... "have aliens infiltrated our government? Because it seems like they are listening experts and making logical conclusions."
I expect the experts testifying used illustrations in crayon and very small words. And they still got a weasel-worded statement from the committee. "Cryptography experts and information security professionals believe that it is exceedingly difficult and impractical, if not impossible, to devise and implement a system..." No, that's not what they said. Every single one of them said it is impossible. Because it is.
Congresses come and go, but there is one invariant: they all have trouble with mathematics.
AmiMoJo isn't just virtue-signaling. AmiMoJo is invested in this shit. I suspect he/she/it is actually one of the authors of the 27 coordinated anti-gamer articles that were published in the gaming press on the same day, a wave of toxicity so profound that Intel and others actually pulled advertising over it.
What's the point of a computer that can download illegal content? If you want to have laws, enforce it inside each computer with encryption where the user can't modify it.
Consoles. Phones. Tablets. Chromebooks. The general purpose computer is dying more rapidly than one might believe. I fully expect that within my lifetime, ownership of a general purpose computer will require registration, and ownership of an "unregistered" will be a federal criminal offense. Compilers will be treated as munitions, and explicitly watermark every binary they produce. Think this is ridiculous? There is a very clear path from here to there, and there is an enormous amount of money pushing just as hard as it can to move society along that path.
This is how liberty dies—with thunderous applause, as exemplified by the GP and his many many frightened ilk.
At present, the thrust is measured to micro-cow level to millennial level, at least to improve the level of 100 cents or even cattle-level satellite can be used for attitude control, orbit and so on.
More than a decade of Google Translate, and it still pulls stuff like that. I swear human Asian language translators have been trolling machine translation to Romance languages since its inception.
Yeah, if you're a developer with limited screen real estate, you're doing it wrong. I kept my CRTs until I could buy an LCD that was actually an upgrade, not a downgrade. Now I have an UltraHD flat panel primary monitor plus two secondary monitors. I have 119 tabs open in 4 windows and I have no problem identifying the tab I'm looking for when I need it. (And I need about 80 of those tabs on any given day.) And I still have room for a metric ton of source code on the screen.
As the OP said, browsers are work tools. All reference documentation is HTML nowadays. Doubly so for open source documentation. All corporate 'paperwork' isn't paper anymore—it's HTML. Parts catalogs, datasheets, national and international standards documents, all either HTML or a PDF that came from HTML.
You need more pixels. If your hardware can't push that many pixels, it's time to upgrade from that crusty old machine you bought in the '00s. If you're trying to develop on an undocked laptop with a monitor that's not even 1080p (as something like 90% of laptops are), my god man, what are you doing? Your monitor is your window into the digital world. Why would you cripple yourself trying to peer through a keyhole?
A 24" UltraHD TN panel with dual HDMI 2.0 and 1 DisplayPort from Samsung is $308.81 with free shipping on Amazon right now. Price is basically no issue now. Weirdly, UltraHD 3840x2160 panels are cheaper than 2560x1600 panels. TN vs IPS maybe. Regardless, it's time to stop peering through a keyhole. You need more pixels.
Obviously he was fired for cause. The cause is violating company policies. He's going to court to challenge the legality of those policies, and therefore the quoted cause for his firing.
I wouldn't be surprised if he wins. Every company in America has written policies that are illegal at least a little bit. They're almost never challenged. Choosing a California company to challenge is probably an easier win than most, since California still has some worker protection laws on the books.
California law seems a little more unusual than I realized. Apparently he's suing on behalf of all Google employees, as well as himself, without getting class action status. I didn't know that was possible. (And possibly it's not.) More likely he'll get the $14,600 statutory award and Google will be ordered to change their policies. And they won't.
He used his unemployment benefits to start a landscaping design business. Now he's self-employed fulltime. Crony capitalism at work.
This is the second time in a month I've seen this attempt to redefine crony capitalism to mean "any contact with government money". That's not what it means. Somebody, somewhere is subjecting you to propaganda and you are losing.
crony noun, plural cronies. 1. a close friend or companion; chum.
In this context, such a close friend that they're willing to do something illegal. A crony capitalist is a person who is nominally running a business in a market-based economy who is actually collecting money from the government because of specific actions of a close personal friend actually in the government directing funds via contract. Nothing else qualifies.
It is illegal and specifically maligned over and above other forms of fraud because government is supposed to help everyone, not just people with friends in it, and because government contracts are supposed to be granted based on objective standards, in order to get the public the best value for their tax money.
People who are not crony capitalists: welfare recipients; EBT recipients; student loan recipients; student tuition grant recipients; Section 8 housing grant recipients; Social Security recipients; and unemployment insurance recipients (your brother).
Otherwise he'll get run into massive amounts of cost and delays due to existing underground infrastructure - of which some old elements may not be marked accurately (or even at all) on any map.
Supposing he's talking about creating a subway system for the Los Angeles area, going deep may be no help. There are currently over 4000 operating oil wells in the Los Angeles Basin, and thousands of abandoned ones. Not to mention the whole basin at subway depths is soft, sedimentary, and tectonically active. I was under the impression that there are good geological reasons why LA doesn't have a subway system. The boring is the easy part; coming up with a tunnel liner that can withstand constant low grade earthquakes is the hard part.
As others have pointed out, cell towers are few and far between in the Dakotas. When the dropped connections, battery drain, and phone crashing stops, then you'll know they've brought in the Stingray. It'll be much closer to the protesters, and provide a much more reliable signal.
The Facebook login attempts are happening the old-fashioned way, from protesters being identified by taking a photo with a zoom lens, running it through the FBI's gigantic facial recognition database, and then Googling the result. The login attempt is definitely an unconstitutional search attempt. The facial recognition database and its usage... might not be. With the Supreme Court we have had and are going to have, it's not.
What material would you make the power line from where the losses over 35,800 km are sufficiently small that it would deliver a useful amount of power?...
As with your first idea, that pushes the required strength of the cable far beyond anything that we can even model and predict the properties of, let alone produce in experimental quantities in a lab.
Last I checked, that was a problem even with beamed power climbers. The tension on a 35,800 km suspension bridge is astronomical. If we're positing a material that can withstand that pull, plus the weight of some number of climbers, we're already into the realm of unobtanium. In which case the power line requirement is just as easy. All you have to do is add one more ridiculous requirement to the already ridiculous requirements: the material the elevator is made of must also be a room temperature superconductor. Given the properties of carbon nanotubes, this requirement might not be totally outrageous. But still, a usable elevator material is currently unobtanium.
Contrary to the summary in the Miranda warning, there is in fact no absolute right to remain silent in American law. The right enshrined in the fifth amendment is you shall not be compelled to: Be a witness against yourself in a criminal case
That's three elements which all must be true for the protection to apply.
That does not seem to be true. Witnesses testifying to Congress have exercised their Fifth Amendment right for decades, and that's not a criminal case. Some very expensive lawyers say your Fifth Amendment rights are broader than outlined here, and it seems to have stood up just fine.
Has anyone noticed the strong correlation between green house gasses and the Social Justice Liberals.
Don't be ridiculous. Everybody knows global warming is caused by the absence of pirates. The reason there was a 15 year pause in the rise of average temperatures was because of the activities of Somali pirates. Now that the various navies of the world have suppressed their activities, temperatures will begin to rise again.
Japan is going to have t have some serious cultural changes within the next 10-15 years, or the new lace will be a ghost town.
Japan tried to transition to Western courtship rituals, but didn't remove the cultural impediments, like the severe social emberassment Japanese men suffer when they're denied after approaching a woman. Since it doesn't look like they're going to be able to shed that, they're going to have to go back to what worked for them: arranged marriages. We'll see if they figure it out in time.
Supply and demand DOES apply to the labor force. Since tech labor salaries are not rising rapidly it is clear that those who say it is in short supply are LYING.
While this is true, there is an additional confounding factor. $100,000 is a magic number to management. Employees are not supposed to make more than that. That's for management. Not plebes. It has taken the pressure of an actual historical tech labor shortage to get salaries to push through that glass ceiling and there is still tremendous resistance, or Silicon Valley salaries would be 65% higher than they are, to match the cost of living ratio of the Midwest.
That's not to say that tech labor shortage is still extant. It isn't, or as you say, salaries would have continued rising, all numerology to the contrary.
This varied wildly by state, and even by county within a state. I too remember shovel-ready infrastructure jobs. I remember tons of road construction, which also had signs citing stimulus funds. In the case of my county, they used it to accelerate existing plans to convert a multi-access divided highway into a limited access highway. They built tons of new overpasses and new pavement in new places, with new ramps, ripping out a dozen stoplights in the process, plus putting in a whole new road where there wasn't one before (but the land had been bought years before).
All of this was going to happen anyway, but completion dates for the various phases extended into the 2020s. My county executive is actually competent. They had plans to do the most important thing a government can do—improve the roads—with a sensible budget that was pay-as-you-go so it wouldn't saddle us with a ridiculous debt burden, and they were busily executing this plan before the crash, and would have continued more or less as planned. When the crash yielded stimulus, they grabbed it with both hands and cut 6-8 years off the schedule.
America's multi-tiered governmental system has its good points and bad points. The worst bad point is wildly varying competence levels at the local level across the country. There's lots of places where idiots are in charge, and those idiots, who are idiots because they don't know what government is for, didn't have anything shovel-ready. In those places, yeah, cronies in the financial sector sucked up all the money. Of course they did. Taking candy from a drooling moron who has way too much candy is just too much for some people to pass up. In other places, long-term economically useful things actually got done.
They were forced to make a custom cake. Which made them active participants in the wedding.
No, it didn't. It made them participants in a wedding reception. Also known as the awkward party where Aunt Gertrude has a few too many martinis and starts macking on the bartender.
There is no cake in wedding ceremonies. There is a distinct absence of cake. Wedding ceremonies do not involve confections of any kind. The baker does not get invited to the wedding, as a rule. The baker is expected to show up at a party that happens to come after a wedding, often not even in the same venue, and deliver a fucking cake. That's all.
These repeated attempts to conflate baking with wedding participation would be funny if they weren't so pathetic. Millenials often get accused of being special snowflakes. These people take being a special snowflake to a whole new level.
Price out a rocket like buying a car? Seriously? You patterned your buying experience after the worst buying experience known to man? The one everybody in the country loathes? And your competitor also happens to run the only US auto manufacturer that doesn't put you through the horror that is the traditional auto buying experience? I don't even...
Over and over we have seen asymmetric warfare by untrained citizens with second-hand small arms working against the most powerful armed forces the world has ever seen. Over and over and over.
Uhm. What? Over and over we have seen asymmetric warfare by untrained citizens with second-hand small arms barely able to even annoy the most powerful armed forces the world has ever seen, armed forces which are more operationally constrained than any occupying force in history, to the point they are forced to act like nothing more than unusually well-armed police.
At no time have the operations of the most powerful armed forces in the world retreated or even lost anything significant without the express order of politicians. Bombers roam the skies with impunity. Tanks roam the streets with impunity. Even foot soldiers by and large go where they like, intrude where they like, arrest whom they like. The only times they have trouble, it's because the politicians have forbidden them to roam the streets in tanks.
Make no mistake, if Americans once again resort to civil war, it will be total war.
"...should guerrillas or bushwhackers molest our march, or should the inhabitants burn bridges, obstruct roads, or otherwise manifest local hostility, then army commanders should order and enforce a devastation more or less relentless according to the measure of such hostility."
Such orders have not been given since World War II, and the results are enlightening:
We are not only fighting armies, but a hostile people, and must make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war, as well as their organized armies. I know that this recent movement of mine through Georgia has had a wonderful effect in this respect. Thousands who had been deceived by their lying papers into the belief that we were being whipped all the time, realized the truth, and have no appetite for a repetition of the same experience.
Letter, Sherman to Henry W. Halleck, December 24, 1864.
We're living in a post-factual world they say. Sure. Just like the Confederate states were. It's a lovely, comforting world to be sure. Right up until the truth shows up on your doorstep on the point of a bayonet.
Revoke their clearances. At which point they're no longer eligible for any government post that requires a security clearance... or any position with a civilian government contractor that requires a security clearance.
And provoke a constitutional crisis if the person won't resign and their appointer won't fire them. There's language in the Constitution describing the heads of departments of the executive branch, the people currently titled "Secretary", and it gives them sweeping authority to act on behalf of the president. But nowhere in it is a security clearance required, and its lack is no impediment to doing the job (legally).
Our current system automatically grants clearance to members of all three branches of the federal government who require classified information to do their constitutionally designated jobs, even if they would not have otherwise been granted a clearance. It was said repeatedly that no one would have given Bill Clinton a clearance if they didn't have to. But they had to. There is currently no option to withdraw a clearance from a President or a Cabinet official or a Congressman on a security committee. The US Constitution doesn't leave any wiggle room there. If you are elected to the position or appointed and confirmed to the position, you have the explicit constitutional authority to do the job, regardless of what the spooks think of you.
Importantly, there is no Constitutional description of a classification system, or classified information in general. US classified information was created by executive order, and its sole constitutional justification is contained wholly within the constitutionally granted authority of the Office of the President.
Take a potato harvester it does a fairly good job of picking up potatoes but it also picks up mud and rocks there is usually a team of around 4 people riding on the back pulling off mud and rocks to avoid carrying half the field back to the sheds then the crates filled on the field go on to a grader which sizes the potatos and again there is a team of people removing more mud and rocks. you can't automate that.
Used to be. Many forms of automation in past decades have depended on physics to do discrimination jobs. For instance, (and topically), ripeness of cranberries is established with a bounce test. An overripe berry doesn't bounce high enough, and is therefore physically rejected. More commonly, (and without the holiday tie-in), everything that happens inside a combine harvester of grain is based on physics. Wheat and chaff are separated by exploiting their physical differences. Same for corn and husk. But a potato and a rock the right size are harder to distinguish physically without an unacceptably high rate of potato destruction.
We've pretty much reached the limit of easily exploited physical differences like that, so we're now using more and more processing power instead. Your crisp processing machine already contains the leading edge of that, using a color sensor to detect burnt crisps. The machine that can distinguish between a clod of dirt and a potato will contain a neural network trained to the task. The hardware required to efficiently train such a large neural network and the hardware required to successfully execute such a large neural network has finally been commoditized. A LOT of things are going to change because of that. Machine discrimination is entering a whole new era which was formerly the exclusive domain of humans.
Very hard for a machine to identify a nettle from a lettuce someones got to pick that out. As my old mam used to say the cheapest robot is the human being.
It's like you guys are grown in pods like orcs in "Lord of the Rings" and released into the wild in batches.
What a weirdly specific analogy. That analogy looks hand-crafted for use against Slashdot users, who might actually recognize it, as opposed to most of the rest of the world, who wouldn't get it.
Slashdot Mirror
... "have aliens infiltrated our government? Because it seems like they are listening experts and making logical conclusions."
I expect the experts testifying used illustrations in crayon and very small words. And they still got a weasel-worded statement from the committee. "Cryptography experts and information security professionals believe that it is exceedingly difficult and impractical, if not impossible, to devise and implement a system..." No, that's not what they said. Every single one of them said it is impossible. Because it is.
Congresses come and go, but there is one invariant: they all have trouble with mathematics.
Virtue-signaling mission accomplished. Tribal identity confirmed. Congrats!
AmiMoJo isn't just virtue-signaling. AmiMoJo is invested in this shit. I suspect he/she/it is actually one of the authors of the 27 coordinated anti-gamer articles that were published in the gaming press on the same day, a wave of toxicity so profound that Intel and others actually pulled advertising over it.
What's the point of a computer that can download illegal content? If you want to have laws, enforce it inside each computer with encryption where the user can't modify it.
Consoles. Phones. Tablets. Chromebooks. The general purpose computer is dying more rapidly than one might believe. I fully expect that within my lifetime, ownership of a general purpose computer will require registration, and ownership of an "unregistered" will be a federal criminal offense. Compilers will be treated as munitions, and explicitly watermark every binary they produce. Think this is ridiculous? There is a very clear path from here to there, and there is an enormous amount of money pushing just as hard as it can to move society along that path.
This is how liberty dies—with thunderous applause, as exemplified by the GP and his many many frightened ilk.
At present, the thrust is measured to micro-cow level to millennial level, at least to improve the level of 100 cents or even cattle-level satellite can be used for attitude control, orbit and so on.
More than a decade of Google Translate, and it still pulls stuff like that. I swear human Asian language translators have been trolling machine translation to Romance languages since its inception.
Given the limited screen real estate...
Yeah, if you're a developer with limited screen real estate, you're doing it wrong. I kept my CRTs until I could buy an LCD that was actually an upgrade, not a downgrade. Now I have an UltraHD flat panel primary monitor plus two secondary monitors. I have 119 tabs open in 4 windows and I have no problem identifying the tab I'm looking for when I need it. (And I need about 80 of those tabs on any given day.) And I still have room for a metric ton of source code on the screen.
As the OP said, browsers are work tools. All reference documentation is HTML nowadays. Doubly so for open source documentation. All corporate 'paperwork' isn't paper anymore—it's HTML. Parts catalogs, datasheets, national and international standards documents, all either HTML or a PDF that came from HTML.
You need more pixels. If your hardware can't push that many pixels, it's time to upgrade from that crusty old machine you bought in the '00s. If you're trying to develop on an undocked laptop with a monitor that's not even 1080p (as something like 90% of laptops are), my god man, what are you doing? Your monitor is your window into the digital world. Why would you cripple yourself trying to peer through a keyhole?
A 24" UltraHD TN panel with dual HDMI 2.0 and 1 DisplayPort from Samsung is $308.81 with free shipping on Amazon right now. Price is basically no issue now. Weirdly, UltraHD 3840x2160 panels are cheaper than 2560x1600 panels. TN vs IPS maybe. Regardless, it's time to stop peering through a keyhole. You need more pixels.
My guess is that someone was fired for cause...
Obviously he was fired for cause. The cause is violating company policies. He's going to court to challenge the legality of those policies, and therefore the quoted cause for his firing.
I wouldn't be surprised if he wins. Every company in America has written policies that are illegal at least a little bit. They're almost never challenged. Choosing a California company to challenge is probably an easier win than most, since California still has some worker protection laws on the books.
California law seems a little more unusual than I realized. Apparently he's suing on behalf of all Google employees, as well as himself, without getting class action status. I didn't know that was possible. (And possibly it's not.) More likely he'll get the $14,600 statutory award and Google will be ordered to change their policies. And they won't.
He used his unemployment benefits to start a landscaping design business. Now he's self-employed fulltime. Crony capitalism at work.
This is the second time in a month I've seen this attempt to redefine crony capitalism to mean "any contact with government money". That's not what it means. Somebody, somewhere is subjecting you to propaganda and you are losing.
crony
noun, plural cronies.
1. a close friend or companion; chum.
In this context, such a close friend that they're willing to do something illegal. A crony capitalist is a person who is nominally running a business in a market-based economy who is actually collecting money from the government because of specific actions of a close personal friend actually in the government directing funds via contract. Nothing else qualifies.
It is illegal and specifically maligned over and above other forms of fraud because government is supposed to help everyone, not just people with friends in it, and because government contracts are supposed to be granted based on objective standards, in order to get the public the best value for their tax money.
People who are not crony capitalists: welfare recipients; EBT recipients; student loan recipients; student tuition grant recipients; Section 8 housing grant recipients; Social Security recipients; and unemployment insurance recipients (your brother).
Otherwise he'll get run into massive amounts of cost and delays due to existing underground infrastructure - of which some old elements may not be marked accurately (or even at all) on any map.
Supposing he's talking about creating a subway system for the Los Angeles area, going deep may be no help. There are currently over 4000 operating oil wells in the Los Angeles Basin, and thousands of abandoned ones. Not to mention the whole basin at subway depths is soft, sedimentary, and tectonically active. I was under the impression that there are good geological reasons why LA doesn't have a subway system. The boring is the easy part; coming up with a tunnel liner that can withstand constant low grade earthquakes is the hard part.
As others have pointed out, cell towers are few and far between in the Dakotas. When the dropped connections, battery drain, and phone crashing stops, then you'll know they've brought in the Stingray. It'll be much closer to the protesters, and provide a much more reliable signal.
The Facebook login attempts are happening the old-fashioned way, from protesters being identified by taking a photo with a zoom lens, running it through the FBI's gigantic facial recognition database, and then Googling the result. The login attempt is definitely an unconstitutional search attempt. The facial recognition database and its usage... might not be. With the Supreme Court we have had and are going to have, it's not.
Probably no Stingray though. At least not yet.
This story only made it to Slashdot's front page in order to out the members of Scientology on the board! They're coming to get you!
Ok maybe not.
For the first time in ages, the related links beneath the summary are actually... related.
The ones at the bottom of the comments still aren't though...
What material would you make the power line from where the losses over 35,800 km are sufficiently small that it would deliver a useful amount of power? ...
As with your first idea, that pushes the required strength of the cable far beyond anything that we can even model and predict the properties of, let alone produce in experimental quantities in a lab.
Last I checked, that was a problem even with beamed power climbers. The tension on a 35,800 km suspension bridge is astronomical. If we're positing a material that can withstand that pull, plus the weight of some number of climbers, we're already into the realm of unobtanium. In which case the power line requirement is just as easy. All you have to do is add one more ridiculous requirement to the already ridiculous requirements: the material the elevator is made of must also be a room temperature superconductor. Given the properties of carbon nanotubes, this requirement might not be totally outrageous. But still, a usable elevator material is currently unobtanium.
Contrary to the summary in the Miranda warning, there is in fact no absolute right to remain silent in American law. The right enshrined in the fifth amendment is you shall not be compelled to:
Be a witness
against yourself
in a criminal case
That's three elements which all must be true for the protection to apply.
That does not seem to be true. Witnesses testifying to Congress have exercised their Fifth Amendment right for decades, and that's not a criminal case. Some very expensive lawyers say your Fifth Amendment rights are broader than outlined here, and it seems to have stood up just fine.
Has anyone noticed the strong correlation between green house gasses and the Social Justice Liberals.
Don't be ridiculous. Everybody knows global warming is caused by the absence of pirates. The reason there was a 15 year pause in the rise of average temperatures was because of the activities of Somali pirates. Now that the various navies of the world have suppressed their activities, temperatures will begin to rise again.
With apologies to Mark Twain:
There are lies, damned lies, and marketing.
whaddayagonnado?
Not hire either one of them and compose my own motherfucking website.
Japan is going to have t have some serious cultural changes within the next 10-15 years, or the new lace will be a ghost town.
Japan tried to transition to Western courtship rituals, but didn't remove the cultural impediments, like the severe social emberassment Japanese men suffer when they're denied after approaching a woman. Since it doesn't look like they're going to be able to shed that, they're going to have to go back to what worked for them: arranged marriages. We'll see if they figure it out in time.
Supply and demand DOES apply to the labor force. Since tech labor salaries are not rising rapidly it is clear that those who say it is in short supply are LYING.
While this is true, there is an additional confounding factor. $100,000 is a magic number to management. Employees are not supposed to make more than that. That's for management. Not plebes. It has taken the pressure of an actual historical tech labor shortage to get salaries to push through that glass ceiling and there is still tremendous resistance, or Silicon Valley salaries would be 65% higher than they are, to match the cost of living ratio of the Midwest.
That's not to say that tech labor shortage is still extant. It isn't, or as you say, salaries would have continued rising, all numerology to the contrary.
Or what if it gets out there, goes crazy, and starts destroying satellites willy-nilly?
Don't worry. It won't be running Windows.
Remember the shovel ready jobs? Never happened.
This varied wildly by state, and even by county within a state. I too remember shovel-ready infrastructure jobs. I remember tons of road construction, which also had signs citing stimulus funds. In the case of my county, they used it to accelerate existing plans to convert a multi-access divided highway into a limited access highway. They built tons of new overpasses and new pavement in new places, with new ramps, ripping out a dozen stoplights in the process, plus putting in a whole new road where there wasn't one before (but the land had been bought years before).
All of this was going to happen anyway, but completion dates for the various phases extended into the 2020s. My county executive is actually competent. They had plans to do the most important thing a government can do—improve the roads—with a sensible budget that was pay-as-you-go so it wouldn't saddle us with a ridiculous debt burden, and they were busily executing this plan before the crash, and would have continued more or less as planned. When the crash yielded stimulus, they grabbed it with both hands and cut 6-8 years off the schedule.
America's multi-tiered governmental system has its good points and bad points. The worst bad point is wildly varying competence levels at the local level across the country. There's lots of places where idiots are in charge, and those idiots, who are idiots because they don't know what government is for, didn't have anything shovel-ready. In those places, yeah, cronies in the financial sector sucked up all the money. Of course they did. Taking candy from a drooling moron who has way too much candy is just too much for some people to pass up. In other places, long-term economically useful things actually got done.
YMMV.
They were forced to make a custom cake. Which made them active participants in the wedding.
No, it didn't. It made them participants in a wedding reception. Also known as the awkward party where Aunt Gertrude has a few too many martinis and starts macking on the bartender.
There is no cake in wedding ceremonies. There is a distinct absence of cake. Wedding ceremonies do not involve confections of any kind. The baker does not get invited to the wedding, as a rule. The baker is expected to show up at a party that happens to come after a wedding, often not even in the same venue, and deliver a fucking cake. That's all.
These repeated attempts to conflate baking with wedding participation would be funny if they weren't so pathetic. Millenials often get accused of being special snowflakes. These people take being a special snowflake to a whole new level.
Price out a rocket like buying a car? Seriously? You patterned your buying experience after the worst buying experience known to man? The one everybody in the country loathes? And your competitor also happens to run the only US auto manufacturer that doesn't put you through the horror that is the traditional auto buying experience? I don't even...
Over and over we have seen asymmetric warfare by untrained citizens with second-hand small arms working against the most powerful armed forces the world has ever seen. Over and over and over.
Uhm. What? Over and over we have seen asymmetric warfare by untrained citizens with second-hand small arms barely able to even annoy the most powerful armed forces the world has ever seen, armed forces which are more operationally constrained than any occupying force in history, to the point they are forced to act like nothing more than unusually well-armed police.
At no time have the operations of the most powerful armed forces in the world retreated or even lost anything significant without the express order of politicians. Bombers roam the skies with impunity. Tanks roam the streets with impunity. Even foot soldiers by and large go where they like, intrude where they like, arrest whom they like. The only times they have trouble, it's because the politicians have forbidden them to roam the streets in tanks.
Make no mistake, if Americans once again resort to civil war, it will be total war.
"...should guerrillas or bushwhackers molest our march, or should the inhabitants burn bridges, obstruct roads, or otherwise manifest local hostility, then army commanders should order and enforce a devastation more or less relentless according to the measure of such hostility."
Such orders have not been given since World War II, and the results are enlightening:
We are not only fighting armies, but a hostile people, and must make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war, as well as their organized armies. I know that this recent movement of mine through Georgia has had a wonderful effect in this respect. Thousands who had been deceived by their lying papers into the belief that we were being whipped all the time, realized the truth, and have no appetite for a repetition of the same experience.
Letter, Sherman to Henry W. Halleck, December 24, 1864.
We're living in a post-factual world they say. Sure. Just like the Confederate states were. It's a lovely, comforting world to be sure. Right up until the truth shows up on your doorstep on the point of a bayonet.
Revoke their clearances. At which point they're no longer eligible for any government post that requires a security clearance... or any position with a civilian government contractor that requires a security clearance.
And provoke a constitutional crisis if the person won't resign and their appointer won't fire them. There's language in the Constitution describing the heads of departments of the executive branch, the people currently titled "Secretary", and it gives them sweeping authority to act on behalf of the president. But nowhere in it is a security clearance required, and its lack is no impediment to doing the job (legally).
Our current system automatically grants clearance to members of all three branches of the federal government who require classified information to do their constitutionally designated jobs, even if they would not have otherwise been granted a clearance. It was said repeatedly that no one would have given Bill Clinton a clearance if they didn't have to. But they had to. There is currently no option to withdraw a clearance from a President or a Cabinet official or a Congressman on a security committee. The US Constitution doesn't leave any wiggle room there. If you are elected to the position or appointed and confirmed to the position, you have the explicit constitutional authority to do the job, regardless of what the spooks think of you.
Importantly, there is no Constitutional description of a classification system, or classified information in general. US classified information was created by executive order, and its sole constitutional justification is contained wholly within the constitutionally granted authority of the Office of the President.
Take a potato harvester it does a fairly good job of picking up potatoes but it also picks up mud and rocks there is usually a team of around 4 people riding on the back pulling off mud and rocks to avoid carrying half the field back to the sheds then the crates filled on the field go on to a grader which sizes the potatos and again there is a team of people removing more mud and rocks. you can't automate that.
Used to be. Many forms of automation in past decades have depended on physics to do discrimination jobs. For instance, (and topically), ripeness of cranberries is established with a bounce test. An overripe berry doesn't bounce high enough, and is therefore physically rejected. More commonly, (and without the holiday tie-in), everything that happens inside a combine harvester of grain is based on physics. Wheat and chaff are separated by exploiting their physical differences. Same for corn and husk. But a potato and a rock the right size are harder to distinguish physically without an unacceptably high rate of potato destruction.
We've pretty much reached the limit of easily exploited physical differences like that, so we're now using more and more processing power instead. Your crisp processing machine already contains the leading edge of that, using a color sensor to detect burnt crisps. The machine that can distinguish between a clod of dirt and a potato will contain a neural network trained to the task. The hardware required to efficiently train such a large neural network and the hardware required to successfully execute such a large neural network has finally been commoditized. A LOT of things are going to change because of that. Machine discrimination is entering a whole new era which was formerly the exclusive domain of humans.
Very hard for a machine to identify a nettle from a lettuce someones got to pick that out. As my old mam used to say the cheapest robot is the human being.
Used to be. Not anymore.
It's like you guys are grown in pods like orcs in "Lord of the Rings" and released into the wild in batches.
What a weirdly specific analogy. That analogy looks hand-crafted for use against Slashdot users, who might actually recognize it, as opposed to most of the rest of the world, who wouldn't get it.
You're trying too hard, Coward.