Slashdot has really come a long way in the past 10 years.
I remember back in 1996 - the Cult of the Free-Market Fairy was going strong, and talk like what was in your post was met with accusations of Stalinism.
You could have a custom OS written in pure assembly for a quarter of that!
Not from a CMMI-Level 5 organization (given all the paperwork, change management, formal testing, etc. that the Government Requires). - worse still - when you're talking about a DoD contract, add DISA STIG, and IA compliance, etc. etc. etc.
Alito subscribes to the notion of the unitary executive, which basically means that anything the president does is legal, by definition.
Remember that this applies to the recent Joe Lieberman dust-up.
Lieberman voted for Alito.
He may be a democrat. But he is an enemy of democracy. It is a very good thing that he was defeated in the primary (though it looks like his independent run will be successful).
Democrats don't posess the party discipline that Republicans have. In a lot of ways, this is a good thing. But in this particular case - Lieberman's fellatio of radical rightwing republicans could have dire consequences for the future of this nation, and what it stands for.
....because bleach is already banned from flights. It has been for some time. Not sure about Ammonia though. I would guess anhydrous ammonia is a no-no simply because it can kill you even without the bleach.
You don't need anhydrous ammonia.
And the bleach (pre 8/12) could have been smuggled on in a drink container. Banned, but easily smuggled on.
The chlorine-gas vector is a valid threat - only mitigated by the oxygen masks. And the locked door to the flight deck.
Stopping terrorism is just a pretext for a power grab.
Actually, it serves them if the terrorism continues.
In early November of 2004, any sane, rational person would have thought that the arrival of a videotaped message from Osama bin Laden, the Project Manager of 9/11, whom Bush had spent tens of billions of dollars and 3 years trying to capture, would have been a highlight of the incompetence and ineffectiveness of the Bush Administration.
On the contrary - it caused a ripple of fear that gave Bush the edge in what was otherwise a very close election.
Actually, it gives me hope: The executive branch is still afraid of something..
Actually, be aware that they're most likely not driven by fear in this case.
More likely that they're trying to bait critics to complain, so that said critics can be outed on FoxNews as shrill, liberal, crazy, lunatic-fringe, unpatriotic, terrorist supporters.
The irony, is that what they're fighting against, partially, is western corporate and economic hegemony. And by getting liquids banned on planes, they're forcing all passengers to pay the obnoxiously inflated prices for. . .
Personally, at home I run MacOS X, and to access my work data, I run Virtual PC (a VM)- which is painfully, uselessly slow. Except that I run our VPN software in the Virtual PC session, and then connect to my desktop at work via Remote Desktop (RDP).
The RDP session behaves much faster than the native VPC that hosts it. (ironic, I know).
So in the context of the original problem, I dont' know if this is a good solution either, because the server hosting multiple VM's for each client session would have to have zillions of gigs of RAM. Citrix would be far more effcient, both with network bandwidth and hardware utilization.
The real challenge to upgrading one's business skills, is to not get bogged down in meetings. Once you start down that road, it's very difficult to also perform marathon coding sessions - or especially, provide good support to your "customers" (external or internal).
A freind of mine recently started down that path - and yesterday, complained that he had 12 hours of meetings on his schedule.
The "support" role is kind of a nice one, because you have a great opportunity to sharpen social skills, and because problems tend to come in across a broad spectrum of areas of knowledge, you tend to also develop a very broad base of technical skills. The trade-off is, you end up with the attention span of a ferret on acid, you never get technically very deep in any particular topic, including "business" technology.
I'm starting down the tech-to-business path as well, having transitioned from support to development, and I know I've got to avoid meeting overload. I already know how to not get bogged down in "support" - that was how I made it out.
Corporations have long been treating consumers like sheep.
No, more like a sex-toy. I *wish* all they did to me was shave my head and sell the hair once a year.
Re:Formal study vs. Hard Work
on
The Expert Mind
·
· Score: 1
This article is going to bring up the subject of formal study vs. hard work. It's very simple: You will get nowhere without hard work. But you will go farther and faster with formal study.
This whole debate is useless. It's not what you know. It's who you know. And how much money your family has. And how long they've had it.
If Werner Von Braun was the father of American Manned Spaceflight, surely Michael Griffith is its executioner.
Constellation/Ares is a clusterfuck. Granted, the Shuttle situation has them in a bind, and we don't have the budget to spend our way out (because $90 Billion a year down the Iraq rat hole) - but the current plan is designed to fail while we're looking like we're trying.
It's sad, really. Kind of how we talk about how there used to be a British Empire, and they used to be a major sea power. Kind of how we talk about the accomplishments of the Hellenic Greeks. The Ancient Egyptians used to build these great pyramids. And the US used to put people into space.
. . . or the stone slab was lowered on ropes, then the rope-tabs were chiseled-off once the slab was in place, and then the spot where the tabs were, was polished.
You can move your millions of cubic feet of sand. I'll use the rope-tab method.
We don't have a mechanism to make the executives responsible for the deception pay for it
In the case of Enron we did. Fastow's in jail. Skilling's going to be in jail for a good long time (too bad they couldn't pin Baxter's death on him - that was no suicide).
Unfortunately, Justice was too slow to find Ken Lay before he escaped.
Then there's the alternate theory that the corpse was a drifter that looked like him, and the real Ken Lay is on a beach in French Polynesia somewhere, retiring with his billions - his only punishment being his lost born identity.
In fact, the Bible is chock full of stories about angels, demons, spirits, and precognition, just to name a few.
Indeed. In fact, there are stories about other Gods. Moloch. Ashterah. They're referred to as entities who exist, not just conjecturally. Some crazy shit in there - and I think probably 99% of the bible-thumpers out there have definately NOT read the entire book. Just the parts their conservative pastor told them to read.
(example: at my ex-church, they had this "read the bible in a year" study group. My wife signed up, and showed me what they were reading, and they were skipping from place to place, maybe covering about 10% of the material. We quit shortly after that.)
America has perhaps shined brighter than any other nation in the world in the past 50 years, with regard to scientific advancement and research. This is a pretty plain fact, difficult to refute. But as our scientific elites gained in social prominence, there was a backlash - particularly by those who feel THREATENED by such advancement, and how it informs public policy, education, government spending policy, etc.
The counter-enlightenment has been a strong force, particularly among religious conservatives, for quite a while - at least since the McCarthy era, when intellectuals were attacked (as they were during the Russian Revolution, and in Nazi Germany). But in this country, it has particularly picked up steam since the 1980's. By pandering to the luddites, the conservatives win votes. By promoting propaganda to discredit intellectualism, they cement their hold on power. It's a feedback loop.
You and I are the only two people I know of to have ever made that connection.
I agree 100%.
Personally, I believe that this is why scripture says that Pi = 3.0 (in Kings, 1 or 2, I forget which). It's an error specifically placed there as a message that the scripture can't be taken as inerrent or perfect. (among the many, many other contradictions and errors).
But wow, I wish this meme would take hold and spread.
I don't think using a search engine is a good way to find porn. You end up with more ads and scams than anything else.
The best way is to get involved in some pervy IRC or message board, and trade it P2P. Or sharpen your shell-scripting skills writing curl-based tools to suck entire server's dry of every jpg image. (which used to work great in the 1990's, but they've gotten a lot savvier about blocking directory access or encrypting paths of late).
Too many people are having their jollies over it, while secretly being scared someone's going to get a peek at their searching record when Google finally loses its mind and makes the data available.
That's why you need to set up an auto-search script right away. enumerate through a dictionary, and send random words at the rate of 1000 searches per minute. Run that for about a week, and we'll see how useful Google's record of your search history is.
It doesn't matter if someone nefarious is on the same link-local segment sniffing all your traffic, if they can't identify through technological means who you are, and can't compel the provider through legal means either because they didn't keep that information or just won't give it over.
There are many technological means by which they can successful defeat your anonymity.
1. Crack the encryption: what do you think the NSA has all those computers for? 2. Get a bogus warrant, and impound the provider's server, gather the keys. 3. Hack the provider's server, gather (or otherwise compromise) the keys (some proposed laws actually gave the RIAA the right to do this - those laws were not passed yet, but I'm betting they'll be slipped in on some "anti-terror" or "anti-child-porn" rider at some point).
The ONLY way to transmit this data securely is to not physically connect to the actual internet, and instead, connect via some independent network that is not being monitored. Old-fashioned BBS dialup? We already know that the Phone Companies are allowing taps.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow.
Slashdot has really come a long way in the past 10 years.
I remember back in 1996 - the Cult of the Free-Market Fairy was going strong, and talk like what was in your post was met with accusations of Stalinism.
And now - Score 5: Insightful.
Good to see.
You could have a custom OS written in pure assembly for a quarter of that!
Not from a CMMI-Level 5 organization (given all the paperwork, change management, formal testing, etc. that the Government Requires). - worse still - when you're talking about a DoD contract, add DISA STIG, and IA compliance, etc. etc. etc.
That's too much unpredictability, too much time for the National Guard to shoot the plane down in an unpopulated area.
yeah, but the end result is still likely the same. A plane falls out of the sky, all souls aboard lost.
And people are still terrorized.
Then again - even if the plotters are caught, the attack prevented - people are still terrorized.
Alito subscribes to the notion of the unitary executive, which basically means that anything the president does is legal, by definition.
Remember that this applies to the recent Joe Lieberman dust-up.
Lieberman voted for Alito.
He may be a democrat. But he is an enemy of democracy. It is a very good thing that he was defeated in the primary (though it looks like his independent run will be successful).
Democrats don't posess the party discipline that Republicans have. In a lot of ways, this is a good thing. But in this particular case - Lieberman's fellatio of radical rightwing republicans could have dire consequences for the future of this nation, and what it stands for.
....because bleach is already banned from flights. It has been for some time. Not sure about Ammonia though. I would guess anhydrous ammonia is a no-no simply because it can kill you even without the bleach.
You don't need anhydrous ammonia.
And the bleach (pre 8/12) could have been smuggled on in a drink container. Banned, but easily smuggled on.
The chlorine-gas vector is a valid threat - only mitigated by the oxygen masks. And the locked door to the flight deck.
Stopping terrorism is just a pretext for a power grab.
Actually, it serves them if the terrorism continues.
In early November of 2004, any sane, rational person would have thought that the arrival of a videotaped message from Osama bin Laden, the Project Manager of 9/11, whom Bush had spent tens of billions of dollars and 3 years trying to capture, would have been a highlight of the incompetence and ineffectiveness of the Bush Administration.
On the contrary - it caused a ripple of fear that gave Bush the edge in what was otherwise a very close election.
Fear is not a rational emotion.
Actually, it gives me hope: The executive branch is still afraid of something..
Actually, be aware that they're most likely not driven by fear in this case.
More likely that they're trying to bait critics to complain, so that said critics can be outed on FoxNews as shrill, liberal, crazy, lunatic-fringe, unpatriotic, terrorist supporters.
The game is the same since McCarthy.
Character Assassination.
It's just more sophisticated now.
The irony, is that what they're fighting against, partially, is western corporate and economic hegemony.
And by getting liquids banned on planes, they're forcing all passengers to pay the obnoxiously inflated prices for. . .
Coca Cola.
and (in stark contrast to the iPod) a white-on-black color scheme.
Personally, at home I run MacOS X, and to access my work data, I run Virtual PC (a VM)- which is painfully, uselessly slow. Except that I run our VPN software in the Virtual PC session, and then connect to my desktop at work via Remote Desktop (RDP).
The RDP session behaves much faster than the native VPC that hosts it. (ironic, I know).
So in the context of the original problem, I dont' know if this is a good solution either, because the server hosting multiple VM's for each client session would have to have zillions of gigs of RAM. Citrix would be far more effcient, both with network bandwidth and hardware utilization.
No Sound, No 3D.
Two very desirable features for a typical office desktop.
Now if only we could invent an OS that had no spam, and no popups.
The real challenge to upgrading one's business skills, is to not get bogged down in meetings. Once you start down that road, it's very difficult to also perform marathon coding sessions - or especially, provide good support to your "customers" (external or internal).
A freind of mine recently started down that path - and yesterday, complained that he had 12 hours of meetings on his schedule.
The "support" role is kind of a nice one, because you have a great opportunity to sharpen social skills, and because problems tend to come in across a broad spectrum of areas of knowledge, you tend to also develop a very broad base of technical skills. The trade-off is, you end up with the attention span of a ferret on acid, you never get technically very deep in any particular topic, including "business" technology.
I'm starting down the tech-to-business path as well, having transitioned from support to development, and I know I've got to avoid meeting overload. I already know how to not get bogged down in "support" - that was how I made it out.
Corporations have long been treating consumers like sheep.
No, more like a sex-toy. I *wish* all they did to me was shave my head and sell the hair once a year.
This article is going to bring up the subject of formal study vs. hard work. It's very simple: You will get nowhere without hard work. But you will go farther and faster with formal study.
This whole debate is useless. It's not what you know. It's who you know. And how much money your family has. And how long they've had it.
If Werner Von Braun was the father of American Manned Spaceflight, surely Michael Griffith is its executioner.
Constellation/Ares is a clusterfuck.
Granted, the Shuttle situation has them in a bind, and we don't have the budget to spend our way out (because $90 Billion a year down the Iraq rat hole) - but the current plan is designed to fail while we're looking like we're trying.
It's sad, really. Kind of how we talk about how there used to be a British Empire, and they used to be a major sea power. Kind of how we talk about the accomplishments of the Hellenic Greeks. The Ancient Egyptians used to build these great pyramids. And the US used to put people into space.
. . . or the stone slab was lowered on ropes, then the rope-tabs were chiseled-off once the slab was in place, and then the spot where the tabs were, was polished.
You can move your millions of cubic feet of sand. I'll use the rope-tab method.
We don't have a mechanism to make the executives responsible for the deception pay for it
In the case of Enron we did. Fastow's in jail. Skilling's going to be in jail for a good long time (too bad they couldn't pin Baxter's death on him - that was no suicide).
Unfortunately, Justice was too slow to find Ken Lay before he escaped.
Then there's the alternate theory that the corpse was a drifter that looked like him, and the real Ken Lay is on a beach in French Polynesia somewhere, retiring with his billions - his only punishment being his lost born identity.
To the cries of "witch hunt", I say, "Burn them at the stake.
Burnin's too good for 'em.
They should be torn into itsy-bitsy pieces.
And buried alive.
In fact, the Bible is chock full of stories about angels, demons, spirits, and precognition, just to name a few.
Indeed. In fact, there are stories about other Gods. Moloch. Ashterah. They're referred to as entities who exist, not just conjecturally. Some crazy shit in there - and I think probably 99% of the bible-thumpers out there have definately NOT read the entire book. Just the parts their conservative pastor told them to read.
(example: at my ex-church, they had this "read the bible in a year" study group. My wife signed up, and showed me what they were reading, and they were skipping from place to place, maybe covering about 10% of the material. We quit shortly after that.)
Here's what it is:
America has perhaps shined brighter than any other nation in the world in the past 50 years, with regard to scientific advancement and research. This is a pretty plain fact, difficult to refute. But as our scientific elites gained in social prominence, there was a backlash - particularly by those who feel THREATENED by such advancement, and how it informs public policy, education, government spending policy, etc.
The counter-enlightenment has been a strong force, particularly among religious conservatives, for quite a while - at least since the McCarthy era, when intellectuals were attacked (as they were during the Russian Revolution, and in Nazi Germany). But in this country, it has particularly picked up steam since the 1980's. By pandering to the luddites, the conservatives win votes. By promoting propaganda to discredit intellectualism, they cement their hold on power. It's a feedback loop.
You and I are the only two people I know of to have ever made that connection.
I agree 100%.
Personally, I believe that this is why scripture says that Pi = 3.0 (in Kings, 1 or 2, I forget which). It's an error specifically placed there as a message that the scripture can't be taken as inerrent or perfect. (among the many, many other contradictions and errors).
But wow, I wish this meme would take hold and spread.
I don't think using a search engine is a good way to find porn. You end up with more ads and scams than anything else.
The best way is to get involved in some pervy IRC or message board, and trade it P2P. Or sharpen your shell-scripting skills writing curl-based tools to suck entire server's dry of every jpg image. (which used to work great in the 1990's, but they've gotten a lot savvier about blocking directory access or encrypting paths of late).
Bushie would have to convey his immunity to a defense contractor who could then break that GPL license to develop a "weapon".
That would be pretty unprecedented. Not impossible, but I think it would be unlikely.
Too many people are having their jollies over it, while secretly being scared someone's going to get a peek at their searching record when Google finally loses its mind and makes the data available.
That's why you need to set up an auto-search script right away.
enumerate through a dictionary, and send random words at the rate of 1000 searches per minute. Run that for about a week, and we'll see how useful Google's record of your search history is.
It doesn't matter if someone nefarious is on the same link-local segment sniffing all your traffic, if they can't identify through technological means who you are, and can't compel the provider through legal means either because they didn't keep that information or just won't give it over.
There are many technological means by which they can successful defeat your anonymity.
1. Crack the encryption: what do you think the NSA has all those computers for?
2. Get a bogus warrant, and impound the provider's server, gather the keys.
3. Hack the provider's server, gather (or otherwise compromise) the keys (some proposed laws actually gave the RIAA the right to do this - those laws were not passed yet, but I'm betting they'll be slipped in on some "anti-terror" or "anti-child-porn" rider at some point).
The ONLY way to transmit this data securely is to not physically connect to the actual internet, and instead, connect via some independent network that is not being monitored. Old-fashioned BBS dialup? We already know that the Phone Companies are allowing taps.