So - don't forget to check the box at the bottom of the form saying that you agree to their privacy policy. (whereby, your blood will give them a DNA sequence that they can sell as marketing information - which funds the tests. And the CEO's retirement plan).
If one has gone through the trouble to contract with a PKI provider for an ssl certificate, and taken other reasonable precautionary measures, I would think that the secured traffic provides a reasonable expectation of privacy, by a legal definition, even if technically, that privacy is not bulletproof. If you're sending plaintext over the wire, then, of course, you should know you could be listened to. But not secured traffic.
We have had a rash of "bang-bang" style bank robberies in my County, over the past 3-5 years. A couple of these serial robbers have been caught. Anyway, the reported average take is usually somewhere between $3000 - $8000 or so. In my opinion, that's no where near worth the risk. That's not even chump-change, and far more than that is stolen minute-by-minute by white-collar criminals.
"cleared" == background, criminal, and credit-history check.
So, if you don't have any credit problems, if you don't have a criminal history, AND if they interview your friends and family, and they don't say you're a lying cheating scumbag, then you're golden.
SERIOUSLY: If the NSA wants to relocate me to Hawaii and pay me 6-figures, I am totally down with that, and I *promise* not to share my creds with anyone!
"Weird, I can't reproduce it under my user, give me your password so I can try it with yours, you can reset your password after I'm done".
That's not what should happen. Pretty much every secure environment I've worked in, the procedure is: "Sorry about your user-profile bro, we're wiping the machine, and you need to start over. You *did* have backups of all the stuff in your profile. Right?"
This is the content of every single (mandatory) security training I've been required to take, over the years. It just seems unbelievable to me, that various government agencies spend so much money in this training, and developing strong security practices, that the NSA, of all agencies, would not be following these procedures.
Based on what we *know* right now, our best-bet is to build a series of self-sustainable "generation ships"; (very-large spacecraft, capable of sustaining human life over the course of several generations, including the necessary ecosystems to support such life.)
Such technology is at least theoretically do-able, from a technical standpoint.
From an ECONOMIC standpoint, of course, it is as impossible as faster-than-light travel. To expend the money required for such an enterprise, to send-off one or more such "generation ships", with no possible ROI within the lifetime (or thousands of lifetimes) of the investor, is not something that can be done with a civilization that does not even want to invest the money to educate their own children.
And this would only happen if we knew, for certain, that the destination worlds were inhabitable. (and not yet inhabited). And even if they were, we would have to wait thousands of years for the colony to develop to the point of economic viability so that they could even send a response.
The solution is pretty simple (re: "kicking companies' asses") . . . a Corporate Charter is a legal instrument GRANTED BY GOVERNMENT, to a corporation. It's in the common interest for corporate charters to exist, in most cases. But when that ceases to be - then the government should be much more eager to just revoke the charter. (In modern law, this is actually very difficult; akin to depriving people of property.
Another is vaccination, where I have a very clear interest in everyone else getting vaccinated - to increase the level of herd immunity, so that diseases have fewer viable hosts, reducing my chance of becoming infected. Damn viruses are commies.
Yes - this kind of procurement scam used to be illegal.
Before Bush's wars.
(yes, I do fault Obama for taking advantage of it, instead of fixing it, like he promised. But congress under Bush pretty much unanimously legalized this no-bid contract procedure - with nary a whimper of opposition).
When asked as he left the podium whether he believed America would be going through all this political turmoil again in a few months, the President didn't waste words. "No."'"
I've found that Estimation is a job that greatly improves with experience. 20 years ago, I couldn't estimate for shit. Now, I'm pretty good. After a few projects of various types, as long as you remember how long previous projects took, you can breakdown your tasks, and estimate based on similar tasks. Use RAND's 3-point estimation, (more commonly known as PERT). With ready access to a reference, it's actually not technically complicated, and is rarely wrong. Even if your project is something new that you've never done before - there are likely substantial portions of the project that you HAVE done before. But the key is the experience.
Girls and boys are both raised by women AND men. They are taught social skills by their mothers and fathers first, before they end up in public school, and going up against that social framework. Our parents teach us how to treat each other, and what roles are appropriate, and it's from our parents, we learn things like; "nerds aren't cool". The few of us who are not taught "nerds aren't cool" go into a classroom of 29 other kids who ARE taught that.
It's reinforced over the years, but overall, the source of our own social conditioning, is the way we raise our kids. And there are just way too many people who don't teach their kids that studying hard and mastering calculus, and going into engineering, is the right way to spend the time of one's youth. Instead of playing video games, smoking weed, and hanging out with friends.
A big part of a hiring decision is based on how well a candidate presents himself -- I'm deliberately using the masculine pronoun here -- in a resume, interview, and general self-promotion
oh; that's true.
So you hire people based on how good they are at doing something else -- not the job at hand.
I've never actually ended up in the position I was hired for. I always sort of work my way into the role that fits. It's always inconsistent with the initial job description.
At my current job - I was desperate to find a new job, so when I applied here, and interviewed, I sat and thought about it and made a concerted effort to be as arrogant and cocksure as I could. It is absolutely against my nature. It makes me very uncomfortable. I knew that then, and I'm even more certain of it now. But at that time - I really believed that that's what it would take to get me this job, so I kept my now-boss on the phone for almost 2 hours, blowing myself and my abilities up to be some kind of god-like superstar. And they flew me out and hired me. Crazy.
In the past 7 years working here, while I feel as if I deliberately misled him, I can't say that I actually lied about anything. And while I've certainly exceeded my own expectations at this job, I'm not sure that I've performed up to what I promised. I don't think he was disappointed. I get consistently good reviews. But coming out of that situation, recalling that interview, it's almost surreal, and I feel as if it was somebody else doing the talking, because I've never talked like that about myself before or since. But I'm absolutely certain that it was my attitude during the interview that got me this job, because my skills and credentials are honestly pretty mediocre. I do try really hard.:)
The women you know want to get away from computers, because they've been conditioned, all their lives, to an experience of: computers don't help me get friends, they only put me into a position of having to beg some creepy arrogant neckbeard for help. Of course, they want to get away from the computer.
It IS very much "hamster pushes the lever gets a reward" - men push that "be good at computers" lever, and their reward: they get to play "hero" with the tech knowledge. At least the pretty (dumb) blonde smiles and says thanks. Great spank material for later.
Women get conditioned with a "be good at social relationships and cooking and sewing" lever, and their reward is getting to play "hero" with the arranging parties and decorating the homestead stuff. At least the caveman slaps her on the ass and tells her she's hot.
Why are we still locking our children into these gender-based roles - when it's been clearly shown that people can step outside of them, and do well?
I am certain that this is a social force, and I am pretty sure that it begins - as soon as kids are exposed to social forces. (ie. kindergarten/grade-school).
Among the peer group of my children, I watched very carefully, as this happened. Girls and boys are both affected, and I think it's way worse now than it was in MY generation. Girls are certainly affected to a much higher proportion. But the mechanism is this: The dumber you are, the more popular you are, the more fun you are, the more friends you have, the more social activities (and etc) you get to participate in. Some people refer to this phenomenon as "it's not cool to be a nerd" - well, that's really it, in a nutshell. But it's worse than that, because "nerd" has been redefined, in this generation, to be anyone who plays video games or watches science fiction. But this is so mainstream now, there's really nothing special about being a "nerd" and it's not really a significant thing that they're now "cool and accepted" - because the REAL nerds don't have time to play video games. They're busting their asses learning math. If you don't know your math by age 11 or 12, you will end up getting tracked into the "dumb and popular kids" classes. You don't really have much of a hope at an engineering career by then, no matter how much Dr. Who you watch, and how much Mario Bros. you play. You can probably make it in IT. But let's face it, these kids aren't going to be writing ML search algorithms, or designing new chips.
The "bar for entry" for nerdhood, is now so low, that the greatest achievement of a female nerd, as a teen, is to be a whiz at sewing, so you can do cosplay, and post your sexy anime costume pics on tumblr.
We have TONS of mechanisms for getting teens interested in "nerdy stuff". They make great culture consumers. (until they grow up and have zero disposable income).
We have ZERO societal mechanisms for getting kids aged 5-10 involved in mastering Algebra. And our education system, after that age, slots kids, and once you're on a track, you're ON it. It's very difficult to get out of that, and there's no social incentive for the kids who are used to kissing up to the social framework, to spend their time grinding through calculus books.
If a planet has land, and land is property, the question must be posed: does an Asteroid have property, which can be owned. And who could own that? We already have companies trying to "sell" people claim to titles of property on both the moon, and mars. But I don't think that there's any basis in international law - in fact, I think that there are some treaties that BAN claiming sovereignity of the moon.
So if NASA can "own" an asteroid, (in the legal sense) - then they could "take" it, and change it's orbit. But if this asteroid belongs to "the world" (by fiat of international declaration) - then it might even be illegal for NASA to MOVE it from it's natural orbital trajectory. (in that case, it might actually be considered "LITTERING" to land a probe on another planet.) (I understand that there are some islamic scholars who have a problem with smashing probes into the moon, because the moon is a sacred object, as a signifier of the start and end of each month in their calendar - and this is also the source of some of the Moon-landing hoax conspiracy theories that are out there. . . )
Would the douchebags of the world try to challenge, in court, what NASA is trying to do with this asteroid?
Von Braun was dreaming about going to the moon, and colonizing space, when he was building V-2's for Hitler. In his mind - - he was conning Hitler into giving him the necessary R&D funds for science, by letting Hitler kill people with them. Hitler caught on, and tried to have him arrested. When he came to the US, it was pretty much the same deal. Von Braun built a bunch of ballistic missiles for the US (including redstone and atlas), and in the 50's, early thermonuclear weapons were actually pretty huge, and there were ideas about placing strategic weapons on-orbit (until the UN banned the idea) - so while the US and the Soviets were playing "who can build the biggest bomb" - the moon race was also about "who can put the most weapons into orbit" - to extort and threaten the rest of the world with nuclear annihilation.
Then came Apollo, and the test-ban, and the acceptance of the reality that smaller nukes were probably the most practical in warfare anyway. And Congress decided to stop funding Von Braun's pet science projects. He also did try, very hard, (in the form of actual Disney-produced propaganda films) - to get the American public on board with the whole idea of space colonization. But in the end, most Americans didn't really give a crap, and just wanted to be able to wave a big American dick around, so they wouldn't have to hide under their beds from the commie invasion anymore. As soon as it became clear that the Soviets weren't going to be competing on that front anymore (the 1980's) - congress's funding got tighter and tighter.
It got even worse when we started COOPERATING with Russia (ISS). A lot of people in congress wanted to kill that right-quick. The only reason any funding kept flowing, was with the shuttle, it was easy to funnel cash to ATK (Thiokol, the contractors who build the SRB's. - and ALSO make the Minuteman. . . ) When the Shuttle ended, that made the justification very difficult.
Von Braun was a special case, and a very strong driving force. One of those greatly underrated and unknown geniuses. (Not gonna talk about ethics). He pulled of miracles, and got us to the moon.
I think that Elon Musk is doing some fantastic stuff right now - and he's kind of "out there" as far as being a visionary. So who knows? I think that he understands that space exploration is about much more than next quarter's profits. And that's a huge part of the thinking that is required to actually DO this. Very few people actually understand this.
Step one: Get into a position where, politically, you know that it is impossible to be fired. Step two: Purposely fuck over the company's stock over a period of years, by making shitty decisions. Step three: On the basis of the company's de-valued stock, re-negotiate a higher number of options for your retirement package. Step four: Announce retirement, watch your retirement package's value skyrocket. . .
Slashdot Mirror
So - don't forget to check the box at the bottom of the form saying that you agree to their privacy policy. (whereby, your blood will give them a DNA sequence that they can sell as marketing information - which funds the tests. And the CEO's retirement plan).
because all the hospitable places are too overcrowded with other people?
If one has gone through the trouble to contract with a PKI provider for an ssl certificate, and taken other reasonable precautionary measures, I would think that the secured traffic provides a reasonable expectation of privacy, by a legal definition, even if technically, that privacy is not bulletproof. If you're sending plaintext over the wire, then, of course, you should know you could be listened to. But not secured traffic.
We have had a rash of "bang-bang" style bank robberies in my County, over the past 3-5 years. A couple of these serial robbers have been caught. Anyway, the reported average take is usually somewhere between $3000 - $8000 or so. In my opinion, that's no where near worth the risk. That's not even chump-change, and far more than that is stolen minute-by-minute by white-collar criminals.
"cleared" == background, criminal, and credit-history check.
So, if you don't have any credit problems, if you don't have a criminal history, AND if they interview your friends and family, and they don't say you're a lying cheating scumbag, then you're golden.
SERIOUSLY: If the NSA wants to relocate me to Hawaii and pay me 6-figures, I am totally down with that, and I *promise* not to share my creds with anyone!
"Weird, I can't reproduce it under my user, give me your password so I can try it with yours, you can reset your password after I'm done".
That's not what should happen. Pretty much every secure environment I've worked in, the procedure is: "Sorry about your user-profile bro, we're wiping the machine, and you need to start over. You *did* have backups of all the stuff in your profile. Right?"
This is the content of every single (mandatory) security training I've been required to take, over the years. It just seems unbelievable to me, that various government agencies spend so much money in this training, and developing strong security practices, that the NSA, of all agencies, would not be following these procedures.
Humanity will not stop.
Until Nature stops us.
Solution:
Build the ship out of uranium.
As you approach c, it becomes more mass. Feed that mass into a nuclear reactor to drive the propulsion. Ship becomes less massive. Science, bitches. :)
Based on what we *know* right now, our best-bet is to build a series of self-sustainable "generation ships"; (very-large spacecraft, capable of sustaining human life over the course of several generations, including the necessary ecosystems to support such life.)
Such technology is at least theoretically do-able, from a technical standpoint.
From an ECONOMIC standpoint, of course, it is as impossible as faster-than-light travel. To expend the money required for such an enterprise, to send-off one or more such "generation ships", with no possible ROI within the lifetime (or thousands of lifetimes) of the investor, is not something that can be done with a civilization that does not even want to invest the money to educate their own children.
And this would only happen if we knew, for certain, that the destination worlds were inhabitable. (and not yet inhabited). And even if they were, we would have to wait thousands of years for the colony to develop to the point of economic viability so that they could even send a response.
The solution is pretty simple (re: "kicking companies' asses") . . . a Corporate Charter is a legal instrument GRANTED BY GOVERNMENT, to a corporation. It's in the common interest for corporate charters to exist, in most cases. But when that ceases to be - then the government should be much more eager to just revoke the charter. (In modern law, this is actually very difficult; akin to depriving people of property.
Another is vaccination, where I have a very clear interest in everyone else getting vaccinated - to increase the level of herd immunity, so that diseases have fewer viable hosts, reducing my chance of becoming infected. Damn viruses are commies.
Yes - this kind of procurement scam used to be illegal.
Before Bush's wars.
(yes, I do fault Obama for taking advantage of it, instead of fixing it, like he promised. But congress under Bush pretty much unanimously legalized this no-bid contract procedure - with nary a whimper of opposition).
Werner Von Braun is dead.
And his dream was to conquer space. Not health insurance.
When asked as he left the podium whether he believed America would be going through all this political turmoil again in a few months, the President didn't waste words. "No."'"
. . . still naive.
I've found that Estimation is a job that greatly improves with experience. 20 years ago, I couldn't estimate for shit. Now, I'm pretty good. After a few projects of various types, as long as you remember how long previous projects took, you can breakdown your tasks, and estimate based on similar tasks. Use RAND's 3-point estimation, (more commonly known as PERT). With ready access to a reference, it's actually not technically complicated, and is rarely wrong. Even if your project is something new that you've never done before - there are likely substantial portions of the project that you HAVE done before. But the key is the experience.
Yes, easy to blame evil men for everything -
I don't think it's "evil men".
Girls and boys are both raised by women AND men. They are taught social skills by their mothers and fathers first, before they end up in public school, and going up against that social framework. Our parents teach us how to treat each other, and what roles are appropriate, and it's from our parents, we learn things like; "nerds aren't cool". The few of us who are not taught "nerds aren't cool" go into a classroom of 29 other kids who ARE taught that.
It's reinforced over the years, but overall, the source of our own social conditioning, is the way we raise our kids. And there are just way too many people who don't teach their kids that studying hard and mastering calculus, and going into engineering, is the right way to spend the time of one's youth. Instead of playing video games, smoking weed, and hanging out with friends.
A big part of a hiring decision is based on how well a candidate presents himself -- I'm deliberately using the masculine pronoun here -- in a resume, interview, and general self-promotion
oh; that's true.
So you hire people based on how good they are at doing something else -- not the job at hand.
I've never actually ended up in the position I was hired for. I always sort of work my way into the role that fits. It's always inconsistent with the initial job description.
At my current job - I was desperate to find a new job, so when I applied here, and interviewed, I sat and thought about it and made a concerted effort to be as arrogant and cocksure as I could. It is absolutely against my nature. It makes me very uncomfortable. I knew that then, and I'm even more certain of it now. But at that time - I really believed that that's what it would take to get me this job, so I kept my now-boss on the phone for almost 2 hours, blowing myself and my abilities up to be some kind of god-like superstar. And they flew me out and hired me. Crazy.
In the past 7 years working here, while I feel as if I deliberately misled him, I can't say that I actually lied about anything. And while I've certainly exceeded my own expectations at this job, I'm not sure that I've performed up to what I promised. I don't think he was disappointed. I get consistently good reviews. But coming out of that situation, recalling that interview, it's almost surreal, and I feel as if it was somebody else doing the talking, because I've never talked like that about myself before or since. But I'm absolutely certain that it was my attitude during the interview that got me this job, because my skills and credentials are honestly pretty mediocre. I do try really hard. :)
enforced gender roles.
That's why.
The women you know want to get away from computers, because they've been conditioned, all their lives, to an experience of: computers don't help me get friends, they only put me into a position of having to beg some creepy arrogant neckbeard for help. Of course, they want to get away from the computer.
It IS very much "hamster pushes the lever gets a reward" - men push that "be good at computers" lever, and their reward: they get to play "hero" with the tech knowledge. At least the pretty (dumb) blonde smiles and says thanks. Great spank material for later.
Women get conditioned with a "be good at social relationships and cooking and sewing" lever, and their reward is getting to play "hero" with the arranging parties and decorating the homestead stuff. At least the caveman slaps her on the ass and tells her she's hot.
Why are we still locking our children into these gender-based roles - when it's been clearly shown that people can step outside of them, and do well?
I am certain that this is a social force, and I am pretty sure that it begins - as soon as kids are exposed to social forces. (ie. kindergarten/grade-school).
Among the peer group of my children, I watched very carefully, as this happened. Girls and boys are both affected, and I think it's way worse now than it was in MY generation. Girls are certainly affected to a much higher proportion. But the mechanism is this: The dumber you are, the more popular you are, the more fun you are, the more friends you have, the more social activities (and etc) you get to participate in. Some people refer to this phenomenon as "it's not cool to be a nerd" - well, that's really it, in a nutshell. But it's worse than that, because "nerd" has been redefined, in this generation, to be anyone who plays video games or watches science fiction. But this is so mainstream now, there's really nothing special about being a "nerd" and it's not really a significant thing that they're now "cool and accepted" - because the REAL nerds don't have time to play video games. They're busting their asses learning math. If you don't know your math by age 11 or 12, you will end up getting tracked into the "dumb and popular kids" classes. You don't really have much of a hope at an engineering career by then, no matter how much Dr. Who you watch, and how much Mario Bros. you play. You can probably make it in IT. But let's face it, these kids aren't going to be writing ML search algorithms, or designing new chips.
The "bar for entry" for nerdhood, is now so low, that the greatest achievement of a female nerd, as a teen, is to be a whiz at sewing, so you can do cosplay, and post your sexy anime costume pics on tumblr.
We have TONS of mechanisms for getting teens interested in "nerdy stuff". They make great culture consumers. (until they grow up and have zero disposable income).
We have ZERO societal mechanisms for getting kids aged 5-10 involved in mastering Algebra. And our education system, after that age, slots kids, and once you're on a track, you're ON it. It's very difficult to get out of that, and there's no social incentive for the kids who are used to kissing up to the social framework, to spend their time grinding through calculus books.
If a planet has land, and land is property, the question must be posed: does an Asteroid have property, which can be owned. And who could own that? We already have companies trying to "sell" people claim to titles of property on both the moon, and mars. But I don't think that there's any basis in international law - in fact, I think that there are some treaties that BAN claiming sovereignity of the moon.
So if NASA can "own" an asteroid, (in the legal sense) - then they could "take" it, and change it's orbit. But if this asteroid belongs to "the world" (by fiat of international declaration) - then it might even be illegal for NASA to MOVE it from it's natural orbital trajectory. (in that case, it might actually be considered "LITTERING" to land a probe on another planet.) (I understand that there are some islamic scholars who have a problem with smashing probes into the moon, because the moon is a sacred object, as a signifier of the start and end of each month in their calendar - and this is also the source of some of the Moon-landing hoax conspiracy theories that are out there. . . )
Would the douchebags of the world try to challenge, in court, what NASA is trying to do with this asteroid?
Apollo was Von Braun's pet project.
Von Braun was dreaming about going to the moon, and colonizing space, when he was building V-2's for Hitler. In his mind - - he was conning Hitler into giving him the necessary R&D funds for science, by letting Hitler kill people with them. Hitler caught on, and tried to have him arrested. When he came to the US, it was pretty much the same deal. Von Braun built a bunch of ballistic missiles for the US (including redstone and atlas), and in the 50's, early thermonuclear weapons were actually pretty huge, and there were ideas about placing strategic weapons on-orbit (until the UN banned the idea) - so while the US and the Soviets were playing "who can build the biggest bomb" - the moon race was also about "who can put the most weapons into orbit" - to extort and threaten the rest of the world with nuclear annihilation.
Then came Apollo, and the test-ban, and the acceptance of the reality that smaller nukes were probably the most practical in warfare anyway. And Congress decided to stop funding Von Braun's pet science projects. He also did try, very hard, (in the form of actual Disney-produced propaganda films) - to get the American public on board with the whole idea of space colonization. But in the end, most Americans didn't really give a crap, and just wanted to be able to wave a big American dick around, so they wouldn't have to hide under their beds from the commie invasion anymore. As soon as it became clear that the Soviets weren't going to be competing on that front anymore (the 1980's) - congress's funding got tighter and tighter.
It got even worse when we started COOPERATING with Russia (ISS). A lot of people in congress wanted to kill that right-quick. The only reason any funding kept flowing, was with the shuttle, it was easy to funnel cash to ATK (Thiokol, the contractors who build the SRB's. - and ALSO make the Minuteman. . . ) When the Shuttle ended, that made the justification very difficult.
Von Braun was a special case, and a very strong driving force. One of those greatly underrated and unknown geniuses. (Not gonna talk about ethics). He pulled of miracles, and got us to the moon.
I think that Elon Musk is doing some fantastic stuff right now - and he's kind of "out there" as far as being a visionary. So who knows? I think that he understands that space exploration is about much more than next quarter's profits. And that's a huge part of the thinking that is required to actually DO this. Very few people actually understand this.
Step one: Get into a position where, politically, you know that it is impossible to be fired.
Step two: Purposely fuck over the company's stock over a period of years, by making shitty decisions.
Step three: On the basis of the company's de-valued stock, re-negotiate a higher number of options for your retirement package.
Step four: Announce retirement, watch your retirement package's value skyrocket. . .
It's the cognitive dissonance of not being able to accept that Santa is not real.
(and the guy dressed up in the red suit, and beard, is putting roofies into your kool-aide, and butt raping you in your sleep).
Believe in Christmas!