Climate Change is something that we need to stop?
Yes.
If this is all part of a cycle (all signs point to yes)
Liar. Reports of "decreasing" temperature, at the tail end of the hottest decade ever, do not imply that the fluctuations in average temperature during the past decade are merely cyclical, natural variations. They are certainly not. Although annual mean temperatures do naturally oscillate just as surely as daily weather fluctuates noticeably in most locations [not so much around the poles and the most barren deserts, but mostly...], if you check the data on noaa.gov and other sites that compare recent years and decades to the average over the past 150 years, instead of cherry-picking comparisons only against 1998 and others among the top-10 hottest years, you'll see quickly and unarguably that more recent oscillations are about a progressively higher median. That is because of the greenhouse effect and it is proven.
... unless you can explain where the additional heat goes when it is not radiated, because of CO2.
CO2 insulates by inhibiting infrared radiation. Infrared wavelength photons correspond to the quantity of energy-per-atom responsible for the atomic oscillation known commonly as "heat." Industrial-scale petroleum and coal combustion have dramatically increased the atmospheric concentration of CO2. Q.E.D.: CO2 pollution is directly responsible for global warming
Are cars and mankind contributing to the change in climate? Yes.
Great detective work. Wanna cookie?
Has the earth been going through a similar climate change every few thousand years for as long as we can tell? Also yes.
Liar-liar-pants on fire! I thought that Exxon-Mobil fired all you shills. Are you working pro bono now or being paid under the table?
If Megan Meier had merely lost sleep, or suffered from panic attacks, or cut herself as a result of the harassment she endured from Lori Drew, would Drew have been convicted? Or even arrested?
Quiz: How long can you go without sleep, before going clinically, permanently insane? Sleep is an absolutely necessary biological function, and one can die from its lack, as sure as one can die without food, hydration or adequate ambient temperature. People also die from cuts, and the fact that some people survive them or perform them so frequently under distress that to you the activity appears "recreational" does not excuse or mitigate the intentional inflicting of suffering on another: torture.
These perverse incentives -- "rewarding" Megan Meier for her suicide by vicariously exacting her revenge on Lori Drew...
What an utterly despicable, fatuous excuse for ethical reasoning! If Megan Meier considered "These perverse incentives" even comparable to the incentive of life as a direct result of Lori Drew's actions, which is indisputable and Lori Drew's self-stated intent, Lori Drew had at that time deprived Megan Meier of the unalienable, Constitutional right to pursuit of her own happiness, and Lori Drew is from that moment forward guilty of a felony. Her accomplices are her ISP and the social networking site, who were unwitting and, until proven guilty, presumed unwilling, thus they are not prosecutable but still an indispensable accessory to the conspiracy, satisfying the condition "two or more persons" in the Civil Rights Statutes, without putting the ISP or social networking site in moral or legal jeopardy.
Perhaps the story should not have been covered at all, or anywhere near as much as it was. (I realize I may be contributing to the problem here, but my penance is that I'm calling for less coverage in the future, and I would never be writing about this if the mainstream media hadn't covered it so extensively.) What about all the other people who committed suicide during the same year, also as a result of vicious harassment, but with the only difference being that their suicides did not involve the Internet?
That is your only remotely interesting point, and it so closely mimics the Slashdot meme about patents, "add 'with a computer' to a pompous description of any obvious and non-novel device, idea, or process, and you have yourself a shiny new patent!" as to render even that interest nearly imperceptible. Yes, Internet-related stories obviously get disproportionate coverage. You noticed, want a cookie? More importantly, which you completely missed or ignored, crimes committed using the Internet are seen as necessitating their own statutes rather than prosecution under existing ones, which are generally written in platform-independent language. Lori Drew misrepresented herself. She forged her identity, and initiated romantic relations with a minor under that false identity, and prosecutors had trouble finding an applicable statute to successfully prosecute her. That's the real "WTF" story here, not your macabre question of whether people so viciously harassed that the prospect of revenge rivals or exceeds their will to live, have a bit more or less legal standing, posthumously.
Drop dead.
Researchers began studying the role of sarcasm in detecting FTD, because it requires a patient to spot discrepancies between a person's words and the tone of their voice, Hodges said.
I wonder how they separated the demented patients from the ones who are merely tone deaf. In the diagnosed-Alzheimer's group, we should assume some have varying degrees of hearing loss as well, but that their diagnosis is less likely to be a spurious result of their hearing loss. Because shouting five times a day for lunch would be as reliable for diagnosing Alzheimer's as asking five times a day for lunch, in a normal voice. An Alzheimer's diagnosis does not seem likely to be confused with hearing problems, even though they are likely to be coincident in many cases, just because of advanced age. In the suspected-dementia group, however, controlling for hearing loss would seem to be absolutely necessary, especially because they are proposing to diagnose dementia on an ability that relies directly on tone detection. Nothing in the article says the researchers didn't do that, it just doesn't say anything about it at all.
1.5 pages is a respectable length for an abstract, not a summary of a funded scientific study, of pretty much any research topic. Slashdot science articles are generally fascinating, but ultimately, unsatisfying without access to the original. Not that I'd always go to the trouble of reading through the entire thing, but often I'd want to Ctrl+F for at least one string to see whether the research included _____.
I didn't think to check until I was in the parking lot, but the coin dispenser definitely spit out three pennies when it owed me four. Admittedly, I normally leave my pennies, or throw them in the parking lot if given to me by a human, but in this case the discrepancy stood out like a sore thumb. My total bill was $x.21 and I paid an integer number of dollars so obviously I was owed $0.79 worth of coins, and after I took my three quarters (better than pennies in that they're occasionally useful for parking, at least) the wrong number of pennies was conspicuous enough that I did a double-take. Sure enough, three coppers where there should have been four. True story.
Also, a common argument against using open source software in "Fortune 1000" and lesser-numbered corporatist Ponzi schemes, and in favor of using proprietary software, especially Microsoft software and Windows-only compatible software by any house, is the "need for a neck to wring" if ^B^B when something goes wrong. The identical argument, applied to voting, obviously favors paper ballots and human counters over any and all automation schemes and devices.
The trouble, of course, is what it means to "intercept". If "intercept" simply means "passes through any equipment even if the meaningful, contextual content of excluded traffic is never read, analyzed, searched, or stored in any way", then yes, all traffic under such provisions is being "intercepted". Except that's not what intercepted means in a legal context. By that same logic, since any telephone company has the technical capability to tap any phone number for a law enforcement entity, they are, in effect, "tapping" all of them.
That is not the same logic at all. The difference between passing communications on phone company wires, and recording communications in NSA data warehouses for possible later analysis, just in case, is obvious and pertinent.
Sure, you can argue that this is government equipment, and that you don't know what it's doing.
No, you can't see what it's doing, nor can any court (save, perhaps, FISC); that would disable the entire notion of secret foreign intelligence collection (which does not require, and never has required, court oversight when US Persons are not involved). That's where Congressional intelligence oversight comes in, and that's the whole purpose of it being there. Intelligence is a difficult balance in a free and open society.
What's difficult to balance? Al Qaida didn't just learn that we'd like to intercept their phone calls because the New York Times ran a story that the NSA, under the direction of the Bush administration, was breaking federal law. Just what tactical advantage to terrorists supposedly obtain, when my government respects my Fourth Amendment rights? All 20 of the 9-11 hijackers, including the one who missed his taxi or whatever, did arouse sufficient reasonable suspicion to be under surveillance, proving that in order to stop terrorists the government does not need more surveillance power. We need better people conducting and analyzing the surveillance.
Intelligence is a difficult balance in a free and open society. But, believe it or not, the primary mission and purpose of the United States' foreign intelligence apparatus is just that -- foreign intelligence, albeit updated to have some semblance of relevance in the world of the Internet.
Trust, but verify.
The problem is that the majority of Americans believe in authoritarian government. They might disagree as to some details of policy that this government should enact, but just about everybody agrees that it shouldn't be up to people to run their own lives.
A lot of us had pretty vague ideas about how a lot of things, including government, ought to work. I'm optimistic about the likelihood of general understanding and appreciation of civics to improve at an accelerated pace, once the alcoholic in the Oval Office is replaced by the Constitutional law scholar.
I'm not sure your business critical data is the real risk.
Normally, that structure implies that you believe the opposite, an assumption that I do not believe is reasonable. Consider the Bush administration's recent, blatant preferential treatment toward businesses which, paraphrasing Michael Moore, acquire money purely by already having money, producing nothing. Contrast Bernanke's and Paulson's, "emergency relief" largesse to the financial professions against their absolute refusal to loan 1/10th what AIG has already received, to save 3 million automobile manufacturing and sales jobs, except with funds already allocated specifically to reduce CO2 pollution, despite the fact that the alleged justification for Henry Paulson's "Troubled Asset Relief Program" was to keep the credit available to businesses, to meet payrolls. Confronted with the facts that TARP funds are being used for mergers, not loans, and three prominent companies are in danger of missing payrolls and other expenses without those loans, Bush and Co. responded with indifference and malice. Without claiming certainty, it's certainly reasonable to be concerned that such preference for un-productive, dishonest companies is now policy throughout the Executive Branch. Worse, using NSA methods, clearances and technological resources, only a few accomplices would be needed, at certain undisclosed locations within some agencies. We already know the administration has done far worse.
So, for all the conspiracy theory fanatics out there. It comes down to the all-mighty dollar, not some nefarious deed
So, in your mind, dollars rule out nefarious deeds. that's stupid.
... to spy on your daily surfing and email habits....unless of course your are a child predator, drug dealer, human trafficker, organized crime-lord, etc.
Yes, well, the problem is that to be accurate you would have to also let "etc" = 100% legal statuses including political opponent, personal rival, and superior inventor, especially in a field with government-sponsored monopolies like telecomms and passenger transportation. Yes, government-sponsored monopolies, in the form of exclusive telecomms franchises and direct subsidies to oil companies, and farm corporations to burn food, are all highly suspicious as possible real motives for the blatantly criminal activities of the FBI and NSA, in the name of "Homeland Security." So who are you, that you claim to know that only criminals are subject to NSA spying? That is certainly not true. And in case you complain that Rachel Maddow is liberal, yes she is, she believes in liberty. And if you don't, emigrate to Saudi Arabia. Liberty is patriotic and searches and seizures without a warrant are not. The abuses by the NSA are not a concoction or an exaggeration from "liberal" MSNBC, the Associated Press carried the same story and Newsweek has yet another scoop. You cannot even send a bit across the publicly owned Internet anymore without the NSA committing surveillance crime against you. You'd have to be a neo-con conspiracy nut to believe any of Alberto Gonzales's arguments that NSA has any legal grounds to exist.
Great example of settling for encryption when privacy is needed on public infrastructure. Thanks for the backup.
I'm glad my spurious capitalization-based joke was noticed. It would have been more literally accurate to capitalize the second occurrence of the string "gates" in that sentence but traditionally a punch line comes closer to the end. Sorry for the confusion. To answer your question, I'd say Gates is an enabler of the barbarians more than either their controller or puppet.
There are a lot of programs that are a much bigger waste of taxpayer money that should be looked at first.
"It's not the greatest evil on Earth" is not a valid defense. The relevant question is not "Does something else even more wasteful exist?" but simply, "Are farm subsidies a net benefit or a net loss to those paying them, the taxpayers?" The answer is "Yes, farm subsidies are unquestionably a waste of our money." The exceptional cases will gladly be paid what they're worth, by the free market, and as you admit the viable farms can be insured according to well-established actuarial equations.
But what about the millions that go to independent farmers who make less than $30-40k/yr that would go bankrupt after a bad year without these subsidies? That is the unfortunate reality with cost of seed and chemicals these days...companies like Monsanto jacking the prices to astronomical levels. In the 90's an average bag of seed corn was $50....it's expected that in the next two years, it will be $500. When you consider you need a couple dozen bags for a small 40-acre field, that adds up really quick.
I'd guess one could afford at least enough education to make a living as a plumber or a locksmith or an auto mechanic for the market value of a 40-acre field. If that looks cold, consider that most of us don't have 40 acres to sell, then you'll understand why I despise farmers who do have even that "small" amount of land, and still presume to receive Welfare, euphemistically re-branded to portray them as heroic, patriotic defenders of the fatherland for Christ's sake. They're just charity cases and if their communities won't bail them out they're just bums.
I don't see anything in the referenced article about using the public internet for transmission of military data. He is talking about the public internet as a target for offensive action by an enemy with the intention of damaging the country and forcing a surrender, or at least achieving military advantage, by economic means.
If true, that means you did not watch the interview, on which the text on TechCrunch is mere commentary, and irrelevant without the interview. About 1:50 in that interview, he refers to the "military part of the Internet" [emphasis mine] and before that, the first thing he says to Charlie's question about "cyberspace" is "I like to think about it in terms of, um, any of the other domains that we have to conduct operations in." He goes on to explicitly conflate commerce, transportation, and his concept of a "domain" of military operations, as all dependent on the same Internet. Admittedly, censorship is not overtly advocated in this interview, but that dependence he cited as the reason for military cyber monitoring was also invoked by former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales in defense of NSA's illegal wiretapping of US citizens without warrants. "When the President does it, it's not illegal" is a Nixonian fallacy worthy of impeachment and imprisonment, and the military use of the public infrastructure can plainly be seen to be pulling the public toward military dictatorship under the Bush administration.
Chilton talks about DDoS as "kind of clogging circuits." Assuming he knows what he's talking about in more professional terms than those he chooses to use for Charlie Rose's audience, I disagree with the implicit premise that discussion using such "dumbed down" vocabulary is valuable. That only gives uninformed persons the illusion of understanding, which is more dangerous than leaving them ignorant. At least when I talk over morons heads, they correctly understand the fact that they are ignorant.
I have a better idea but Steve Jobs hasn't paid me for it yet.
not that I'm any kind of expert
Neither is General Chilton, or he would not be talking with a straight face about using the public Internet for secured transmission of military data. He's a fucking idiot if he believes what he's saying and you should not take him seriously just because of his uniform. You're a voter and a taxpayer, right? Don't trust him, treat him as an employee.
... but I would think that one could argue that once certain technologies got up to a decent level to allow for things like network cards, long distance communications, encryption, personal computers, etc... something like the internet would be inevitable.
Yes. What was not inevitable is that military personnel would choose to use publicly available, privately-owned hardware on basically an "honor system" set of customs to transmit mission-critical data. Truly, the barbarians are not only at the gates, they have sauntered lazily through unguarded gates, and now the barbarians control the Gates. DARPANET was based on sensible use of redundancy. Once it was available to the public it ceased to be a sensible thing for the military to use, but somebody decided that instead of a discreet military network, what the United States really needed was a diffuse military-industrial complex, blurring into academia, commerce, and eventually all of public life. Now, even responsible military officers trying only to do their jobs but encumbered by duties and procedures that constrain them to depend on the www, are routinely whining to us that they must infringe on our unalienable rights to free speech and security against unreasonable searches and seizures, in order merely to effectively protect our lives and the so-called "liberties" that in fact we don't have. This infrastructure is not our enemy, the military's infantile dependence upon it, is. But until they're weaned onto their own, physically separate DoD.net, we're all effectively under martial law. Al Gore was an idiot to voluntarily take any "credit" for the worldwide web.
The problem is that it isn't clear who has the remit for comprehensive defense of the internet.
What horse shit! One does not comprehensively defend an open network. For applications requiring military-grade comprehensive defense, one makes a physically separate closed network. VPN doesn't cut it and never will, by any name.
only difference being the medical ones are frequently in Latin
& consistent & unique & platform-independent & portable &c.
IT is not having growing pains, it is having birthing pains. Whether it's still being born or giving birth to something better I cannot say, but hopefully the latter of course.
It's actually impressive, but based on the headline I was expecting a fully SMS-controlled robot. Relative to that, the real story was a let-down. Bad headline, good story.
I say you win humor competition on this thread.
The corporate open-source business model that relies solely on support and service revenue streams is failing to meet the expectations of investors
... would have been correct, but would have violated the one taboo of his corporate audience. It would have admitted the free market superiority of the independent contractor business model.
The people paying had no understanding of what portion of their needs are already available in the public domain. The people being paid had no motive to educate their marks. Salesmen are just conmen who haven't been convicted yet.
I'm convinced that open peer review is more conducive to production and maintenance of secure software than any proprietary development model that prohibits examination of source code, but this isn't my primary reason for preferring Linux. As a tool, it's better because what I learn this year about the kernel, the shell, and using both, will not be tossed out like the Windows NT kernel. Linus allows modifications to the kernel as necessary and beneficial, but as a general rule, now that I don't use Windows, what I learn about how to use this computing tool is more analogous to learning about science and less analogous to trying to keep current on clothing fashions. Although the sum of things to know about both science & Unix-based software expands even while my own knowledge expands, what I know now is still true tomorrow. A major change to the Linux kernel is not quite as rare as a major change to Newtonian mechanics, but it's just an analogy anyway. My second reason for preferring to use Linux is that it encourages more Austrian school, pure laissez-faire capitalism by setting software authors in direct competition. Corporatist programmers for Microsoft & friends still compete on "outcomes" but their work is hidden from public view so their quality of work is less often directly compared to one another. Under a corporatist, patent & copyright based software development model, a programmer competes once to be hired, and that's based on reading a résumé, rarely one's code. Mediocre people frequently describe academic work as "competitive" as if colleges have a static number of As and Bs to award, but that's bullshit. Professors only grade on a curve when it's beneficial to the class average and you all know it. From the point of hiring onward, any competition to produce the best software is filtered through the marketing departments. Linux allows programmers to work as independent contractors in theory, and to compete head-to-head. In practice, collaboration is still necessary and beneficial for many major projects and hiring agencies still have a role, but anti-competitive corporate entities have less power to group programmers into a few camps or to stifle innovation by depleting the pool of competitors, because open source licensing prohibits taking away any programmer's right to compete against another by producing demonstrably better code.
The thing is that this site is a Linux-centric religious institute, so obviously you'll easily and frequently hear "Upgrade myth busted", "Linux to dominate world in 2009" and "w00t!".
Except for you, right?
I wanted to compare the number of Google hits for "w00t!" with & without "quotes" but I guess my regex-fu is weak. I haven't been able to prevent Google from dropping the "quotes" from the string to search so I don't have the data I want to compare. What I did find is that the most popular "woot"-containing page as measured by Google is is obviously selling things, from the preview text:
Welcome to Woot. Skip straight to the product or let us know if anything on our site can be improved to further meet your accessibility needs. ...
The next three pages are from dictionary/wiki sites, and after that, fewer sites use the string "w00t!" as defined, than are about "w00t!" and its recent victory in the fierce "Word of the Year" competition, which according to the "standards" in place at Reuters, qualifies as "news."
Obviously I haven't made an air-tight case that "w00t!" has only ever been used as trash-talk, attributed falsely to others, but if you can figure out the Google machine you can see for yourself that it's more often used ironically and in stories about the word itself, than in the supposed "definition" as as exclamation of some sort. And considering the comment to which I'm replying, which cites zero evidence for your sweeping claim that "this site is a Linux-centric religious institute, so obviously" it's equally obvious that I've exceeded your standards of evidence already. "To cut a long story short" you've attributed "w00t!" and other trash talk to everybody else who uses this site, instead of finding some facts that support your opinion that
The truth is that MicroSoft isn't all bad
nor your prediction that
but at the end of the day I do believe people will skip Vista to some degree (ME anyone?) only to hop on board at the next iteration again.
nor your opinion:
not necessarily bad for the market or the consumers.
Why argue ad hominem unless no facts exist which support your assertions?
Again, the phone companies didn't get duped. They knew the government was spying on US citizens, and that they needed a warrant for that. Whatever they were promised, they knew what was going on.
It doesn't matter, the law says that the government presents them with the authorization, they act, they get immunity. It's really quite simple. It is not the phone company's job to validate the legal papers the government gives them in accordance with the law.
So, you accept "just following orders" as a defense. I don't. Don't you recall one of their competitors refusing, and publicizing their refusal, to comply with illegal wiretaps? Do you see how that contradicts your modified "innocent bystander" argument -- really more of an "innocent accomplice" argument, which is just as ridiculous as the words themselves suggest.
Also, although it might be literally true that "it is not the phone company's job to validate the legal papers the government gives them in accordance with the law" many judges still frown on taking actions, knowing that they assist a criminal to commit a crime. Being an "accessory" generally carries less culpability than initiating the crime, and I think most people, including most judges, would be pretty sympathetic to the "dude, it's the fscking NSA" argument. Or, "the first couple dozen seemed legit, but eventually I started noticing that they disproportionately named movie stars and prominent political opponents of the Bush administration, but by then I already felt like an accomplice and just hoped it would blow over when the War On Terror (TM) was won." I just don't want to assume they were acting in good faith because I really don't know, and I don't want to let everybody off the hook at Verizon if the snooping into Obama's records is how they typically treat their customers. You know, I've met cubicle people before and I haven't found them per se to be more ethical than normal people. And the current article suggests they aren't adequately supervised.
Your attempting to impose that which while it might be what you think is a good idea, isn't what the law states. The law says they have to comply unless there is some hardship it will be creating. With immunity from prosecution, that wouldn't exist.
Don't assume too much. Opposing blanket immunity means nothing more than wanting to know the facts before they're pardoned, or found "not guilty." Without immunity, I don't believe you or I know that Verizon or any other telecomm would be found guilty. But I want to know what they've been up to, and a subpoena has a way of making information available that is generally not available otherwise. At least, the probability is low that the certainty of your statements is based on first hand knowledge, but I don't know. I've been assuming your nick is ironic, but for all I know, you're W himself. He's [You've?] been on "limited duty" lately, which is probably a good thing, but what's Cheney doing to stay active in his golden years?
... until they've showed it to their lawyer.
My opinion regarding military outsourcing and ownership is that if it's developed internally by the military, it should be shared with taxpayers as long as it's not a national security issue. It's the military. I have to assume that being the military, they'd want to have every advantage possible over any other military. So I would think that for the most important pieces, they'll do the R&D ...
The extent of outsourcing to Blackwater and Halliburton and KBR, and whatever are their current spin-offs' aliases don't fill me with confidence in that assumption.
And it does present the position that the government, through an act of legislation, did create a situation that allowed taps to be ordered without a warrant.
If we need to learn anything from the failure to apprehend 9-11 conspirators before the event, it's that planning of a terrorist crime does not go undetected by the FBI. The Bureau was just too incompetent to act effectively on the information they had. It was literally a lack of intelligence, not the euphemistic "intelligence failure" that's blamed for run of the mill stupidity. They don't need more powers, they need to hire better people.