I'm sure the people who made it are well treated and probably just like me: 30 something, stylish, hip and know their way around a wine shop.
It brings an almost orgasmic pleasure to me to think of all you hipsters slaving away on an assembly line, the acrid smell of solder and flux heavy in the sweltering heat, listening to obscure hipster music playing in the background, smiling while their coworkers pass out next to you from exhaustion, so deluded they think they're actually living the good life.
But then I realize that it's people like you that are the reason teenagers and young adults are pissing away their lives for pennies an hour, living in giant dormatories with suicide nets strung outside the balconies to catch workers who can't take it anymore... because that's what's expected of them and there's a hundred more just like them willing to take their place.
...All so you can get a 15% discount off the price of a piece of equipment you only bought to impress your friends. Drink up, hipster. Drink all the wine. You're gonna need it to drown your conscience.
What more advanced engineering? Rope and pulleys is pretty advanced for Egypt. And what does this have to do with the horse versus slave claim? The world didn't have good work horses at the time of Egypt.
Horses were first domesticated around 4000 BC, and were considered to be widely domesticated by 3000 BC. Camels, which were much more suited to desert work, were first domesticated during the same time period, although there is evidence that domestication of camels may have occurred even earlier. The first Egyptian pyramids were made around 2630 BC. That's about 1,600 years later for either horses or camels.
Since your entire argument is based on that fact, it's Myth Busted for you. Let's see how your other claims stack up...
All the work we throw to China makes it a better place (and better safety regulation will follow).
Better safety regulation doesn't naturally flow from more economic opportunity; The United States has the largest GDP of any country. It consistently ranks dead last amongst the so-called "first world" countries in worker rights, and is notable for its lack of a labor (labour) party, which most European countries, as well as Canada and Australia, etc., all have. This one, I'm going to have to go with "Not Plausible"
While all the work we chase out of our own countries with ridiculous safety regulations makes us less well off (with worse safety regulations to follow).
Until the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement, the expansion of the H1-B visa program, and numerous other agreements and laws under the umbrella of globalization, our country's middle class and our GDP grew lock in step and at many times the rate it has since. As the wealth disparity gap grew, our GDP growth year over year fell. Eventually, the middle class imploded, triggering a global economic crisis that continues to this day. We didn't chase the money away -- we let it walk out the front door to the sound of applause. This myth I'm going to have to leave as "Plausible", however, because macroeconomics is a complicated field, and it's hard to say for certainty the relationship between any of the variables I mentioned earlier. I believe the evidence supports my position, but I'm open to reasonable debate.
...But by someone who knows their history a bit better than you.
Negative emotions can lead to positive results. Becoming angry at an injustice provides an impetus for challenging it. Don't be upset if you're "hating yourself", be upset only if you were apathetic after reading it. The only thing required for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.
"For now, humans are still a cheaper and more practical choice."
That's been the argument about labor since the dark ages. Slavery was cheaper than horses. The pyramids were built by people dragging slabs up the sides using ropes and pulleys; Even though it's almost a certainty that the Egyptians knew of more advanced engineering. They also buried the slaves (alive) with the king when he died. The question has never been whether humans are cheaper than machines: The larger the size of the labor pool, the lower the cost of labor. Supply and demand; Basic economics.
The question has been how workers are treated, and what level of servitude a society is willing to accept for some, or all, of its members. Even by the laws of the United States, what China routinely allows with its workforce is inhumane. I say this with the full knowledge that my country has some of the worst labor laws in the first world -- the fewest number of vacation days, the spread between what the head of a company is paid and its entry-level workers the highest of any country on Earth, and a grossly underfunded federal workforce safety department.
We shouldn't be doing business with them; They don't even have child labor laws worth a damn. But they have a lot of our money and they're cheap. For many countries, that's enough. I wish it weren't -- where are the europeans' "citizens of the world" speeches when they really matter? You're just as guilty as we are, that's why. Until human rights are something afforded to our enemies, as well as our friends, then we should be honest with ourselves: Nobody really has human rights. What we have... are privileges. And we live our lives in comfort because a significant portion of the world doesn't, and we aren't willing to help them get them.
Has a false DMCA takedown notice ever resulted in legal liability? I'm genuinely curious, we always hear about bogus takedown notices that don't result in anything bad happening to the evildoers.
That's because they only target people who don't have money. When RIAA started going after peer to peer users (file downloaders), they meticulously selected people for prosecution whom they knew would be unable to mount an effective legal defense. Then, when they lost, they used those cases to establish precident to go after other file sharers in the same jurisdiction. If an appeal did happen, or they targeted someone who did have money, they backed off, offering to settle -- or in the case of a certain infamous law professor who's students worked for free assisting in the defense of an otherwise indigent person, they made sure to make an example out of them by pulling every legal trick possible to cost time and money, and then demanded the maximum penalties across the board, ruining the person's life.
By doing this repeatedly, they managed to do things like neutralize the right to reverse engineer out of the DMCA. They've established that punitive amounts should be used instead of compensatory amounts. They have repeatedly lobbied to establish all of copyright law under the umbrella of strict liability, which requires no proof of intent, and makes no distinction between accidental and intentional harm. They have attempted (and often succeeded) in creating criminal laws where downloading is punished more harshly than rape, assault, or murder.
The reason you don't hear about false DMCA notices is because they're only made against the poor. Copyright law has always targeted the most vulnerable members of society -- the poor and disadvantaged, and punished them disproportionately in the same manner as the war on drugs has. The rich have licensing agreements and lawyers who can arrange settlements. From simple traffic violations to murder, money buys you a clean record almost every time -- unless you get noticed by the media, or you step on the toes of someone with even more money. Right now, in my own county, I was given a speeding ticket. As is common with people with a clean driving record, I was offered a chance to continue it for dismissal, a sort of probation -- if I don't get any more traffic violations, it falls off my record. It was never there. Ah, but there was a $700 "court costs fee" before the judge could offer it.
Don't kid yourself: Our judicial system has been corrupted by money. In time, it will be corrupted by other things as well, as has every other... over a long enough timeframe, every justice system fails. Every empire that acquired the rule of law has later lost it under pressure by the rich, the powerful, and slowly corroded under the weight of its own uncountable rules.
There's going to be push-back from corporations on this one unless they break it so it's insecure. Truly secure browser-to-server communication resistant to man in the middle attacks would mean IT can't record and document what information is being sent from employees' computers. Legal will put the kabosh on the use of any tech that prevents them from papering over their asses by saying they did everything possible to prevent transmission of confidential/proprietary data. Note: Everything in a corporation is considered confidential and proprietary, including "Hello, world."
Whatever they're planning will involve some manner of broken certificate issuing authorities, or some backdoor way so that an interested party can "legitimately" spy on the over the wire traffic. You can count on it: A truly secure communications medium is the one thing nobody with money wants to have in existance. It threatens so many (admitedly broken) business models... in fact there's an entire tech ecosystem built around the inherent insecurities of modern information infrastructure. They don't want it fixed: Broken = money. Fixed = broke.
Why not just admit that they've found the unbreakable DRM?
Because they haven't. Software can still be disassembled and stripped of authentication routines. This just adds another layer of bullshit to the cake of lies. Repeat after me: Client side security is a lie. Client side security is a lie...
Why in the name of Oppenheimer did they fire the one guy who actually did his job, when everyone above and around him appeared to fail pretty seriously at theirs?
Young grasshopper, when you have learned why managers punish people for bringing mistakes to the attention of their supervisors, it will be time for you to join the workforce. I've been fired several times for bringing security faults through appropriate channels -- in truth, management doesn't want to know about security problems and punish those who point them out, because once pointed out, plausible deniability goes out the window. You're making it their problem, and if there's no budget for said problem your paycheck becomes the budget for solving it. It makes them look bad and holds back their promotion opportunities -- and so while you may do the right thing, it's almost always a bad career move.
And as was noted there are plenty of ways to perform service to your country and those around you without serving in the military!
I've wanted to get into digital forensics with the FBI's cyber crime unit here, but despite having a clean record (minus a speeding ticket, heh) they told me to bugger off. I still help people who do work with law enforcement off the books, consulting and offering advice. It's just not the same though -- it's sad when someone feels a duty to serve, but can't find a home with most federal agencies. The few that would take me I'm just not interested in -- my skill set is computers, not busting street dealers. I would jump at the chance to work with people catching pedophiles, stalkers, and other online dirtbags, in any capacity... even just as a consultant, getting paid dirt to do it. I was raised in a small town... I don't know what it is about that, but everyone I know who feels the same way comes from a small town; We all seem to have a code of ethics that tells us we need to serve our community in some fashion.
There are ways to serve in a similar capacity without coming anywhere near traditional military.
True, but they require security clearances and background checks. I have no criminal record save a speeding ticket, but I fail every time; They still consider anyone who isn't heterosexual to be a security risk. They aren't allowed to say that's the reason for the denial, of course, but I've been told by enough people who hold or have held them it's still going to be awhile before people who are LGBT are considered equal in that area... like so many others. The other thing is, and it's something not many people know: Security clearances at the higher levels become increasingly subjective. The closer a person is scrutinized, the more likely they are to find some random attribute that's probably harmless as threatening, simply because someone many years ago who also possessed said random attribute did something they shouldn't have. And especially for fringe-communities like LGBT, the most common rejection reason is that they're worried the person's lifestyle could be used as leverage against them. Your cross-dressing coworker of 20 years probably doesn't want his conservative boss to know about his hobby at the local gay bar. So although it may be illegal to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation... that doesn't mean much in the world of security clearances. There, it's all about liabilities and exposures... and until LGBT folk are socially equal to their non-LGBT peers, they'll always be turned away.
This is one of the reasons why I suspect all government agents seem to look and act alike... they've boiled away the other 97% of applicants that had any personality or interesting quirks and were left with these rarified beasties that are put into those positions precisely because they're completely sterile.
"Any additional earnings derived would be passed onto an independent trust to invest in improving Internet access and security."
Ah, so what you're saying is, in five years or so when there's a big fat bank account out there earmarked for improving internet access and security, long after the original promise that it would be used for that purpose has moved out of the public eye, some bureaucrat will redirect the funds to some other public works project. Let's be honest here: Everybody talks about improving internet access and security, but how much of the money set aside for actually doing it, er, actually does it? Look at the sad state of affairs as it sits today, then realize that every broken security model, application, and piss-poor internet feed was created with the promise of being far more than it turned out to be.
Well, again, you're pretty much right clear across the board. I guess the only thing I can say is, I think the reason people have lost perspective is because we don't see the whole production, just the highlight reel. It's not really newsworthy to report that everything went according to plan. I don't have absolute confirmation or proof that terrorists are out there, planning to include me in their next political statement. I don't need to either. I know that yes, there's probably some asshole in a cave right now making bombs who wants me dead. I also know there's another asshole, my kind of asshole, making sure he fails. It doesn't make the news when J. Random Terrorist takes two to the chest courtesy of Uncle Sam because that was the plan all along. As long as everything is going to plan, even if the plan is shit nobody blinks.
Of course, you know what happens when things don't go according to plan... we get to watch it on CNN. The problem with the news is the same as the problem watching NASCAR. People watch it to see cars wreck, not go in circles. Of course, whereas most people know race car driving is entertainment... they don't look at CNN the same way.
This is part of the reason it is hard to take the whole "Assange is a persecuted martyr" seriously: his supporters never seem to know all the facts, they simply react. Knee-jerk reactions do not help, and make your entire position look bad.
Dude, you are smoking the cheap $3 Propaganda brand crack. Assange isn't a persecuted martyr because he's still breathing. He is being persecuted, however. The fact that he's a political figure simply can't be ignored or dismissed. You may agree or disagree with the charges. You may think he's an asshole, or the greatest thing since sliced bread. And we can argue the minutae of it until the heat death of the universe, but it's pointless. You and I are just random people on the internet. An embassy, a sovereign foreign government responsible for millions of lives, has come out and said "Something smells fishy about this." These aren't the kind of people to make rash decisions. You and I may not have all the facts. His supporters may or may not. But the embassy officials that put their country's pride and reputation on the line do have them. It would be reckless of them to have offered him asylum if they didn't feel there was firm ground to stand on. Remember -- The British government was inches away from wiping their arse with the Geneva conventions and storming the place, creating a massive international diplomatic incident... the kind of incident wars have been started over in years past.
The statement he isn't being persecuted is readily refuted by the simple observation that diplomats aren't irrational. It's a job requirement that they consider carefully the consequences of each action, and even in a small country there's going to be a vetting process to ensure that their interests are represented by someone who isn't nuts. Bottom line is he is being persecuted; You can agree or disagree with it, but you can't outright deny it. The evidence simply can't support your position.
All that said, let me step away from intellectual discourse now and say I think the man was a fucking moron. Who in their right mind moons the government with the largest standing military and biggest economy by GDP on the planet? I could give a flying fuck through a rolling doughnut about whatever charges they're bringing him up on, or the diplomatic incidents he's created -- the dumb bastard's gonna have his ass battered and deep fried at the end of this, one way or another. Maybe what he did was right, maybe it wasn't, but goddamnit man... if you're gonna shine the biggest badass in the room, at least be a man and take your lumps right then and there, not run off and hide under someone's skirt after.
*cough* We now return you to your regularly scheduled flame fest, already in progress...
Oh, and P.S. Thank you for your service. I would serve with you if I could, but at the time I would otherwise have been eligible to enlist, discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation was still legal and prevalent in our armed services. If I can't stand with you, the least I can do is stand behind you. Again, thank you.
...and who greatly benefit from the odd proclivity of those in free societies to see the enemy as their own government, while overlooking the actual adversary.
After noting your disclaimer and then reading your post, two thoughts occurred to me. First, that they've trained you well. Your response was concise, well-articulated, and you were careful to define the limits of what you know (and what, by extension, anyone could know from the data). As a US citizen, this is comforting to me. The information and understanding of our military is often sensationalized, spun, and twisted to serve particular political ends to the point that a clear picture of what our military is actually about is lost. To hear a first-hand account directly from someone on the front-lines is invaluable to me precisely because it is so hard to come by. Thank you for sharing.
The second thought stemmed from your comment towards the end about how citizens of a 'free' society often consider their own government to be the enemy. I'm sure you'll agree that many of the threats to our country aren't conventional. From terrorism to urban combat, cyber to commercial -- arguably, some of our enemies don't even consider themselves as such. Nowadays neglecting to secure a router could take out internet access for millions of people and cost many millions in economic damages.
When you consider how varied the attacks and attackers can be, and how they could combine in novel ways not anticipated by either the defenders or attackers, how do we go about defining our enemies at all? If a system administrator misconfigures a router and damages our information infrastructure, is that any less relevant than someone sticking C4 to the side of a power transmission tower to cause a similar amount of damage? Both have harmed the country's interests -- arguably, both could be called enemies of the state for having done so.
To bring it all home, my point is this: How do we, as citizens, trust our military when we can't be completely sure whether an action (or inaction) could lead to a military response? Likewise, how can the military trust us? Much of the infrastructure that units like yours seek to protect are under civilian control. How do you separate friend from foe in a battlefield where accidents and mistakes are as costly as attacks and sabotage? Especially when the theatre in question is one where misdirection and disinformation are so prevalent? Everything has the potential to be a threat or a decoy.
If the cost of getting this supposed speed is too high, why bother?
Same reason we use median income as a measure of economic prosperity. Same reason many states only count unemployment based on the number of people requesting benefits. It makes the situation look less desperate than it is. Truthfully, the average case, the average person, is doing quite poorly in all areas right now.
Over a third of our bridges are structurally deficient and in need of repair. Our interstate roadways are in terrible shape -- you can go to any major city and find areas "coned off" but with no crews or equipment staged at the site. Repairs are taking longer, and running over budget more often. Our telecommunications are badly oversubscribed -- carriers blame the iPhone for sucking up bandwidth, but in all the other G20 countries, the iPhone isn't even competitive with local offerings. You can go to London and see people streaming the BBC on their morning commute, watching TV on their phones. Digital TV has been available in South Korea on their mobile devices since the turn of the century, whereas we only recently switched off our analog systems, and it was a botched job as well -- converters were in short supply, overpriced, and the FCC was ignoring the problems of the conversion and instead focusing on auctioning off the freed up spectrum, for which the general public has seen no benefit from. There are sewers and water mains in New York that date back to the pre-civil war era which haven't seen any maintenance since. Food prices are rising, but consumers here are being duped because manufacturers are subtly shrinking container sizes, or adding more packaging (empty space), to maintain the illusion that you're still buying the same amount for the same price. Meat and vegetable prices have risen so much that people on public assistance can't afford it; The elderly and marginally employed, our most vulnerable citizens, have been thrown under a bus. The ever-widening waist line has become the new symbol of America, and while many outsiders consider this a sign of decadence, in fact it is a sign of poor nutrition -- the cheapest food is processed. Grains, starches, etc., are all cheap, high calorie foods. And while a significant portion of anyone's diet should include them, for the poor, it's their only source of food -- and it's killing us slowly. While every other G20 country has reported either flat or falling mortality rates, ours has sharply risen. The number one cause of death now amongst those most able to work: age 25-40, is suicide.
America is dying, literally and figuratively. And we're lying to ourselves about this simple, naked truth. We're window dressing for a dinner theatre of one... that's why we use misleading statistics and facts. In truth, if you're an average american reading this, more likely than not you're living paycheck to paycheck, trying to do everything you can to get back what you had. You're not fighting for freedom from tyranny, terrorism, or oppression: You're fighting for the right to exist.
Well that is easy. That is because IE 6 is required to administer.
If software had to go through the same rigorous background checks that the employees who use it have to at these facilities, I don't think IE6 would have gotten a security clearance. How is it that the government can refuse to grant a security clearance based on sexual orientation under the notion that it could be used to blackmail someone, but allow the use of software with a proven and highly publicized record of leaking information? What's more, people with security clearances are subjected to intense scrutiny -- their supervisors know about every little aspect of their lives, including that little dimple on the inside of your right thigh, yet routinely employ software that is essentially a big black box -- nobody knows how or why it works.
The government needs to start taking software review as seriously as it takes personnel review with regard to security clearances and access to classified and/or sensitive materials. From a security standpoint, it doesn't matter much whether it was a web browser or a person that passed information to an enemy; The end result is the same.
Many of our enemies are now seeing that it is comparatively less costly to exploit technology than people. You'd think we'd have learned this lesson after the second world war -- wasn't cracking Enigma enough of a wake up call?
The question I have is how it's less expensive (in the long run) to lay a chip out by hand once instead of improving your VLSI layout software forever. NP classification notwithstanding.
Coding in assembly still remains a superior method of squeezing extra performance out of software. It's just that few people do it because compilers are "good enough" at guessing which optimizations to apply, and where, and usually development costs are the primary concern for software development. But when you're shipping hundreds of millions of units of hardware, and you're trying to pack as much processing power in a small and efficient form factor, you don't go with VLSI for the same reason you don't go with a compiler for realtime code: You need that extra few percent.
You can hide from natural disasters. You can't hide from bacon shortages. It doesn't matter where you live, come next year... the shortages are coming to a table near you. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
North Carolina did not outlaw global warming, they required planning to be done using historical data instead of a myriad of guesses that sea levels will rise if X isn't done.
Ummm, they made exponential extrapolation illegal for the purposes of defining rising sea levels. All the data says that sea level rise isn't "feet x year". It's about as stupid as defining the value of pi to be exactly 3, scientifically, mathematically, etc. And it's not an ad hominem attack -- these people are climate change deniers, a position not supported by science. Saying they aren't trying to declare it illegal is mincing words -- that's their intent, they just can't come out and do it directly, so they're redefining the meaning of everything, cutting funding, and throwing all manner of administrative roadblocks up because they don't believe in it.
the planning commissions never attempted to incorporate these guesses as to what will be more if and when something in the future happens so their law is now consistent with the vast majority of inland states.
Dude, I live in Minnesota. I'm 800 feet above sea level. We're not planning for rising sea levels, because it's fucking pointless. We don't have laws regarding the planning of sea levels, because the sea will never, under any circumstances, in the next few million years, reach us. The vast majority of inland states are likewise hundreds of feet above sea level -- and they also have no laws on the books regarding planning for the impossible. There is no "majority" for inland states -- because no such laws exist!
And to the effect, it does not define life as starting two weeks before, it defines a period of time when a count is to start for the purpose of terminating a life.
*facepalm* The common, medical, scientific, and legal definition of conception is that it begins when the sperm enters the egg. Since the legal definition now is that it happens at the start of a woman's menstral cycle, and fertilization can't happen until the egg is released two weeks later, it effectively moves the date of conception back two weeks.
Everything you said if factually incorrect because of how far you exaggerated it for effect and impact.
Sir, I'm not in the business of splitting hairs just to win an argument with some guy on the internet -- but clearly, you have far too much time on your hand and real problem with anyone who disagrees with you, so you run around yelling "liar! liar! They aren't using the exact, same, specific terminology I am, which makes them a liar! I win!" And you think calling someone else's arguments a "farce", "factually incorrect", or "exaggerated" somehow coats this childish reaction in a veneer of intellectualism.
It doesn't. Dude, you're still an asshole, splitting hairs, on the internet.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure the people who made it are well treated and probably just like me: 30 something, stylish, hip and know their way around a wine shop.
It brings an almost orgasmic pleasure to me to think of all you hipsters slaving away on an assembly line, the acrid smell of solder and flux heavy in the sweltering heat, listening to obscure hipster music playing in the background, smiling while their coworkers pass out next to you from exhaustion, so deluded they think they're actually living the good life.
But then I realize that it's people like you that are the reason teenagers and young adults are pissing away their lives for pennies an hour, living in giant dormatories with suicide nets strung outside the balconies to catch workers who can't take it anymore... because that's what's expected of them and there's a hundred more just like them willing to take their place.
...All so you can get a 15% discount off the price of a piece of equipment you only bought to impress your friends. Drink up, hipster. Drink all the wine. You're gonna need it to drown your conscience.
What more advanced engineering? Rope and pulleys is pretty advanced for Egypt. And what does this have to do with the horse versus slave claim? The world didn't have good work horses at the time of Egypt.
Horses were first domesticated around 4000 BC, and were considered to be widely domesticated by 3000 BC. Camels, which were much more suited to desert work, were first domesticated during the same time period, although there is evidence that domestication of camels may have occurred even earlier. The first Egyptian pyramids were made around 2630 BC. That's about 1,600 years later for either horses or camels.
Since your entire argument is based on that fact, it's Myth Busted for you. Let's see how your other claims stack up...
All the work we throw to China makes it a better place (and better safety regulation will follow).
Better safety regulation doesn't naturally flow from more economic opportunity; The United States has the largest GDP of any country. It consistently ranks dead last amongst the so-called "first world" countries in worker rights, and is notable for its lack of a labor (labour) party, which most European countries, as well as Canada and Australia, etc., all have. This one, I'm going to have to go with "Not Plausible"
While all the work we chase out of our own countries with ridiculous safety regulations makes us less well off (with worse safety regulations to follow).
Until the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement, the expansion of the H1-B visa program, and numerous other agreements and laws under the umbrella of globalization, our country's middle class and our GDP grew lock in step and at many times the rate it has since. As the wealth disparity gap grew, our GDP growth year over year fell. Eventually, the middle class imploded, triggering a global economic crisis that continues to this day. We didn't chase the money away -- we let it walk out the front door to the sound of applause. This myth I'm going to have to leave as "Plausible", however, because macroeconomics is a complicated field, and it's hard to say for certainty the relationship between any of the variables I mentioned earlier. I believe the evidence supports my position, but I'm open to reasonable debate.
...But by someone who knows their history a bit better than you.
Truth hurts. Thank you for making me hate myself.
Negative emotions can lead to positive results. Becoming angry at an injustice provides an impetus for challenging it. Don't be upset if you're "hating yourself", be upset only if you were apathetic after reading it. The only thing required for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.
"For now, humans are still a cheaper and more practical choice."
That's been the argument about labor since the dark ages. Slavery was cheaper than horses. The pyramids were built by people dragging slabs up the sides using ropes and pulleys; Even though it's almost a certainty that the Egyptians knew of more advanced engineering. They also buried the slaves (alive) with the king when he died. The question has never been whether humans are cheaper than machines: The larger the size of the labor pool, the lower the cost of labor. Supply and demand; Basic economics.
The question has been how workers are treated, and what level of servitude a society is willing to accept for some, or all, of its members. Even by the laws of the United States, what China routinely allows with its workforce is inhumane. I say this with the full knowledge that my country has some of the worst labor laws in the first world -- the fewest number of vacation days, the spread between what the head of a company is paid and its entry-level workers the highest of any country on Earth, and a grossly underfunded federal workforce safety department.
We shouldn't be doing business with them; They don't even have child labor laws worth a damn. But they have a lot of our money and they're cheap. For many countries, that's enough. I wish it weren't -- where are the europeans' "citizens of the world" speeches when they really matter? You're just as guilty as we are, that's why. Until human rights are something afforded to our enemies, as well as our friends, then we should be honest with ourselves: Nobody really has human rights. What we have... are privileges. And we live our lives in comfort because a significant portion of the world doesn't, and we aren't willing to help them get them.
Has a false DMCA takedown notice ever resulted in legal liability? I'm genuinely curious, we always hear about bogus takedown notices that don't result in anything bad happening to the evildoers.
That's because they only target people who don't have money. When RIAA started going after peer to peer users (file downloaders), they meticulously selected people for prosecution whom they knew would be unable to mount an effective legal defense. Then, when they lost, they used those cases to establish precident to go after other file sharers in the same jurisdiction. If an appeal did happen, or they targeted someone who did have money, they backed off, offering to settle -- or in the case of a certain infamous law professor who's students worked for free assisting in the defense of an otherwise indigent person, they made sure to make an example out of them by pulling every legal trick possible to cost time and money, and then demanded the maximum penalties across the board, ruining the person's life.
By doing this repeatedly, they managed to do things like neutralize the right to reverse engineer out of the DMCA. They've established that punitive amounts should be used instead of compensatory amounts. They have repeatedly lobbied to establish all of copyright law under the umbrella of strict liability, which requires no proof of intent, and makes no distinction between accidental and intentional harm. They have attempted (and often succeeded) in creating criminal laws where downloading is punished more harshly than rape, assault, or murder.
The reason you don't hear about false DMCA notices is because they're only made against the poor. Copyright law has always targeted the most vulnerable members of society -- the poor and disadvantaged, and punished them disproportionately in the same manner as the war on drugs has. The rich have licensing agreements and lawyers who can arrange settlements. From simple traffic violations to murder, money buys you a clean record almost every time -- unless you get noticed by the media, or you step on the toes of someone with even more money. Right now, in my own county, I was given a speeding ticket. As is common with people with a clean driving record, I was offered a chance to continue it for dismissal, a sort of probation -- if I don't get any more traffic violations, it falls off my record. It was never there. Ah, but there was a $700 "court costs fee" before the judge could offer it.
Don't kid yourself: Our judicial system has been corrupted by money. In time, it will be corrupted by other things as well, as has every other... over a long enough timeframe, every justice system fails. Every empire that acquired the rule of law has later lost it under pressure by the rich, the powerful, and slowly corroded under the weight of its own uncountable rules.
There's going to be push-back from corporations on this one unless they break it so it's insecure. Truly secure browser-to-server communication resistant to man in the middle attacks would mean IT can't record and document what information is being sent from employees' computers. Legal will put the kabosh on the use of any tech that prevents them from papering over their asses by saying they did everything possible to prevent transmission of confidential/proprietary data. Note: Everything in a corporation is considered confidential and proprietary, including "Hello, world."
Whatever they're planning will involve some manner of broken certificate issuing authorities, or some backdoor way so that an interested party can "legitimately" spy on the over the wire traffic. You can count on it: A truly secure communications medium is the one thing nobody with money wants to have in existance. It threatens so many (admitedly broken) business models... in fact there's an entire tech ecosystem built around the inherent insecurities of modern information infrastructure. They don't want it fixed: Broken = money. Fixed = broke.
Why not just admit that they've found the unbreakable DRM?
Because they haven't. Software can still be disassembled and stripped of authentication routines. This just adds another layer of bullshit to the cake of lies. Repeat after me: Client side security is a lie. Client side security is a lie...
The[sic] there's that name. Makes me think of urinate every time someone says it.
Probably best if I not tell you what I think when I hear the word 'pad'. -- Some woman
Why in the name of Oppenheimer did they fire the one guy who actually did his job, when everyone above and around him appeared to fail pretty seriously at theirs?
Young grasshopper, when you have learned why managers punish people for bringing mistakes to the attention of their supervisors, it will be time for you to join the workforce. I've been fired several times for bringing security faults through appropriate channels -- in truth, management doesn't want to know about security problems and punish those who point them out, because once pointed out, plausible deniability goes out the window. You're making it their problem, and if there's no budget for said problem your paycheck becomes the budget for solving it. It makes them look bad and holds back their promotion opportunities -- and so while you may do the right thing, it's almost always a bad career move.
Politics. It'll fuck you every time.
And as was noted there are plenty of ways to perform service to your country and those around you without serving in the military!
I've wanted to get into digital forensics with the FBI's cyber crime unit here, but despite having a clean record (minus a speeding ticket, heh) they told me to bugger off. I still help people who do work with law enforcement off the books, consulting and offering advice. It's just not the same though -- it's sad when someone feels a duty to serve, but can't find a home with most federal agencies. The few that would take me I'm just not interested in -- my skill set is computers, not busting street dealers. I would jump at the chance to work with people catching pedophiles, stalkers, and other online dirtbags, in any capacity... even just as a consultant, getting paid dirt to do it. I was raised in a small town... I don't know what it is about that, but everyone I know who feels the same way comes from a small town; We all seem to have a code of ethics that tells us we need to serve our community in some fashion.
There are ways to serve in a similar capacity without coming anywhere near traditional military.
True, but they require security clearances and background checks. I have no criminal record save a speeding ticket, but I fail every time; They still consider anyone who isn't heterosexual to be a security risk. They aren't allowed to say that's the reason for the denial, of course, but I've been told by enough people who hold or have held them it's still going to be awhile before people who are LGBT are considered equal in that area... like so many others. The other thing is, and it's something not many people know: Security clearances at the higher levels become increasingly subjective. The closer a person is scrutinized, the more likely they are to find some random attribute that's probably harmless as threatening, simply because someone many years ago who also possessed said random attribute did something they shouldn't have. And especially for fringe-communities like LGBT, the most common rejection reason is that they're worried the person's lifestyle could be used as leverage against them. Your cross-dressing coworker of 20 years probably doesn't want his conservative boss to know about his hobby at the local gay bar. So although it may be illegal to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation... that doesn't mean much in the world of security clearances. There, it's all about liabilities and exposures... and until LGBT folk are socially equal to their non-LGBT peers, they'll always be turned away.
This is one of the reasons why I suspect all government agents seem to look and act alike... they've boiled away the other 97% of applicants that had any personality or interesting quirks and were left with these rarified beasties that are put into those positions precisely because they're completely sterile.
"Any additional earnings derived would be passed onto an independent trust to invest in improving Internet access and security."
Ah, so what you're saying is, in five years or so when there's a big fat bank account out there earmarked for improving internet access and security, long after the original promise that it would be used for that purpose has moved out of the public eye, some bureaucrat will redirect the funds to some other public works project. Let's be honest here: Everybody talks about improving internet access and security, but how much of the money set aside for actually doing it, er, actually does it? Look at the sad state of affairs as it sits today, then realize that every broken security model, application, and piss-poor internet feed was created with the promise of being far more than it turned out to be.
Well, again, you're pretty much right clear across the board. I guess the only thing I can say is, I think the reason people have lost perspective is because we don't see the whole production, just the highlight reel. It's not really newsworthy to report that everything went according to plan. I don't have absolute confirmation or proof that terrorists are out there, planning to include me in their next political statement. I don't need to either. I know that yes, there's probably some asshole in a cave right now making bombs who wants me dead. I also know there's another asshole, my kind of asshole, making sure he fails. It doesn't make the news when J. Random Terrorist takes two to the chest courtesy of Uncle Sam because that was the plan all along. As long as everything is going to plan, even if the plan is shit nobody blinks.
Of course, you know what happens when things don't go according to plan... we get to watch it on CNN. The problem with the news is the same as the problem watching NASCAR. People watch it to see cars wreck, not go in circles. Of course, whereas most people know race car driving is entertainment... they don't look at CNN the same way.
... They really should.
This is part of the reason it is hard to take the whole "Assange is a persecuted martyr" seriously: his supporters never seem to know all the facts, they simply react. Knee-jerk reactions do not help, and make your entire position look bad.
Dude, you are smoking the cheap $3 Propaganda brand crack. Assange isn't a persecuted martyr because he's still breathing. He is being persecuted, however. The fact that he's a political figure simply can't be ignored or dismissed. You may agree or disagree with the charges. You may think he's an asshole, or the greatest thing since sliced bread. And we can argue the minutae of it until the heat death of the universe, but it's pointless. You and I are just random people on the internet. An embassy, a sovereign foreign government responsible for millions of lives, has come out and said "Something smells fishy about this." These aren't the kind of people to make rash decisions. You and I may not have all the facts. His supporters may or may not. But the embassy officials that put their country's pride and reputation on the line do have them. It would be reckless of them to have offered him asylum if they didn't feel there was firm ground to stand on. Remember -- The British government was inches away from wiping their arse with the Geneva conventions and storming the place, creating a massive international diplomatic incident... the kind of incident wars have been started over in years past.
The statement he isn't being persecuted is readily refuted by the simple observation that diplomats aren't irrational. It's a job requirement that they consider carefully the consequences of each action, and even in a small country there's going to be a vetting process to ensure that their interests are represented by someone who isn't nuts. Bottom line is he is being persecuted; You can agree or disagree with it, but you can't outright deny it. The evidence simply can't support your position.
All that said, let me step away from intellectual discourse now and say I think the man was a fucking moron. Who in their right mind moons the government with the largest standing military and biggest economy by GDP on the planet? I could give a flying fuck through a rolling doughnut about whatever charges they're bringing him up on, or the diplomatic incidents he's created -- the dumb bastard's gonna have his ass battered and deep fried at the end of this, one way or another. Maybe what he did was right, maybe it wasn't, but goddamnit man... if you're gonna shine the biggest badass in the room, at least be a man and take your lumps right then and there, not run off and hide under someone's skirt after.
*cough* We now return you to your regularly scheduled flame fest, already in progress...
Oh, and P.S. Thank you for your service. I would serve with you if I could, but at the time I would otherwise have been eligible to enlist, discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation was still legal and prevalent in our armed services. If I can't stand with you, the least I can do is stand behind you. Again, thank you.
...and who greatly benefit from the odd proclivity of those in free societies to see the enemy as their own government, while overlooking the actual adversary.
After noting your disclaimer and then reading your post, two thoughts occurred to me. First, that they've trained you well. Your response was concise, well-articulated, and you were careful to define the limits of what you know (and what, by extension, anyone could know from the data). As a US citizen, this is comforting to me. The information and understanding of our military is often sensationalized, spun, and twisted to serve particular political ends to the point that a clear picture of what our military is actually about is lost. To hear a first-hand account directly from someone on the front-lines is invaluable to me precisely because it is so hard to come by. Thank you for sharing.
The second thought stemmed from your comment towards the end about how citizens of a 'free' society often consider their own government to be the enemy. I'm sure you'll agree that many of the threats to our country aren't conventional. From terrorism to urban combat, cyber to commercial -- arguably, some of our enemies don't even consider themselves as such. Nowadays neglecting to secure a router could take out internet access for millions of people and cost many millions in economic damages.
When you consider how varied the attacks and attackers can be, and how they could combine in novel ways not anticipated by either the defenders or attackers, how do we go about defining our enemies at all? If a system administrator misconfigures a router and damages our information infrastructure, is that any less relevant than someone sticking C4 to the side of a power transmission tower to cause a similar amount of damage? Both have harmed the country's interests -- arguably, both could be called enemies of the state for having done so.
To bring it all home, my point is this: How do we, as citizens, trust our military when we can't be completely sure whether an action (or inaction) could lead to a military response? Likewise, how can the military trust us? Much of the infrastructure that units like yours seek to protect are under civilian control. How do you separate friend from foe in a battlefield where accidents and mistakes are as costly as attacks and sabotage? Especially when the theatre in question is one where misdirection and disinformation are so prevalent? Everything has the potential to be a threat or a decoy.
Wonderful! First our video games are on rails. Now our guns are.
The difference is, with our guns you can choose the target.
If the cost of getting this supposed speed is too high, why bother?
Same reason we use median income as a measure of economic prosperity. Same reason many states only count unemployment based on the number of people requesting benefits. It makes the situation look less desperate than it is. Truthfully, the average case, the average person, is doing quite poorly in all areas right now.
Over a third of our bridges are structurally deficient and in need of repair. Our interstate roadways are in terrible shape -- you can go to any major city and find areas "coned off" but with no crews or equipment staged at the site. Repairs are taking longer, and running over budget more often. Our telecommunications are badly oversubscribed -- carriers blame the iPhone for sucking up bandwidth, but in all the other G20 countries, the iPhone isn't even competitive with local offerings. You can go to London and see people streaming the BBC on their morning commute, watching TV on their phones. Digital TV has been available in South Korea on their mobile devices since the turn of the century, whereas we only recently switched off our analog systems, and it was a botched job as well -- converters were in short supply, overpriced, and the FCC was ignoring the problems of the conversion and instead focusing on auctioning off the freed up spectrum, for which the general public has seen no benefit from. There are sewers and water mains in New York that date back to the pre-civil war era which haven't seen any maintenance since. Food prices are rising, but consumers here are being duped because manufacturers are subtly shrinking container sizes, or adding more packaging (empty space), to maintain the illusion that you're still buying the same amount for the same price. Meat and vegetable prices have risen so much that people on public assistance can't afford it; The elderly and marginally employed, our most vulnerable citizens, have been thrown under a bus. The ever-widening waist line has become the new symbol of America, and while many outsiders consider this a sign of decadence, in fact it is a sign of poor nutrition -- the cheapest food is processed. Grains, starches, etc., are all cheap, high calorie foods. And while a significant portion of anyone's diet should include them, for the poor, it's their only source of food -- and it's killing us slowly. While every other G20 country has reported either flat or falling mortality rates, ours has sharply risen. The number one cause of death now amongst those most able to work: age 25-40, is suicide.
America is dying, literally and figuratively. And we're lying to ourselves about this simple, naked truth. We're window dressing for a dinner theatre of one... that's why we use misleading statistics and facts. In truth, if you're an average american reading this, more likely than not you're living paycheck to paycheck, trying to do everything you can to get back what you had. You're not fighting for freedom from tyranny, terrorism, or oppression: You're fighting for the right to exist.
Well that is easy. That is because IE 6 is required to administer.
If software had to go through the same rigorous background checks that the employees who use it have to at these facilities, I don't think IE6 would have gotten a security clearance. How is it that the government can refuse to grant a security clearance based on sexual orientation under the notion that it could be used to blackmail someone, but allow the use of software with a proven and highly publicized record of leaking information? What's more, people with security clearances are subjected to intense scrutiny -- their supervisors know about every little aspect of their lives, including that little dimple on the inside of your right thigh, yet routinely employ software that is essentially a big black box -- nobody knows how or why it works.
The government needs to start taking software review as seriously as it takes personnel review with regard to security clearances and access to classified and/or sensitive materials. From a security standpoint, it doesn't matter much whether it was a web browser or a person that passed information to an enemy; The end result is the same.
Many of our enemies are now seeing that it is comparatively less costly to exploit technology than people. You'd think we'd have learned this lesson after the second world war -- wasn't cracking Enigma enough of a wake up call?
Well, not directly. But clearly there's data from public networks leaking into it; Security is badly broken somewhere.
Obligatory: Would you like to play a game of thermonuclear warfare?
Next up, petitioning the White House to find out why the fuck nuclear control systems are on the internet ...
The question I have is how it's less expensive (in the long run) to lay a chip out by hand once instead of improving your VLSI layout software forever. NP classification notwithstanding.
Coding in assembly still remains a superior method of squeezing extra performance out of software. It's just that few people do it because compilers are "good enough" at guessing which optimizations to apply, and where, and usually development costs are the primary concern for software development. But when you're shipping hundreds of millions of units of hardware, and you're trying to pack as much processing power in a small and efficient form factor, you don't go with VLSI for the same reason you don't go with a compiler for realtime code: You need that extra few percent.
You can hide from natural disasters. You can't hide from bacon shortages. It doesn't matter where you live, come next year... the shortages are coming to a table near you. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
What'd they do, shift all the load to AMD servers?
Nah, just cranked the AC on high and left all the lights on and spare servers powered up running Prime.
North Carolina did not outlaw global warming, they required planning to be done using historical data instead of a myriad of guesses that sea levels will rise if X isn't done.
Ummm, they made exponential extrapolation illegal for the purposes of defining rising sea levels. All the data says that sea level rise isn't "feet x year". It's about as stupid as defining the value of pi to be exactly 3, scientifically, mathematically, etc. And it's not an ad hominem attack -- these people are climate change deniers, a position not supported by science. Saying they aren't trying to declare it illegal is mincing words -- that's their intent, they just can't come out and do it directly, so they're redefining the meaning of everything, cutting funding, and throwing all manner of administrative roadblocks up because they don't believe in it.
the planning commissions never attempted to incorporate these guesses as to what will be more if and when something in the future happens so their law is now consistent with the vast majority of inland states.
Dude, I live in Minnesota. I'm 800 feet above sea level. We're not planning for rising sea levels, because it's fucking pointless. We don't have laws regarding the planning of sea levels, because the sea will never, under any circumstances, in the next few million years, reach us. The vast majority of inland states are likewise hundreds of feet above sea level -- and they also have no laws on the books regarding planning for the impossible. There is no "majority" for inland states -- because no such laws exist!
And to the effect, it does not define life as starting two weeks before, it defines a period of time when a count is to start for the purpose of terminating a life.
*facepalm* The common, medical, scientific, and legal definition of conception is that it begins when the sperm enters the egg. Since the legal definition now is that it happens at the start of a woman's menstral cycle, and fertilization can't happen until the egg is released two weeks later, it effectively moves the date of conception back two weeks.
Everything you said if factually incorrect because of how far you exaggerated it for effect and impact.
Sir, I'm not in the business of splitting hairs just to win an argument with some guy on the internet -- but clearly, you have far too much time on your hand and real problem with anyone who disagrees with you, so you run around yelling "liar! liar! They aren't using the exact, same, specific terminology I am, which makes them a liar! I win!" And you think calling someone else's arguments a "farce", "factually incorrect", or "exaggerated" somehow coats this childish reaction in a veneer of intellectualism.
It doesn't. Dude, you're still an asshole, splitting hairs, on the internet.