On the contrary Zimmerman's defense relied on saying that Trayvon physically assaulted him. If the Jury was allowed to know that Trayvon had an established recent history of initiating violent confrontations that would make Zimmerman's statement that he was attacked much more credible. All Zimmerman needed to justify his shooting was to be in fear of losing his life.
Zimmerman's lack of knowledge prior to the incident doesn't factor into it at all because he did not need a reason to follow and ask questions of someone. If that activity had carried on for long enough it could have crossed the line into illegal harassment or stalking, but this happened far to quickly for that to happen here.
While I have little hope of anything happening to the offending lawyers in this case, I believe the judge did say that she would wait to take action until after a verdict was reached. The verdict has now been rendered so hopefully we'll see some action on this soonish.
To me that is all the same. If a variable is only ever a single fixed value then it is not actually a variable, it's just a value that you haven't determined yet. There are plenty of places in math I would guess where variables act just like they do in programming. For instance you could say in math that "A = B * B" The value of A can be any positive number and B can be any number at all, if you pick a number for one you can then determine what the other will be in that case.
The easiest way I can think of to demonstrate the concept of a variable to any idiot would be to ask them how fast they were moving while traveling to the class. Or how much do you weigh and how old are you?
It's even more asinine than that. You have to specify the document exactly that you want. So if you want a copy of an email you need to specify the subject, to and from, time and date, and who knows what else. If there is anything that does not match exactly they can reply that no such document exists and leave it at that.
My only two issues with Steam the no second hand sales/trades and customer service regarding bad product.
I've never sold or cared to sell a game I owned. I have however given games I was done with to a sibling and Steam doesn't allow for that. On the upside I usually can buy and gift them a copy very inexpensively. Whenever Terraria goes on sale for less than a a couple bucks I buy a few copies to gift to people later.
The only other issue I am aware of that does bother me is the stories of people having their entire account locked because they reversed the charge for a game that turned out to not work or was falsely advertised. The fact that they would need to reverse the charge in and of it's self is bad. But that the entire account with it's existing software library can be revoked over a disagreement about a single transaction is pretty rediculous.
The second issue there is the only one I normally spend any time pondering, and it's also why I rarely buy a game that isn't deeply discounted, to minimize my risk. If I get a crap game that won't work or whatever I can write it off as a low cost loss of $5 to $10.
Yes and no. I've known plenty of people that are good leaders in small groups but suck at managing larger groups, and visa versa. The solution to stagnation due to retention of merely competent officers would be to not retain them in the same position and rank if you know you have a more competent person that deserves the position. Letting them go because you hope that the next guy is better is just dumb. And while people might think that crappy officers, especially in the lower ranks make little difference I would disagree. I've seen shops deliberately tank their performance in order to kill the career of an officer they didn't like. Depending on what the shop does that can have much further reaching consequences than just those dozen people. On top of that promotion is often determined by how well your golfing bud^H^H^H boss or commander writes your appraisals. I've seen people given medals where the wording of the award made it sound like they saved the world, when in reality they had broken something themselves and managed to fix it before a critical failure happened.
Exactly! By keeping your US citizen ship you are a paying customer or share holder. If you don't like it you can renounce and leave whenever you wish.
That said if we were not quite so used to meddling in other nations affairs, or at least stuck to the morally justifiable stuff we could probably have lower taxes.
I would agree on the pay factor, although there is a lot to be said for having a brain dead easy job and in fact being able to spend most of your clock time doing leisure reading. I spent around a year and a half as an armed guard and it was cake, cake with very delicous frosting. I finally quit and moved on because I was sick of the employer. I make 3 to 4 times the money now with actual benefits, promotion potential, retirement options and less hours.
I'm not sure how you are equating these changes to making the combat less strategic. Because units don't stack you can only attack another unit or city with a limited number of other units at once, air units can pile on like crazy though. And in the same vein a city can only be defended by a limited number of units because you can't build an infinite stack of units and put them all in one tiny city, again with the exception of fighter and bomber aircraft. This strategy plays out in other ways to like transport, you can only move so many units through a mountain pass in a turn because of the limited room available on either side.
Well a senior captain would of course cost more than a more junior captain. The way it works is that instead of keeping older officers you force them out hoping that the younger crop of officers will be more competent. Instead they should just focus on getting rid of incompetents through out the rank structure, keep the competent officers while actively promoting the stand outs.
Tell that to the drug runners who load up tons of cocaine for their runs in speed boats. Anyways you don't need tons of explosives to do critical damage. Insurgents have been rigging up HEAT rounds as more precise IEDs for years now. Putting them on a speed boat doesn't strike me as particularly challenging.
The gross numbers for people with varying security clearances is a bit of a red herring. For instance unless there is something weird in an enlistees background they automatically are granted a Secret clearance when they finish Basic Training. When I went through there were entire career fields that were tagged for getting Top Secret clearances, even though it might not ever be needed.
So you end up with tons of people who are in theory certified as being trust worthy but never actually are given any kind of access. Many people are given clearances above what they need just in case their is a spillage from a higher classified system. Even when people do have some access it is not universal access, they might have access to only one system or part of a system.
Probing for other systems to access is also not trivial. Google can't crawl airgapped networks so finding anything you don't already have an address for would be difficult even should you have access. I don't know about Snowden but Manning actually had authorized access to the stuff he leaked because his job specifically gave him very broad access to a large number of systems.
In the end a clearance does not automatically translate to access.
Granted my kids are all still pretty young, but I easily spend more on eating out and other personal expenses than I do on my kids. At this point probably the biggest money saver has been networking with other people to get lightly used clothes instead of buying brand new everything. The cost of clothes and shoes for babies and toddlers is just insane.
My kids are also part of my retirement plan. By the time I'm retiring they should be pretty well established and I'll be able to rotate between their homes mooching my way and spoiling grand children as I go.
My Father was in this boat in the 90's if that makes any sense. Anyways he ended up finally getting a job through a contractor at a place that wouldn't even consider his resume previously because he lacked a degree. He actually ended up working for that company for nearly 15 years as a contractor despite his co-workers and managers constantly pushing the HR group to actually hire him as a regular employee. Every few years HR would try to get him kicked out because they had limits on how long a contractor could work there, and every time his bosses would fight tooth and nail to keep him on. The last few years his contract was actually through a close personal friend that just managed the payroll deductions and took a couple percent off the top.
The gas for me is significantly lower than that though I have a short commute and for a drive of that length I suppose that is accurate enough.
Insurance sounds very expensive to me. We own a Corolla and a relatively new minivan. The Corolla is probably worth 25% or less of the van. Together though their full coverage insurance is around $900 a year. $100-$300 a month sounds expensive in the extreme.
The maintenance cost sounds very high to me also but I would recommend saving half that much every month for a vehicular bugdet anyways.
That kind of money can easily get you a car that will last a decade or longer. I drove a twenty year old Corolla for a while and the only thing I had to fix was the battery, even the AC still worked. I'm not trying to knock public transit, especially relatively well done systems. But the savings are only going to be huge for the individual when they are overspending on a car.
Regardless of what the NSA's mission and purpose are they allowed to violate US law in order to accomplish it? And if they are allowed to violate US laws in the course of their job which laws if any are sacrosanct?
If a US citizen travels to another countries jurisdiction and does something which would not be legal for them to do in the US they can still be held accountable in our courts. So where is the NSA's authorization to violate our own laws and which laws specifically?
Buy a good used Corolla for $5000 cash. Figure out how you qualify for coverage through USAA, easily the best insurance I've ever seen while being dirt cheap, I'm paying $100 a month for full coverage on two vehicles. Doing that I bet you wouldn't even come close to $300 a month after fuel. And as an added benefit you don't have to huff an air freshener the whole ride.
There is also the whole issue of how bad a large city smells. I've visited NYC and I loved all the restaurants, bakeries and little shops. But the smell was pretty awful and omnipresent, the subway system smelled even worse and the heat/humidty down there was incredible. The scenary was nonexistant aside from central park. I could see the press of humanity being too much for some people also. I lived all around the greater San Jose area for a couple years and it was a much more pleasant area to live. And even then I'd have to be offered triple my current salary to seriously consider moving there.
I think part of the answer is that automated cars can park themselves much more space efficiently than most drivers manage. How often do you pass up parking spaces because a driver, or two, couldn't manage to park inbetween or parallel with the lines?
Also automated cars that are able to talk to one another could actually use the space on roadways much more efficiently. The safe following distance will be much shorter for a pair of cars that are able to assess a situation, communicate and start taking appropriate action within a time frame that is shorter than your brain can even process what is happening.
One of the most humorous things I keep hearing is that he was just a lowly so-and-so, he wouldn't have that kind of access. Who exactly do these people think is actually running their systems. For a system of this scale there are going to be hundreds of servers if not more and databases of epic proportions. They have to employ a small army of SA's and DBA's running all of that crap. Then you have all kinds of other folks that'll be performing other functions like security checks and such that will need access. I wouldn't be surprised if each of the servers in this system are accessible at the root level by at least 50 people or more whom these big wigs wouldn't even consider as having access. I've worked in places where I helped monitor dozens of different systems and not a one of them would likely have ever thought to list me as someone with 100% unfettered access to their data. Sometimes I think that these people live in a completely different reality than the rest of us, they seriously have no idea of the technicalities involved in the everyday running of their lives and pet projects.
The pay, especially if you are a Civil Servant, is not that awesome. There are other benefits though that warrant mention; up to 5% retirement savings matching, seperate and generous sick and vacation time (4 hours and 4 - 8 hours per pay peried), 1.1% pension per year of work, a good health insurance plan, every Federal Holiday off and then some. While the pay scale isn't so great in the expensive regions it's pretty solid elsewhere, GS-12's are the standard for IT and start at $68K and get another $2k per step increase, in all the localities that don't get a higher adjustment.
The interest can kill you on this. If you aren't buying that home outright you will likely pay twice or more the value of the home over the duration of the loan. And like you said the value of the home may go up or down and those spikes probably won't be timed for your retirement. I belive home ownership is a good idea and am 7 years or so into buying my house. But holding it as your sole retirement plan is a very bad and risky thing to do. You should be diversifying your savings into safer and safer investments as you get closer to retirement, risky is good when you are younger but by the time you are nearly at retirement you'll want 90% or more of your money in very safe assets
I would like to see more front page coverage and discussion of this but I don't know that I want them solely running editorial bits about how evil it is. One of the qualities of Journalism is supposed to be attempting to maintain an unbiased point of view letting the reader/viewer form their own opinions. The opinion bits are editorials and should have their own space clearly marked as such. Although if there ever was a time for waxing editorial this would be it.
The issue with the affair wasn't that he was sleeping with someone that he might betray secrets to. The issue, as with all people who hold clearances is that it is risky behaviour and opened him up to potential blackmail. The fact that once it was revealed it did destroy his career is proof that it was a valid security concern. It's all a bit of a catch 22, and there are plenty more where that came from. Pretty much anything that you could conceivably want to hide from your co-workers can cost you your clearance if it comes up in the wrong way.
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On the contrary Zimmerman's defense relied on saying that Trayvon physically assaulted him. If the Jury was allowed to know that Trayvon had an established recent history of initiating violent confrontations that would make Zimmerman's statement that he was attacked much more credible. All Zimmerman needed to justify his shooting was to be in fear of losing his life.
Zimmerman's lack of knowledge prior to the incident doesn't factor into it at all because he did not need a reason to follow and ask questions of someone. If that activity had carried on for long enough it could have crossed the line into illegal harassment or stalking, but this happened far to quickly for that to happen here.
While I have little hope of anything happening to the offending lawyers in this case, I believe the judge did say that she would wait to take action until after a verdict was reached. The verdict has now been rendered so hopefully we'll see some action on this soonish.
To me that is all the same. If a variable is only ever a single fixed value then it is not actually a variable, it's just a value that you haven't determined yet. There are plenty of places in math I would guess where variables act just like they do in programming. For instance you could say in math that "A = B * B" The value of A can be any positive number and B can be any number at all, if you pick a number for one you can then determine what the other will be in that case.
The easiest way I can think of to demonstrate the concept of a variable to any idiot would be to ask them how fast they were moving while traveling to the class. Or how much do you weigh and how old are you?
It's even more asinine than that. You have to specify the document exactly that you want. So if you want a copy of an email you need to specify the subject, to and from, time and date, and who knows what else. If there is anything that does not match exactly they can reply that no such document exists and leave it at that.
My only two issues with Steam the no second hand sales/trades and customer service regarding bad product.
I've never sold or cared to sell a game I owned. I have however given games I was done with to a sibling and Steam doesn't allow for that. On the upside I usually can buy and gift them a copy very inexpensively. Whenever Terraria goes on sale for less than a a couple bucks I buy a few copies to gift to people later.
The only other issue I am aware of that does bother me is the stories of people having their entire account locked because they reversed the charge for a game that turned out to not work or was falsely advertised. The fact that they would need to reverse the charge in and of it's self is bad. But that the entire account with it's existing software library can be revoked over a disagreement about a single transaction is pretty rediculous.
The second issue there is the only one I normally spend any time pondering, and it's also why I rarely buy a game that isn't deeply discounted, to minimize my risk. If I get a crap game that won't work or whatever I can write it off as a low cost loss of $5 to $10.
Yes and no. I've known plenty of people that are good leaders in small groups but suck at managing larger groups, and visa versa. The solution to stagnation due to retention of merely competent officers would be to not retain them in the same position and rank if you know you have a more competent person that deserves the position. Letting them go because you hope that the next guy is better is just dumb. And while people might think that crappy officers, especially in the lower ranks make little difference I would disagree. I've seen shops deliberately tank their performance in order to kill the career of an officer they didn't like. Depending on what the shop does that can have much further reaching consequences than just those dozen people. On top of that promotion is often determined by how well your golfing bud^H^H^H boss or commander writes your appraisals. I've seen people given medals where the wording of the award made it sound like they saved the world, when in reality they had broken something themselves and managed to fix it before a critical failure happened.
Exactly! By keeping your US citizen ship you are a paying customer or share holder. If you don't like it you can renounce and leave whenever you wish.
That said if we were not quite so used to meddling in other nations affairs, or at least stuck to the morally justifiable stuff we could probably have lower taxes.
I would agree on the pay factor, although there is a lot to be said for having a brain dead easy job and in fact being able to spend most of your clock time doing leisure reading. I spent around a year and a half as an armed guard and it was cake, cake with very delicous frosting. I finally quit and moved on because I was sick of the employer. I make 3 to 4 times the money now with actual benefits, promotion potential, retirement options and less hours.
I'm not sure how you are equating these changes to making the combat less strategic. Because units don't stack you can only attack another unit or city with a limited number of other units at once, air units can pile on like crazy though. And in the same vein a city can only be defended by a limited number of units because you can't build an infinite stack of units and put them all in one tiny city, again with the exception of fighter and bomber aircraft. This strategy plays out in other ways to like transport, you can only move so many units through a mountain pass in a turn because of the limited room available on either side.
Well a senior captain would of course cost more than a more junior captain. The way it works is that instead of keeping older officers you force them out hoping that the younger crop of officers will be more competent. Instead they should just focus on getting rid of incompetents through out the rank structure, keep the competent officers while actively promoting the stand outs.
Tell that to the drug runners who load up tons of cocaine for their runs in speed boats. Anyways you don't need tons of explosives to do critical damage. Insurgents have been rigging up HEAT rounds as more precise IEDs for years now. Putting them on a speed boat doesn't strike me as particularly challenging.
The gross numbers for people with varying security clearances is a bit of a red herring. For instance unless there is something weird in an enlistees background they automatically are granted a Secret clearance when they finish Basic Training. When I went through there were entire career fields that were tagged for getting Top Secret clearances, even though it might not ever be needed.
So you end up with tons of people who are in theory certified as being trust worthy but never actually are given any kind of access. Many people are given clearances above what they need just in case their is a spillage from a higher classified system. Even when people do have some access it is not universal access, they might have access to only one system or part of a system.
Probing for other systems to access is also not trivial. Google can't crawl airgapped networks so finding anything you don't already have an address for would be difficult even should you have access. I don't know about Snowden but Manning actually had authorized access to the stuff he leaked because his job specifically gave him very broad access to a large number of systems.
In the end a clearance does not automatically translate to access.
Granted my kids are all still pretty young, but I easily spend more on eating out and other personal expenses than I do on my kids. At this point probably the biggest money saver has been networking with other people to get lightly used clothes instead of buying brand new everything. The cost of clothes and shoes for babies and toddlers is just insane.
My kids are also part of my retirement plan. By the time I'm retiring they should be pretty well established and I'll be able to rotate between their homes mooching my way and spoiling grand children as I go.
My Father was in this boat in the 90's if that makes any sense. Anyways he ended up finally getting a job through a contractor at a place that wouldn't even consider his resume previously because he lacked a degree. He actually ended up working for that company for nearly 15 years as a contractor despite his co-workers and managers constantly pushing the HR group to actually hire him as a regular employee. Every few years HR would try to get him kicked out because they had limits on how long a contractor could work there, and every time his bosses would fight tooth and nail to keep him on. The last few years his contract was actually through a close personal friend that just managed the payroll deductions and took a couple percent off the top.
The gas for me is significantly lower than that though I have a short commute and for a drive of that length I suppose that is accurate enough.
Insurance sounds very expensive to me. We own a Corolla and a relatively new minivan. The Corolla is probably worth 25% or less of the van. Together though their full coverage insurance is around $900 a year. $100-$300 a month sounds expensive in the extreme.
The maintenance cost sounds very high to me also but I would recommend saving half that much every month for a vehicular bugdet anyways.
That kind of money can easily get you a car that will last a decade or longer. I drove a twenty year old Corolla for a while and the only thing I had to fix was the battery, even the AC still worked. I'm not trying to knock public transit, especially relatively well done systems. But the savings are only going to be huge for the individual when they are overspending on a car.
Regardless of what the NSA's mission and purpose are they allowed to violate US law in order to accomplish it? And if they are allowed to violate US laws in the course of their job which laws if any are sacrosanct?
If a US citizen travels to another countries jurisdiction and does something which would not be legal for them to do in the US they can still be held accountable in our courts. So where is the NSA's authorization to violate our own laws and which laws specifically?
$500-$800 indeed!
Buy a good used Corolla for $5000 cash. Figure out how you qualify for coverage through USAA, easily the best insurance I've ever seen while being dirt cheap, I'm paying $100 a month for full coverage on two vehicles. Doing that I bet you wouldn't even come close to $300 a month after fuel. And as an added benefit you don't have to huff an air freshener the whole ride.
There is also the whole issue of how bad a large city smells. I've visited NYC and I loved all the restaurants, bakeries and little shops. But the smell was pretty awful and omnipresent, the subway system smelled even worse and the heat/humidty down there was incredible. The scenary was nonexistant aside from central park. I could see the press of humanity being too much for some people also. I lived all around the greater San Jose area for a couple years and it was a much more pleasant area to live. And even then I'd have to be offered triple my current salary to seriously consider moving there.
Prior art I would suppose.
Myself I would think that using microwaves to sterilize your enemies might be more effective.
I think part of the answer is that automated cars can park themselves much more space efficiently than most drivers manage. How often do you pass up parking spaces because a driver, or two, couldn't manage to park inbetween or parallel with the lines?
Also automated cars that are able to talk to one another could actually use the space on roadways much more efficiently. The safe following distance will be much shorter for a pair of cars that are able to assess a situation, communicate and start taking appropriate action within a time frame that is shorter than your brain can even process what is happening.
One of the most humorous things I keep hearing is that he was just a lowly so-and-so, he wouldn't have that kind of access. Who exactly do these people think is actually running their systems. For a system of this scale there are going to be hundreds of servers if not more and databases of epic proportions. They have to employ a small army of SA's and DBA's running all of that crap. Then you have all kinds of other folks that'll be performing other functions like security checks and such that will need access. I wouldn't be surprised if each of the servers in this system are accessible at the root level by at least 50 people or more whom these big wigs wouldn't even consider as having access. I've worked in places where I helped monitor dozens of different systems and not a one of them would likely have ever thought to list me as someone with 100% unfettered access to their data. Sometimes I think that these people live in a completely different reality than the rest of us, they seriously have no idea of the technicalities involved in the everyday running of their lives and pet projects.
The pay, especially if you are a Civil Servant, is not that awesome. There are other benefits though that warrant mention; up to 5% retirement savings matching, seperate and generous sick and vacation time (4 hours and 4 - 8 hours per pay peried), 1.1% pension per year of work, a good health insurance plan, every Federal Holiday off and then some. While the pay scale isn't so great in the expensive regions it's pretty solid elsewhere, GS-12's are the standard for IT and start at $68K and get another $2k per step increase, in all the localities that don't get a higher adjustment.
The interest can kill you on this. If you aren't buying that home outright you will likely pay twice or more the value of the home over the duration of the loan. And like you said the value of the home may go up or down and those spikes probably won't be timed for your retirement. I belive home ownership is a good idea and am 7 years or so into buying my house. But holding it as your sole retirement plan is a very bad and risky thing to do. You should be diversifying your savings into safer and safer investments as you get closer to retirement, risky is good when you are younger but by the time you are nearly at retirement you'll want 90% or more of your money in very safe assets
I would like to see more front page coverage and discussion of this but I don't know that I want them solely running editorial bits about how evil it is. One of the qualities of Journalism is supposed to be attempting to maintain an unbiased point of view letting the reader/viewer form their own opinions. The opinion bits are editorials and should have their own space clearly marked as such. Although if there ever was a time for waxing editorial this would be it.
The issue with the affair wasn't that he was sleeping with someone that he might betray secrets to. The issue, as with all people who hold clearances is that it is risky behaviour and opened him up to potential blackmail. The fact that once it was revealed it did destroy his career is proof that it was a valid security concern. It's all a bit of a catch 22, and there are plenty more where that came from. Pretty much anything that you could conceivably want to hide from your co-workers can cost you your clearance if it comes up in the wrong way.