Historically speaking, opium smoking was the method of choice for what we'd broadly label recreational opiate users through the 1920s and this cohort didn't switch to heroin or morphine until the late 1920s once various tariff and import restrictions cut off the raw opium supplies.
What's interesting about this to me is that recreational users by and large avoided the highly concentrated opiates of morphine and heroin and stuck with smoking opium, which by most measures has a lower addiction potential than highly concentrated opiates. By cutting off the supply of raw opium, these users were actually switched to an opiate with a much more dangerous profile and greater addiction potential.
Users who were broadly categorized as medically addicted from laudanum or morphine quite often merely maintained their addictions in a manner very similar to what would now be a methadone maintenance program. They didn't necessarily spiral into a cycle of degeneracy.
I think the problems attributable to oxycontin and its links to heroin use are similar -- people who may be physically addicted but are largely not spiraling find their medication cut off for various reasons (changes in laws or prescribing guidelines or whatever) may shift to stronger opiates over which they have less control.
I also question the essential truth of risk with prescription opiates. I lost a half a finger due to a machine accident and the adjacent finger fused at the distal joint. I took oxycodone at 5 mg for months. Initial prescribed dosing was 60 mg per day, which I judged excessive and within a couple of weeks I was down to 5-15 mg, and that eventually got down to about 5 mg per day as I figured out a dose in the AM was more effective than waiting until pain levels exceeded my tolerance during the day.
At the end of my treatment, I had zero cravings for the medication despite the fact that there was always a noticable euphoria when taking a tablet. I also had no problem shaping my doses for the most effective pain management, which was mostly reducing what I took and planning its use for greatest effectiveness at least quantity. If oxycodone is so addictive, why did I find it so easy? My own sense was while small doses produced a pleasant euphoria, larger doses produced a carry-on sluggishness and lack of energy that outweighed any increased pain threshold from lower dosing.
My guess is that the drug companies have tried to have the best of both words, designing drugs that fit the traditional treatment model of "fixing" some defined biological problems while quietly promoting them as viable lifestyle drugs for patients whose principal problem seems to be disaffection.
It is in the national interest that people be sober and rational as much as possible.
I think this kind of Calvinistic mindset is really why drugs remain illegal and big pharma hasn't tried to develop safer recreational drugs. A lot of people are invested in the idea of permanent sobriety.
I can't say there's necessarily a compelling argument in favor of inebriation, at best there seems to be long-term evidence that controlled, low levels of inebriation aren't harmful.
I think the better argument, though, isn't being in favor of inebriation, but being in favor of harm reduction. Human civilization has been seeking, producing and using mind altering substances for millennia and even primitive hunter-gatherer societies use mind-altering substances, so there seems to be something about their use that is ingrained in humans and which no amount of punitive, religious or ideological efforts can eliminate.
So why not seize on this and come up with alternatives which meet these use patterns and reduce the hazards and problems associated with traditional intoxicants?
People do it FOR the "lingering stupor". Also they have solved the smoking it problem. Not to mention OD is literally impossible.
The lingering stupor I'm talking about isn't the first hour, but the hours after that where you're sort of high, but sort of not.
I don't disagree that it mostly hits the checkboxes -- no death potential from overdose, the emerging use of vaporizers to eliminate the need for combustion, no evidence of long-term corrosive physical effects, the high it produces makes people generally calm and gregarious (as opposed to the frequent hostility produced by alcohol or the psychosis produced by amphetimines).
But the high that it produces probably isn't satisfying for the person specifically looking for a different kind of euphoria, and I'd wager that any kind of engineering effort to create one would probably focus on a stimulant-type euphoria, a sedating type of euphoria and maybe some kind of hybrid which produces a calming effect without so much sluggishness or sedation.
I think the police want drug prohibition, not because they think that enforcing drug prohibition makes much of a difference, but because it supplies a ready justification for stopping and searching people and the odds aren't bad that some of these stops will result in arrests for drug possession, boosting an officer's arrest stats.
Strip away drug laws and the cops have a lot less to do, or, more likely, have to focus their efforts on solving/preventing other crimes.
Where are big pharma's recreational drugs? The ones they engineer from the ground up to provide a pleasant, short-term euphoria with designed-in features to prevent overdose, mitigate overconsumption and abuse, and cheap enough that they could be priced lower than mass-produced marijuana?
I would kind of expect that somebody, somewhere would figure out that this would not only be big business but good public policy. Punitive measures to inhibit use of the existing classes of recreational drugs hasn't worked, so why not engineer alternatives that mimic those highs but minus as much of the negative side effects as possible?
The current class of recreational drugs have all kinds of nasty side effects, addictions, overdose deaths, corrosive physical effects, hangovers, and all the social problems they produce. Marijuana isn't bad in comparison to most, but even it still has the lingering stupor and the smoking aspect.
You would think that the bright guys in the lab would be able to come up with something new that minimized the negatives while still giving people something that would dissuade most people from bothering with the legacy highs.
I think you're right, but I think you have to label DOS generically as loads of people were first exposed to other DOS systems, like Apple ][ DOS 3.3 and the various other DOS-alike command line interpreters for home computers like the Radio Shack Color Computer, C64, and so on.
The IBM PC was expensive and many schools had Apple ][s and a lot of home users used ColorComputer and Commodore 64s versus more expensive IBM branded PCs.
I think part of the reason DOS may rightly be seen as "old school" computing is just the character-cell command line "look" which most people don't see unless their computer is doing something wrong, someone is fixing it for them, and it looks like every other CRT-based terminal running on any other system -- IBM 3270 sessions, VT-100 talking to a VAX, and so on.
There was an episode of "Hollywood Squares" back in the 1970s where they brought in actors who looked just like famous people -- I remember one was a dead ringer for Jimmy Carter. I also seem to remember reading about a Hollywood talent agency that specialized in lookalike actors.
Given humans ability (or willingness) to see faces in the moon, Jesus in a cream pie, etc, my guess is that humans have a recognition system that is very pliant and sees many faces as identical even if they aren't hard-number identical.
You can either conclude that people see false matches as true matches (ie, human recognition as bad) or that defining a "doppelganger" is only meaningful in terms of human perception, and that attempts to define it based on facial measurements misses the meaning of "looking alike".
What I find interesting are the "types" -- people who don't look identical, but who share a lot of overall body and facial similarities and that facial similarities often follow overall body similarities.
My guess is that the corporations and the NSA are asking for this.
The former wants to own the standards and their patents so they can make more money licensing the technology around the world.
The latter wants to make sure that spying is baked into the goods and that the owners of the tech are the corporations they can most easily inject backdoors into.
The whole thing gets rolled up into a "vital national security interest" kind of thing with lots of whispering that we don't want to become dependent on Huawei for our vital wireless communication oligopoly, possibly contaminating our precious bodily fluids in the process.
A guy with a history of petty crimes, in the process of getting divorced, and had just been fired from his job.
That's the new recruiting criteria for ISIS affiliates. People who only ever had it together in a marginal sense going through yet another crisis realizing they can now be somebody by killing a bunch of people in the name of some religious identity they barely have.
These people are Travis Bickle from the movie "Taxi Drivier" except rather than focusing their simple minded rage and failure on crime, they're focusing it on the larger society they only sort of fit into, and usually only sort of fitting into it for reasons that have nothing to do with their religious identity.
In many ways,the Dallas cop shooting was an ISIS attack in all but name -- disaffected loser unable to reconcile his place in life with his own actions, lashing out at the part of society he blamed for it in the name of a larger and more righteous cause. That shooter just chose to identify with some kind of black power mindset rather than Islamic terrorism.
I'm also wondering - does the financial sector get a pass from these directives?
It's kind of funny how you think the "rule of law" is some kind of universal concept that applies to everyone equally.
Of course this is meant to be selectively applied and not meant to be applied in a way that hurts their financial benefactors.
In other terms...
"Plebian, this law only applies to you. Our productive Equites and Senatores are not governed by this rule. Now, move along before I report your disloyal questioning to the Censor."
This app was a scam by design: there are little benefits of knowing of attack 15 minutes after it took place.
I guess it depends on whether or not the attack duration is longer than 15 minutes. If a group of guys is roaming a downtown area with RPKs and grenades for an hour and a half, I might want to know what parts of town to avoid, even if they don't tell me for 30 minutes after it started.
It might even be useful to know if you're not danger close, so you have some understanding why roads or closed or people are running away like it was the zombie apocalypse.
Around here in the Midwest, we get weather alerts on our phones even though we already know its storming or if whatever tornado has already touched down elsewhere. I'd think of the terrorist alert as really just a civil defense alert, like any other civil emergency, such as weather or wildfires.
Slashdot has always been going down hill. The Internet has been going downhill, since at least the time when AOL users began flooding USENET. What passes for "editing" is as unsophisticated as reading random Facebook shares, and always has been. You never read it here first because there's almost no original content, unless Bennett Hasselton was given the floor. It's links about links from other sites, a hall of mirrors.
I think the purely political content without any substantive technology base has gone up, but political division is way up and people seem to want that. Since the site has long been a commercial product and not a hobby site, I guess there's some pandering to what people want (although I'm still at a loss as to how they make money on this site).
I'm not convinced the comments are more inflammatory than before and if they are its probably driven by the inflammatory nature of the topics, but then again, Mac vs. PC was always inflammatory as anything Apple does still garnering its share of hostility here.
I also think it's easy to miss that as you get older, the readership average probably doesn't as much. 14060 means you joined probably within days of me, 14022, what, in 199x or something? We don't see the world as we did nearly 20 years ago because it has changed and we have changed, but it's easier to see the world change than your own perception of the world changing.
Like so many other things, though, there is a level of reliable enough that falls short of AWS-style redundancy and costs a whole lot less.
I have had exposure to several customers who moved to high end cloud environments and after paying the bills and doing the math decided they could do it on site for less money than they were paying and with less hassles and support headaches. They had more downtime exposure than the cloud, but most of them have been willing to accept the risks associated with low-percentage events like fires or tornadoes than to pay the recurring costs to insure against them with cloud infrastructure.
There's no question that a complete system (apps, storage, processes, etc) built to be run in the cloud is better than on-premise, but many places are straddled with systems that don't translate into cloud environments easily or inexpensively and can't or won't pay to completely retool their applications, business processes, etc to make them cloud friendly or face other limitations like limited internet bandwidth.
I wonder if there's a way to come up with a format that decoders would process as a JPEG but only containing a preview-quality image but have the rest of the file be some higher quality version of the image in a more advanced format for a format-aware decoder. And do it all in a total file size better than high quality JPEG.
You'd get backwards compatibility (albeit with degraded quality) but higher quality than existing JPEG.
Although with storage continually getting better and cheaper, you have to work miracles in terms of size and quality to make changing from JPEG worthwhile. Like high bitrate MP3s, there are extremely good enough for most people.
What's so funny about this is that the short-sighted penny pinchers who are always howling about IT spending are the FIRST ones to flock to the cloud with this mistaken idea of how cheap and free the cloud is.
Worse, I work for a SMB IT consultancy and our sales people gleefully sell cloud services (managed by someone else, not us) to these same customers when it's not even cheaper TCO over 4 years and without realizing that they are selling out the bedrock of their own business. And it's not even like the pennies worth of referral and "preferred partner" value we get is worth anything or not trivial to switch out for another "preferred provider".
What is it about paying rent people find so appealing?
I'm not sure how he would have coordinated any potential landing zone with the actual location of the plane when he jumped. It probably would have required a skilled air navigator with access to VOR equipment in the 1970s to time a night jump correctly to have much hope of landing close to a planned target.
Just jumping out the back and hoping you had it timed right? He could be off by miles without knowing the plane's specific heading and airspeed. The heading might have been guessable if the plane was following known air routes, but would you be able to rely on that if your "flight" wasn't a regularly scheduled route? ATC may have advised a variation in case he really did have a bomb. And air speed may have varied as well, making distance calculation subject to substantial error even if the course was expected.
There have been practically successful parachute escape hijackings (ie, the hijacker manages to land safely) so it's not impossible, but the circumstances of DB Cooper's escape make it seem really unlikely he was able to pull it off.
Assuming he survived the jump (using one of the oldest of the 4 parachutes he got) in what amounts to ordinary street clothes, how does he survive a hike out of the wilderness in November in a raincoat and loafers, likely at least pretty damp if not wet from atmospheric condensation? Even if he landed completely dry, you're talking a high risk of hypothermia dressed that way in November navigating miles of wilderness.
However well he planned it, there's no way he managed to hit a narrow drop zone where he might have staged survival gear -- his potential drop zone would have been miles wide jumping in the dark and without any decent navigational clues as to where to jump.
The larger mystery is why his body or chute were never found, but these seem more likely to be side effects of a potentially large search area than a successful landing and evasion.
It was always big from a "mystery" perspective, but the circumstances of his jump have always made it extremely unlikely that he survived -- jumping into -70F windchill air, into a wilderness area, at night, without anything more protective than a suit and raincoat.
The big mysteries seem to be identifying who he was and what happened to the body, parachute and the money. Some decayed packets of money were found, but that seems to lead more credence to the theory that the jump/landing/escape was a failure.
Isn't Trump imbued with the same "hope" that Sanders' small-donor machine had? That a candidate could be elected with some kind of funding base that wasn't the usual collection of rich donors demanding influence?
I don't know actually true this would be for Trump, but much as been written about his low levels of funding and how little his campaign has spent, indicating that he's taken less money from the usual suspects.
Of course, I'm not personally investing in the idea that even should he manage to get elected he wouldn't be influenced by the usual rich types, but at least the standard narrative is that he's "using his own money" and "not being bought".
I think with the rise of industrialization and the bulking up of cities, food quality got worse for for urban residents as they became more dependent on the primitive factory foods they used to eat and polluted water supplies.
Prior to that, though, weren't there a lot of adaptations to many of the quality problems that were inherent to the food supply?
People living in urban areas often substituted beer for water, blended wine with water or drank tea instead of water (I've read that Chinese laborers on the railroads avoided a lot of sickness because their affection for tea meant they drank boiled water). People at a lot of stews, which both served to make cooking simpler (since a single pot can contain all your ingredients) as well as enabling the cooking with a lot of moisture to tenderize meats, many of which were probably tough, taken from wild game or older animals kept for their wool or milk and only eaten when they become unproductive for those uses. Stewing would have gone a long way towards killing bacteria, parasites and the addition of moisture would have diluted some environmental pollutants.
Prior to industrialization, people tended to live in rural areas and generally ate what was within a day or two's walk at most if not food that was raised around them, whether wild game or domestic agriculture (poultry, fowl eggs, pork, goat, lamb). Parasites in the water may have been something of a problem, especially in areas with poor water supplies or in times of low water flows. But overall it seems like they would have avoided most of the problems with contaminated foods.
I'm only guessing, but I think a planned and coordinated physical sabotage of power systems could cause chaos on a regional level if the right substations and pylons were knocked out. Knock out some primary feeds, get some secondary ones to overload and go offline and you've got a regional blackout that could days or longer to repair, as not all of the transformers and switchgear could necessarily be just swapped out (depending on the nature of the sabotage).
Most of that stuff is guarded at best by chain link fences, high voltage power lines aren't guarded at all.
It's always struck me as odd that we haven't seen that kind of sabotage here. Either the systems are too hard to decipher (thus increasing the risk that the attack would be ineffective at scale) or the actors involved aren't sophisticated enough to run an op like that in a foreign country.
The mistake we make is in judging political entities by the liberties they endorse.
Instead we should recognize that all political entities believe in regulating the behaviors they believe are counter-productive to their world view or they believe prevent achieving their goals.
That would be the FTC, the group nominally oriented towards making sure business practices are legitimate.
Ideally the FTC would have a much larger and more vigorous enforcement arm whose job it was to audit and punish firms suspected of fraudulent business practices.
Dating sites would be just one more business category where they could audit for suspicious business practices such as fake profiles, phony gender ratios, and dishonest success rates.
It's always bothered me that both American society at large and government has such a very soft attitude towards dishonest business practices, aka "salesmanship". It seems to be broadly accepted that it's OK to make false, misleading or dishonest claims about products and services. Transparency is clearly important to well-running markets, yet we seem to be just fine with non-transparent markets and sellers who make false and misleading claims.
The problem with the Philip Marlowe question is that "The Big Sleep" is sine qua non of Chandler film adaptations and every other attempt paled in comparison.
"The Big Sleep" was directed by Howard Hawkes, the screenplay was written by William Faulkner, was a noir picture made during the noir phase of Hollywood, has Bogart *and* Lauren Bacall, and the film was made and set during the same basic time period as the books. So it doesn't suffer from the "period piece" flaws of shoehorning modern sensibilities into another time period, making everything about the production true to the original book's setting -- the characters, sets, dialog, actors and sensibility are all true to an era.
Bogart also had established himself as the "Private Dick" persona in The Maltese Falcon, which adds to his verisimilitude as Marlowe.
All the other Marlowe adaptations have ended up suffering by comparison. Lesser screenplays, changes in time period, and so on. They all get something wrong.
As someone who never missed an episode of "In Search of..." when it was in its original syndication, I love that stuff although 99% of it is utterly unbelievable. I've tagged a bunch of episodes from your suggested list, though. Oak Island is a particular favorite (and for some reason seems actually compelling...) and I will probably listen to that one first.
My problem with most conspiracy stuff is the presentation is often so horrible.
Slashdot Mirror
Historically speaking, opium smoking was the method of choice for what we'd broadly label recreational opiate users through the 1920s and this cohort didn't switch to heroin or morphine until the late 1920s once various tariff and import restrictions cut off the raw opium supplies.
What's interesting about this to me is that recreational users by and large avoided the highly concentrated opiates of morphine and heroin and stuck with smoking opium, which by most measures has a lower addiction potential than highly concentrated opiates. By cutting off the supply of raw opium, these users were actually switched to an opiate with a much more dangerous profile and greater addiction potential.
Users who were broadly categorized as medically addicted from laudanum or morphine quite often merely maintained their addictions in a manner very similar to what would now be a methadone maintenance program. They didn't necessarily spiral into a cycle of degeneracy.
I think the problems attributable to oxycontin and its links to heroin use are similar -- people who may be physically addicted but are largely not spiraling find their medication cut off for various reasons (changes in laws or prescribing guidelines or whatever) may shift to stronger opiates over which they have less control.
I also question the essential truth of risk with prescription opiates. I lost a half a finger due to a machine accident and the adjacent finger fused at the distal joint. I took oxycodone at 5 mg for months. Initial prescribed dosing was 60 mg per day, which I judged excessive and within a couple of weeks I was down to 5-15 mg, and that eventually got down to about 5 mg per day as I figured out a dose in the AM was more effective than waiting until pain levels exceeded my tolerance during the day.
At the end of my treatment, I had zero cravings for the medication despite the fact that there was always a noticable euphoria when taking a tablet. I also had no problem shaping my doses for the most effective pain management, which was mostly reducing what I took and planning its use for greatest effectiveness at least quantity. If oxycodone is so addictive, why did I find it so easy? My own sense was while small doses produced a pleasant euphoria, larger doses produced a carry-on sluggishness and lack of energy that outweighed any increased pain threshold from lower dosing.
My guess is that the drug companies have tried to have the best of both words, designing drugs that fit the traditional treatment model of "fixing" some defined biological problems while quietly promoting them as viable lifestyle drugs for patients whose principal problem seems to be disaffection.
It is in the national interest that people be sober and rational as much as possible.
I think this kind of Calvinistic mindset is really why drugs remain illegal and big pharma hasn't tried to develop safer recreational drugs. A lot of people are invested in the idea of permanent sobriety.
I can't say there's necessarily a compelling argument in favor of inebriation, at best there seems to be long-term evidence that controlled, low levels of inebriation aren't harmful.
I think the better argument, though, isn't being in favor of inebriation, but being in favor of harm reduction. Human civilization has been seeking, producing and using mind altering substances for millennia and even primitive hunter-gatherer societies use mind-altering substances, so there seems to be something about their use that is ingrained in humans and which no amount of punitive, religious or ideological efforts can eliminate.
So why not seize on this and come up with alternatives which meet these use patterns and reduce the hazards and problems associated with traditional intoxicants?
People do it FOR the "lingering stupor". Also they have solved the smoking it problem. Not to mention OD is literally impossible.
The lingering stupor I'm talking about isn't the first hour, but the hours after that where you're sort of high, but sort of not.
I don't disagree that it mostly hits the checkboxes -- no death potential from overdose, the emerging use of vaporizers to eliminate the need for combustion, no evidence of long-term corrosive physical effects, the high it produces makes people generally calm and gregarious (as opposed to the frequent hostility produced by alcohol or the psychosis produced by amphetimines).
But the high that it produces probably isn't satisfying for the person specifically looking for a different kind of euphoria, and I'd wager that any kind of engineering effort to create one would probably focus on a stimulant-type euphoria, a sedating type of euphoria and maybe some kind of hybrid which produces a calming effect without so much sluggishness or sedation.
I think the police want drug prohibition, not because they think that enforcing drug prohibition makes much of a difference, but because it supplies a ready justification for stopping and searching people and the odds aren't bad that some of these stops will result in arrests for drug possession, boosting an officer's arrest stats.
Strip away drug laws and the cops have a lot less to do, or, more likely, have to focus their efforts on solving/preventing other crimes.
Where are big pharma's recreational drugs? The ones they engineer from the ground up to provide a pleasant, short-term euphoria with designed-in features to prevent overdose, mitigate overconsumption and abuse, and cheap enough that they could be priced lower than mass-produced marijuana?
I would kind of expect that somebody, somewhere would figure out that this would not only be big business but good public policy. Punitive measures to inhibit use of the existing classes of recreational drugs hasn't worked, so why not engineer alternatives that mimic those highs but minus as much of the negative side effects as possible?
The current class of recreational drugs have all kinds of nasty side effects, addictions, overdose deaths, corrosive physical effects, hangovers, and all the social problems they produce. Marijuana isn't bad in comparison to most, but even it still has the lingering stupor and the smoking aspect.
You would think that the bright guys in the lab would be able to come up with something new that minimized the negatives while still giving people something that would dissuade most people from bothering with the legacy highs.
I think you're right, but I think you have to label DOS generically as loads of people were first exposed to other DOS systems, like Apple ][ DOS 3.3 and the various other DOS-alike command line interpreters for home computers like the Radio Shack Color Computer, C64, and so on.
The IBM PC was expensive and many schools had Apple ][s and a lot of home users used ColorComputer and Commodore 64s versus more expensive IBM branded PCs.
I think part of the reason DOS may rightly be seen as "old school" computing is just the character-cell command line "look" which most people don't see unless their computer is doing something wrong, someone is fixing it for them, and it looks like every other CRT-based terminal running on any other system -- IBM 3270 sessions, VT-100 talking to a VAX, and so on.
There was an episode of "Hollywood Squares" back in the 1970s where they brought in actors who looked just like famous people -- I remember one was a dead ringer for Jimmy Carter. I also seem to remember reading about a Hollywood talent agency that specialized in lookalike actors.
Given humans ability (or willingness) to see faces in the moon, Jesus in a cream pie, etc, my guess is that humans have a recognition system that is very pliant and sees many faces as identical even if they aren't hard-number identical.
You can either conclude that people see false matches as true matches (ie, human recognition as bad) or that defining a "doppelganger" is only meaningful in terms of human perception, and that attempts to define it based on facial measurements misses the meaning of "looking alike".
What I find interesting are the "types" -- people who don't look identical, but who share a lot of overall body and facial similarities and that facial similarities often follow overall body similarities.
My guess is that the corporations and the NSA are asking for this.
The former wants to own the standards and their patents so they can make more money licensing the technology around the world.
The latter wants to make sure that spying is baked into the goods and that the owners of the tech are the corporations they can most easily inject backdoors into.
The whole thing gets rolled up into a "vital national security interest" kind of thing with lots of whispering that we don't want to become dependent on Huawei for our vital wireless communication oligopoly, possibly contaminating our precious bodily fluids in the process.
A guy with a history of petty crimes, in the process of getting divorced, and had just been fired from his job.
That's the new recruiting criteria for ISIS affiliates. People who only ever had it together in a marginal sense going through yet another crisis realizing they can now be somebody by killing a bunch of people in the name of some religious identity they barely have.
These people are Travis Bickle from the movie "Taxi Drivier" except rather than focusing their simple minded rage and failure on crime, they're focusing it on the larger society they only sort of fit into, and usually only sort of fitting into it for reasons that have nothing to do with their religious identity.
In many ways,the Dallas cop shooting was an ISIS attack in all but name -- disaffected loser unable to reconcile his place in life with his own actions, lashing out at the part of society he blamed for it in the name of a larger and more righteous cause. That shooter just chose to identify with some kind of black power mindset rather than Islamic terrorism.
I'm also wondering - does the financial sector get a pass from these directives?
It's kind of funny how you think the "rule of law" is some kind of universal concept that applies to everyone equally.
Of course this is meant to be selectively applied and not meant to be applied in a way that hurts their financial benefactors.
In other terms...
"Plebian, this law only applies to you. Our productive Equites and Senatores are not governed by this rule. Now, move along before I report your disloyal questioning to the Censor."
This app was a scam by design: there are little benefits of knowing of attack 15 minutes after it took place.
I guess it depends on whether or not the attack duration is longer than 15 minutes. If a group of guys is roaming a downtown area with RPKs and grenades for an hour and a half, I might want to know what parts of town to avoid, even if they don't tell me for 30 minutes after it started.
It might even be useful to know if you're not danger close, so you have some understanding why roads or closed or people are running away like it was the zombie apocalypse.
Around here in the Midwest, we get weather alerts on our phones even though we already know its storming or if whatever tornado has already touched down elsewhere. I'd think of the terrorist alert as really just a civil defense alert, like any other civil emergency, such as weather or wildfires.
Slashdot has always been going down hill. The Internet has been going downhill, since at least the time when AOL users began flooding USENET. What passes for "editing" is as unsophisticated as reading random Facebook shares, and always has been. You never read it here first because there's almost no original content, unless Bennett Hasselton was given the floor. It's links about links from other sites, a hall of mirrors.
I think the purely political content without any substantive technology base has gone up, but political division is way up and people seem to want that. Since the site has long been a commercial product and not a hobby site, I guess there's some pandering to what people want (although I'm still at a loss as to how they make money on this site).
I'm not convinced the comments are more inflammatory than before and if they are its probably driven by the inflammatory nature of the topics, but then again, Mac vs. PC was always inflammatory as anything Apple does still garnering its share of hostility here.
I also think it's easy to miss that as you get older, the readership average probably doesn't as much. 14060 means you joined probably within days of me, 14022, what, in 199x or something? We don't see the world as we did nearly 20 years ago because it has changed and we have changed, but it's easier to see the world change than your own perception of the world changing.
Like so many other things, though, there is a level of reliable enough that falls short of AWS-style redundancy and costs a whole lot less.
I have had exposure to several customers who moved to high end cloud environments and after paying the bills and doing the math decided they could do it on site for less money than they were paying and with less hassles and support headaches. They had more downtime exposure than the cloud, but most of them have been willing to accept the risks associated with low-percentage events like fires or tornadoes than to pay the recurring costs to insure against them with cloud infrastructure.
There's no question that a complete system (apps, storage, processes, etc) built to be run in the cloud is better than on-premise, but many places are straddled with systems that don't translate into cloud environments easily or inexpensively and can't or won't pay to completely retool their applications, business processes, etc to make them cloud friendly or face other limitations like limited internet bandwidth.
I wonder if there's a way to come up with a format that decoders would process as a JPEG but only containing a preview-quality image but have the rest of the file be some higher quality version of the image in a more advanced format for a format-aware decoder. And do it all in a total file size better than high quality JPEG.
You'd get backwards compatibility (albeit with degraded quality) but higher quality than existing JPEG.
Although with storage continually getting better and cheaper, you have to work miracles in terms of size and quality to make changing from JPEG worthwhile. Like high bitrate MP3s, there are extremely good enough for most people.
What's so funny about this is that the short-sighted penny pinchers who are always howling about IT spending are the FIRST ones to flock to the cloud with this mistaken idea of how cheap and free the cloud is.
Worse, I work for a SMB IT consultancy and our sales people gleefully sell cloud services (managed by someone else, not us) to these same customers when it's not even cheaper TCO over 4 years and without realizing that they are selling out the bedrock of their own business. And it's not even like the pennies worth of referral and "preferred partner" value we get is worth anything or not trivial to switch out for another "preferred provider".
What is it about paying rent people find so appealing?
I'm not sure how he would have coordinated any potential landing zone with the actual location of the plane when he jumped. It probably would have required a skilled air navigator with access to VOR equipment in the 1970s to time a night jump correctly to have much hope of landing close to a planned target.
Just jumping out the back and hoping you had it timed right? He could be off by miles without knowing the plane's specific heading and airspeed. The heading might have been guessable if the plane was following known air routes, but would you be able to rely on that if your "flight" wasn't a regularly scheduled route? ATC may have advised a variation in case he really did have a bomb. And air speed may have varied as well, making distance calculation subject to substantial error even if the course was expected.
There have been practically successful parachute escape hijackings (ie, the hijacker manages to land safely) so it's not impossible, but the circumstances of DB Cooper's escape make it seem really unlikely he was able to pull it off.
Assuming he survived the jump (using one of the oldest of the 4 parachutes he got) in what amounts to ordinary street clothes, how does he survive a hike out of the wilderness in November in a raincoat and loafers, likely at least pretty damp if not wet from atmospheric condensation? Even if he landed completely dry, you're talking a high risk of hypothermia dressed that way in November navigating miles of wilderness.
However well he planned it, there's no way he managed to hit a narrow drop zone where he might have staged survival gear -- his potential drop zone would have been miles wide jumping in the dark and without any decent navigational clues as to where to jump.
The larger mystery is why his body or chute were never found, but these seem more likely to be side effects of a potentially large search area than a successful landing and evasion.
It was always big from a "mystery" perspective, but the circumstances of his jump have always made it extremely unlikely that he survived -- jumping into -70F windchill air, into a wilderness area, at night, without anything more protective than a suit and raincoat.
The big mysteries seem to be identifying who he was and what happened to the body, parachute and the money. Some decayed packets of money were found, but that seems to lead more credence to the theory that the jump/landing/escape was a failure.
Isn't Trump imbued with the same "hope" that Sanders' small-donor machine had? That a candidate could be elected with some kind of funding base that wasn't the usual collection of rich donors demanding influence?
I don't know actually true this would be for Trump, but much as been written about his low levels of funding and how little his campaign has spent, indicating that he's taken less money from the usual suspects.
Of course, I'm not personally investing in the idea that even should he manage to get elected he wouldn't be influenced by the usual rich types, but at least the standard narrative is that he's "using his own money" and "not being bought".
I think with the rise of industrialization and the bulking up of cities, food quality got worse for for urban residents as they became more dependent on the primitive factory foods they used to eat and polluted water supplies.
Prior to that, though, weren't there a lot of adaptations to many of the quality problems that were inherent to the food supply?
People living in urban areas often substituted beer for water, blended wine with water or drank tea instead of water (I've read that Chinese laborers on the railroads avoided a lot of sickness because their affection for tea meant they drank boiled water). People at a lot of stews, which both served to make cooking simpler (since a single pot can contain all your ingredients) as well as enabling the cooking with a lot of moisture to tenderize meats, many of which were probably tough, taken from wild game or older animals kept for their wool or milk and only eaten when they become unproductive for those uses. Stewing would have gone a long way towards killing bacteria, parasites and the addition of moisture would have diluted some environmental pollutants.
Prior to industrialization, people tended to live in rural areas and generally ate what was within a day or two's walk at most if not food that was raised around them, whether wild game or domestic agriculture (poultry, fowl eggs, pork, goat, lamb). Parasites in the water may have been something of a problem, especially in areas with poor water supplies or in times of low water flows. But overall it seems like they would have avoided most of the problems with contaminated foods.
Who says it would have to be a computer attack?
I'm only guessing, but I think a planned and coordinated physical sabotage of power systems could cause chaos on a regional level if the right substations and pylons were knocked out. Knock out some primary feeds, get some secondary ones to overload and go offline and you've got a regional blackout that could days or longer to repair, as not all of the transformers and switchgear could necessarily be just swapped out (depending on the nature of the sabotage).
Most of that stuff is guarded at best by chain link fences, high voltage power lines aren't guarded at all.
It's always struck me as odd that we haven't seen that kind of sabotage here. Either the systems are too hard to decipher (thus increasing the risk that the attack would be ineffective at scale) or the actors involved aren't sophisticated enough to run an op like that in a foreign country.
The mistake we make is in judging political entities by the liberties they endorse.
Instead we should recognize that all political entities believe in regulating the behaviors they believe are counter-productive to their world view or they believe prevent achieving their goals.
That would be the FTC, the group nominally oriented towards making sure business practices are legitimate.
Ideally the FTC would have a much larger and more vigorous enforcement arm whose job it was to audit and punish firms suspected of fraudulent business practices.
Dating sites would be just one more business category where they could audit for suspicious business practices such as fake profiles, phony gender ratios, and dishonest success rates.
It's always bothered me that both American society at large and government has such a very soft attitude towards dishonest business practices, aka "salesmanship". It seems to be broadly accepted that it's OK to make false, misleading or dishonest claims about products and services. Transparency is clearly important to well-running markets, yet we seem to be just fine with non-transparent markets and sellers who make false and misleading claims.
The problem with the Philip Marlowe question is that "The Big Sleep" is sine qua non of Chandler film adaptations and every other attempt paled in comparison.
"The Big Sleep" was directed by Howard Hawkes, the screenplay was written by William Faulkner, was a noir picture made during the noir phase of Hollywood, has Bogart *and* Lauren Bacall, and the film was made and set during the same basic time period as the books. So it doesn't suffer from the "period piece" flaws of shoehorning modern sensibilities into another time period, making everything about the production true to the original book's setting -- the characters, sets, dialog, actors and sensibility are all true to an era.
Bogart also had established himself as the "Private Dick" persona in The Maltese Falcon, which adds to his verisimilitude as Marlowe.
All the other Marlowe adaptations have ended up suffering by comparison. Lesser screenplays, changes in time period, and so on. They all get something wrong.
As someone who never missed an episode of "In Search of..." when it was in its original syndication, I love that stuff although 99% of it is utterly unbelievable. I've tagged a bunch of episodes from your suggested list, though. Oak Island is a particular favorite (and for some reason seems actually compelling...) and I will probably listen to that one first.
My problem with most conspiracy stuff is the presentation is often so horrible.