Suspicion yes, but that's still not proof of anything. How did they eventually nail him? I realize you can convict on circumstantial evidence, but "He was capable of it" doesn't seem like quite enough proof.
This is basic security clearance stuff. It you're doing anything that gives someone leverage over you (outside of your job), you don't get to know anything important. Seems reasonable to me.
No, it's completely insane, and a circular argument. If you gamble, you could be blackmailed by somebody threatening to tell your boss. Your boss will fire you for that because... it creates leverage? It's only leverage because the boss makes it leverage. If the boss would butt his dumb ass out of your private life, it wouldn't be effective as leverage anymore.
Example: Dickhead calls your boss and tattles on you for gambling. Your boss yawns and says "Who gives a fuck?" and hangs up. Look! No leverage!
"I'm a contractor. I have a team of carpenters who are tasked with building a house. It seems this is going to require the driving of a large number of nails. My team of carpenters would like to know what sort of tool or mechanism would work best to drive these nails. Right now, we have one guy who holds the nail while another guy hits it with his thermos. This does eventually drive in the nail, but 90% of the time the nail bends, and it's denting our thermoses. I wonder if there exists some genius, super-carpenter bad-ass out there who might be able to suggest a better way."
Either they are asking because they want to match your SSN to their records (in which case, they already have your SSN), or they do not have your SSN, in which case you can just type in a fake number.
No, because "mass destruction" is a term that implies certain things based on the meaning of those two words. For instance, I do not use "mass destruction" to refer to a shovel. Because those words do not mean that.
The term "WMD" was intended to distinguish certain weapons of "mass destruction" from other conventional weapons, for instance conventional bunker-busting bombs. With respect to military weapons, a convention explosive bomb capable of leveling a three story building is not considered a WMD. WMD was meant to describe weapons such as thermonuclear bombs, mass chemical and biological agents, etc.
It appears we no longer have a useful term to refer to weapons which cause "mass destruction." Apparently, a couple of ounces of low-velocity explosive packed inside a metal container one can acquire at Walmart now meet the qualification. This is ludicrous.
Or, you know, you could work out those problems with a design before you start.
Can you list the projects you've worked on where there was a complete, correct design at the beginning, and that design was then flawlessly executed? I would like to study and learn from such projects.
As I understand it, in a stand-up, one is supposed to say what one did yesterday (I don't care), what one is going to do today (again, I don't care), and what road-blocks, if any, you have (and, unless your problems affect me doing my work, I still don't care).
So you're saying if a fellow team member is doing something in a way you think could be done better, you just stay silent? If a team member is planning to do something that you think isn't actually necessary because of something you're doing, you just stay silent? If a team member is struggling with a problem you have the skill set to help out with, you just stay silent?
It's true, for Agile to work, you need to have a team. The group you are a part of doesn't seem to fit the definition (or at least you don't).
Interfaces often make sense, but you can tell when somebody has gone interface-crazy when it is no longer possible, by simply looking at the source code, to determine what actually is going to happen -- instead, you're reduced to tracing the code in a debugger to see what actually goes on.
The same number of dollars could have been cut from specific programs in a way that would have had no noticeable impact on critical and important services. Instead, they chose to impact vital services in order to send a message to the public: "If you ask us to cut budgets, we'll do it in the most painful way possible." It's nothing more than an enormous "fuck you" to the American public.
License plates are a special case. They only have letters and numbers on them. The resolution of a camera may be too low for image processing software to extract an arbitrary image from it. But the fact that it is a license plate gives the algorithm prior knowledge which may help it extract the most likely plate number even if an arbitrary image can't be recognized.
It's not about breaking the bank. The point is, there is still a possibility of something getting through. It's stupid to spend that much money to have a less-than-100% success rate, when you could spend less and get a perfect success rate.
Let's say each MoC gets 200 letters per day -- a reasonable estimate based on some quick Googling. 535 members times 200 letters equals 107000 pieces of mail per day.
Suppose you pay some worker minimum wage to screen mail. They spend on average 20 seconds examining each piece of mail. That's 594 man-hours per day. Minimum wage in DC is $8.25 per hour. So, $4900 per day to screen the mail, just for labor costs.
$4900 per day is a pretty solid base estimate. On top of that, there are costs associated with enhanced checking for "suspicious" items. Assume 1 in 1000 items is deemed suspicious and undergoes extensive chemical testing at a cost of $50 (that's being generous). That's $5350 additional per day. A total of $10,250 per day to check the mail. 52 weeks a year, 6 days a week of mail is 312 days per year. Total cost per year is therefore $3.2 million.
Don't you think such an expenditure is completely idiotic? For one thing, the system can fail, despite all your checks. Something could slip through. On the other hand, you could, for a small fraction of that money, design and implement a robotic system which automatically opens the mail, digitally scans it, and transmits it to the MoC in the form of a PDF. 0% chance of failure, as well as much much cheaper.
Are we seriously testing all mail coming to members of Congress for poisons? How the hell is this accomplished in a reasonable amount of time, with reasonable accuracy, and how much is it costing us?
How about we build a robot that opens the mail, scans the pages into digital form, and skip all that ludicrous bullshit?
Godwin's Law says nothing about losing arguments. It states that as a discussion continues, the probability of an argument involving Nazis approaches 100%. It does not state that the person who makes such an argument loses the debate.
A bigger pity that Google will get down on their knees and deepthroat the MPAA like a good little whore.
Your perspective is skewed. Google isn't doing this because the *AA asks them to, they are doing it because it is the law.
If the *AA's get out of hand, Google could easily just buy the entire industry. Every single one of those companies. With cash. Several times over. You don't seem to understand the amount of money Google has. They aren't kowtowing to private corporate interests at this point, they are simply doing what the law requires them to do. If you get a take-down notice, you have to take it down. If the *AA's begin to make the world suck too bad for Google, they could just purchase them and eradicate all of it.
The purpose of the serial, in my mind, is not to prevent piracy but to identify the customer for purposes of support, enabling feature sets, etc. Basically, to register the product.
As a legitimate user, I *like* seeing my name show up in the "About this software" dialog box, along with information about the particular set of features I have purchased, info on how long my support contract is valid for, etc. I am not at all annoyed by it.
What do you do when need or even want something that does have DRM? Pirate it?
I go without. I don't play games, so that removes a whole world of personal conflict.
It occurs to me that I wasn't quite accurate. I pay for streaming video services, so I suppose DRM is involved there. But unlike the DRM I've heard of in software, I've never had usability problems due to that, and I'm okay with paying a monthly fee for streaming as opposed to owning the content outright. But for stuff I actually buy to own, I won't do it if there's DRM.
Any DRM would only inconvenience legitimate customers.
As a customer who won't buy DRM-protected stuff, I don't consider the simple act of entering a license key to be DRM... What do you think? As long as the validation of the key happens locally, I don't mind doing this. In a way, it makes the purchase feel a bit more personalized.
Yeah, I know the license validation can be hacked around. That's not the point, it's kind of like signing your signature to something. I can forge someone else's signature, but I know I'm being dishonest if I do that.
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Suspicion yes, but that's still not proof of anything. How did they eventually nail him? I realize you can convict on circumstantial evidence, but "He was capable of it" doesn't seem like quite enough proof.
So pay off the guy's debt for him and put him in treatment.
This is basic security clearance stuff. It you're doing anything that gives someone leverage over you (outside of your job), you don't get to know anything important. Seems reasonable to me.
No, it's completely insane, and a circular argument. If you gamble, you could be blackmailed by somebody threatening to tell your boss. Your boss will fire you for that because... it creates leverage? It's only leverage because the boss makes it leverage. If the boss would butt his dumb ass out of your private life, it wouldn't be effective as leverage anymore.
Example: Dickhead calls your boss and tattles on you for gambling. Your boss yawns and says "Who gives a fuck?" and hangs up. Look! No leverage!
"I'm a contractor. I have a team of carpenters who are tasked with building a house. It seems this is going to require the driving of a large number of nails. My team of carpenters would like to know what sort of tool or mechanism would work best to drive these nails. Right now, we have one guy who holds the nail while another guy hits it with his thermos. This does eventually drive in the nail, but 90% of the time the nail bends, and it's denting our thermoses. I wonder if there exists some genius, super-carpenter bad-ass out there who might be able to suggest a better way."
Really? You don't give any part of your SSN to anyone? I take it you are not the beneficiary of any insurance policy and never held a job?
Either they are asking because they want to match your SSN to their records (in which case, they already have your SSN), or they do not have your SSN, in which case you can just type in a fake number.
No, because "mass destruction" is a term that implies certain things based on the meaning of those two words. For instance, I do not use "mass destruction" to refer to a shovel. Because those words do not mean that.
If it's a bomb, call it a bomb. Calling it a WMD is nothing but linguistic mind control.
The term "WMD" was intended to distinguish certain weapons of "mass destruction" from other conventional weapons, for instance conventional bunker-busting bombs. With respect to military weapons, a convention explosive bomb capable of leveling a three story building is not considered a WMD. WMD was meant to describe weapons such as thermonuclear bombs, mass chemical and biological agents, etc.
It appears we no longer have a useful term to refer to weapons which cause "mass destruction." Apparently, a couple of ounces of low-velocity explosive packed inside a metal container one can acquire at Walmart now meet the qualification. This is ludicrous.
Or, you know, you could work out those problems with a design before you start.
Can you list the projects you've worked on where there was a complete, correct design at the beginning, and that design was then flawlessly executed? I would like to study and learn from such projects.
As I understand it, in a stand-up, one is supposed to say what one did yesterday (I don't care), what one is going to do today (again, I don't care), and what road-blocks, if any, you have (and, unless your problems affect me doing my work, I still don't care).
So you're saying if a fellow team member is doing something in a way you think could be done better, you just stay silent? If a team member is planning to do something that you think isn't actually necessary because of something you're doing, you just stay silent? If a team member is struggling with a problem you have the skill set to help out with, you just stay silent?
It's true, for Agile to work, you need to have a team. The group you are a part of doesn't seem to fit the definition (or at least you don't).
Interfaces often make sense, but you can tell when somebody has gone interface-crazy when it is no longer possible, by simply looking at the source code, to determine what actually is going to happen -- instead, you're reduced to tracing the code in a debugger to see what actually goes on.
In physics, being wrong by a couple orders of magnitude is no big deal. Call me back when he's off by 10^20.
I love how in your comment you specify that there are "specific programs" that could be cut without elaborating on what those actually are.
War spending. If you're going to force me to state the fucking obvious, there you go.
The same number of dollars could have been cut from specific programs in a way that would have had no noticeable impact on critical and important services. Instead, they chose to impact vital services in order to send a message to the public: "If you ask us to cut budgets, we'll do it in the most painful way possible." It's nothing more than an enormous "fuck you" to the American public.
Suppose the White House DID blow up, and Obama WAS injured. Why the hell should this affect the price of corn?
License plates are a special case. They only have letters and numbers on them. The resolution of a camera may be too low for image processing software to extract an arbitrary image from it. But the fact that it is a license plate gives the algorithm prior knowledge which may help it extract the most likely plate number even if an arbitrary image can't be recognized.
It's not about breaking the bank. The point is, there is still a possibility of something getting through. It's stupid to spend that much money to have a less-than-100% success rate, when you could spend less and get a perfect success rate.
Let's say each MoC gets 200 letters per day -- a reasonable estimate based on some quick Googling. 535 members times 200 letters equals 107000 pieces of mail per day.
Suppose you pay some worker minimum wage to screen mail. They spend on average 20 seconds examining each piece of mail. That's 594 man-hours per day. Minimum wage in DC is $8.25 per hour. So, $4900 per day to screen the mail, just for labor costs.
$4900 per day is a pretty solid base estimate. On top of that, there are costs associated with enhanced checking for "suspicious" items. Assume 1 in 1000 items is deemed suspicious and undergoes extensive chemical testing at a cost of $50 (that's being generous). That's $5350 additional per day. A total of $10,250 per day to check the mail. 52 weeks a year, 6 days a week of mail is 312 days per year. Total cost per year is therefore $3.2 million.
Don't you think such an expenditure is completely idiotic? For one thing, the system can fail, despite all your checks. Something could slip through. On the other hand, you could, for a small fraction of that money, design and implement a robotic system which automatically opens the mail, digitally scans it, and transmits it to the MoC in the form of a PDF. 0% chance of failure, as well as much much cheaper.
Are we seriously testing all mail coming to members of Congress for poisons? How the hell is this accomplished in a reasonable amount of time, with reasonable accuracy, and how much is it costing us?
How about we build a robot that opens the mail, scans the pages into digital form, and skip all that ludicrous bullshit?
Godwin's Law says nothing about losing arguments. It states that as a discussion continues, the probability of an argument involving Nazis approaches 100%. It does not state that the person who makes such an argument loses the debate.
A bigger pity that Google will get down on their knees and deepthroat the MPAA like a good little whore.
Your perspective is skewed. Google isn't doing this because the *AA asks them to, they are doing it because it is the law.
If the *AA's get out of hand, Google could easily just buy the entire industry. Every single one of those companies. With cash. Several times over. You don't seem to understand the amount of money Google has. They aren't kowtowing to private corporate interests at this point, they are simply doing what the law requires them to do. If you get a take-down notice, you have to take it down. If the *AA's begin to make the world suck too bad for Google, they could just purchase them and eradicate all of it.
The purpose of the serial, in my mind, is not to prevent piracy but to identify the customer for purposes of support, enabling feature sets, etc. Basically, to register the product.
As a legitimate user, I *like* seeing my name show up in the "About this software" dialog box, along with information about the particular set of features I have purchased, info on how long my support contract is valid for, etc. I am not at all annoyed by it.
What do you do when need or even want something that does have DRM? Pirate it?
I go without. I don't play games, so that removes a whole world of personal conflict.
It occurs to me that I wasn't quite accurate. I pay for streaming video services, so I suppose DRM is involved there. But unlike the DRM I've heard of in software, I've never had usability problems due to that, and I'm okay with paying a monthly fee for streaming as opposed to owning the content outright. But for stuff I actually buy to own, I won't do it if there's DRM.
Any DRM would only inconvenience legitimate customers.
As a customer who won't buy DRM-protected stuff, I don't consider the simple act of entering a license key to be DRM... What do you think? As long as the validation of the key happens locally, I don't mind doing this. In a way, it makes the purchase feel a bit more personalized.
Yeah, I know the license validation can be hacked around. That's not the point, it's kind of like signing your signature to something. I can forge someone else's signature, but I know I'm being dishonest if I do that.