It might have been an interesting study if they had focused on "tier 1" nations -- those with a developed infrastructure, economies, etc.
Going beyond tier 1 nations would be interesting if they focused on some kind of currency-adjusted cost; it might start to look like the Economist's Big Mac index.
More interesting yet would be adjusting for population density -- knowing the Japanese can get 100 Meg up/down for $10/month is kind of meaningless as a comparison when you take into account that the population density allows a huge number of people to be directly served by Ethernet runs from an actual Ethernet switch and not via some add-on or specialized "broadband" technology.
But in any super poor country, pretty much everything costing more than $10 in the U.S. is going to be some 100x or 1000x multiple of the median local income.
I've never had any problem using it, including what looks like a dozen in-place upgrades on my 3 year old XP SP3 box.
But it is getting to be "too much" of an application that does too little. I don't think it's going to change, though, as AFAICT it has become the "Apple Desktop". In fact it wouldn't surprise me if it became almost some kind of virtual desktop environment in the future, a place to run iApps on desktops, interact with Apple's Apple-product-only app and media marketplace.
It doesn't scale well in terms of being able to categorize your media or create media libraries specific to individual devices, especially if you have multiple devices -- I've always hated the way you choose and filter media, especially music, among media devices. "Checked" songs are sheer idiocy with an iPhone, iPad and two iPods all syncing the same music, and there's no other song-level ability include/exclude specific songs from specific devices.
I'd like to see a much more specific sync application for iPhones in particular, especially one which would allow you to sync with multiple computers and was more focused on mail, contacts and app data than on digital media like music and movies.
The U.S. is rapidly becoming a two-tier society in terms of civil rights because of our desire to lock everyone up and the reality of being unable to do so (most of this is driven by the war and drugs and the secondary lawlessness caused by drugs).
First-tier citizens are those who have never been convicted of a felony.
Second-tier citizens are those who have been convicted of a felony and are either on long-term probation or parole or have served a long sentence. In most cases, these people lose most of their civil rights and cannot reclaim them without a difficult appeal process or a pardon.
I don't have a problem with convicted felons, serving their sentence in a prison or on parole losing their civil rights. Depending on the crime, some long-term probationary convicts, such as violent criminals, should probably have some of their rights curtailed (eg, buying a weapon) for the duration of their probationary period.
The problem is, though, that we're convicting these people on 10+ year sentences, often for violent crimes, and then after 18 months, we're letting them out on probation or parole and treating them like second class citizens forever. And then we wonder why unemployment is so high and why people don't feel part of the society as a whole.
Why the rage? Just spell out very clearly (and in writing) exactly what will happen if component X fails, and the cost to implement redundancy now. When component X fails and the company loses Y dollars of revenue and the CEO comes to you, just pull out the email and say "I tried to design redundancy but he wouldn't spend the money".
It's never that easy. IT is *always* wrong when disaster strikes, even with memos, charts, graphs and color glossy photographs with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one.
The first excuse is always that you didn't explain the issue clearly enough, so they can't be responsible for refusing funding. -- "I've warned him about his communication skills, they're consistently full of technical language he can't or won't explain." I like when they make their ignorance your problem.
This is often coupled with "IT's solution wasn't redundant and couldn't be made redundant without spending significant money, that, at the time and considering the economic situation, could not be justified, given the focus on saving jobs and salaries." In other words, I don't get my bonus without suppressing spending, and daddy needs a new S550.
And all this is assuming that, after the disaster, you're given an opportunity to even explain the outcome and management's role in not preventing it. Usually the CTO/CIO is told they'll "be OK after this" but we "probably need to clean house a little to get rid of the people that always blame management." In other words, for keeping the real reasons hushed up, somebody gets paid and the smart people get shitcanned without ever getting a chance to explain management's failure. This is sometimes sold as in "everyone's best interest" if there's an ESOP and/or bonuses paid in options, since keeping the stock price up becomes the only thing that matters.
All in all, there's just too many ways for execs to control the debate and dole out blame, regardless of "proof" that their willingness to line their own pockets outweighed doing the right thing. I think its also common in non-high-tech industries for CIO-type positions to be filled by rejects and trustees from the accounting & finance department with an over-arching mandate to "cut costs". That's great, except they end up with cash incentives (stock, bonus money, etc) to cripple DR or other "just in case" systems because they are so expensive, and when shit does happen, they get away with it by saying they were "told" to keep costs down.
If you fail over your HA systems every Sunday at 02:00 (or whatever time is safe...)
(voice of tech ignorant executive)
"We can't be down then. We have remote workers that want to do things at that time."
"The overtime for that window is too expensive, and we can't do it during production hours. We'll just assume you planned carefully."
"You just told me part of the reason that system is so expensive is that it is much less likely to fail. Well, we're not paying for a spare."
And after hearing that, I want to duct tape those fucking executives to their $1500 chair and let them watch while I take a powder-actuated nailer to their precious Mercedes S550.
SCSI is a standard, but there were a lot of connectors and getting the "right" cabling for your chain was often difficult. Apple abused the standard for a long time with their non-standard 25 pin connector that tied all the grounds together.
Security increases complexity and it makes IT more difficult to use. The suits bitch and then want to switch to something else that's not so "hard".
Really, MS is just pandering to what corporations want -- software that just works, so that they can hire minimally competent employees and pay them the lowest possible wage without having to hire bothersome "specialists" who question the boss' IT judgment.
The problem with cash is the bulk and the fact that it's paper.
One way around this would be to convert the cash to more concentrated forms -- precious gems, gold, etc. The downside is it can draw attention to convert them and in the case of an emergency you may not be able to convert them back easily or anonymously and may even pay a steep premium for redemption to cash. Generally not worth it if anonymity and quick access is at a premium and for amounts under, say, a million dollars.
Ideally cash to be stored would be vacuum sealed with a commercial food vacuum sealer. A commercial sealer will develop enough vacuum to compress it (helping mitigate some of the bulk) as well as protect it from the elements, sniffing dogs, etc. Vacuum sealed, $200,000 shouldn't take up much more space than a ream of paper.
There's not many "quick" access places in the home that I like. I might be inclined to keep $10,000 in a safe, since I can get it quick, it can't be stolen, and if "discovered" it usually doesn't draw too much attention or make you look too guilty because $10,000 isn't that much anymore.
For long-term storage in the home, these are some ideas I like, some having easier access than others.
1) Roof vents for plumbing: In most houses these are open or screened with removable screens but are usually fairly large pipes with straight runs down. Sealed bundles of cash can be chained end-on-end, and they could be placed quickly and removed quickly and not discovered very easily.
2) Dummy interior plumbing: I've got a couple of large cast-iron drain pipes in my house. You could add another one with a plugged end terminating into a real one, and the other one disappearing into a wall like any other "normal" pipe. Most people won't even begin to question them or think that they serve no purpose; with the right engineering this could even have quick access.
3) Hot water heaters: The tank itself is generally wrapped with fiberglass insulation. Buy a new tank at Home Depot, open it up and replace the some of the insulation with sealed cash. I figure a 75 gallon tank could pretty easily stash a half-million dollars. Hard to get at without trashing the hot water tank.
Generally speaking, though, the quality of a stash space is inversely proportionate to the difficulty of access (eg, under concrete, etc), and it wouldn't surprise me one bit if the FBI or other big-time police agencies didn't have "stash" specialists who have "seen them all".
This is why all the conservative nutjobs think I'm a liberal nutjob. You can't see anything from anyone else's perspective than your own. And anyone saying "the US does the same thing" with regards to using technical intercepts to punish political enemies (we call them terrorists here, they call them terrorists there) means that they are saying the governments are the same. That's simply false. There is no requirement for the brutality to be equal for there to be hypocrisy because of the US punishing a company for selling a mostly innocuous feature that's required by law in the US. It's required in the US. It's on every single piece of gear in the US. It's on almost all pieces of gear on the planet because it's required in multiple places and cheaper to just put it in everything than make versions for the countries the US doesn't like. And the "free market" USA is bashing private companies for selling equipment with required features to undesirable countries. I guess that makes the US the socialist country now. After all, they are doing all they can to interfere with the free market, with inconsistent restrictions and interfering with private enterprise. Since you defend that, you must be a communist fascist as well, trying to force everyone to only do what you want and preventing free enterprise and such.
What perspective do I need to believe that killing women by stoning them for talking to men outside their family is somehow justifiable? If you're so interested in honesty, at least admit that the Iranian theocracy is brutal, corrupt, illegitimate and quite often downright medieval. If you're not willing to go there, then I'm guessing you're willing to justify *any* socio-political system, up to and including all the usual suspects now, and throughout history. I mean, with the right "perspective", Apartheid South Africa is no worse than the US.
As for the comparisons, Iranian "political enemies" are people who have publicly challenged the legitimacy of the government -- if you want to equate these people with those the US government has labeled "terrorists", go ahead, but I don't see the Iranian government's political enemies flying airplanes into buildings to kill innocent people or financing, planning or engaging in other acts of religiously inspired political violence.
Do you have the understanding that many of the countries in the Middle East believe themselves to have the oldest civilizations on the planet
You don't gain respect for being an old civilization when you treat your own people like it was still the 12th century. Stonings, beheadings, amputations, and that's just the state religion, it doesn't include the political assassinations, torture, imprisonment and the theocratic-military dictatorship repression.
So "lawful intercept" means an intercept done according to the local laws. Are you asserting that Iran broke its own laws when it performed the intercept?
I'm asserting that Iran uses intercepts without judicial oversight and in pursuit of a corrupt, brutal dictatorship. That such practices are semantically "lawful" because the Iranian legal system is either subjugated to its theocratic or political system or or does not respect the self-evident human rights of it citizens does not fail to differentiate them from "lawful intercept" practices of the United States or other Western democracies. Furthermore, I would assert that Iran probably does have laws respecting human rights and individual liberty, much as the Soviets did, but they are unenforceable by the judiciary and ignored by the political and theocratic leadership.
I asserted that it's hypocrisy to require one feature in the USA, and have that used according to law and think that fine, but when the same feature, included because it's impossible to get the gear without it because of all the places that require it, is used in an unfriendly country according to that country's laws is somehow wrong.
It is not hypocrisy in the least; the challenge is that the features in question are used effect the brutalization and repression of their citizenry. In order for it to qualify as hypocrisy, there would have to substantial similarity between the governments of the US and Iran. There isn't.
Sell it to someone in the US or UK and you are fine, but sell it to Iran and it's suddenly an international incident
Do you have any ability to see the difference between the US/UK/Europe and Iran? Or are you a general anti-West hater who draws some kind of moral equivalence with any U.S. action you find objectionable and the policies of Iran, which include rigging elections, taking political prisoners, extrajudicial killings of citizens, not to mention backing medieval religious punishments like stoning?
Despite the missteps and military adventures of the US/UK, "lawful" intercept generally means intercepts that take place within the rule of law, generally involving the review and approval of the judiciary, and in the US this generally means significant national security concerns or criminal investigation, not suppression of popular discontent or beefing up the state security apparatus.
Yes, it's not always perfect in the west, but at least we're not amputating people or killing women half-buried in the sand by throwing rocks at them for expressing their sexuality.
If you're not capable of differentiating between an imperfect West and a corrupt, barbaric Iran, don't ask the questions.
At some point, though, every location was populated by migrants from somewhere else.
Maybe the third or fourth century BC isn't "far enough" to go back, but at some point arguing that arguing that North Africa wasn't populated by Caucasians because those shown living there 2500 years ago were migrants is like arguing that Normandy isn't populated by the French because it was colonized by Vikings.
Thanks for your info -- the Carthaginians was the oldest non-Egyptian North African civilization I could think of.
One of the great arguments against UFOs has always been the extreme distance they would have to cover to get here and the difficulty of covering that kind of distance hauling a biological entity. Alpha Centauri is 4 light years and change, and it'd be a substantial effort to fly to Earth with life forms.
Is the BS propaganda about North Africa being populated by blacks? The "Cleopatra was black" meme?
Carthaginians are almost uniformly portrayed as Caucasoid, not Negroid. Considering that the Punic Wars were fought around 280 BC and current populations being predominately non-Negroid, it leads me to believe that North Africa has never been populated by Negroid peoples, at least not since, say, 1000 BC.
We have consumer pre-sort in Minneapolis for recyclables (as opposed to single-stream for every other municipality that I'm aware of) and the bad news is that it cuts participation, at least at my household. I don't have the room for seperate containers for clear glass, colored glass, plastic, aluminum, steel and newspaper.
So I don't bother with anything but newspaper and cardboard, but primarily because those items are a hassle in my trash due to their volume. The rest I just toss in the trash and I'm not the only one I know with the same philosophy.
I definitely would recycle more if it was single stream because it would be so easy and less of a burden. I can't help but think that consumer pre-sort is just environmentalist genuflection to their green religion as it adds a fairly negligible benefit.
As it happens, I have a client with a waste-to-energy plant, built in the early 80s. The plant takes consumer household waste and creates a low-tech fuel that's burned in electric power stations. They have an automated sorting system that works pretty well and given the plant's age and relatively old technology, I can only assume that modern sort systems for recycling work much better.
Most Zombie literature holds that large-scale weapons like bombs, machine guns, artillery and explosive weapons are ineffective. Some take the tack that the outbreak happens so quickly that we don't get use them because the Zombie overwhelm the delivery systems (you can't drop a bomb without a plane; no pilots? no air base? no bombing).
I think this undersells military weapons and how effective they might be.
A gattling-type machine gun or minigun would be devastating in massed crowds -- it'd be like using a firehose. Cluster munitions would also be pretty devastating, as would most conventional high explosives, particularly carpet bombing. Zombies don't hide or dig bunkers.
Fire gets dismissed as "zombies-don't-feel-pain" but I think that discounts how hot napalm could burn (or be made to burn); at some point the flesh will incinerate.
I do agree that among ordinary civilians, ordinary small arms could be ineffective among most people -- poor skills and a reasonable challenge (assuming headshots) for even skilled handgunners, limited ammo, and so on.
They're crappy because a "designer" designed them. Designers do great things with visuals, but those things are quite often terrible as user interface elements.
I can't count how many times I've had people tell me something like "Gee, that job offer sounded really good but we're in the middle of a project and it would derail it if I left..." or "....I really wanted to give them 30 days notice but they wanted me right away at my new job and I couldn't do that."
WHAT!? Who cares! Most employers (corporate and small) will terminate an employee without any advance notice if there's even the slightest financial advantage to them, and in fact, that is SOP in most places.
Your employer is not your friend. Your co-workers are not your friends. They do not deserve loyalty.
There was a bar in the ground floor of the building I worked in that had a great sign on the wall:
"People work for money. If you want loyalty, buy a dog."
Strangely, I find the iPad almost not big enough..
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7-Inch iPad Rumored
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It's a good size for most things, but it's still not big enough to comfortably display a newspaper or a magazine without zooming & panning, and this includes some web sites. "Normal" Facebook (not touch.facebook.com) is scaled fairly small -- I can read it, but it's about 10-20% too small.
A Wired-type magazine app is nice, but I'm not holding my breath for them all to be that way -- the Zinio app I think is a great compromise, but again, you're still zooming and panning.
Ideally a retina display (TM) resolution iPad with a screen size matching the outline of Vanity Fair magazine would be perfect. Video would have more impact, books could display more text without constant scrolling/page turning and/or too small text.
Would it be portable? Not really, but that wouldn't be the point -- for me that size would be easily portable from the kitchen to the living room or the bedroom and probably just fine for airplane travel, and it's not like the existing iPad size is so small you can carry it in your pocket.
I think you're conflating "good industrial design" (look, feel, form factor, usability) with a broad definition of "fashionable" which appears to include a fair amount of disdain (some of it correct) for the superficial and trend-focused elements of "fashionable" usually associated with clothes or lifestyle choices.
Industrial Design zealots often make two points: 1) Most things are poorly designed and 2) People react positively to good design.
With a lot of Apple's products (iPod/iPhone/iPad) I think people are drawn to the high-quality industrial design, and those devices have that, and they have been very successful.
Has this led to these products being seen as trendy or desirable? Sure, but that doesn't mean they aren't well designed or useful.
(1) Size up opponent in terms of political clout, potential exposure and wealth. (2) Weakness on any front? Issue National Security Letter (3) Profit!!!
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It might have been an interesting study if they had focused on "tier 1" nations -- those with a developed infrastructure, economies, etc.
Going beyond tier 1 nations would be interesting if they focused on some kind of currency-adjusted cost; it might start to look like the Economist's Big Mac index.
More interesting yet would be adjusting for population density -- knowing the Japanese can get 100 Meg up/down for $10/month is kind of meaningless as a comparison when you take into account that the population density allows a huge number of people to be directly served by Ethernet runs from an actual Ethernet switch and not via some add-on or specialized "broadband" technology.
But in any super poor country, pretty much everything costing more than $10 in the U.S. is going to be some 100x or 1000x multiple of the median local income.
I've never had any problem using it, including what looks like a dozen in-place upgrades on my 3 year old XP SP3 box.
But it is getting to be "too much" of an application that does too little. I don't think it's going to change, though, as AFAICT it has become the "Apple Desktop". In fact it wouldn't surprise me if it became almost some kind of virtual desktop environment in the future, a place to run iApps on desktops, interact with Apple's Apple-product-only app and media marketplace.
It doesn't scale well in terms of being able to categorize your media or create media libraries specific to individual devices, especially if you have multiple devices -- I've always hated the way you choose and filter media, especially music, among media devices. "Checked" songs are sheer idiocy with an iPhone, iPad and two iPods all syncing the same music, and there's no other song-level ability include/exclude specific songs from specific devices.
I'd like to see a much more specific sync application for iPhones in particular, especially one which would allow you to sync with multiple computers and was more focused on mail, contacts and app data than on digital media like music and movies.
The U.S. is rapidly becoming a two-tier society in terms of civil rights because of our desire to lock everyone up and the reality of being unable to do so (most of this is driven by the war and drugs and the secondary lawlessness caused by drugs).
First-tier citizens are those who have never been convicted of a felony.
Second-tier citizens are those who have been convicted of a felony and are either on long-term probation or parole or have served a long sentence. In most cases, these people lose most of their civil rights and cannot reclaim them without a difficult appeal process or a pardon.
I don't have a problem with convicted felons, serving their sentence in a prison or on parole losing their civil rights. Depending on the crime, some long-term probationary convicts, such as violent criminals, should probably have some of their rights curtailed (eg, buying a weapon) for the duration of their probationary period.
The problem is, though, that we're convicting these people on 10+ year sentences, often for violent crimes, and then after 18 months, we're letting them out on probation or parole and treating them like second class citizens forever. And then we wonder why unemployment is so high and why people don't feel part of the society as a whole.
Why the rage? Just spell out very clearly (and in writing) exactly what will happen if component X fails, and the cost to implement redundancy now. When component X fails and the company loses Y dollars of revenue and the CEO comes to you, just pull out the email and say "I tried to design redundancy but he wouldn't spend the money".
It's never that easy. IT is *always* wrong when disaster strikes, even with memos, charts, graphs and color glossy photographs with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one.
The first excuse is always that you didn't explain the issue clearly enough, so they can't be responsible for refusing funding. -- "I've warned him about his communication skills, they're consistently full of technical language he can't or won't explain." I like when they make their ignorance your problem.
This is often coupled with "IT's solution wasn't redundant and couldn't be made redundant without spending significant money, that, at the time and considering the economic situation, could not be justified, given the focus on saving jobs and salaries." In other words, I don't get my bonus without suppressing spending, and daddy needs a new S550.
And all this is assuming that, after the disaster, you're given an opportunity to even explain the outcome and management's role in not preventing it. Usually the CTO/CIO is told they'll "be OK after this" but we "probably need to clean house a little to get rid of the people that always blame management." In other words, for keeping the real reasons hushed up, somebody gets paid and the smart people get shitcanned without ever getting a chance to explain management's failure. This is sometimes sold as in "everyone's best interest" if there's an ESOP and/or bonuses paid in options, since keeping the stock price up becomes the only thing that matters.
All in all, there's just too many ways for execs to control the debate and dole out blame, regardless of "proof" that their willingness to line their own pockets outweighed doing the right thing. I think its also common in non-high-tech industries for CIO-type positions to be filled by rejects and trustees from the accounting & finance department with an over-arching mandate to "cut costs". That's great, except they end up with cash incentives (stock, bonus money, etc) to cripple DR or other "just in case" systems because they are so expensive, and when shit does happen, they get away with it by saying they were "told" to keep costs down.
If you fail over your HA systems every Sunday at 02:00 (or whatever time is safe...)
(voice of tech ignorant executive)
"We can't be down then. We have remote workers that want to do things at that time."
"The overtime for that window is too expensive, and we can't do it during production hours. We'll just assume you planned carefully."
"You just told me part of the reason that system is so expensive is that it is much less likely to fail. Well, we're not paying for a spare."
And after hearing that, I want to duct tape those fucking executives to their $1500 chair and let them watch while I take a powder-actuated nailer to their precious Mercedes S550.
You're telling me payola, and not a word class set of tits, is what's behind Katy Perry's success?
SCSI is a standard, but there were a lot of connectors and getting the "right" cabling for your chain was often difficult. Apple abused the standard for a long time with their non-standard 25 pin connector that tied all the grounds together.
Even better was Ike Turner's response when asked if he beat his wife, Tina:
"Beat my wife? I don't hit the bitch anymore than any normal man beats his wife."
Why does MS insist on lax security?
Security increases complexity and it makes IT more difficult to use. The suits bitch and then want to switch to something else that's not so "hard".
Really, MS is just pandering to what corporations want -- software that just works, so that they can hire minimally competent employees and pay them the lowest possible wage without having to hire bothersome "specialists" who question the boss' IT judgment.
The problem with cash is the bulk and the fact that it's paper.
One way around this would be to convert the cash to more concentrated forms -- precious gems, gold, etc. The downside is it can draw attention to convert them and in the case of an emergency you may not be able to convert them back easily or anonymously and may even pay a steep premium for redemption to cash. Generally not worth it if anonymity and quick access is at a premium and for amounts under, say, a million dollars.
Ideally cash to be stored would be vacuum sealed with a commercial food vacuum sealer. A commercial sealer will develop enough vacuum to compress it (helping mitigate some of the bulk) as well as protect it from the elements, sniffing dogs, etc. Vacuum sealed, $200,000 shouldn't take up much more space than a ream of paper.
There's not many "quick" access places in the home that I like. I might be inclined to keep $10,000 in a safe, since I can get it quick, it can't be stolen, and if "discovered" it usually doesn't draw too much attention or make you look too guilty because $10,000 isn't that much anymore.
For long-term storage in the home, these are some ideas I like, some having easier access than others.
1) Roof vents for plumbing: In most houses these are open or screened with removable screens but are usually fairly large pipes with straight runs down. Sealed bundles of cash can be chained end-on-end, and they could be placed quickly and removed quickly and not discovered very easily.
2) Dummy interior plumbing: I've got a couple of large cast-iron drain pipes in my house. You could add another one with a plugged end terminating into a real one, and the other one disappearing into a wall like any other "normal" pipe. Most people won't even begin to question them or think that they serve no purpose; with the right engineering this could even have quick access.
3) Hot water heaters: The tank itself is generally wrapped with fiberglass insulation. Buy a new tank at Home Depot, open it up and replace the some of the insulation with sealed cash. I figure a 75 gallon tank could pretty easily stash a half-million dollars. Hard to get at without trashing the hot water tank.
Generally speaking, though, the quality of a stash space is inversely proportionate to the difficulty of access (eg, under concrete, etc), and it wouldn't surprise me one bit if the FBI or other big-time police agencies didn't have "stash" specialists who have "seen them all".
This is why all the conservative nutjobs think I'm a liberal nutjob. You can't see anything from anyone else's perspective than your own. And anyone saying "the US does the same thing" with regards to using technical intercepts to punish political enemies (we call them terrorists here, they call them terrorists there) means that they are saying the governments are the same. That's simply false. There is no requirement for the brutality to be equal for there to be hypocrisy because of the US punishing a company for selling a mostly innocuous feature that's required by law in the US. It's required in the US. It's on every single piece of gear in the US. It's on almost all pieces of gear on the planet because it's required in multiple places and cheaper to just put it in everything than make versions for the countries the US doesn't like. And the "free market" USA is bashing private companies for selling equipment with required features to undesirable countries. I guess that makes the US the socialist country now. After all, they are doing all they can to interfere with the free market, with inconsistent restrictions and interfering with private enterprise. Since you defend that, you must be a communist fascist as well, trying to force everyone to only do what you want and preventing free enterprise and such.
What perspective do I need to believe that killing women by stoning them for talking to men outside their family is somehow justifiable? If you're so interested in honesty, at least admit that the Iranian theocracy is brutal, corrupt, illegitimate and quite often downright medieval. If you're not willing to go there, then I'm guessing you're willing to justify *any* socio-political system, up to and including all the usual suspects now, and throughout history. I mean, with the right "perspective", Apartheid South Africa is no worse than the US.
As for the comparisons, Iranian "political enemies" are people who have publicly challenged the legitimacy of the government -- if you want to equate these people with those the US government has labeled "terrorists", go ahead, but I don't see the Iranian government's political enemies flying airplanes into buildings to kill innocent people or financing, planning or engaging in other acts of religiously inspired political violence.
Do you have the understanding that many of the countries in the Middle East believe themselves to have the oldest civilizations on the planet
You don't gain respect for being an old civilization when you treat your own people like it was still the 12th century. Stonings, beheadings, amputations, and that's just the state religion, it doesn't include the political assassinations, torture, imprisonment and the theocratic-military dictatorship repression.
So "lawful intercept" means an intercept done according to the local laws. Are you asserting that Iran broke its own laws when it performed the intercept?
I'm asserting that Iran uses intercepts without judicial oversight and in pursuit of a corrupt, brutal dictatorship. That such practices are semantically "lawful" because the Iranian legal system is either subjugated to its theocratic or political system or or does not respect the self-evident human rights of it citizens does not fail to differentiate them from "lawful intercept" practices of the United States or other Western democracies. Furthermore, I would assert that Iran probably does have laws respecting human rights and individual liberty, much as the Soviets did, but they are unenforceable by the judiciary and ignored by the political and theocratic leadership.
I asserted that it's hypocrisy to require one feature in the USA, and have that used according to law and think that fine, but when the same feature, included because it's impossible to get the gear without it because of all the places that require it, is used in an unfriendly country according to that country's laws is somehow wrong.
It is not hypocrisy in the least; the challenge is that the features in question are used effect the brutalization and repression of their citizenry. In order for it to qualify as hypocrisy, there would have to substantial similarity between the governments of the US and Iran. There isn't.
Sell it to someone in the US or UK and you are fine, but sell it to Iran and it's suddenly an international incident
Do you have any ability to see the difference between the US/UK/Europe and Iran? Or are you a general anti-West hater who draws some kind of moral equivalence with any U.S. action you find objectionable and the policies of Iran, which include rigging elections, taking political prisoners, extrajudicial killings of citizens, not to mention backing medieval religious punishments like stoning?
Despite the missteps and military adventures of the US/UK, "lawful" intercept generally means intercepts that take place within the rule of law, generally involving the review and approval of the judiciary, and in the US this generally means significant national security concerns or criminal investigation, not suppression of popular discontent or beefing up the state security apparatus.
Yes, it's not always perfect in the west, but at least we're not amputating people or killing women half-buried in the sand by throwing rocks at them for expressing their sexuality.
If you're not capable of differentiating between an imperfect West and a corrupt, barbaric Iran, don't ask the questions.
I do, it's called "consulting".
At some point, though, every location was populated by migrants from somewhere else.
Maybe the third or fourth century BC isn't "far enough" to go back, but at some point arguing that arguing that North Africa wasn't populated by Caucasians because those shown living there 2500 years ago were migrants is like arguing that Normandy isn't populated by the French because it was colonized by Vikings.
Thanks for your info -- the Carthaginians was the oldest non-Egyptian North African civilization I could think of.
One of the great arguments against UFOs has always been the extreme distance they would have to cover to get here and the difficulty of covering that kind of distance hauling a biological entity. Alpha Centauri is 4 light years and change, and it'd be a substantial effort to fly to Earth with life forms.
Drones would make so much more sense.
Is the BS propaganda about North Africa being populated by blacks? The "Cleopatra was black" meme?
Carthaginians are almost uniformly portrayed as Caucasoid, not Negroid. Considering that the Punic Wars were fought around 280 BC and current populations being predominately non-Negroid, it leads me to believe that North Africa has never been populated by Negroid peoples, at least not since, say, 1000 BC.
We have consumer pre-sort in Minneapolis for recyclables (as opposed to single-stream for every other municipality that I'm aware of) and the bad news is that it cuts participation, at least at my household. I don't have the room for seperate containers for clear glass, colored glass, plastic, aluminum, steel and newspaper.
So I don't bother with anything but newspaper and cardboard, but primarily because those items are a hassle in my trash due to their volume. The rest I just toss in the trash and I'm not the only one I know with the same philosophy.
I definitely would recycle more if it was single stream because it would be so easy and less of a burden. I can't help but think that consumer pre-sort is just environmentalist genuflection to their green religion as it adds a fairly negligible benefit.
As it happens, I have a client with a waste-to-energy plant, built in the early 80s. The plant takes consumer household waste and creates a low-tech fuel that's burned in electric power stations. They have an automated sorting system that works pretty well and given the plant's age and relatively old technology, I can only assume that modern sort systems for recycling work much better.
Most Zombie literature holds that large-scale weapons like bombs, machine guns, artillery and explosive weapons are ineffective. Some take the tack that the outbreak happens so quickly that we don't get use them because the Zombie overwhelm the delivery systems (you can't drop a bomb without a plane; no pilots? no air base? no bombing).
I think this undersells military weapons and how effective they might be.
A gattling-type machine gun or minigun would be devastating in massed crowds -- it'd be like using a firehose. Cluster munitions would also be pretty devastating, as would most conventional high explosives, particularly carpet bombing. Zombies don't hide or dig bunkers.
Fire gets dismissed as "zombies-don't-feel-pain" but I think that discounts how hot napalm could burn (or be made to burn); at some point the flesh will incinerate.
I do agree that among ordinary civilians, ordinary small arms could be ineffective among most people -- poor skills and a reasonable challenge (assuming headshots) for even skilled handgunners, limited ammo, and so on.
They're crappy because a "designer" designed them. Designers do great things with visuals, but those things are quite often terrible as user interface elements.
This is so true!
I can't count how many times I've had people tell me something like "Gee, that job offer sounded really good but we're in the middle of a project and it would derail it if I left..." or "....I really wanted to give them 30 days notice but they wanted me right away at my new job and I couldn't do that."
WHAT!? Who cares! Most employers (corporate and small) will terminate an employee without any advance notice if there's even the slightest financial advantage to them, and in fact, that is SOP in most places.
Your employer is not your friend. Your co-workers are not your friends. They do not deserve loyalty.
There was a bar in the ground floor of the building I worked in that had a great sign on the wall:
"People work for money. If you want loyalty, buy a dog."
It's a good size for most things, but it's still not big enough to comfortably display a newspaper or a magazine without zooming & panning, and this includes some web sites. "Normal" Facebook (not touch.facebook.com) is scaled fairly small -- I can read it, but it's about 10-20% too small.
A Wired-type magazine app is nice, but I'm not holding my breath for them all to be that way -- the Zinio app I think is a great compromise, but again, you're still zooming and panning.
Ideally a retina display (TM) resolution iPad with a screen size matching the outline of Vanity Fair magazine would be perfect. Video would have more impact, books could display more text without constant scrolling/page turning and/or too small text.
Would it be portable? Not really, but that wouldn't be the point -- for me that size would be easily portable from the kitchen to the living room or the bedroom and probably just fine for airplane travel, and it's not like the existing iPad size is so small you can carry it in your pocket.
I think you're conflating "good industrial design" (look, feel, form factor, usability) with a broad definition of "fashionable" which appears to include a fair amount of disdain (some of it correct) for the superficial and trend-focused elements of "fashionable" usually associated with clothes or lifestyle choices.
Industrial Design zealots often make two points: 1) Most things are poorly designed and 2) People react positively to good design.
With a lot of Apple's products (iPod/iPhone/iPad) I think people are drawn to the high-quality industrial design, and those devices have that, and they have been very successful.
Has this led to these products being seen as trendy or desirable? Sure, but that doesn't mean they aren't well designed or useful.
I mean, why not?
(1) Size up opponent in terms of political clout, potential exposure and wealth.
(2) Weakness on any front? Issue National Security Letter
(3) Profit!!!