Any kind of sustained, concentrated thinking does this. The brain is very reactive and adapts quickly , instantly to stresses put on it in terms of not only coordination , balance and physical skill but also higher cognitive functions, abstract reasoning, emotional reasoning, meditation, self control, anything you can name. I have noticed generally the more vascular and active the tissue, the faster it adapts. Brains change like that. Muscles recover after 5 or so days. Tendons take weeks to heal. Bones take a even longer to heal (change).
Franklin sued to pay people to steal corpses so he and his friends could dissect them and learn about anatomy. This was very highly illegal in Colonial America. They had a basement in a where he was staying . It was a part of the Enlighenment impulse to to come to understand reality through natural science without the *benefit* of the intermediaries of his day the Church and the King, who were glad to tell you everything you needed to know about any topic whatsoever.
As is sometimes the case with facts about historical Americans you have to go overseas to get a unbiased analysis of what was going on. US web pages will tell you Franklin this universally curious and endlessly inventive guy, golly, just knew nothing about what was happening in the basement of the house he lived- he was more interested in non-squimish subject matter like physics . Overseas of course they're less sensitive to the idea that one of our Founding Fathers may have been involved in grave robbing and dissecting corpses merely for curiosity's sake:
The article is filled with inaccuracies which all support this person's conclusion that, essentially "ho hum, nothing can be done and nothing will be done".
It's in the scope of domestic intelligence that we can see the most likelihood of change. Unfortunately, much smart money is now going on the bet that in the long run the result of all these revelations will actually be more domestic surveillance (under various changing names and labels) not less!
First he cites that bastion of liberal liberty, equality and fraternity, France, explicit legalization of their spy agency's domestic surveillance as evidence that the EU is "going there" en masse, with the spy agencies chortling all the way.:
For example, just weeks ago, and shortly after a high level French ex-intelligence official was quoted as saying essentially that "we don't resent NSA, we simply envy them!" France passed legislation legalizing a vast range of repressive domestic surveillance practices.
News stories immediately proclaimed this to be an enormous expansion of French spying. But observers in the know noted that in reality this kind of surveillance had been going on by the French government for a very long time -- the new legislation simply made it explicitly legal.
The reality is much more nuanced in a number of important ways.
First note that the EU directive that mandates private carriers retain IP and telephony metadata , the EU Data Retention Directive, stipulates a much shorter time frame- just two years- than the "forever and a day" time frame the NSA allows itself.
This is not nothing. It's harder to blackmail politicians for what they did in their youths if you don't happen to have that data laying around to mine at the time they become politicians later in life.
In general it limits the time frame at which abuse could be aided by super-god-knowledge of the target's most intimate details.
Neither does the fact of the DRD in EU support this statement:
So, the handwriting appears increasingly clear. Pressure will rise to move the responsibility for holding this data corpus from NSA per se, back to the carriers or perhaps some ersatz independent org, but the data will still be collected. And despite calls for more limited access by NSA and other agencies , one can safely assume that whatever access they say they really, truly need for national security, they're going to get -- one way or another. There's simply no obvious way that there will be a real return to any actual, meaningful, truly individualized search warrant requirement (no matter how any changes are ostensibly framed to the public).
The reason it doesn't support it is because, under the DRD, a *court order* is needed by the intelligence agencies before they can access the metadata held by the telcos. That is a significant barrier, and in fact more in line with what has traditionally been the case in the US and which falls within societal comfort levels - a search warrant being issued to the police upon presentation of probably cause to a court.
Secondly, and in contrast to the tone of this blog entry, there is significant political resistance within the EU by a number of nations which has resulted in the rejection of the DRD by the highest courts of the respective nations.
Nations now fighting the Directive include Cyprus, Czech Republic, Germany, Greece, and Romania. The DRD was adopted in Romania, but declared unconstitutional in 2009. In February 2011, Cyprus declared their national data retention law unconstitutional. The Courts in Bulgaria declared their mandatory data retention laws unconstitutional and the German law adopting the Directive was declared unconstitutional in March 2010.
In March 2011, the law tra
Now they can do this with armed with evidence. Or not. People aren't machines created to adjudicate based on evidence. For those who are interested in doing so however, it's there to support or refute their arguments. This is a good thing since *there is no other working alternative to deciding things on a rational basis*.
The government never does anything to any established university or the elites that populate them. This has to be counted as an industry, like the Too Big To Fail banks and the oil companies and the telcos, whose members are elites and have an entirely different set of rules applied to them.
Consider the price of university; it's purely a product of government subsidies with no relation to either the overall economy or the customer's ability to pay. In order to sustain these prices, bankruptcy protection has had to be removed from their customers. This would be the same bankruptcy protection enjoyed by Lehman Brothers after they were their first of the banks to implode during 2008 financial fraud, and which allowed Lehman Brothers CEO take a taxpayer funded deca-million dollar golden parachute out the door.
There are not even ordinary consumer protections for a lousy product. If I buy something and it's just terrible, I can take it back. If I take a class and it's a joke and the prof is unintelligible , I have no way of getting my money back.
A slap on the wrist? You don't say? The scales of justice will make up for the imbalance. We'll jail-for-life some inner city kid in California who's third strike is selling a dime bag and whose first tow strikes were a schoolyard fight and shoplifting. After all, THOSE people are the ones committing crimes form whom society desperately needs to be protected....
For some of the younger readers: snapchat can't actually guarantee that your photo is deleted, so don't send anything you don't want all over the web, as ever.
For instance, anyone you send your photo to could screen capture your photo before it disappears, then pass that screen capture around.
Someone could also be between you and your recipient and be capturing everything you send.
It's just wrong, that's all. Wrong because our emails are *clearly* the "papers" mentioned in the Constitution. If there's a law that makes 3rd party possession of same somehow the equivalent of "it suddenly not being yours" then it's THAT law that has to go. This is how it is in most of Europe BTW. YOU control your phone records, not Verizon.
I could almost live with TIA if I thought that it would only be accessed via a court order, but that's not what we have. What we have is secret FISA orders, executed in secret, using secret criteria in accord with secret interpretations of secret executive orders.
I sympathize with this judge's concerns, I do, but the real world consequences of what they're doing are more likely to be worse than the real world consequences of stopping them from doing it, even if we have another 9-11 every year.
Our democracy will not survive if the government can data mine all our "anonymous" data until programs it wrote decide that we fit a "profile" and THAT itself constitutes "reasonable suspicion". This can be used to stifle all dissent, and will be used for exactly that, starting, obviously, with people who speak out against the legitimacy of this process in the first place. A guy like Howard Zinn would just be destroyed by this.. we wouldn't have legitimate dissent in this nation.
Here's something that should help people think clearly on this topic. The NSA line operators and management REFUSED to permit the NSA to apply the same level of monitoring to THEM as they apply to us. They didn't want Congress to second guess them or know what they were doing.
(Binney) ".. also explained that NSA never developed and implemented technology in order to have the capabilities to track activities by employees on the agencyâ(TM)s systems because of two groups of people: the analysts and management.
The analysts âoerealized that what that would be doing is monitoring everything they did and assessing what they were doing. They objected. They didnâ(TM)t want to be monitored.â
Management resisted because it meant one would be âoeable to assess returns on all the programs around the world.â It would be possible to âoelay out all the programs in the world and map [them] against the spending and the return on investment.â
It meant the agency would be âoeexposed to Congress for auditing,â Binney added.â Management did not want that."
But this is the ONE thing that MUST be implemented. If an NSA operator cuts a fart, I want Congress to be able to know what he had for lunch. Unwatched watchers cannot be permitted to exist. Period.
At the heart of what's going on here is the people at the NSA are looking into their own hearts and deciding that they're all right and the American public has nothing to fear from them or their intentions. Bully for them, I'm sure it's true, but they won't always be there.
It's not about them or their intentions. It's about the institution, the process, *the machine* and how we're building that machine.
You can't say to yourself, as an NSA employee, by way of assuaging your own secret apprehensions, "Well, if push ever does come to shove, if it came right down to it, an unconstitutional, openly fascist-level of abuse would just never happen because WE'D never permit it". At least, you can't tell yourself that and also bash guys like Snowden and Binney because THOSE guys , whom you hate so much they make you grind your teeth , they're exactly the hypothetical WE you posit in the above safeguard. It doesn't look any different that THIS.. THIS THIS that is before your ey
God what assholes. It's about the government's INCLINATION and POWER to track down and ruin people they unilaterally deem to be "against them" where "them" is whatever current administration has the power. Can't they fucking see the difference? If Google starts disappearing people or neutralizing their lives, they're running the risk of being caught because they're breaking the law.
It's about data mining and having a real identity to work on, that's all. This is just bullshit from some fucking PR firm hired to float a cover story and try to build a false version of reality- people like not being able to be anonymous. False versions of reality are what PR firms exist to create.
The current iron-clad Texas misegenation law is the result of years of lobbying by the powerful and well-connected Texas Apartheid Dealers Association (TADA), founded and run for 30 years by legendary Texas slaver Buford T Justice
your point seems to be if an industry can capture a legislature fair n' square then that's all on the up and up and should changing times force exposure of the resulting outrageous and ridiculous laws to the light of day and consequently people have a PROBLEM with those laws , well, they should just mind their own business and STFU.
I think this is what people are saying. At least, it's what I am saying. You're trying to make it all about when the laws were passed or how long they've been around distorting market conditions.
But no one else CARES about that detail because it's IRRELEVANT to the fact this is nothing more than a regressive and unjust good ole' boys system which is bought and paid for by its direct beneficiaries. The longevity of the law is 100% irrelevant and yes, it IS currently being used by oil-loving Texas and its oil billionaires to keep an electric car off the road in Texas
Try OOMA. If you can get it to work, it's great. You only have ot pay some small telephone regulatory fees each month if you don't upgrade to their 100 / year package.
What we ought to do is just let Munis have community WIFI. They have actually been stopped by the courts by the telcos. Sorry, but that is just corruption. The idea that private corporations can stop the democratically elected local governments from enacting laws which are otherwise not unconsitutional is new to me and I wonder where the legal basis for such comes from.
People need to wake up and educate themselves as to what's at stake here. Allowing auction style bidding wars for bandwidth to decide the price of bandwidth is preposterous. Should we do the same thing for access to highways? Maybe make trucking companies bid for the right to use them? I wonder what effect that would have on competition and ultimately the price of delivered goods , i.e. everything.
The fact is the FCC is a fox watching the henhouse. These people just need to go on back to their true home- the industry to be regulated- and let actual regulators attend to the process of regulation for the general welfare of society. It's not that hard to get straight on this, people just need to contact their representatives and let them know they're aware of this issue and how they feel. The telcos don't HAVE a constituency they didn't purchase and their pockets are not that deep. The solution is all about education and communication- it's not even a left-right partisan issue. Call your Congressperson and tell them how where you stand. This is how democracy works people.
Texas law dictates that only franchised dealers can sell cars in the state.
Tesla, of course, has no dealers. It markets its cars through company-owned stores or galleries (think: Apple Store) and buyers complete the sale online through company headquarters in California."
The current iron-clad Texas franchise law is the result of years of lobbying by the powerful and well-connected Texas Auto Dealers Association (TADA), founded and run for 30 years by legendary Texas lobbyist Gene Fondren.
In 2012, dealership interests "invested" more than $2.5 million in the Texas legislative elections, according to the the watchdog group Texans For Public Justice. Sixty percent of Texas lawmakers received checks from TADA in 2012.
Two elderly billionaire car dealers, Tom Friedkin and Red McCombs--the latter is also chairman of the former Blackwater security firm--kicked in more than a million dollars between them.
Tesla, meanwhile, made no direct political contributions.
Texas will start offering $2,500 rebates for electric or compressed natural gas vehicles, according to the Houston Chronicle.
Except, of course, if you're buying a Tesla. Tesla Motors Inc. (Nasdaq: TSLA), based in Palo Alto, Calif., makes high performance, 100-percent electric cars. Because the cars are sold directly from the manufacturer, rather than from a franchise dealership, they don't qualify for the Texas incentive.
It's the latest blow in the Texas versus Tesla war thatâ(TM)s been brewing ever since the car-maker charged onto the scene with its two-seat roadster in 2008.
Dealerships lobbied hard during the legislative session to prevent Tesla-friendly laws from passing and were successful. The state's franchise laws limit what Tesla salespeople and technicians can do in the state, leaving it up to Tesla owners themselves to offer test drives and spread the word about the car.
Other shenanigans from Comcast includes: Charging extra ($35) for the battery inside the cable modem to keep the telephony working during blackouts
Get OOMA, the get used to paying virtually nothing in the way of a bill . Get a UPS that kicks in when the elec goes out. It will run your router + OOMA for a *very* long time.
Also. The FCC is filled to the gills with politically well connected, revolving door sycophants there to do industry's bidding before jumping back on the gravy train. It's the poster child for a watchdog agency overrun and infested with regulatory saboteurs and common's-hating overpavers.
Tesla is a danger to the prostitute and coke habits of the CEOs and members of board of every Established Car Maker in the world. It should therefore be banned.
I am glad to see Texas is leading the way in this regard. Y'all don't Don't Mess With Texas!
God yes . AJAX == JAXASS . This whole fucking AJAX "responsive web" shit. I can think of very few sites that this is actually a boon to, yet they all have to have it. Javascript is NOT a programming language -Turing be damned- it's a fucking scripting language with severe limitations and exceeding those limitations requires the quote from Dr Johnson: after seeing a dog walk dog walk on it's hinder quarters- he commented
"the wonder is not that the thing was done well, its that it can be done at all."
Exactly. So you made javascript make your p0rn stars boobs look like they're going BOOMBA BOOMBA.. wow. Thanks for that.
Hyperlinks work people, hyperlinks work. And if they're fucking blue, people, if they're fucking blue people know WTF they are and where the fuck to find them and what the fuck to expect when they click on them.
". However over time those "A-players" with excellent skills become lazy and sloppy, because of the mediocre environment that surrounds them."
Uh. Part of the definition of an A-player is they're self motivated and willing to extend themselves vigorously into every task. They also want enough authority to *seek consensus to make changes* rather than wait for the next todo list to be issued by their idiot manager.
So no, it's not their B-player team that is dragging them down.
In fact, the environments I have been in which everyone was an A-Player or acted like one, or felt they had to act like one were the WORST for actual resultant productivity because the people who survive those environments aren't the A-iest of A-Players, they're the most devious, withholding, backstabbing and politically savvy of the assembled A-Players who have as their constant targets their nearest rivals.
Malcom Galdwell has a great article about this phenomena of anti-productivity that results from super competitive environments in exclusive universities. The upshot is that a lot of our most talented people QUIT their fields - to our everlasting detriment- because in hyper competitive environments they feel disoriented, diminished, inadequate, undermined and unsupported, especially since they tend to come from supportive high schools which want them to excel.
In Netflix case, there's also a huge amount of disingenuity built into the argument. Claims of "desperate labor shortages" and "inadequate pool of qualified candidates" for tech jobs is literally the oldest trick in the book to flood the market with labor and drive down prices for labor. Netflix is just a fucking liar. Believe it or not, they did the same thing with sous chefs in the 80-s and 90s they ALWAYS do the same thing whenever anyone in the middle class starts threatening to partake of the profits. They go to Congress and say "eh, this whole free market thing really sucks, who wants to pay according to supply and demand? We need to up supply- a lot. Give us another 20 million work visas. Here's your reelection cash. Same arrangement as last time. Thanks"
This is the eternal narcissism of the CEO, whose employment picture will never be anywhere as volatile- irrespective of his performance or the pool of qualified candidates who could do his job better than he does at 1/5 the cost to the company. This basically is the degenerate thinking of some guy who walks around with two people behind him holding up the train of his cape.
So what's the take away lesson? Don't apply to Netflix, for sure. Also, drop Netflix if you hate companies with abusive labor practices. "Use We only hire A Players ! " notices on jobs as code for "Do Not Apply" and "no thanks" to headhunters. f you're an A-Player Seek seek small company environments that say yes to initiative and are grateful for your efforts. If you're this type of person, you know there is no higher high than making cool shit people love.
Slashdot Mirror
Any kind of sustained, concentrated thinking does this. The brain is very reactive and adapts quickly , instantly to stresses put on it in terms of not only coordination , balance and physical skill but also higher cognitive functions, abstract reasoning, emotional reasoning, meditation, self control, anything you can name. I have noticed generally the more vascular and active the tissue, the faster it adapts. Brains change like that. Muscles recover after 5 or so days. Tendons take weeks to heal. Bones take a even longer to heal (change).
Franklin sued to pay people to steal corpses so he and his friends could dissect them and learn about anatomy. This was very highly illegal in Colonial America. They had a basement in a where he was staying . It was a part of the Enlighenment impulse to to come to understand reality through natural science without the *benefit* of the intermediaries of his day the Church and the King, who were glad to tell you everything you needed to know about any topic whatsoever.
As is sometimes the case with facts about historical Americans you have to go overseas to get a unbiased analysis of what was going on. US web pages will tell you Franklin this universally curious and endlessly inventive guy, golly, just knew nothing about what was happening in the basement of the house he lived- he was more interested in non-squimish subject matter like physics . Overseas of course they're less sensitive to the idea that one of our Founding Fathers may have been involved in grave robbing and dissecting corpses merely for curiosity's sake:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/aug/11/usa.past
The article is filled with inaccuracies which all support this person's conclusion that, essentially "ho hum, nothing can be done and nothing will be done".
It's in the scope of domestic intelligence that we can see the most likelihood of change. Unfortunately, much smart money is now going on the bet that in the long run the result of all these revelations will actually be more domestic surveillance (under various changing names and labels) not less!
First he cites that bastion of liberal liberty, equality and fraternity, France, explicit legalization of their spy agency's domestic surveillance as evidence that the EU is "going there" en masse, with the spy agencies chortling all the way.:
For example, just weeks ago, and shortly after a high level French ex-intelligence official was quoted as saying essentially that "we don't resent NSA, we simply envy them!" France passed legislation legalizing a vast range of repressive domestic surveillance practices.
News stories immediately proclaimed this to be an enormous expansion of French spying. But observers in the know noted that in reality this kind of surveillance had been going on by the French government for a very long time -- the new legislation simply made it explicitly legal.
The reality is much more nuanced in a number of important ways.
First note that the EU directive that mandates private carriers retain IP and telephony metadata , the EU Data Retention Directive, stipulates a much shorter time frame- just two years- than the "forever and a day" time frame the NSA allows itself.
This is not nothing. It's harder to blackmail politicians for what they did in their youths if you don't happen to have that data laying around to mine at the time they become politicians later in life.
In general it limits the time frame at which abuse could be aided by super-god-knowledge of the target's most intimate details.
Neither does the fact of the DRD in EU support this statement:
So, the handwriting appears increasingly clear. Pressure will rise to move the responsibility for holding this data corpus from NSA per se, back to the carriers or perhaps some ersatz independent org, but the data will still be collected. And despite calls for more limited access by NSA and other agencies , one can safely assume that whatever access they say they really, truly need for national security, they're going to get -- one way or another. There's simply no obvious way that there will be a real return to any actual, meaningful, truly individualized search warrant requirement (no matter how any changes are ostensibly framed to the public).
The reason it doesn't support it is because, under the DRD, a *court order* is needed by the intelligence agencies before they can access the metadata held by the telcos. That is a significant barrier, and in fact more in line with what has traditionally been the case in the US and which falls within societal comfort levels - a search warrant being issued to the police upon presentation of probably cause to a court.
Secondly, and in contrast to the tone of this blog entry, there is significant political resistance within the EU by a number of nations which has resulted in the rejection of the DRD by the highest courts of the respective nations.
https://www.eff.org/issues/mandatory-data-retention/eu
Nations now fighting the Directive include Cyprus, Czech Republic, Germany, Greece, and Romania. The DRD was adopted in Romania, but declared unconstitutional in 2009. In February 2011, Cyprus declared their national data retention law unconstitutional. The Courts in Bulgaria declared their mandatory data retention laws unconstitutional and the German law adopting the Directive was declared unconstitutional in March 2010. In March 2011, the law tra
The cure for a lack of sunshine is more and better sunshine
Please god not me. Please god not me....Please god ....
They're hiding under the floorboards!
They're hiding under the floorboards!
My kids are hiding under the floorboards !!!!!!
Now they can do this with armed with evidence. Or not. People aren't machines created to adjudicate based on evidence. For those who are interested in doing so however, it's there to support or refute their arguments. This is a good thing since *there is no other working alternative to deciding things on a rational basis*.
I think transparency is intended to forestall the structural imbalances which create jealousy in the first place.
The government never does anything to any established university or the elites that populate them. This has to be counted as an industry, like the Too Big To Fail banks and the oil companies and the telcos, whose members are elites and have an entirely different set of rules applied to them.
Consider the price of university; it's purely a product of government subsidies with no relation to either the overall economy or the customer's ability to pay. In order to sustain these prices, bankruptcy protection has had to be removed from their customers. This would be the same bankruptcy protection enjoyed by Lehman Brothers after they were their first of the banks to implode during 2008 financial fraud, and which allowed Lehman Brothers CEO take a taxpayer funded deca-million dollar golden parachute out the door.
There are not even ordinary consumer protections for a lousy product. If I buy something and it's just terrible, I can take it back. If I take a class and it's a joke and the prof is unintelligible , I have no way of getting my money back.
A slap on the wrist? You don't say? The scales of justice will make up for the imbalance. We'll jail-for-life some inner city kid in California who's third strike is selling a dime bag and whose first tow strikes were a schoolyard fight and shoplifting. After all, THOSE people are the ones committing crimes form whom society desperately needs to be protected....
For some of the younger readers: snapchat can't actually guarantee that your photo is deleted, so don't send anything you don't want all over the web, as ever.
For instance, anyone you send your photo to could screen capture your photo before it disappears, then pass that screen capture around.
Someone could also be between you and your recipient and be capturing everything you send.
Just so you know.
Nice comment. Good points, good job, thanks.
Should have been secret FISA COURTS COURTS...obviously
It's just wrong, that's all. Wrong because our emails are *clearly* the "papers" mentioned in the Constitution. If there's a law that makes 3rd party possession of same somehow the equivalent of "it suddenly not being yours" then it's THAT law that has to go. This is how it is in most of Europe BTW. YOU control your phone records, not Verizon.
I could almost live with TIA if I thought that it would only be accessed via a court order, but that's not what we have. What we have is secret FISA orders, executed in secret, using secret criteria in accord with secret interpretations of secret executive orders.
I sympathize with this judge's concerns, I do, but the real world consequences of what they're doing are more likely to be worse than the real world consequences of stopping them from doing it, even if we have another 9-11 every year.
Our democracy will not survive if the government can data mine all our "anonymous" data until programs it wrote decide that we fit a "profile" and THAT itself constitutes "reasonable suspicion". This can be used to stifle all dissent, and will be used for exactly that, starting, obviously, with people who speak out against the legitimacy of this process in the first place. A guy like Howard Zinn would just be destroyed by this.. we wouldn't have legitimate dissent in this nation.
Here's something that should help people think clearly on this topic. The NSA line operators and management REFUSED to permit the NSA to apply the same level of monitoring to THEM as they apply to us. They didn't want Congress to second guess them or know what they were doing.
(Binney) ".. also explained that NSA never developed and implemented technology in order to have the capabilities to track activities by employees on the agencyâ(TM)s systems because of two groups of people: the analysts and management.
The analysts âoerealized that what that would be doing is monitoring everything they did and assessing what they were doing. They objected. They didnâ(TM)t want to be monitored.â
Management resisted because it meant one would be âoeable to assess returns on all the programs around the world.â It would be possible to âoelay out all the programs in the world and map [them] against the spending and the return on investment.â
It meant the agency would be âoeexposed to Congress for auditing,â Binney added.â Management did not want that."
From:
http://dissenter.firedoglake.com/2013/12/27/interview-with-nsa-whistleblower-bill-binney-afraid-were-spreading-secret-government-around-world/
But this is the ONE thing that MUST be implemented. If an NSA operator cuts a fart, I want Congress to be able to know what he had for lunch. Unwatched watchers cannot be permitted to exist. Period.
At the heart of what's going on here is the people at the NSA are looking into their own hearts and deciding that they're all right and the American public has nothing to fear from them or their intentions. Bully for them, I'm sure it's true, but they won't always be there.
It's not about them or their intentions. It's about the institution, the process, *the machine* and how we're building that machine.
You can't say to yourself, as an NSA employee, by way of assuaging your own secret apprehensions, "Well, if push ever does come to shove, if it came right down to it, an unconstitutional, openly fascist-level of abuse would just never happen because WE'D never permit it". At least, you can't tell yourself that and also bash guys like Snowden and Binney because THOSE guys , whom you hate so much they make you grind your teeth , they're exactly the hypothetical WE you posit in the above safeguard. It doesn't look any different that THIS .. THIS THIS that is before your ey
God what assholes. It's about the government's INCLINATION and POWER to track down and ruin people they unilaterally deem to be "against them" where "them" is whatever current administration has the power. Can't they fucking see the difference? If Google starts disappearing people or neutralizing their lives, they're running the risk of being caught because they're breaking the law.
It's about data mining and having a real identity to work on, that's all. This is just bullshit from some fucking PR firm hired to float a cover story and try to build a false version of reality- people like not being able to be anonymous. False versions of reality are what PR firms exist to create.
Thin Thread
http://www.businessinsider.com/nsa-whistleblower-william-binney-was-right-2013-6
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThinThread
http://www.whistleblower.org/program-areas/homeland-security-a-human-rights/surveillance/nsa-whistleblowers-bill-binney-a-j-kirk-wiebe
Binney.
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/backissues/2013/06/takes-the-nsas-surveillance-programs.html
http://www.democracynow.org/2012/4/20/exclusive_national_security_agency_whistleblower_william
http://publicintelligence.net/binney-nsa-declaration/
Reinstate him as DNI.
FTFY:
The current iron-clad Texas misegenation law is the result of years of lobbying by the powerful and well-connected Texas Apartheid Dealers Association (TADA), founded and run for 30 years by legendary Texas slaver Buford T Justice
your point seems to be if an industry can capture a legislature fair n' square then that's all on the up and up and should changing times force exposure of the resulting outrageous and ridiculous laws to the light of day and consequently people have a PROBLEM with those laws , well, they should just mind their own business and STFU.
I think this is what people are saying. At least, it's what I am saying. You're trying to make it all about when the laws were passed or how long they've been around distorting market conditions.
But no one else CARES about that detail because it's IRRELEVANT to the fact this is nothing more than a regressive and unjust good ole' boys system which is bought and paid for by its direct beneficiaries. The longevity of the law is 100% irrelevant and yes, it IS currently being used by oil-loving Texas and its oil billionaires to keep an electric car off the road in Texas
Try OOMA. If you can get it to work, it's great. You only have ot pay some small telephone regulatory fees each month if you don't upgrade to their 100 / year package.
What we ought to do is just let Munis have community WIFI. They have actually been stopped by the courts by the telcos. Sorry, but that is just corruption. The idea that private corporations can stop the democratically elected local governments from enacting laws which are otherwise not unconsitutional is new to me and I wonder where the legal basis for such comes from.
People need to wake up and educate themselves as to what's at stake here. Allowing auction style bidding wars for bandwidth to decide the price of bandwidth is preposterous. Should we do the same thing for access to highways? Maybe make trucking companies bid for the right to use them? I wonder what effect that would have on competition and ultimately the price of delivered goods , i.e. everything.
The fact is the FCC is a fox watching the henhouse. These people just need to go on back to their true home- the industry to be regulated- and let actual regulators attend to the process of regulation for the general welfare of society. It's not that hard to get straight on this, people just need to contact their representatives and let them know they're aware of this issue and how they feel. The telcos don't HAVE a constituency they didn't purchase and their pockets are not that deep. The solution is all about education and communication- it's not even a left-right partisan issue. Call your Congressperson and tell them how where you stand. This is how democracy works people.
.
Sure thing El-ron.
http://www.greencarreports.com/news/1087815_tesla-underground-texas-franchise-rules-make-model-s-owners-skirt-the-law
Texas law dictates that only franchised dealers can sell cars in the state.
Tesla, of course, has no dealers. It markets its cars through company-owned stores or galleries (think: Apple Store) and buyers complete the sale online through company headquarters in California."
The current iron-clad Texas franchise law is the result of years of lobbying by the powerful and well-connected Texas Auto Dealers Association (TADA), founded and run for 30 years by legendary Texas lobbyist Gene Fondren.
In 2012, dealership interests "invested" more than $2.5 million in the Texas legislative elections, according to the the watchdog group Texans For Public Justice. Sixty percent of Texas lawmakers received checks from TADA in 2012.
Two elderly billionaire car dealers, Tom Friedkin and Red McCombs--the latter is also chairman of the former Blackwater security firm--kicked in more than a million dollars between them.
Tesla, meanwhile, made no direct political contributions.
http://www.bizjournals.com/dallas/news/2013/11/06/tesla-left-out-of-texas-new-electric.html
Texas will start offering $2,500 rebates for electric or compressed natural gas vehicles, according to the Houston Chronicle.
Except, of course, if you're buying a Tesla.
Tesla Motors Inc. (Nasdaq: TSLA), based in Palo Alto, Calif., makes high performance, 100-percent electric cars. Because the cars are sold directly from the manufacturer, rather than from a franchise dealership, they don't qualify for the Texas incentive.
It's the latest blow in the Texas versus Tesla war thatâ(TM)s been brewing ever since the car-maker charged onto the scene with its two-seat roadster in 2008.
Dealerships lobbied hard during the legislative session to prevent Tesla-friendly laws from passing and were successful. The state's franchise laws limit what Tesla salespeople and technicians can do in the state, leaving it up to Tesla owners themselves to offer test drives and spread the word about the car.
Other shenanigans from Comcast includes: Charging extra ($35) for the battery inside the cable modem to keep the telephony working during blackouts
Get OOMA, the get used to paying virtually nothing in the way of a bill . Get a UPS that kicks in when the elec goes out. It will run your router + OOMA for a *very* long time.
Done.
Spoken with all the intelligence, insight acumen and sincerity of a bought-and-paid-for sock puppet employed by a major PR firm.
Don't you have another issue you're supposed to be spamming online forums with industry speak for ?
Better get working down today's list or you're going to be out of a job pretty soon, bitch.
Shoot anyone against it.
Also. The FCC is filled to the gills with politically well connected, revolving door sycophants there to do industry's bidding before jumping back on the gravy train. It's the poster child for a watchdog agency overrun and infested with regulatory saboteurs and common's-hating overpavers.
http://www.npr.org/2011/05/20/136492206/new-republic-the-fccs-revolving-door-is-shameless
http://www.opensecrets.org/revolving/search_result.php?agency=Federal+Communications+Commission&id=EIFCC
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A62718-2004Nov19.html
http://articles.latimes.com/2013/aug/30/business/la-fi-mo-powell-20130830
http://www.theverge.com/2012/11/20/3670940/michael-powell-fcc-chariman-cable-companies-mercy-contet
Tesla is a danger to the prostitute and coke habits of the CEOs and members of board of every Established Car Maker in the world. It should therefore be banned.
I am glad to see Texas is leading the way in this regard. Y'all don't Don't Mess With Texas!
http://jalopnik.com/how-texas-absurd-anti-tesla-laws-turn-car-buying-into-1451492195
Also: yeeeeeeeHAW!
God yes . AJAX == JAXASS . This whole fucking AJAX "responsive web" shit. I can think of very few sites that this is actually a boon to, yet they all have to have it. Javascript is NOT a programming language -Turing be damned- it's a fucking scripting language with severe limitations and exceeding those limitations requires the quote from Dr Johnson: after seeing a dog walk dog walk on it's hinder quarters- he commented
"the wonder is not that the thing was done well, its that it can be done at all."
Exactly. So you made javascript make your p0rn stars boobs look like they're going BOOMBA BOOMBA .. wow. Thanks for that.
Hyperlinks work people, hyperlinks work. And if they're fucking blue, people, if they're fucking blue people know WTF they are and where the fuck to find them and what the fuck to expect when they click on them.
". However over time those "A-players" with excellent skills become lazy and sloppy, because of the mediocre environment that surrounds them."
Uh. Part of the definition of an A-player is they're self motivated and willing to extend themselves vigorously into every task. They also want enough authority to *seek consensus to make changes* rather than wait for the next todo list to be issued by their idiot manager.
So no, it's not their B-player team that is dragging them down.
In fact, the environments I have been in which everyone was an A-Player or acted like one, or felt they had to act like one were the WORST for actual resultant productivity because the people who survive those environments aren't the A-iest of A-Players, they're the most devious, withholding, backstabbing and politically savvy of the assembled A-Players who have as their constant targets their nearest rivals.
Malcom Galdwell has a great article about this phenomena of anti-productivity that results from super competitive environments in exclusive universities. The upshot is that a lot of our most talented people QUIT their fields - to our everlasting detriment- because in hyper competitive environments they feel disoriented, diminished, inadequate, undermined and unsupported, especially since they tend to come from supportive high schools which want them to excel.
In Netflix case, there's also a huge amount of disingenuity built into the argument. Claims of "desperate labor shortages" and "inadequate pool of qualified candidates" for tech jobs is literally the oldest trick in the book to flood the market with labor and drive down prices for labor. Netflix is just a fucking liar. Believe it or not, they did the same thing with sous chefs in the 80-s and 90s they ALWAYS do the same thing whenever anyone in the middle class starts threatening to partake of the profits. They go to Congress and say "eh, this whole free market thing really sucks, who wants to pay according to supply and demand? We need to up supply- a lot. Give us another 20 million work visas. Here's your reelection cash. Same arrangement as last time. Thanks"
This is the eternal narcissism of the CEO, whose employment picture will never be anywhere as volatile- irrespective of his performance or the pool of qualified candidates who could do his job better than he does at 1/5 the cost to the company. This basically is the degenerate thinking of some guy who walks around with two people behind him holding up the train of his cape.
So what's the take away lesson? Don't apply to Netflix, for sure. Also, drop Netflix if you hate companies with abusive labor practices. "Use We only hire A Players ! " notices on jobs as code for "Do Not Apply" and "no thanks" to headhunters. f you're an A-Player Seek seek small company environments that say yes to initiative and are grateful for your efforts. If you're this type of person, you know there is no higher high than making cool shit people love.