And let's just assume it's true: FISA didn't keep up with the requirements of some new gee-wiz wiretapping technology.
Nobody was smart enough to have a new set of laws proposed to cover these capabilities?
Don't tell me that would compromise effectiveness. That's a lame, bullshit excuse. These people are paid vast sums of money to protect us, while protecting our rights. If they can't do that job, then they need to step aside and let someone else do it. Surely some legal genius could concoct wording that could cover the capability without spilling the beans. Provisional warrants? Extend the 72 hour window? Exclusion for automated selection phase of data collection? Hell - ANYTHING to provide some kind of oversight or audit trail to the process. Somebody's gotta watch the watchers. Even Saddam Fucking Hussein had people who know what he did and can report it at his trial. Bush's spies have nothing but their computer.
How the fuck did we get to this place, in America, where my fellow citizens are so worked into a frenzy of fear over terrorists, that they're seriously entertaining burning the Constitution? Over technical expediency. Over convenience for eavesdroppers.
May posterity forget that you were our countrymen indeed.
That aside, is it porkier to have engineers at an existing facility in Michigan do the tests or to fund a new research facility in Utah to do the tests?
I forget, is Orrin Hatch (R. Utah) on the appropriations commitee?
I can tell you that we don't get issued ANYTHING unless the leadership is confident that it will benefit our mission.
I suggest you study the history of the procurement of the Beretta 9mm pistol, replacement for the old.45 auto. Pay careful attention to the bits about known problems with metal fatigue, and slide recoil injuring shooters.
Also, there's a much higher terminal velocity for plasma/electric engines than for chemical rockets, because the propellant leaves the nozzle at much higher velocities than exhaust does from a chemical rocket. There's a limit to how fast a chemical rocket can go, theoretically - something along the lines of 25,000-ish miles per hour. The only way to make things go faster than that is to either use gravitational slingshot, or plasma/electric drives, which will have a much higher terminal velocity.
You can download java from Sun for free, install it in about 5 minutes, and start developing..net, you need MSDN subscription, about seven CD's, a pHD in Windows to figure out what version of IE, what service pack, what MS SQL server version, what IIS version, and what service packs of each of those you need - just to begin the endurance sport that is setting up your machine to develop.net. What does.net actually do? I have no fucking idea.
Aslan = Jesus is pretty obvious. Being a Christian myself, I had no problems with that. But the typical more secular slashdotter might not enjoy the movie if they don't ignore the religious parallels.
I think the whole religious parallel think is way overblown. It's media hype dreamed up by the goons at Focus on the Family, or some other well funded radical think tank.
Of course there's going to be themes in a fictional book. All stories have themes. Themes come from our culture, and they can come from Christianity, and they can come from any other religion, and they can come from other sources. Whatever inspired C.S. Lewis. It's not at all remarkable that C.S. Lewis was inspired by his religion. That doesn't make Narnia some Children's version of the Bible. Is the story of Aslan similar to the story of Christ? I suppose so. But I don't think that should offend any atheist or agnostic, or anyone of any other religion. (except maybe wiccan, since the antagonist was a witch - but hell, how often are witches portrayed as protagonists anyway?)
Now - where Battlefield Earth is concerned, I'd say that's a different subject entirely.
I think that one of the most valuable features of any given Wikipedia article is the "Links" section at the bottom of most entries. If an article author provides links and references, then it makes it far easier for a researcher to verify the credibility of the article.
In fact, this is as it should be. If you leave the responsibility for verifying credibility with the author, well, then, thats just like interogating a criminal suspect, and then asking him if he's lying. You verify that by looking at other sources. It's the responsibility of the reasearcher to establish his source's credibility. With Encyclopedia Britanica, people just make the assumption - and it's most often true, but not always, that an Encyclopedia Britannica article is credible. And that's because there's more accountability in the system: The author, the publisher, are all well known and subject to tort law in cases of libel. Wikipedia - not so much. But it's the responsibility of the reader to know that. Uphold that principle, and you don't have to throw out the baby with the bathwater; Wikipedia is a great and useful tool. Not always perfect, but far better than nothing.
Given that viruses function by modifying a host-cell's DNA, and that not all DNA modifications are perfect, and that Cancer is usually the result of an error in DNA transcription, I think the virus-cancer relationship is pretty much a no-brainer. Of course, there's a difference between theory and practice. . .
Re:Cool Yes, Difficult Yes, Impossible No.
on
Hard Drive Window
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· Score: 1
easier to make a glove-box than a clean-room.
Take a glass fishtank, tape a peice of stiff clear plastic with four holes cut into it (two big enough for your wrists, two big enough for fingers), duct-tape or glue a pair of rubber gloves into the big holes, the small holes would be for an air supply, maybe a vacuum-cleaner hose, and a jury-rigged air filter from a car "cabin" filter (designed to remove dust and pollen), and maybe a static mat on the wall (which becomes the "bottom" since the front-wall is the top of the fishtank), and ground the static mat through the metal-frame of the tank, in the corner (assuming it's the kind of fishtank with a metal frame).
I've talked to people whose number one love in their lives is fooling around with their hardware, always getting the latest video card or swapping motherboards or whatever. Even a rabid Machead like me agrees that they'd be nuts to get a Mac.
Actually, that used to be me. With my Beige G3, overclocked and modded monstrosity that it was. Then I got a dual G5, and you know what? I don't miss the hardware tweaking one bit;)
For what I spent on the G5, it was roughly the equivalent of what I spent over 5 years hacking around on the Beige G3, CPU upgrades, peltier coolers, extra fans, case-hackery, video card after video card, new logic board when I blew the first one, new hard drives, new IDE card, new USB card, firewire card, etc.
I didn't want to spend that kind of money on a new G4, because Apple's main bus bandwidth problems were always a constraint until the G5. My G5 makes me happy. But then I found out they're going to x86. Sad. I'm planning on maybe putting together an intel box and trying to run a bootleg copy of OS X86. But frankly, I just don't want to spend the time. I wont replace the G5 until Apple forces me to by coming out with another great piece of software that they only make available on x86. You know damn well they're going to do it, even though they say they won't.
And as far as Apple Apps go, no, not all of them are the best-of-breed. I'm a firefox user myself. Safari's quirks and shortcomings outnumber Firefox's. (adblock, flashblock). But on just about every other software front, they make me happy. Oh- I guess I'm a bit steamed about the whole QuicktimePro thing. Really pisses me off when I think of it. I try not to think about it too much - and stick with VLC.app.
At my last employer (a dotcom), we went through several mergers and buy outs. I regularly saw accounts (os accounts, and accounts in databases or HR applications), share drives, and email addresses on distribution lists, belonging to people who left prior to the merger, or had been laid off years prior, or resigned, etc.
In one case, a Netware 3.x box, with probably 100 legacy user accounts in the bindery, got boxed up and shipped 2000 miles when one site closed after a merger. Three years later, that box was still up, being used as a test node (don't want to reveal too much), and the accounts were still there, including the Admin account we hacked on the day they shut the site down. We could still log into it using the same password.
Of course, I work in a whole different world now - my current employer takes security pretty seriously. Last year, a co-worker got his access cut because he was on a team and the other two had been laid off! (he left three weeks later anyway - some people can see the writing on the wall. Then there's idiots like me).
Good luck to Musk. I've read about some of their proposed vehicles. I have more faith that Duke Nukem forever will fly before SpaceX's big birds. I'm not opposed to competition in the spacelaunch business - I'm just very pessimistic about it. There's a whole lot of inertia in this business. Some of it's because the gummint is involved, and some of it is because of military contracting involvement. (which is a different kind of inertia). It's a high-cost culture for a reason.
I begin to wonder if the labels understand cause and effect.
Interesting that you should put it in those terms.
In Ethics, there are two basic schools of thought, with regard to analyzing a dilemma to determine the ethical choice. The Utilitarian approach says (very simplified here) which ever action's consequence yeilds the greatest amount of good to the greatest number of people. The Rights-based approach says (very simplified), to apply our moral code of rights to the problem, and dwells on a universal standard of right and wrong. The most correct way to analyze the ethics of a dilemma is to use both approaches, and consider all stakeholders, and also consider the legal ramifications, etc.
It does, indeed, look as though the Rights-based approach was the only side of this issue they looked at before deciding to act. All they thought about was: "It's wrong to copy music, and break the law, and we have the right to protect it - period." And they did not consider the consequences of this decision. Ironic that the folks who usuall harp about people not considering the moral absolutes, are also the same people who loudly tout the "free market" - and they don't realize the inherent conflict.
When someone pays 99 cents for a song on iTunes, they're not paying for the song. The song is worthless. The song can be had for free. They're paying for the convenience of not having to locate an illegal copy.
The sooner the RIAA realizes this, the sooner they'll understand that they're basically all worthless parasites, and the sooner they'll blow their brains out, and the rest of us can live happily ever after.
Well, the idea COULD work, I suppose, if there was some way to enforce scarcity.
Commodities have values because of scarcity.
With digital data, there's no such thing, therefore, no real value.
The thing is - they only want to enforce scarcity on the consumer side - so consumers can't resell, or reproduce the product. But then they want to have the right to infinitely reproduce it themselves. Well - money can't be infinitely reproduced. So with THAT arrangement, the "controlled" digital music has a theoretically infinite value (instead of an infinitely small value). Therefore - the market-value of a track would be determined by how many illegal copies could be made.
When we discussed this subject (actually, it was based on the ebay/auctions.com case from a few years ago), I read huge dissertations, 10 pages long, that essentially said what you said in two sentences.
It's really very simple. Whoever is trying to make this out to be more complicated than your two sentences, is probably trying to justify something else.
has served on the boards of half a dozen multibilliondollar companies, was the expert at State on US-USSR relations during the Cold War, and is presently serving as the Secretary of State of the United States of America.
For what it's worth - her opinions on the military capabilities of the USSR were a gross exaggeration of their actual capacity. She got where she was by getting the ear of important people, and telling them what they wanted to hear - whether it was correct or not. Maybe that's smart. But I seem to recall a story from my childhood about boy who cried wolf just a few times too many. Things didn't work out well for that boy. Condi's story is not yet over.
There are strong opponents to SOX, particularly in the securities-trading community (where most of the fraud that caused SOX in the first place occurs).
My response to this:
Fine. SOX is optional. But you forfeit coverage under Corporate Bankruptcy law. In other words; if you choose not to comply with SOX, you don't qualify for Bankruptcy Protection, should you need it, and you're responsible for all the debts your company incurs when you drive it into the ground by stealing.
Slashdot Mirror
All that is nothing but Idle Speculation.
And let's just assume it's true: FISA didn't keep up with the requirements of some new gee-wiz wiretapping technology.
Nobody was smart enough to have a new set of laws proposed to cover these capabilities?
Don't tell me that would compromise effectiveness. That's a lame, bullshit excuse. These people are paid vast sums of money to protect us, while protecting our rights. If they can't do that job, then they need to step aside and let someone else do it. Surely some legal genius could concoct wording that could cover the capability without spilling the beans. Provisional warrants? Extend the 72 hour window? Exclusion for automated selection phase of data collection? Hell - ANYTHING to provide some kind of oversight or audit trail to the process. Somebody's gotta watch the watchers. Even Saddam Fucking Hussein had people who know what he did and can report it at his trial. Bush's spies have nothing but their computer.
How the fuck did we get to this place, in America, where my fellow citizens are so worked into a frenzy of fear over terrorists, that they're seriously entertaining burning the Constitution? Over technical expediency. Over convenience for eavesdroppers.
May posterity forget that you were our countrymen indeed.
I'm glad you informed us that Clinton did it too.
That makes it alright.
Even trade: Bush can go get a blowjob now.
It would probably do him some good.
In fact, it would probably do the whole world some good.
That aside, is it porkier to have engineers at an existing facility in Michigan do the tests or to fund a new research facility in Utah to do the tests?
I forget, is Orrin Hatch (R. Utah) on the appropriations commitee?
it's assumed to be mostly waste.
.45 auto. Pay careful attention to the bits about known problems with metal fatigue, and slide recoil injuring shooters.
You misspelled "graft".
I can tell you that we don't get issued ANYTHING unless the leadership is confident that it will benefit our mission.
I suggest you study the history of the procurement of the Beretta 9mm pistol, replacement for the old
. . . for sufficiently broad definitions of "nothing"
Diesels have less waste-heat to work with, however.
Also, there's a much higher terminal velocity for plasma/electric engines than for chemical rockets, because the propellant leaves the nozzle at much higher velocities than exhaust does from a chemical rocket. There's a limit to how fast a chemical rocket can go, theoretically - something along the lines of 25,000-ish miles per hour. The only way to make things go faster than that is to either use gravitational slingshot, or plasma/electric drives, which will have a much higher terminal velocity.
The difference between java and .net:
.net, you need MSDN subscription, about seven CD's, a pHD in Windows to figure out what version of IE, what service pack, what MS SQL server version, what IIS version, and what service packs of each of those you need - just to begin the endurance sport that is setting up your machine to develop .net. What does .net actually do? I have no fucking idea.
You can download java from Sun for free, install it in about 5 minutes, and start developing.
First the RIAA gets a cut of all music sold.
Then they get a cut of all blank media sold.
Now they want a cut of all the hardware action.
Where will it end?
Aslan = Jesus is pretty obvious. Being a Christian myself, I had no problems with that. But the typical more secular slashdotter might not enjoy the movie if they don't ignore the religious parallels.
I think the whole religious parallel think is way overblown. It's media hype dreamed up by the goons at Focus on the Family, or some other well funded radical think tank.
Of course there's going to be themes in a fictional book. All stories have themes. Themes come from our culture, and they can come from Christianity, and they can come from any other religion, and they can come from other sources. Whatever inspired C.S. Lewis. It's not at all remarkable that C.S. Lewis was inspired by his religion. That doesn't make Narnia some Children's version of the Bible. Is the story of Aslan similar to the story of Christ? I suppose so. But I don't think that should offend any atheist or agnostic, or anyone of any other religion. (except maybe wiccan, since the antagonist was a witch - but hell, how often are witches portrayed as protagonists anyway?)
Now - where Battlefield Earth is concerned, I'd say that's a different subject entirely.
I think that one of the most valuable features of any given Wikipedia article is the "Links" section at the bottom of most entries. If an article author provides links and references, then it makes it far easier for a researcher to verify the credibility of the article.
In fact, this is as it should be. If you leave the responsibility for verifying credibility with the author, well, then, thats just like interogating a criminal suspect, and then asking him if he's lying. You verify that by looking at other sources. It's the responsibility of the reasearcher to establish his source's credibility. With Encyclopedia Britanica, people just make the assumption - and it's most often true, but not always, that an Encyclopedia Britannica article is credible. And that's because there's more accountability in the system: The author, the publisher, are all well known and subject to tort law in cases of libel. Wikipedia - not so much. But it's the responsibility of the reader to know that. Uphold that principle, and you don't have to throw out the baby with the bathwater; Wikipedia is a great and useful tool. Not always perfect, but far better than nothing.
Given that viruses function by modifying a host-cell's DNA, and that not all DNA modifications are perfect, and that Cancer is usually the result of an error in DNA transcription, I think the virus-cancer relationship is pretty much a no-brainer. Of course, there's a difference between theory and practice. . .
easier to make a glove-box than a clean-room.
Take a glass fishtank, tape a peice of stiff clear plastic with four holes cut into it (two big enough for your wrists, two big enough for fingers), duct-tape or glue a pair of rubber gloves into the big holes, the small holes would be for an air supply, maybe a vacuum-cleaner hose, and a jury-rigged air filter from a car "cabin" filter (designed to remove dust and pollen), and maybe a static mat on the wall (which becomes the "bottom" since the front-wall is the top of the fishtank), and ground the static mat through the metal-frame of the tank, in the corner (assuming it's the kind of fishtank with a metal frame).
I've talked to people whose number one love in their lives is fooling around with their hardware, always getting the latest video card or swapping motherboards or whatever. Even a rabid Machead like me agrees that they'd be nuts to get a Mac.
;)
Actually, that used to be me. With my Beige G3, overclocked and modded monstrosity that it was.
Then I got a dual G5, and you know what? I don't miss the hardware tweaking one bit
For what I spent on the G5, it was roughly the equivalent of what I spent over 5 years hacking around on the Beige G3, CPU upgrades, peltier coolers, extra fans, case-hackery, video card after video card, new logic board when I blew the first one, new hard drives, new IDE card, new USB card, firewire card, etc.
I didn't want to spend that kind of money on a new G4, because Apple's main bus bandwidth problems were always a constraint until the G5. My G5 makes me happy. But then I found out they're going to x86. Sad. I'm planning on maybe putting together an intel box and trying to run a bootleg copy of OS X86. But frankly, I just don't want to spend the time. I wont replace the G5 until Apple forces me to by coming out with another great piece of software that they only make available on x86. You know damn well they're going to do it, even though they say they won't.
And as far as Apple Apps go, no, not all of them are the best-of-breed. I'm a firefox user myself. Safari's quirks and shortcomings outnumber Firefox's. (adblock, flashblock). But on just about every other software front, they make me happy. Oh- I guess I'm a bit steamed about the whole QuicktimePro thing. Really pisses me off when I think of it. I try not to think about it too much - and stick with VLC.app.
After reading this whole thread, I've come to a startling conclusion:
You can't please everyone.
Both of your examples are examples of bad management.
If people are not being evaluated or compensated appropriately - that's MANGEMENT'S FAULT.
If 1 person on a 2000 person team is not incented to perform well - then that's MANAGEMENT'S FAULT.
At my last employer (a dotcom), we went through several mergers and buy outs. I regularly saw accounts (os accounts, and accounts in databases or HR applications), share drives, and email addresses on distribution lists, belonging to people who left prior to the merger, or had been laid off years prior, or resigned, etc.
In one case, a Netware 3.x box, with probably 100 legacy user accounts in the bindery, got boxed up and shipped 2000 miles when one site closed after a merger. Three years later, that box was still up, being used as a test node (don't want to reveal too much), and the accounts were still there, including the Admin account we hacked on the day they shut the site down. We could still log into it using the same password.
Of course, I work in a whole different world now - my current employer takes security pretty seriously. Last year, a co-worker got his access cut because he was on a team and the other two had been laid off! (he left three weeks later anyway - some people can see the writing on the wall. Then there's idiots like me).
Good luck to Musk. I've read about some of their proposed vehicles. I have more faith that Duke Nukem forever will fly before SpaceX's big birds. I'm not opposed to competition in the spacelaunch business - I'm just very pessimistic about it. There's a whole lot of inertia in this business. Some of it's because the gummint is involved, and some of it is because of military contracting involvement. (which is a different kind of inertia). It's a high-cost culture for a reason.
Usually, you can just press "menu" to skip this and go straight to the main menu. Oddly though, they've got the "skip" button disabled.
I begin to wonder if the labels understand cause and effect.
Interesting that you should put it in those terms.
In Ethics, there are two basic schools of thought, with regard to analyzing a dilemma to determine the ethical choice. The Utilitarian approach says (very simplified here) which ever action's consequence yeilds the greatest amount of good to the greatest number of people. The Rights-based approach says (very simplified), to apply our moral code of rights to the problem, and dwells on a universal standard of right and wrong. The most correct way to analyze the ethics of a dilemma is to use both approaches, and consider all stakeholders, and also consider the legal ramifications, etc.
It does, indeed, look as though the Rights-based approach was the only side of this issue they looked at before deciding to act. All they thought about was: "It's wrong to copy music, and break the law, and we have the right to protect it - period." And they did not consider the consequences of this decision. Ironic that the folks who usuall harp about people not considering the moral absolutes, are also the same people who loudly tout the "free market" - and they don't realize the inherent conflict.
EXACTLY.
When someone pays 99 cents for a song on iTunes, they're not paying for the song. The song is worthless. The song can be had for free. They're paying for the convenience of not having to locate an illegal copy.
The sooner the RIAA realizes this, the sooner they'll understand that they're basically all worthless parasites, and the sooner they'll blow their brains out, and the rest of us can live happily ever after.
Well, the idea COULD work, I suppose, if there was some way to enforce scarcity.
Commodities have values because of scarcity.
With digital data, there's no such thing, therefore, no real value.
The thing is - they only want to enforce scarcity on the consumer side - so consumers can't resell, or reproduce the product. But then they want to have the right to infinitely reproduce it themselves. Well - money can't be infinitely reproduced. So with THAT arrangement, the "controlled" digital music has a theoretically infinite value (instead of an infinitely small value). Therefore - the market-value of a track would be determined by how many illegal copies could be made.
I'm currently taking an IT ethics class.
When we discussed this subject (actually, it was based on the ebay/auctions.com case from a few years ago), I read huge dissertations, 10 pages long, that essentially said what you said in two sentences.
It's really very simple. Whoever is trying to make this out to be more complicated than your two sentences, is probably trying to justify something else.
has served on the boards of half a dozen multibilliondollar companies, was the expert at State on US-USSR relations during the Cold War, and is presently serving as the Secretary of State of the United States of America.
For what it's worth - her opinions on the military capabilities of the USSR were a gross exaggeration of their actual capacity. She got where she was by getting the ear of important people, and telling them what they wanted to hear - whether it was correct or not. Maybe that's smart. But I seem to recall a story from my childhood about boy who cried wolf just a few times too many. Things didn't work out well for that boy. Condi's story is not yet over.
There are strong opponents to SOX, particularly in the securities-trading community (where most of the fraud that caused SOX in the first place occurs).
My response to this:
Fine. SOX is optional. But you forfeit coverage under Corporate Bankruptcy law. In other words; if you choose not to comply with SOX, you don't qualify for Bankruptcy Protection, should you need it, and you're responsible for all the debts your company incurs when you drive it into the ground by stealing.
Seems like a fair deal to me.