After all, we must all be protected from any form of true democracy and/or choice!
The people who work at these agencies would probably remind you that without all this surveillance, you'd be hiding under your bed waiting for the next terror attack or IED. Democracy would be on the evening news every night waving a flag over the bodies of its adherents while its opponents marched in the streets, celebrating victory after victory.
People forget that we do have enemies; There is more than one way to organize a society, and a lot of people feel like the best way to deal with a society different than your own, is to advocate, encourage, and even practice violence against them "so they know their place." Are the threats as big as they say? Are the sacrifices we've made to keep those threats at bay worth it? I don't know. But don't you dare get on a soap box and preach about "true democracy" without answering the question: How do we protect it?
You do not just get to handwave away the threats. You have to answer them -- even if it's just to say "Then that is the price we will pay." It's okay to say everything they're doing is wrong; Afterall, this is a democracy right? But if you won't suggest an alternative, then you don't really care about democracy. You just want to rage against "the man" and be a rebel without a cause. You want to feel righteous, but without all that hard work of enduring tensions, making compromises, and reasoning out not what's best for you -- but what's best for an entire country.
And if you do that, then I have no respect for you. You want to bitch about the NSA? Okay, fine. I grant you that. But what's your alternative? Put something on the table for the rest of us to discuss, or give up your chair for someone who's willing to not just talk about democracy, but sit down and actually do it.
My, how much progress we've made in fifteen years...
We've made considerable progress in 15 years. 15 years ago, nobody thought the internet was much more than an academic curiousity. All the big players today didn't exist 15 years ago -- Google, Facebook, eBay, Amazon... didn't exist. 404 Business Not Found. But 15 years ago, and people seem to forget, the telecommunications networks that the internet was built on, and later developed a symbiosis with, was being tapped, surveilled, and that data shared with these same governments; As they had done since a few years after WWII, when the world leaders held summits and asked: How can we prevent the next Nazi Germany? And the answer was the same one that won the Allied Powers WWII: Computers. Cryptography. Information Awareness. Back then, information awareness came down to radios, radars, and phone lines, but the doctrine hasn't changed in 50 years: Knowledge of the enemies communications and positions is what wins wars. It's how Germany kicked the everloving shit out of Europe -- blitzkrieg. Be fast. Go unseen. Rain death from above. And be gone before the enemy can mount a response.
And people act like this is some kind of new thing... like the mentality and the methodologies being used by the NSA and its foreign counterparts are this big revelatory thing. But it's not. Not when you understand that we have our eyes and ears everywhere -- you can't move an army anywhere on Earth without us (and by that, I mean America and her allies) knowing about it, and being able to respond with lightning speed. This is common knowledge today. From satellites to realtime worldwide communication... intelligence assets can now be placed, developed, analyzed, and acted upon through the chain of command in less time than it takes you to brush your teeth in the morning.
Which means there's only one place left a threat can hide: By being small and decentralized... by flying under the radar.
And lookie lookie -- what's the NSA been up to these past few years? They aren't just tracking standing armies now. They aren't even just tracking companies, factories, and infrastructure that those armies would need for logistics. They've gone right now to street level. They're going house by house, cable by cable, looking for anyone and anything that could still fly under the radar.
Good? Bad? Depends on who you ask. But the one thing I've gotten real damn tired of hearing on Slashdot and hundreds of other websites is the tired mantra of "Oh noes! The NSA is spying on us!"... without bothering to answer the question of why much beyond "Because they're just evil, you know." People have developed the NSA's true motives in their minds about as well as Hollywood develops Star Trek villains! "I'm gonna be bad because... I feel like being bad."
"Intelligence expert Professor Des Ball says the Australian Signals Directorate â" formerly known as the Defense Signals Directorate â" is sharing information with the National Security Agency (NSA).
Let's rewrite that to be a bit more accurate and a bit less, er, leading:
One of America's closest allies and long-time member of ECHELON recently reminded the world that they haven't stopped sharing intelligence.
So how's that new "Cloud all the apps" thing working out for you guys so far? Ah. I see you leaked pretty much your whole database of people who had signed up for it. Well then, carry on.
In other news, I hope your new strategy crashes into the dirt so hard the only thing that'll be memorable about Adobe in 5 years will be is the case study on it in business classes around the world on how not to do it.
Fuck off and die in a fire. You do not have the right to dictate changes to a society so that it fits your business model better.
Easy there cowboy, no need to get angry. None of the sites they I'd ever heard of before today, and I pirate the everloving fuck out of anything stamped as owned by the British Emp--er, RIAA. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go dump some more of their junk in the river while dressed like one of the village people...
As long as they maintain this level of incompetence, piracy will live on forever.
Apparently the editors are working for free too now. I mean, how else can you explain "How to Test SaaS, PaaS & IaaS"
Villifying a dead man, nice. Look, I respect you, and I agree with what you say, most of the time, but now that man is dead, and all the grousing about him now is wankerism to an extreme degree, sigifying nothing.
I guess since Hitler's dead now too, we can't call him a bastard either...
Sure there is! Fox News tells us all the time that Obama is a communist and there's a big liberal left-wing conspiracy to oppress them because they hate freedom. Okay... my turn to vomit in my mouth.
But more seriously, the fear here has become palpable. They said "lah-di-dah, airy-fairy view", like it doesn't mean anything, but they're already moving to try and suppress it. How was it that Ghandi put it: First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you... ah, but I forget what comes after that!
This is the first public admission that the UK is shitting a fucking brick about Snowden, but you have to read between the lines to spot it.
You know, I've had very little good to say about Snowden, considering him little more than some kid who punked the NSA, then mooned us on his way out the door. But this kind of reaction suggests there's more to the story than I think anyone realizes. Now, I'm not saying Snowden has anything, but the UK is obviously worried that he'll say he does. Snowden has credibility now -- he could turn that on the UK. And the UK and US are very close allies when it comes to intelligence.
The UK may be worried that it's staunch defense of the US is about to kick of a political shitstorm as some yet unidentified new leak surfaces. And real or not, it could seriously harm the UK's credibility. The Obama administration's absolutely terrible way of handling this entire affair has turned some dumb kid into a weapon potentially more damaging to the UK than a few hundred drone strikes.
If I were the PM, I'd be fucking livid right now with Obama.
You can't rail against the Patriot act in one post then dismiss it as inconsequential in the next.
Yes I can. The patriot act is a bad law. It is also an irrelevant law regardless of what you say. There are over a hundred thousand federal laws alone. We are drowning in laws. There are entire libraries, entire buildings, filled with nothing but laws. Just the ones made by Congress, nevermind the rulings created by our courts, or administrative bodies, bylaws, guidelines. In all of that enormous complexity, there exists a 'backup copy' if you will of the Patriot Act.
The fact is the law is just a convenience for law enforcement. Its absence won't hinder them in any way -- there are a hundred other justifications already lined up and ready for use to continue their behavior.
The changing of a law means nothing if it isn't accompanied by a change of attitude, a change of focus, of perspective -- We have a culture of fear. Fear of the unknown; the terrorists, the boogiemen under our bed, whatever. We have let this fear part us from our liberty and freedom. No law, or the abolition of one, can make us whole.
For this to be meaningful, we need a paradigm shift from being oppressed by our fear to being sustained by it. We must move beyond our fear; We must conquer it. We must prove to the world that every terrorist that blows himself up on our lands, will only strengthen our resolve. It will only drive us to anger, and in our anger we will redouble every quality they hate in us. We will shine with the light of a hundred thousand suns and burn the little fuckers into dust. Our victory against them will be so complete, so absolute, that nobody will ever again test our resolve.
That is what we must project. That is the attitude; One where we will not sacrifice even the tiniest part of our culture, our freedom. We will tell them: Come. We're ready. Come and try and stop us. This is fucking America, and here, here we are free.
Sure, but in the end, the face man (let's call him "Jobs") is going to be a billionaire, whereas the coder ("Woz", if you will) is going to go a few years making $80K at the company he co-founded, and then get fired by Jobs to make way for dozens of other younger, cheaper Wozzes.
It is fortunate then that the Wozzes of the world are not so easily discouraged. Jobs' legacy is that he became rich at the expense of so many others, lived a life of vanity and turtleneck sweaters, and then bargained with the devil to gain a few more years of that life when sickness came for him, arranging secret operations that skirted the law. He was hated by all who worked for him, and his empire is already starting to crumble, and he hasn't been in the ground pushing daisies for all that long either.
But Woz... He helped to kick off the start of the information age. That's something he can tell his children, and his children's children. It is something that those who care about history will remember. But even if they don't, even if history forgets the name Steve Wozniac, he contributed something that genuinely was for the betterment of all mankind.
And that's why the Wozzes of the world get up every day, brush their teeth, comb their hair back, put on their work shoes, and drive the long road into work; They don't care about recognition, they care about contribution. So it has been with all the truly great people down through history. And that is why what Jobs built is already crumbling -- it was just a effigy to his own greatness -- while what Woz built, the personal computer, has lifted over a billion people into the information age already and dramatically altered the course of human history. Apple will eventually die; but the personal computer -- I think that will live on for a very, very long time.
So if coding is so routine, then everyone should know how to do.
I love how this asshole is saying code has no practical value, and yet the only reason said asshole has a job is because someone coded the OS, web server, browser, the routers and switches, and the website itself that he's posting from to claim this.
The thing about society is that every job is important. We need janitors as much as we need CEOs. We need specialist labor as much as general. I mean, we entered a new age in human history -- the Information Age, because most of us are now specialists of one kind or another. This dinosaur is still living in the Industrial Age where you only needed a few schmoot people, and the rest you could (sometimes literally) just feed into the machines.
Sigh. Firstly, you need to read section 215. It grants the Director of the FBI (not NSA) the ability to get ex parte authorizations for a search warrant, and the recipient is then gagged. That's it. The NSA isn't even referenced or involved, except perhaps to process the evidence gathered by the FBI. This is how they go to a bank, library, ISP, etc., and say "We want all your records on this person." and they have to turn them over and then not inform their client this happened. And they don't have to produce any evidence or give a reason to the recipient. It's just "wham, bam, thank you ma'am."... and you better keep this between us.
The authority and power to do this is available in literally hundreds of other laws; Striking section 215 would simply mean they have to use a different administrative process to continue doing the exact same thing. This is political grandstanding -- not only is this "anti-NSA" bill not about the NSA, but regardless of whether it passes or fails, it will not change how business is being done.
Which, big surprise -- Our congress-critters are introducing a bill that accomplishes nothing, but has a nice, patriotic, sounding name. The "freedom act". Yeah. We can all get behind that! What does the freedom act do?
get that this is the feeling of much of/. but what example can you cite?
Pretty much the entire Act as it currently stands. There's a lot of vaguely-worded clauses that grant nearly limitless authority and do not require disclosure of the reasons for many police actions. It would be relatively easy to stitch together what is being given up by these politicians from other parts of the Act and have yourself a new Franken-agency.
I'm sorry, in that case... AMERICA! FUCK YEAH! We ARE the greatest country!
No country's national anthem is "We're Number Two". I am not sure how you could take such esoteric concept as "greatest" when referring to something as large as a country. We would need to establish a set of criterion for objectively measuring greatness.
There are a number of things that are unique to America which are positive. Somewhere over half of our Fortune 500 companies were created by immigrants, despite being only about 1/8th of the population. That certainly speaks to economic opportunity. And we have a temperate climate, and abundant food; We are the bread basket of the world. If America stopped exporting food, billions would starve. We also possess the largest military on the planet and tons of natural resources. People love to bash America, but I think when you look at it as a complete entity, it is certainly one of the best places to live. That isn't to say we are number one at anything, but that also isn't to say we need to be either.
I don't mind a little flag waving and "America, Fuck Yeah!" from time to time. We should be proud of our accomplishments. But that is not license to ignore our failures, or to sit on our laurels. And the same can be said wherever you live as well.
... In other news, senators stopped short of repealing the Patriot Act, likely aware that without deleting the entire act, all they're accomplishing is switching the data collection activities to another agency, which will then perform the role the NSA currently has.
I can't be the only one confused by this article summary. It's going to take an hour of reading Wikipedia to figure it out...
It's the Al Gore pokemon, which hit the graveyard a number of years back, but apparently Mozilla just played the Monster Reborn! card. Remember how he said "We must also promote global access to the Internet. We need to bridge the digital divide not just within our country, but among countries. Only by giving people around the world access to this technology can they tap into the potential of the Information Age." Yup. That. It's baaaaaaack.
Up next, throwing down a wall of magikarp while they desperately try to evade the massive amounts of snark that is about to descend upon them.
Girlintraining almost has it right. While we are not socialistic and have a government being a good big brother to us, we are pseudo-Capitalistic with the worst part of both Socialism and Capitalism in force. If we had a REALLY free economy, the problem would be solved quite quickly. The problem is, we don't have a friggin clue how to solve the problem infrastructure.
Infrastructure that depends on right of way to land creates a natural monopoly. I don't feel going laisse faire would accomplish anything. If you remove government control and hand over access to private citizens, you will amplify the problem a thousand-fold; Everyone between point A and point B will want a cut, and not everyone will be willing to offer access at a reasonable rate. This is why you have easements and eminent domain. Our current system places right of way in the hands of municipalities, which often offer exclusive contracts and can also be bullied or bought off in ways that the state or federal authorities cannot.
You cannot have a 'free' economy when you're dealing with a natural monopoly. Even Adam Smith in Wealth of Nations said as much about land ownership. It must be owned or controlled by the government, or you get situations exactly like this; Profits increase because the fixed costs remain constant but demand is ever-increasing. Telecommunications is the classic case of a natural monopoly. You would be hard pressed to find a better example!
No one questions that its more costly to supply infrastructure to rural areas. The question is why that excuse is at all relevant to American cities.
Because cities are interconnected in terms of telecommunications, electricity, and roadways. Which means the distance between those cities, and the number of cities served, matters a great deal.
I tried to find out recently if I could upgrade to a higher service tier - and the answer was no. Even though I'm on the lowest tier (15 Mbps @ $50/mo) and am an existing customer, they will only "offer" me new subscriber packages for which I am not eligible.
While I sympathize with your problem, as has been discussed elsewhere, the problem is municipalities, who control the right of way for laying new infrastructure. As a result of having to deal with hundreds of thousands of municipalities all over the country, the cost of entry goes up enormously. As well, municipalities typically sign exclusive contracts for periods of 10 to 50 years for right of way for electrical and signal cabling. It is not Comcast's fault, but rather a failure of our Constitution and, by extension, our federal government to centralize right of way permits and promote competition by eliminating exclusive contracts, as has been done in most other western countries.
That said; Turn off your service and ask a friend to pay for a couple months on their credit card and claim they live there. Obviously, pay your friend. They typically have low-cost deals for the first several months of service. When the term expires, have your friend cancel service, and request that the service be re-instated under your name as the previous tenants "didn't work out." Rinse, wash, repeat.
We're 7th in literacy, 27th in math, 22nd in science, 49th in life expectancy, 178th in infant mortality, 3rd in median household income, number 4 in labor force and number 4 in exports. We lead the world in only three categories: number of incarcerated citizens per capita, number of adults who believe angels are real and defense spending - where we spend more than the next 26 countries combined, 25 of whom are allies.
Regulatory hurdles, low population density, and we are one of the largest countries by area on Earth.
Why do we pay more for healthcare?
Because America subscribes to a warped version of capitalism that places things in the private domain when most other governments wisely decided to manage these things. This includes, but is not limited to, basic utilities like water, electricity, telecommunications, internet, and even roadways. This policy benefits a tiny fraction of Americans -- perhaps 1 in every 250 Americans, while harming the rest, and it is not changed because our government has essentially been co-opted by wealthy private interests and corporations. As our popular media is controlled by the same, the illusion is presented of choice regarding political affiliation and candidates, when in fact no choice exists.
Why is our productivity so high compared to real wages?
Because we don't take vacation, or sick days, and have no labour party present to defend workers' rights, leading to the majority of states passing variations of Right to Work laws which effectively ban unions and allow employers to fire people for any reason, at any time. As a result, the rights of workers suffer, leading to institutionalized abuse and exploitation of workers. Should labor prices rise, it is easy to simply order Congress to flood the affected market with immigrants and crash the labor price.
Why does our government spy on us and disregard our civil liberties?
All governments do that. Ours just got caught. As far as why they do it, the reasons are too numerous to list here, but effectively it comes down to national security and preventing any widespread political insurrection amongst a highly exploited worker caste.
Why are we below the average in ability according to OECD?
Because we invest very little in public education, and the price of post-secondary education is inflating at double digit percentages every year, effectively eliminating access to higher education for many, if not the majority, of the population.
Why is the gap between the richest and the poorest on par with that of African countries?
This isn't entirely accurate. Japan has the lowest wealth inequity of any country on Earth, and the highest is Bolivia. The United States, while scoring nearly the same as Uguanda, also wasn't that far off from the United Kingdom. Source The problem is not a wealth "gap" per-se but rather that when you plot wealth distribution as a curve, the United States has an uncharacteristically high concentration of wealth amongst the top 1% -- far higher than any other country on Earth.
There are many reasons for this, but essentially it comes down to a lack of inheritance tax and how our economy has been structured; We are much more an investment and service-based economy than most, and both of these, but investment in particular, leads to rapid wealth disparity being created. Deregulation of the stock market, banks, etc., also have contributed significantly to this problem -- we are, as it were, robbing Peter to pay Paul. See also: Too big to fail. While the impact of any one of these legislative initiatives isn't enough to change things, collectively they are excerting a continuous pressure on the economy and over the past thirty years the problem has worsened. However, the retirement of the boomers has acted like a catalyst, rapidly accelerating this trend.
And finally, why the fuck do people keep telling me this is the greatest country on Earth?
Because we live here. Duh. Nobody's national anthem starts with "We're Number Two!"
This is a horse shit excuse and I'm tired of hearing it.
"A variety of market and technical factors, government efforts, and access to resources at the local level have influenced the deployment of broadband infrastructure. Areas with low population density and rugged terrain, as well as areas removed from cities, are generally more costly to serve than are densely populated areas and areas with flat terrain. As such, deployment tends to be less developed in more rural parts of the country. Technical factors can also affect deployment. GAO also found that a variety of federal and state efforts, and access to resources at the local level, have influenced the deployment of broadband infrastructure." Source: GAO-06-426, A Report to Congressional Committees. May, 2006. US General Accounting Office.
Attempts have been made; in 2007 the Community Broadband Act was proposed. It died in committee. It would have federalized broadband deployment and removed municipalities' and states' ability to restrict or impede broadband deployment. Did you know that in several states, broadband is banned by law?
No. You probably didn't, because as you put it... it's a "horse shit excuse". I must admit, I'm incredulous too that a government as big as ours could be incompetent, or that the Constitutional separation of federal and state might occasionally create entry barriers for prospective companies looking to lay down infrastructure. Yes. Totally shit. Forget I mentioned that; and be doubly sure to forget that large "megalopolis" like New York continually try to pull stupid legislative shit like banning fountain sodas over a certain size, or those stickers on everything claiming the product only causes cancer if you live in California.
Nope, but you're half-way there. The problem with the United States is that, well... States. In most other countries, if you want to run cable, utilities, etc., you go to the federal government, get your permit, do whatever environmental impact studies need done, and be on your merry. But here, you have to deal with municipalities. Thousands of them. And that opens the door for exclusive contracts; Which are typically for 10, 20, even 50 years. And it goes to one company. One. For an entire town. For 50 years. They didn't write any legislation, they just took advantage of how our government was organized. It's a glitch courtesy of our Constitution.
The other half of the equation though, and one most people forget, is that the United States is big. Like, really big. Like, it could fit all those other countries mentioned inside it and still have space left over for dessert. Low population density is what fucks us, even more than the above-mentioned which, while bad, can be fixed by law. You cannot shrink a landmass down to a more maintainable size.
Roads, water works, electricity, cabling... all of it, we need more. A lot more than say, Japan would. In Japan, people are packed in like sardines. There are parts of this country where you can watch your dog run away for three days it's so flat and barren. But it still needs cabling run across it.
We are, in a very literal sense, a victim of our own size. No fat american jokes though please.
And thus began the arms race where eventually the only way to use the internet requires buying an up to date bot plugin for your browser... ^_^
I once tried submitting a tip on a possible terrorism lead to the FBI's website. Then it put up a CAPTCHA, and that pretty much ended it. I hope he didn't blow up anything important.
Slashdot Mirror
After all, we must all be protected from any form of true democracy and/or choice!
The people who work at these agencies would probably remind you that without all this surveillance, you'd be hiding under your bed waiting for the next terror attack or IED. Democracy would be on the evening news every night waving a flag over the bodies of its adherents while its opponents marched in the streets, celebrating victory after victory.
People forget that we do have enemies; There is more than one way to organize a society, and a lot of people feel like the best way to deal with a society different than your own, is to advocate, encourage, and even practice violence against them "so they know their place." Are the threats as big as they say? Are the sacrifices we've made to keep those threats at bay worth it? I don't know. But don't you dare get on a soap box and preach about "true democracy" without answering the question: How do we protect it?
You do not just get to handwave away the threats. You have to answer them -- even if it's just to say "Then that is the price we will pay." It's okay to say everything they're doing is wrong; Afterall, this is a democracy right? But if you won't suggest an alternative, then you don't really care about democracy. You just want to rage against "the man" and be a rebel without a cause. You want to feel righteous, but without all that hard work of enduring tensions, making compromises, and reasoning out not what's best for you -- but what's best for an entire country.
And if you do that, then I have no respect for you. You want to bitch about the NSA? Okay, fine. I grant you that. But what's your alternative? Put something on the table for the rest of us to discuss, or give up your chair for someone who's willing to not just talk about democracy, but sit down and actually do it.
My, how much progress we've made in fifteen years...
We've made considerable progress in 15 years. 15 years ago, nobody thought the internet was much more than an academic curiousity. All the big players today didn't exist 15 years ago -- Google, Facebook, eBay, Amazon... didn't exist. 404 Business Not Found. But 15 years ago, and people seem to forget, the telecommunications networks that the internet was built on, and later developed a symbiosis with, was being tapped, surveilled, and that data shared with these same governments; As they had done since a few years after WWII, when the world leaders held summits and asked: How can we prevent the next Nazi Germany? And the answer was the same one that won the Allied Powers WWII: Computers. Cryptography. Information Awareness. Back then, information awareness came down to radios, radars, and phone lines, but the doctrine hasn't changed in 50 years: Knowledge of the enemies communications and positions is what wins wars. It's how Germany kicked the everloving shit out of Europe -- blitzkrieg. Be fast. Go unseen. Rain death from above. And be gone before the enemy can mount a response.
And people act like this is some kind of new thing... like the mentality and the methodologies being used by the NSA and its foreign counterparts are this big revelatory thing. But it's not. Not when you understand that we have our eyes and ears everywhere -- you can't move an army anywhere on Earth without us (and by that, I mean America and her allies) knowing about it, and being able to respond with lightning speed. This is common knowledge today. From satellites to realtime worldwide communication... intelligence assets can now be placed, developed, analyzed, and acted upon through the chain of command in less time than it takes you to brush your teeth in the morning.
Which means there's only one place left a threat can hide: By being small and decentralized... by flying under the radar.
And lookie lookie -- what's the NSA been up to these past few years? They aren't just tracking standing armies now. They aren't even just tracking companies, factories, and infrastructure that those armies would need for logistics. They've gone right now to street level. They're going house by house, cable by cable, looking for anyone and anything that could still fly under the radar.
Good? Bad? Depends on who you ask. But the one thing I've gotten real damn tired of hearing on Slashdot and hundreds of other websites is the tired mantra of "Oh noes! The NSA is spying on us!" ... without bothering to answer the question of why much beyond "Because they're just evil, you know." People have developed the NSA's true motives in their minds about as well as Hollywood develops Star Trek villains! "I'm gonna be bad because... I feel like being bad."
"Intelligence expert Professor Des Ball says the Australian Signals Directorate â" formerly known as the Defense Signals Directorate â" is sharing information with the National Security Agency (NSA).
Let's rewrite that to be a bit more accurate and a bit less, er, leading:
One of America's closest allies and long-time member of ECHELON recently reminded the world that they haven't stopped sharing intelligence.
So how's that new "Cloud all the apps" thing working out for you guys so far? Ah. I see you leaked pretty much your whole database of people who had signed up for it. Well then, carry on.
In other news, I hope your new strategy crashes into the dirt so hard the only thing that'll be memorable about Adobe in 5 years will be is the case study on it in business classes around the world on how not to do it.
Fuck off and die in a fire. You do not have the right to dictate changes to a society so that it fits your business model better.
Easy there cowboy, no need to get angry. None of the sites they I'd ever heard of before today, and I pirate the everloving fuck out of anything stamped as owned by the British Emp--er, RIAA. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go dump some more of their junk in the river while dressed like one of the village people...
As long as they maintain this level of incompetence, piracy will live on forever.
Nobody rides for free!
Apparently the editors are working for free too now. I mean, how else can you explain "How to Test SaaS, PaaS & IaaS"
amp; amp; baby.
How about "Is Obama a muslim? Of course he is." Confirmation bias is a wonderful thing. You can prove anything with it!
Actually, that's circular logic.
Villifying a dead man, nice. Look, I respect you, and I agree with what you say, most of the time, but now that man is dead, and all the grousing about him now is wankerism to an extreme degree, sigifying nothing.
I guess since Hitler's dead now too, we can't call him a bastard either...
There's not much far-left anything in the US.
Sure there is! Fox News tells us all the time that Obama is a communist and there's a big liberal left-wing conspiracy to oppress them because they hate freedom. Okay... my turn to vomit in my mouth.
But more seriously, the fear here has become palpable. They said "lah-di-dah, airy-fairy view", like it doesn't mean anything, but they're already moving to try and suppress it. How was it that Ghandi put it: First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you... ah, but I forget what comes after that!
This is the first public admission that the UK is shitting a fucking brick about Snowden, but you have to read between the lines to spot it.
You know, I've had very little good to say about Snowden, considering him little more than some kid who punked the NSA, then mooned us on his way out the door. But this kind of reaction suggests there's more to the story than I think anyone realizes. Now, I'm not saying Snowden has anything, but the UK is obviously worried that he'll say he does. Snowden has credibility now -- he could turn that on the UK. And the UK and US are very close allies when it comes to intelligence.
The UK may be worried that it's staunch defense of the US is about to kick of a political shitstorm as some yet unidentified new leak surfaces. And real or not, it could seriously harm the UK's credibility. The Obama administration's absolutely terrible way of handling this entire affair has turned some dumb kid into a weapon potentially more damaging to the UK than a few hundred drone strikes.
If I were the PM, I'd be fucking livid right now with Obama.
You can't rail against the Patriot act in one post then dismiss it as inconsequential in the next.
Yes I can. The patriot act is a bad law. It is also an irrelevant law regardless of what you say. There are over a hundred thousand federal laws alone. We are drowning in laws. There are entire libraries, entire buildings, filled with nothing but laws. Just the ones made by Congress, nevermind the rulings created by our courts, or administrative bodies, bylaws, guidelines. In all of that enormous complexity, there exists a 'backup copy' if you will of the Patriot Act.
The fact is the law is just a convenience for law enforcement. Its absence won't hinder them in any way -- there are a hundred other justifications already lined up and ready for use to continue their behavior.
The changing of a law means nothing if it isn't accompanied by a change of attitude, a change of focus, of perspective -- We have a culture of fear. Fear of the unknown; the terrorists, the boogiemen under our bed, whatever. We have let this fear part us from our liberty and freedom. No law, or the abolition of one, can make us whole.
For this to be meaningful, we need a paradigm shift from being oppressed by our fear to being sustained by it. We must move beyond our fear; We must conquer it. We must prove to the world that every terrorist that blows himself up on our lands, will only strengthen our resolve. It will only drive us to anger, and in our anger we will redouble every quality they hate in us. We will shine with the light of a hundred thousand suns and burn the little fuckers into dust. Our victory against them will be so complete, so absolute, that nobody will ever again test our resolve.
That is what we must project. That is the attitude; One where we will not sacrifice even the tiniest part of our culture, our freedom. We will tell them: Come. We're ready. Come and try and stop us. This is fucking America, and here, here we are free.
Attitude. That's what we need. Not laws.
Sure, but in the end, the face man (let's call him "Jobs") is going to be a billionaire, whereas the coder ("Woz", if you will) is going to go a few years making $80K at the company he co-founded, and then get fired by Jobs to make way for dozens of other younger, cheaper Wozzes.
It is fortunate then that the Wozzes of the world are not so easily discouraged. Jobs' legacy is that he became rich at the expense of so many others, lived a life of vanity and turtleneck sweaters, and then bargained with the devil to gain a few more years of that life when sickness came for him, arranging secret operations that skirted the law. He was hated by all who worked for him, and his empire is already starting to crumble, and he hasn't been in the ground pushing daisies for all that long either.
But Woz... He helped to kick off the start of the information age. That's something he can tell his children, and his children's children. It is something that those who care about history will remember. But even if they don't, even if history forgets the name Steve Wozniac, he contributed something that genuinely was for the betterment of all mankind.
And that's why the Wozzes of the world get up every day, brush their teeth, comb their hair back, put on their work shoes, and drive the long road into work; They don't care about recognition, they care about contribution. So it has been with all the truly great people down through history. And that is why what Jobs built is already crumbling -- it was just a effigy to his own greatness -- while what Woz built, the personal computer, has lifted over a billion people into the information age already and dramatically altered the course of human history. Apple will eventually die; but the personal computer -- I think that will live on for a very, very long time.
So if coding is so routine, then everyone should know how to do.
I love how this asshole is saying code has no practical value, and yet the only reason said asshole has a job is because someone coded the OS, web server, browser, the routers and switches, and the website itself that he's posting from to claim this.
The thing about society is that every job is important. We need janitors as much as we need CEOs. We need specialist labor as much as general. I mean, we entered a new age in human history -- the Information Age, because most of us are now specialists of one kind or another. This dinosaur is still living in the Industrial Age where you only needed a few schmoot people, and the rest you could (sometimes literally) just feed into the machines.
By removing permissions to do those things?
Sigh. Firstly, you need to read section 215. It grants the Director of the FBI (not NSA) the ability to get ex parte authorizations for a search warrant, and the recipient is then gagged. That's it. The NSA isn't even referenced or involved, except perhaps to process the evidence gathered by the FBI. This is how they go to a bank, library, ISP, etc., and say "We want all your records on this person." and they have to turn them over and then not inform their client this happened. And they don't have to produce any evidence or give a reason to the recipient. It's just "wham, bam, thank you ma'am." ... and you better keep this between us.
The authority and power to do this is available in literally hundreds of other laws; Striking section 215 would simply mean they have to use a different administrative process to continue doing the exact same thing. This is political grandstanding -- not only is this "anti-NSA" bill not about the NSA, but regardless of whether it passes or fails, it will not change how business is being done.
Which, big surprise -- Our congress-critters are introducing a bill that accomplishes nothing, but has a nice, patriotic, sounding name. The "freedom act". Yeah. We can all get behind that! What does the freedom act do?
Nothing.
Typical.
get that this is the feeling of much of /. but what example can you cite?
Pretty much the entire Act as it currently stands. There's a lot of vaguely-worded clauses that grant nearly limitless authority and do not require disclosure of the reasons for many police actions. It would be relatively easy to stitch together what is being given up by these politicians from other parts of the Act and have yourself a new Franken-agency.
I'm sorry, in that case... AMERICA! FUCK YEAH! We ARE the greatest country!
No country's national anthem is "We're Number Two". I am not sure how you could take such esoteric concept as "greatest" when referring to something as large as a country. We would need to establish a set of criterion for objectively measuring greatness.
There are a number of things that are unique to America which are positive. Somewhere over half of our Fortune 500 companies were created by immigrants, despite being only about 1/8th of the population. That certainly speaks to economic opportunity. And we have a temperate climate, and abundant food; We are the bread basket of the world. If America stopped exporting food, billions would starve. We also possess the largest military on the planet and tons of natural resources. People love to bash America, but I think when you look at it as a complete entity, it is certainly one of the best places to live. That isn't to say we are number one at anything, but that also isn't to say we need to be either.
I don't mind a little flag waving and "America, Fuck Yeah!" from time to time. We should be proud of our accomplishments. But that is not license to ignore our failures, or to sit on our laurels. And the same can be said wherever you live as well.
... In other news, senators stopped short of repealing the Patriot Act, likely aware that without deleting the entire act, all they're accomplishing is switching the data collection activities to another agency, which will then perform the role the NSA currently has.
I can't be the only one confused by this article summary. It's going to take an hour of reading Wikipedia to figure it out...
It's the Al Gore pokemon, which hit the graveyard a number of years back, but apparently Mozilla just played the Monster Reborn! card. Remember how he said "We must also promote global access to the Internet. We need to bridge the digital divide not just within our country, but among countries. Only by giving people around the world access to this technology can they tap into the potential of the Information Age." Yup. That. It's baaaaaaack.
Up next, throwing down a wall of magikarp while they desperately try to evade the massive amounts of snark that is about to descend upon them.
Girlintraining almost has it right. While we are not socialistic and have a government being a good big brother to us, we are pseudo-Capitalistic with the worst part of both Socialism and Capitalism in force. If we had a REALLY free economy, the problem would be solved quite quickly. The problem is, we don't have a friggin clue how to solve the problem infrastructure.
Infrastructure that depends on right of way to land creates a natural monopoly. I don't feel going laisse faire would accomplish anything. If you remove government control and hand over access to private citizens, you will amplify the problem a thousand-fold; Everyone between point A and point B will want a cut, and not everyone will be willing to offer access at a reasonable rate. This is why you have easements and eminent domain. Our current system places right of way in the hands of municipalities, which often offer exclusive contracts and can also be bullied or bought off in ways that the state or federal authorities cannot.
You cannot have a 'free' economy when you're dealing with a natural monopoly. Even Adam Smith in Wealth of Nations said as much about land ownership. It must be owned or controlled by the government, or you get situations exactly like this; Profits increase because the fixed costs remain constant but demand is ever-increasing. Telecommunications is the classic case of a natural monopoly. You would be hard pressed to find a better example!
No one questions that its more costly to supply infrastructure to rural areas. The question is why that excuse is at all relevant to American cities.
Because cities are interconnected in terms of telecommunications, electricity, and roadways. Which means the distance between those cities, and the number of cities served, matters a great deal.
I tried to find out recently if I could upgrade to a higher service tier - and the answer was no. Even though I'm on the lowest tier (15 Mbps @ $50/mo) and am an existing customer, they will only "offer" me new subscriber packages for which I am not eligible.
While I sympathize with your problem, as has been discussed elsewhere, the problem is municipalities, who control the right of way for laying new infrastructure. As a result of having to deal with hundreds of thousands of municipalities all over the country, the cost of entry goes up enormously. As well, municipalities typically sign exclusive contracts for periods of 10 to 50 years for right of way for electrical and signal cabling. It is not Comcast's fault, but rather a failure of our Constitution and, by extension, our federal government to centralize right of way permits and promote competition by eliminating exclusive contracts, as has been done in most other western countries.
That said; Turn off your service and ask a friend to pay for a couple months on their credit card and claim they live there. Obviously, pay your friend. They typically have low-cost deals for the first several months of service. When the term expires, have your friend cancel service, and request that the service be re-instated under your name as the previous tenants "didn't work out." Rinse, wash, repeat.
We're 7th in literacy, 27th in math, 22nd in science, 49th in life expectancy, 178th in infant mortality, 3rd in median household income, number 4 in labor force and number 4 in exports. We lead the world in only three categories: number of incarcerated citizens per capita, number of adults who believe angels are real and defense spending - where we spend more than the next 26 countries combined, 25 of whom are allies.
Literacy: 48th.
Math: 32nd.
Science: 14th
Life expectancy: 33rd
Infant mortality ('05-10): 40th.
Median household income: 4th.
Labor force: 3rd
Exports (per capita): 43rd
Exports (gross): 2nd
Incarceration (per capita): 1st
Adults (belief in angels): No reliable statistics available. 41-80%
Defense spending (gross): 1st
Defense spending (% GDP): 2nd (tied with Russia)
"where we spend more than the next 26 countries combined, 25 of whom are allies."
False. Only the next 14. Of those, only 9 are allies.
Why is Broadband more expensive?
Regulatory hurdles, low population density, and we are one of the largest countries by area on Earth.
Why do we pay more for healthcare?
Because America subscribes to a warped version of capitalism that places things in the private domain when most other governments wisely decided to manage these things. This includes, but is not limited to, basic utilities like water, electricity, telecommunications, internet, and even roadways. This policy benefits a tiny fraction of Americans -- perhaps 1 in every 250 Americans, while harming the rest, and it is not changed because our government has essentially been co-opted by wealthy private interests and corporations. As our popular media is controlled by the same, the illusion is presented of choice regarding political affiliation and candidates, when in fact no choice exists.
Why is our productivity so high compared to real wages?
Because we don't take vacation, or sick days, and have no labour party present to defend workers' rights, leading to the majority of states passing variations of Right to Work laws which effectively ban unions and allow employers to fire people for any reason, at any time. As a result, the rights of workers suffer, leading to institutionalized abuse and exploitation of workers. Should labor prices rise, it is easy to simply order Congress to flood the affected market with immigrants and crash the labor price.
Why does our government spy on us and disregard our civil liberties?
All governments do that. Ours just got caught. As far as why they do it, the reasons are too numerous to list here, but effectively it comes down to national security and preventing any widespread political insurrection amongst a highly exploited worker caste.
Why are we below the average in ability according to OECD?
Because we invest very little in public education, and the price of post-secondary education is inflating at double digit percentages every year, effectively eliminating access to higher education for many, if not the majority, of the population.
Why is the gap between the richest and the poorest on par with that of African countries?
This isn't entirely accurate. Japan has the lowest wealth inequity of any country on Earth, and the highest is Bolivia. The United States, while scoring nearly the same as Uguanda, also wasn't that far off from the United Kingdom. Source The problem is not a wealth "gap" per-se but rather that when you plot wealth distribution as a curve, the United States has an uncharacteristically high concentration of wealth amongst the top 1% -- far higher than any other country on Earth.
There are many reasons for this, but essentially it comes down to a lack of inheritance tax and how our economy has been structured; We are much more an investment and service-based economy than most, and both of these, but investment in particular, leads to rapid wealth disparity being created. Deregulation of the stock market, banks, etc., also have contributed significantly to this problem -- we are, as it were, robbing Peter to pay Paul. See also: Too big to fail. While the impact of any one of these legislative initiatives isn't enough to change things, collectively they are excerting a continuous pressure on the economy and over the past thirty years the problem has worsened. However, the retirement of the boomers has acted like a catalyst, rapidly accelerating this trend.
And finally, why the fuck do people keep telling me this is the greatest country on Earth?
Because we live here. Duh. Nobody's national anthem starts with "We're Number Two!"
This is a horse shit excuse and I'm tired of hearing it.
"A variety of market and technical factors, government efforts, and access to resources at the local level have influenced the deployment of broadband infrastructure. Areas with low population density and rugged terrain, as well as areas removed from cities, are generally more costly to serve than are densely populated areas and areas with flat terrain. As such, deployment tends to be less developed in more rural parts of the country. Technical factors can also affect deployment. GAO also found that a variety of federal and state efforts, and access to resources at the local level, have influenced the deployment of broadband infrastructure."
Source: GAO-06-426, A Report to Congressional Committees. May, 2006. US General Accounting Office.
Attempts have been made; in 2007 the Community Broadband Act was proposed. It died in committee. It would have federalized broadband deployment and removed municipalities' and states' ability to restrict or impede broadband deployment. Did you know that in several states, broadband is banned by law?
No. You probably didn't, because as you put it... it's a "horse shit excuse". I must admit, I'm incredulous too that a government as big as ours could be incompetent, or that the Constitutional separation of federal and state might occasionally create entry barriers for prospective companies looking to lay down infrastructure. Yes. Totally shit. Forget I mentioned that; and be doubly sure to forget that large "megalopolis" like New York continually try to pull stupid legislative shit like banning fountain sodas over a certain size, or those stickers on everything claiming the product only causes cancer if you live in California.
The telco lobby writes the legislation.
Nope, but you're half-way there. The problem with the United States is that, well... States. In most other countries, if you want to run cable, utilities, etc., you go to the federal government, get your permit, do whatever environmental impact studies need done, and be on your merry. But here, you have to deal with municipalities. Thousands of them. And that opens the door for exclusive contracts; Which are typically for 10, 20, even 50 years. And it goes to one company. One. For an entire town. For 50 years. They didn't write any legislation, they just took advantage of how our government was organized. It's a glitch courtesy of our Constitution.
The other half of the equation though, and one most people forget, is that the United States is big. Like, really big. Like, it could fit all those other countries mentioned inside it and still have space left over for dessert. Low population density is what fucks us, even more than the above-mentioned which, while bad, can be fixed by law. You cannot shrink a landmass down to a more maintainable size.
Roads, water works, electricity, cabling... all of it, we need more. A lot more than say, Japan would. In Japan, people are packed in like sardines. There are parts of this country where you can watch your dog run away for three days it's so flat and barren. But it still needs cabling run across it.
We are, in a very literal sense, a victim of our own size. No fat american jokes though please.
And thus began the arms race where eventually the only way to use the internet requires buying an up to date bot plugin for your browser... ^_^
I once tried submitting a tip on a possible terrorism lead to the FBI's website. Then it put up a CAPTCHA, and that pretty much ended it. I hope he didn't blow up anything important.
Awaiting the half-assed reply from girlintraining, need a good chuckle.
Keep waiting.