Sadly, all he amounted to was mysteriously coming into possession of 500 or so FBI files on all of Clinton's (real or perceived) political enemies. Granted, this is probably nothing compared to what Bush is doing that we do not know about.
Have we already forgotten Mike Brown, the ex-head of FEMA who had practically no experience in emergency services, disaster response, or incident management. Heck, in his previous job (Judges and Stewards Commissioner for the International Arabian Horse Association) he was forced our for "accounting irregularities".
I'm expecting a good many of Bush's appointees follow the same pattern, much as Clinton's did (Chief of White House Personnel Security was a bouncer at a strip club). This is just how the Executive Branch of government works today. Credentials be damned, which of my childhood friends/campaign supporters/cronies needs a job?
Verizon, Cingular, etc. : "Hello Moto, we make a significant amount of money charging total idiots for the right to license crappy ring tones, useless apps, games, and backgrounds. If you release a phone to our customers that allows them to install their own apps, music, and images we will stop buying your phones. Speaking of which, make sure we can lock out DUN and OBEX on your new line of bluetooth phones."
Not quite, consider that blackberries are packet data whereas voice on cell phones is streaming data. You need a constant, uninterrupted connection to do anything useful with the voice part of cell phones, but you can send and receive sms and blackberry email even with very sporatic and overloaded cell infrastructure. It will take longer, but the messages generally eventually get through.
Cell infrastructure is not designed to handle peak usage, it is only able to handle "average" usage. In emergencies it almost always falls down as a result of being overloaded. You see the same thing happen with "trunked" radio systems in this situation, but Motorola still pushes it and people still use it because it works just fine under normal load.
That has always been my policy as well. If I am expected to work at home beyond normal hours (and when I was a systems programmer for a critical mainframe, boy was that ever the case) then I expect to be able to do personal things at work. I've always been lucky to work in positions where that is accepted (and often encouraged, some people understand that hitting ebay or slashdot occationally helps keep people from burning out).
That said though, even though I happened to know they were not monitoring everyone's computer and phone habits, I still never had any expectation of a "right" to privacy.
I'm a huge fan of privacy, but where on earth do people get the idea they have free reign to privately use company resources? Some companies are cool about this sort of thing but there is certainly no "right" to make private, personal use of company network and phone systems.
I've been keeping up with the news, so where does it say the FBI can confiscate equipment without a warrant? Note, I did not say "with a secret warrant" (I've read the patriot act too), I mean completely without any court oversight.
I suppose you don't have to like the FBI, and certainly they got to where they were today due to a lot of PR and manuvering in the Hoover years, but they were responders, likely called in by the local authorities to help with the issue. They weren't sitting in FBI HQ spying on personal emails and suddenly decided to descend on Newton in black cars and helicopters....
And yet this story proved that even they are not above the law. For a truly lawful and just society, nobody can be. Clear and present danger or not, the law must be followed. If the law is too inflexible for this type of scenario then it must be changed, but not broken at will by those sworn to uphold it.
Yeah, I'm with you there. I have some headless XP machines that I will remote desktop into when I need to write a DLL for something (I do a lot of security and digital id work), but I installed and configured them a long time ago. When I set up a XP box for a friend a few weeks ago I was blown away. I had completely forgotten how mind-numbingly ugly the default XP theme is. I have no idea what they were thinking there.
I'm using it now to post this comment, and then I'm switching right back. The toolbar is ugly (granted it is beta), and I'm amused that Yahoo is the default search tool over MSN (google of course is not even an option, after all who searches with that?).
Rendering is still sub par, tabs are nice though. All in all, it has a strong "welcome to the cutting edge of web browsing, circa 2003" feel to it. Given that Firefox actually has some momentum now even in corporate America, not to mention joe average who is beginning to draw a connection between spyware and IE, I think MS is going to have to do better than a poor Firefox clone to reverse that trend.
They have managed to sell themselves to a lot of Universities. The basic idea is that the University pays $x per student (well, they student pays in reality) and the service is licensed to any and all of the University's population.
Newspapers can spin a story to make something which is reasonable behavior sound like a scandal.
So are you saying you have not looked into this story enough on your own to determine that, or that you assume everyone has not? Do you believe that is the case here? Did you look at the wikipedia entry and track the revisions and discussions? I have, and while there are a few resonable edits done by the IP address, there are a LOT that are downright sleazy. Especially the ones regarding the campaign promises (which are not contestable, they are a matter or public record) where they were just deleted. It seems the staffers feel wikipedia should read more like his official web bio rather than a public record based on facts.
It is not hard to validate stories about wikipedia, so again I ask, who cares if this was covered by a right wing news source?
Yet Wikipedia is seriously flawed! I really wish Wikipedia could be used as an academic reference.
Wikipedia is not at all flawed, in fact this example shows that it is working. Flawed would be if this happened and there was no way to find out what was changed and who changed it.
What is flawed is your concept of what it should be, which does not mesh with reality. You want an Encyclopedia Britanica or something like that.
I really wish the edit wars would stop.
Hey, I wish all wars would stop. But people disagree, always have.
I really wish I could truly trust the information posted there.
Then you need to do a little more research, which Wikipedia provides for you in the form of historial articles, tracking who changed what, and the talk pages. You options are to have something which one person or cabal decides is fact, end of story and you can decide to trust that, or you can be exposed to the whole mess of debating, editing, and discussing and make your decision from that. Personally I'll take the latter as it is much easier to trust an open process than the end result of a closed process.
It could be done. The current system is just too open for the kind of abuse described in the article.
If it could be done what is your solution? What would improve the situation?
It is worth pointing out as well that the Lowell Sun is a rabidly right-wing rag
Does it in any way detract from the story it presents? Does it have any bearing at all except to say "here is why you see this story published here and not the daily kos for example"?
"Apologies and kudos if you really did independently conjure that insight"
I did, but I was just trying to be funny and not really insightful. I was also only thinking of mitochondria and not DNA but now that I think about it, OO design is all over the place in life forms.
As a c programmer, I have to consider....maybe I'm wrong, maybe Java IS the way to go:)
Maybe dreams are simply our VM doing garbage collection....
What stops you from encrypting the email on your own computer then cutting and pasting the encrypted block in to the webmail form? There are two totally separate issues here (SSL connection to webmail and SMTP between email servers), both can be addressed but a solution for one will not magically fix the other.
You sir have absolutely no empathy for people who do not pretend to understand every facet of their existence.
Sure I do, which is why I tried to make it painfully clear I wasn't expecting everyone to be a computer expert (I thought I made that clear but it seems I needed to devote some more paragraphs to driving that point home for many people who only saw me write "everyone who is not a computer expert is a failure" or whatever else they wanted to see).
I'm talking about people who hit a certain age and just go "fuck it" I'm not learning anything anymore. Whatever political beliefs my parents held (or the opposite as the case may be) is how I will vote for life, don't bother me with facts. Whatever I know about people (sexes, races, religions) at a certain point is what I will always believe and no experience or investigation on my part will ever change it. Technology will progress and I will desire to take part in it but I will damned pissed if I ever have to learn anything to do so. Everything should work exactly like the stuff I had when I was a kid. There is something really unhealthy about that attitude in society today and more and more people seem to be proud of it.
There's plenty of people who live in really small parts of the world, who really never got a chance to see much; its really not their fault they didn't have the exposure to all the 21st century whoonanny any "properly civilized person" has. Or even smaller things, like say, literacy. You'd be astounded the unliteracy rate of some places in the US.
And you know what, many of these people in third world countries know tons of stuff that "cultured" and "educated" people in the US don't. How many of your average US Joe's would die in the wilderness in a day or two? How many could build an over night shelter, let alone a house? Or get their own food without WalMart? Again, I'm not saying everyone needs to quit their day job and become an aborigine (although I fully expect people to accuse me of this) but some basic knowledge of how to stay alive without a fully functional nanny-like society cannot be a bad thing. Technology has become both a timesaver and crutch in this case. People cannot do basic navigation without a GPS, basic math without a calculator, or even (it seems) figure out what food to eat so as not to balloon up to an unhealthy size unless the government (or diet guru) tells them what to eat. We know how to check email but forget basic rules like "don't just give your credit card out to any anonymous person who asks" and blame computers for being too complicated. These are the same people who wouldn't fall for a scam in real life or over the phone but have some strange trust in the computer technology (which they happily do not understand a bit of) that lets them do this.
Many of these things are just non-integrable into people's existing conception of reality, there's simply no existing rules or patterns to start from, to begin to even understand the faintest thing about some of your obvious concepts. Knowledge is a pyramid with a very very wide base my young paduan. And with no one is volunteering to explain these things, to deconstruct the weird rules their grasping brain substitutes for objectively-seemingly-plausible ones, the situation borders hopeless. It just takes experience, it takes experience to build more.
Totally agree, and there are some things that for the life of me I cannot figure out, but that does not mean I'm going to throw my hands up and say "fuck it all, this learning is hard, I'm done".
Computers especially are non-intuivite systems, criticizing people for not understanding is sub-human;
When to use a semicolon has always eluded me, and unless you just screwed up, I learned a case where it is valid:)
But to the topic at hand, I agree, and this is why I specifically said I don't expect everyone to understand CPU opcodes, but there is no reason why anyone cannot understand what part is the computer, what part i
Slashdot Mirror
Sadly, all he amounted to was mysteriously coming into possession of 500 or so FBI files on all of Clinton's (real or perceived) political enemies. Granted, this is probably nothing compared to what Bush is doing that we do not know about.
Finkployd
Have we already forgotten Mike Brown, the ex-head of FEMA who had practically no experience in emergency services, disaster response, or incident management. Heck, in his previous job (Judges and Stewards Commissioner for the International Arabian Horse Association) he was forced our for "accounting irregularities".
I'm expecting a good many of Bush's appointees follow the same pattern, much as Clinton's did (Chief of White House Personnel Security was a bouncer at a strip club). This is just how the Executive Branch of government works today. Credentials be damned, which of my childhood friends/campaign supporters/cronies needs a job?
Finkployd
Verizon, Cingular, etc. : "Hello Moto, we make a significant amount of money charging total idiots for the right to license crappy ring tones, useless apps, games, and backgrounds. If you release a phone to our customers that allows them to install their own apps, music, and images we will stop buying your phones. Speaking of which, make sure we can lock out DUN and OBEX on your new line of bluetooth phones."
Motorola: "Yes sir, sorry sir."
Not quite, consider that blackberries are packet data whereas voice on cell phones is streaming data. You need a constant, uninterrupted connection to do anything useful with the voice part of cell phones, but you can send and receive sms and blackberry email even with very sporatic and overloaded cell infrastructure. It will take longer, but the messages generally eventually get through.
Cell infrastructure is not designed to handle peak usage, it is only able to handle "average" usage. In emergencies it almost always falls down as a result of being overloaded. You see the same thing happen with "trunked" radio systems in this situation, but Motorola still pushes it and people still use it because it works just fine under normal load.
Finkployd
That has always been my policy as well. If I am expected to work at home beyond normal hours (and when I was a systems programmer for a critical mainframe, boy was that ever the case) then I expect to be able to do personal things at work. I've always been lucky to work in positions where that is accepted (and often encouraged, some people understand that hitting ebay or slashdot occationally helps keep people from burning out).
That said though, even though I happened to know they were not monitoring everyone's computer and phone habits, I still never had any expectation of a "right" to privacy.
Finkployd
I'm a huge fan of privacy, but where on earth do people get the idea they have free reign to privately use company resources? Some companies are cool about this sort of thing but there is certainly no "right" to make private, personal use of company network and phone systems.
Finkployd
Touche, I bow to your superior public debate skills.
Finkployd
Not into answering questions are you.
I've been keeping up with the news, so where does it say the FBI can confiscate equipment without a warrant? Note, I did not say "with a secret warrant" (I've read the patriot act too), I mean completely without any court oversight.
Finkployd
I suppose you can cite the relevent law where a warrant is not needed to search and seize property?
Finkployd
I suppose you don't have to like the FBI, and certainly they got to where they were today due to a lot of PR and manuvering in the Hoover years, but they were responders, likely called in by the local authorities to help with the issue. They weren't sitting in FBI HQ spying on personal emails and suddenly decided to descend on Newton in black cars and helicopters....
And yet this story proved that even they are not above the law. For a truly lawful and just society, nobody can be. Clear and present danger or not, the law must be followed. If the law is too inflexible for this type of scenario then it must be changed, but not broken at will by those sworn to uphold it.
Finkployd
Yeah, I'm with you there. I have some headless XP machines that I will remote desktop into when I need to write a DLL for something (I do a lot of security and digital id work), but I installed and configured them a long time ago. When I set up a XP box for a friend a few weeks ago I was blown away. I had completely forgotten how mind-numbingly ugly the default XP theme is. I have no idea what they were thinking there.
Finkployd
I'm using it now to post this comment, and then I'm switching right back. The toolbar is ugly (granted it is beta), and I'm amused that Yahoo is the default search tool over MSN (google of course is not even an option, after all who searches with that?).
Rendering is still sub par, tabs are nice though. All in all, it has a strong "welcome to the cutting edge of web browsing, circa 2003" feel to it. Given that Firefox actually has some momentum now even in corporate America, not to mention joe average who is beginning to draw a connection between spyware and IE, I think MS is going to have to do better than a poor Firefox clone to reverse that trend.
Finkployd
How do they fare in the ACID2 test, compared to their old bloody (everything's red, it must be blood!) result? Can anyone post a screenshot?
Poorly, I would post a screenshot but I did not read through the entire EULA to know if that is forbidden. Let's just say it is still bloody.
Out of curiousity, what does currently pass acid2? Firefox certainly does not either (although I suppose it is a little closer)
Finkployd
They have managed to sell themselves to a lot of Universities. The basic idea is that the University pays $x per student (well, they student pays in reality) and the service is licensed to any and all of the University's population.
Finkployd
Newspapers can spin a story to make something which is reasonable behavior sound like a scandal.
So are you saying you have not looked into this story enough on your own to determine that, or that you assume everyone has not? Do you believe that is the case here? Did you look at the wikipedia entry and track the revisions and discussions? I have, and while there are a few resonable edits done by the IP address, there are a LOT that are downright sleazy. Especially the ones regarding the campaign promises (which are not contestable, they are a matter or public record) where they were just deleted. It seems the staffers feel wikipedia should read more like his official web bio rather than a public record based on facts.
It is not hard to validate stories about wikipedia, so again I ask, who cares if this was covered by a right wing news source?
Finkployd
Yet Wikipedia is seriously flawed! I really wish Wikipedia could be used as an academic reference.
Wikipedia is not at all flawed, in fact this example shows that it is working. Flawed would be if this happened and there was no way to find out what was changed and who changed it.
What is flawed is your concept of what it should be, which does not mesh with reality. You want an Encyclopedia Britanica or something like that.
I really wish the edit wars would stop.
Hey, I wish all wars would stop. But people disagree, always have.
I really wish I could truly trust the information posted there.
Then you need to do a little more research, which Wikipedia provides for you in the form of historial articles, tracking who changed what, and the talk pages. You options are to have something which one person or cabal decides is fact, end of story and you can decide to trust that, or you can be exposed to the whole mess of debating, editing, and discussing and make your decision from that. Personally I'll take the latter as it is much easier to trust an open process than the end result of a closed process.
It could be done. The current system is just too open for the kind of abuse described in the article.
If it could be done what is your solution? What would improve the situation?
Finkployd
It is worth pointing out as well that the Lowell Sun is a rabidly right-wing rag
Does it in any way detract from the story it presents? Does it have any bearing at all except to say "here is why you see this story published here and not the daily kos for example"?
Finkployd
"Apologies and kudos if you really did independently conjure that insight"
:)
I did, but I was just trying to be funny and not really insightful. I was also only thinking of mitochondria and not DNA but now that I think about it, OO design is all over the place in life forms.
As a c programmer, I have to consider....maybe I'm wrong, maybe Java IS the way to go
Maybe dreams are simply our VM doing garbage collection....
Insanity is a buffer overflow?
Finkployd
I prefer direct conversion myself (regen is a pain to work with). A little more complicated (especially at that frequency) but still doable.
Finkployd
Actually about every geek I know has one or the other.
Actually you just need a reciever capable of picking up FM signals on 145.990, that isn't that hard to built.
Finkployd
Either that, or God is the kind of programmer who likes to create reusable objects.
Sorry, I couldn't help it
Finkployd
Or people who know how tax works.
Capital gains tax rates are higher than income tax.
Were they to take a higher salary, that salary would be taxed, but they would still end up with more money.
There is really no obvious greed based reason to do this.
Finkployd
What stops you from encrypting the email on your own computer then cutting and pasting the encrypted block in to the webmail form? There are two totally separate issues here (SSL connection to webmail and SMTP between email servers), both can be addressed but a solution for one will not magically fix the other.
Finkployd
That's why I refuse to use "anonymizer" networks like tor. You can't even login to your damn webmail, without giving away your account information.
Are you saying you do not use SSL on whatever webmail you use? That is a bigger problem than Tor can fix...
Finkployd
You sir have absolutely no empathy for people who do not pretend to understand every facet of their existence.
:)
Sure I do, which is why I tried to make it painfully clear I wasn't expecting everyone to be a computer expert (I thought I made that clear but it seems I needed to devote some more paragraphs to driving that point home for many people who only saw me write "everyone who is not a computer expert is a failure" or whatever else they wanted to see).
I'm talking about people who hit a certain age and just go "fuck it" I'm not learning anything anymore. Whatever political beliefs my parents held (or the opposite as the case may be) is how I will vote for life, don't bother me with facts. Whatever I know about people (sexes, races, religions) at a certain point is what I will always believe and no experience or investigation on my part will ever change it. Technology will progress and I will desire to take part in it but I will damned pissed if I ever have to learn anything to do so. Everything should work exactly like the stuff I had when I was a kid. There is something really unhealthy about that attitude in society today and more and more people seem to be proud of it.
There's plenty of people who live in really small parts of the world, who really never got a chance to see much; its really not their fault they didn't have the exposure to all the 21st century whoonanny any "properly civilized person" has. Or even smaller things, like say, literacy. You'd be astounded the unliteracy rate of some places in the US.
And you know what, many of these people in third world countries know tons of stuff that "cultured" and "educated" people in the US don't. How many of your average US Joe's would die in the wilderness in a day or two? How many could build an over night shelter, let alone a house? Or get their own food without WalMart? Again, I'm not saying everyone needs to quit their day job and become an aborigine (although I fully expect people to accuse me of this) but some basic knowledge of how to stay alive without a fully functional nanny-like society cannot be a bad thing. Technology has become both a timesaver and crutch in this case. People cannot do basic navigation without a GPS, basic math without a calculator, or even (it seems) figure out what food to eat so as not to balloon up to an unhealthy size unless the government (or diet guru) tells them what to eat. We know how to check email but forget basic rules like "don't just give your credit card out to any anonymous person who asks" and blame computers for being too complicated. These are the same people who wouldn't fall for a scam in real life or over the phone but have some strange trust in the computer technology (which they happily do not understand a bit of) that lets them do this.
Many of these things are just non-integrable into people's existing conception of reality, there's simply no existing rules or patterns to start from, to begin to even understand the faintest thing about some of your obvious concepts. Knowledge is a pyramid with a very very wide base my young paduan. And with no one is volunteering to explain these things, to deconstruct the weird rules their grasping brain substitutes for objectively-seemingly-plausible ones, the situation borders hopeless. It just takes experience, it takes experience to build more.
Totally agree, and there are some things that for the life of me I cannot figure out, but that does not mean I'm going to throw my hands up and say "fuck it all, this learning is hard, I'm done".
Computers especially are non-intuivite systems, criticizing people for not understanding is sub-human;
When to use a semicolon has always eluded me, and unless you just screwed up, I learned a case where it is valid
But to the topic at hand, I agree, and this is why I specifically said I don't expect everyone to understand CPU opcodes, but there is no reason why anyone cannot understand what part is the computer, what part i