You do realize that for all of human history up until the late 1990's most of the world lived perfectly happy, fulfilled lives without a cell phone, right? You really don't need to be connected to everyone else all of the time. Try silencing the damned thing once in a while and connect with the meatsacks around you at the moment.
> living in the basement, and having no contact with society.
Just the opposite, depending on all this tech too much is what makes you a virtual hermit with no real contact with humans.
Yup. People always seem to forget the utility of traffic analysis. Use Tor, encrypt everything, doesn't matter. Just using Tor is going to put you on the short list of people who bear additional attention. Either an paranoid, anarchist or pedo. Odds are more than one of those three. And while the libertarian side of me screams the coldly rational side does have to admit to the reality that it is also true. If I were a cop I'd be making that exact assumption and be right far more often than I was wrong. Playing those odds would lead to a high arrest rate and a promotion.
So how do we fix that problem. Hell, we can't even get more than a percent to even sign email yet with only a little effort from the few developers we could be encrypting most email by default. Default and entirely transparent are the keys to a more secure Internet. Wouldn't even matter a lot if the key management for those 'normals' wasn't perfect. Just getting to a point where most email traffic flowed from server to server unreadable would help. But yes my above observation about traffic analysis would still apply. That could be tackled once we had enough encrypted traffic we could hide things in the stream.
> Meanwhile I have good karma with a default score of 2 for being a complete tool.
Hey, I posted at +3 (Karma + subscriber) unbroken for pretty much the entire time the current slashdot model existed until a couple of months ago when I pissed off an admin or they totally redesigned the moderation system. Since there hasn't been widespread complaining I assume it is just me that is getting the special treatment. Mods can't really hurt you unless you are a totally usless user who never says anything worthwhile. The downmods get cancelled out by upmods on the good stuff and it all works out.
Not unless someone is doing something they shouldn't. Each device is assigned a unique 48bit MAC address at time of manufacture. Each one.
You buy a 24 bit prefix from IEEE (I think) and are then supposed to do your own accounting on the lower 24 bits to be sure you don't duplicate one. If you have ever looked up a MAC to see who made the device, that is how it works. The owner of the prefix is a published record.
> Law enforcement can track you and indict you simply because of a number on the backside of your car! You should probably just leave your car at home.
Yea, that is becoming a major nightmare. Until pervasive cameras it didn't matter much. The could put an APB on a plate number and still not have a very high success rate on the cops finding it. Now with cameras in every intersection that changes. They can get a big chunk of the same info collection that way that cell phone tracking gives them but it isn't quite as good. All tracking cars does is show where the car went, the camers may or may not give a good enough image to prove who was in it. And more than one person can be in a car at the same time. If you have phone data the cars don't add a lot.
Of course they require a lot less legal issues to make use of images already sitting on traffic and homeland security machines so they are starting there. Later they can supplement it with the cell tracks and the merged dataset will be very complete in the picture of where a person goes and what they are doing.
You are half right. Most people assume I'm a bible humping right winger, but in reality I'm an agnostic anti-idiotarian Libertarian. And this crap annoys my Libertarian tendencies. If I didn't need one for work I wouldn't carry a mobile device. But yea the hivemind has started demonstrating their tolerance and diversity bigtime on my ass of late. I just say "bring it bitches." because nothing says "I can't win an argument" like organizing a movement to silence the few of us around here who don't toe the Party line.
The lamers downmodding don't bother me, do wish the admins would lay off though and put my account back to normal. Since pissing one of them off a few months ago karma goes down far faster than it goes up. One downmod is usually enough to kill the posting bonus now. Still manage to average three replies per post though so it hasn't silenced me. Never saw that sort of heavy editorial hand back when Cmdr. Taco ran things so it is a bad sign of things to come.
There, fixed that for ya. Amazing how they managed to get darned near 100% of the population to agree to carry around a tracking device with nary a peep. All it took was to be very careful to NOT talk about the tracking ability, keep news accounts of the police using the cell data off the front page and make the tracker shiny and useful enough. Do those things and not only will everyone carry one they will pay an average of $50/mo for the privledge. Land of the Free indeed.
Won't be long now before they decide they have the hook set deep enough they can start making more overt use of the location/activity data without many people ditching their tracker.
The carriers WILL start renting out access to track data for advertising purposes. They know where and when you are. They will be able to link that beyond your phone. Won't take much computation to get that localized enough to have a good idea which PC you use and then tie it to doubleclick and google's cookies. Then they know EVERYTHING. Combine a tracking cookie to hard billing quality identification data and the possibilities are truly limitless. Sure they COULD do that with Amazon but there is too great a chance of a user revolt. But people won't/can't give up their iShiny.
What law enforcement will do with the data is so obvious and so dark there isn't much point in hammering it again really. Especially combined with security cameras everywhere. Who cares if the image quality isn't good enough for a positive id or you were wearing a hoodie. It gives a time/location and the tracker gives them who was at that spot in spacetime.
Bust a drug dealer and you have probable cause to grab a trace on everyone who came in contact with that person for the last month. Crunch the numbers enough and lots of patterns emerge. Not quite precrime but close enough. You show up as having been in the room with a number of dealers and that will be your ass. Or be around a few people who later get busted for burgulary and how soon until that is cause for a search warrant on your place? Being able to effortlessly work backwards from a bust and turn up clues like that will change the law enforcement game entirely.
And now you see why AT&T yanked all their payphones and for some reason simply refuses to compete in the landline business, even with billions and billions in sunk costs for all that wire going everywhere. Eliminate hardlines and everyone MUST buy a cell. It is already sorta odd to encounter someone who doesn't carry one, eventually it will be reasonable suspicion of criminal activity. Wouldn't suprise me if they become the preferred physical identifier, i.e. 'your papers.'
Yea, that is kinda lame. But it won't bother me because all of the Linux versions gut all of the auto update crap, even the new version available nags.
Without a special flash chip or adding another one your simple electrical fix isn't practical. The ESCD info typically gets reflashed on a pretty regular basis if anything in the machine changes. To save cost it is usually in the same physical flash with the BIOS. Also, your simple jumper would preclude lights out server management.
No, it has to be a gate that can only be cleared by a cold start once flipped on.
You could still allow lights out. Most servers support boot over net so the BIOS is required to have a partial IP stack. Just allow bringing in the new BIOS via tftp from the IPMI remoted BIOS console if nobody is available to insert a USB stick and you don't want to allow reading it out of a FAT partition on the primary drive.. It could print an SHA-256 sum of what it downloaded to ensure you weren't hit by a man in the middle. Hell, it could even check a signature against a key in the current BIOS and warn if it was signed by someone else. Lots of possibilities. But if it is electrically possible to write the BIOS after the bootloaded is executed security isn't really possible.
What about her? She is a bored illionaire who was tapped to lead a doomed company in the almost pitiful hope her media hype can save Yahoo! from it's almost certain fate. It won't; you know that, I know that and she probably knows that. There won't be any needing to pull any allnighters, no death marches to release and if she can't (or doesn't want to) travel for a couple of months it won't really matter because she isn't expected to succeed.
Locking the BIOS with signed updates and crap is exactly the wrong way to go. It means there will still be bugs to exploit. But the forces seeking to lock down the PC will advance yet another step under cover of security theater.
The correct solution is to give the machine a one way gate so that after POST the BIOS can't be updated, period. Electrically impossible. That would require an updater in the BIOS and either storing the extended config now flashed into the same chip with the BIOS to either go elsewhere or the flash chip to be smart enough to have a protected area and an unprotected area and only the protected area be unrevokable without a full reboot. It also should go without saying that the BIOS can't look at the unprotected area before the big switch to prevent buffer overflow attacks from getting into the BIOS while the flash is writable and/or stopping the user from invoking a clear extended data function.
A minimal rescue program in mask ROM would be gravy of course. Lets see the leet warez doodz get past that one. Wouldn't put anything past the NSA though.
> Are you trolling? You actually think its a good idea to waste taxpayer dollars going after weed?
Doesn't really matter what I think. Or you. What matters is Congress has spoken on the issue in the form of making laws. If we don't like them we should take it up with them, I hear there is an election on; now might be a good time. The President doesn't get to decide which laws he will enforce, he swears an oath to faithfully execute the laws of the United States as written. Same goes for 'gay marriage', amnesty for illegals, card check, regulating CO2 as a pollutant and so on. We don't have a king, we have a president. And I can absolutely promise you will instantly agree with me the second Obama leaves office and a Republican administration is sworn in, whether that be this year or some later election.
Should be pretty obvious. They are voting for social policy. They either don't believe Obama's (and the rest of the Ds) policies are the reason for the bad economy or don't care about that as much as they care about the social stuff.
Help me understand. Liberals tend to favor all sort of laws requiring ID. Can't f*cking buy a can of spray paint in Wal*Mart without having a picture ID anymore. Can't board a plane. Can't enter a federal building. Can't drive. Can't buy booze or smokes or a lotto ticket. And to carry a gun you need a second photo ID most places, if you can at all. Shall I continue? Point made? Thought so. So explain why I shouldn't think you guys are lying pieces of crap on this one and are just too scared to admit what you are really on about, you want to protect the sacred right of illegals to vote and for your political machines in the big cities to manufacture as many votes as the Party might require.
> and redistricting
So you are pissed we finally took enough State Legislatures to show you just how unfairly you guys have been playing that little game the last fifty some odd years? Payback too much of a bitch for ya? Well screw you hippie, suck it. In a generation I'll perhaps join you in a call for a more fair system.... but for now enjoy the payback.
> "legalize weed" - not gonna happen. Too bad too.
What other major component of his base has yet to get a major bone thown to them, usually in a totally lawless fashion? Think about it. He announces he is ordering Federal law enforcement resources to be 'redirected' away from enforcing the laws against weed. Lots of blah blah about it being his discretionary authority to direct scarce resources in this time of budget crisis, etc. The message to the college/youth vote will be unmistakable: Romney would instantly reverse this executive order but if I get reelected you can light up forever because after four years weed will be such a open and accepted part of society none would dare revert the change. So you stoners better get off yer ass and put the bong away long enough to drag my sorry ass across the finish line.
It is called a preference cascade. Once you have made the big choice and decided you are going to vote for someone your opinion on their suitability on all of the sub questions tend to fall into line to confirm that major decision. Happens lots of other places as well, nothing unusual.
And we know most of the IT industry is in very blue areas and just from reading/. any outsider can quickly see which way the groupthink goes. Most It types are progressive in their political leanings, favor Obama's redefinition of marriage, attacks on traditional morality and religion and are just waiting on him to legalize weed, probably as soon as the convention. So of course they are chomping at the bit to pull the lever again. Of course they also live in constant fear of being outsourced or rightsized and totally fail to connect their political views to the economic consequences they cause.
Not even in theory. The Kingdom of God would, by definition, operate according to God's Law which is, again by definition, in accord with the laws of nature that He designed into the universe itself. It would of course be perfect and all knowing justice, again by definition.
The Laws of Men are but an imperfect attempt to capture that perfect Natural Law and will always be flawed and in need of continual attempts at further perfection. But you must have Laws and not just principles if men are to know what is and is not permitted. Just gauzy principles lead to the Rule of Men, specifically the Men who decide on a case by case basis if, after the fact, you are to be punished for violating their vision of these principles. That is why the U.S. Founders were so insistent on banning Ex Post Facto laws. It is just that in God's case (and only in His case) His principles are perfectly defined and thus entirely equivalent to perfectly written law.
But short of His Kingdom the perfect knowledge required for a centrally planned society isn't possible and thus any social code written requiring such an impossibility as a build dependency is going to fail to produce the expected results and should suprise nobody when it is implemented anyway and is a disaster.
> Because I recall a lot of Iranians BEGGING for the U.S. to at least express support during the green revolution.
Fool. That was a filthy lie created by the neocons. Obama didn't fall for that obvious gambit. Since he didn't help the Iranians that had to be the correct decision. Remember, when a Democrat is in power dissent is NOT patriotic. The Great Leader cannot be wrong. Please adjust your thinking to eliminate the badfacts leading you to incorrect conclusions.
You seem to be forgetting something fairly important. Our modern notions of ordered liberty, the rule of law (and not of men) equality before the law, even freedom of religion are all the product of the religious men (sorry ladies, that happened later) of the time. It gave the world wonders. Meanwhile every social system constructed by the godless has quickly degenerated into a Hell on Earth. Not saying that it must be so, but to ignore history doesn't sound very 'reality based' to me. At a minimum it should at least cause a bit of pause, some humility and some deep thoughts as to why that is true.
> It CAN be implemented right, it just hasn't been done well so far.
The eternal refrain. A hundred hellholes, mass murdering tyrants, bodies stacked like cordwood, productive economies reduced to ruin never give the true believer pause. Nope, just wasn't done right. Meanwhile the track record for US style ordered liberty is about as close to perfect as can be expected in an imperfect world yet those are just aberations.
Go read Orwell, Hyack or Uncle Milton to learn why it can't ever work. The underlying premise is flawed. No central authority can possess the knowledge required, probably not even if the central authority was a computer. They didn't call it that because it wasn't really invented yet but now we know it as Information Theory.
Free people with free markets and the stable Rule of Law (not the Rule of Men socialism is based on) equally appled produces abundance every time it is tried. Socialism produces decline at best, mass graves at worst. Again, they have both done this every single time they have been tried. You guys talk about being 'reality based', 'rational', 'scientific' etc. yet you refuse to accept the results of hundreds of experimental runs. We spent the entire 20th Century experimenting with various versions of Progressivism, Fascism, Socialism, Communism, Democratic Socialism, Social Democracy and they all either failed horribly or underperformed the more free and market based countries in an almost linear function when liberty is plotted against GDP.
Women who exhibit the same patterns as men tend to earn as much as and often more than men. The trick is finding female oranges to compare to male oranges and not female apples to male oranges.
If a woman has the same educational attainment, works the same job for the same number of hours and years in position their pay is typically the same or better. But that almost never happens.
Women have babies, men don't. All of the differences trace back to that inescapable fact of biology and everything else flows from that. If you don't make it clear you aren't planning on having a baby you won't get picked for any position that can't easily cope with a sudden unplanned absence of up to a year. That right there will explain a fair amount of any measured difference. And of course many women DO actually have babies, which interrupts their career track, especially since many choose to take more time away than the purely medically required absence. Women tend to select careers which provide the work flexibility to permit their family obligations, another significant contributer to measured differences. And while we might argue endlessly whether it is good, correct, etc. there are still more cases of the male partner in a marriage getting a job offer that requires relocation disrupting the female's career track. Add all that up and you have most of the difference.
Now add in the fact, again we can argue endlessly about the rightness of it, whether it can or should be changed by social policy, etc., that men and women have different ideas of what a 'good job' is. Whether they can do it or not, women don't tend to seek jobs in a lot of industries that pay rather well but have difficult working conditions, require erratic schedules with a lot of overtime, etc. This preference is fairly uniform whether the female has children or not, plan on having children, is or is not married, etc. There is also a fairly pronounced difference in the selection of majors and all majors do not pay equally.
This is the same UN that seats Iran on Human Rights organizations to pronounce judgements on free countries. That sees nothing hilarious about appointing Iran to their Commission on Women's Rights. This is the organization this Nobel Laureate turns to for help? Does this poor fool not understand what the U.N. is?
The United Nations was created as a Parliment of Tyrants; by, of and for the unfree hellholes of the world to use as their plaything and propaganda tool. And to siphon as much money out of the 1st world as possible of course by laying on the social justice pity party bull crap heavy and thick. Think about it. When it was created the vast majority of the world's nation states were unfree hellholes, most with a single dicator for life in charge. The people who designed it knew that to be so and explicitly made it one nation state one vote with no counterbalance, no minimum standard of human rights or political freedom to receive full voting rights, no nothing. So the only conclusion to draw from that is the current disfunctional body we see is what they planned on creating. We should then ask some pointed questions:
1. Why? Why did they do what they did. What were their goals? We they simply incompetent on that epic a scale? Doubtful.
2. What now? Is there any point to remaining in the U.N.? Is there any possibility of reform? Really; considering the majority of votes in the General Assembly are still wielded by tyrants and the Security Council is, due to unfree hellholes having a veto, incapable of meaningful action of any kind?
3. What different organizational structure could provide a more useful forum for International cooperation?
Perhaps if this lady were to use the media access granted by her Nobel Prize to instead call for fixing the U.N. we might have a body with the political will to put political pressure on unfree hellholes around the world. But asking the current U.N. to act against it's majority is unlikely to be productive.
> GOP became the party of Filibuster in the Senate.
Exactly. When they became the minority they behaved pretty much indistinguishable from how the Ds behaved when they were in the minority. The only difference is because one side has the commanding heights of the culture/media the talking points change.
D's fillibuster: The fillibuster is a vital part of the checks and balances of power designed by the Founders. It protects the country from the momentary majorities by the forces of intolerance and bigotry when the voters fall for their lies for a brief time.
R's fillibuster: The forces of reaction are abusing our system to prevent the Glorious Leader's Five Year Plan and this anacronism needs to be removed. Heck it wasn't even the old racist white guys you rethuglicans worship who invented the damned thing anyway. First one didn't occur until 1837 and from 1917 to 1949 it required two thirds instead of the current three fifths so it isn't like it has never been adjusted and is holy writ or anything.
> But strictly speaking they are still Zionists, and passionately so.
From dictionary.com:
"Zionism noun a worldwide Jewish movement that resulted in the establishment and development of the state of Israel."
So no, don't see how a Christian can technically be a Zionist. But they can support them and most do. Sorta like how Lech Walesa can endorse Romney but isn't a Republican because you have to be a US registered voter for that.
Slashdot Mirror
You do realize that for all of human history up until the late 1990's most of the world lived perfectly happy, fulfilled lives without a cell phone, right? You really don't need to be connected to everyone else all of the time. Try silencing the damned thing once in a while and connect with the meatsacks around you at the moment.
> living in the basement, and having no contact with society.
Just the opposite, depending on all this tech too much is what makes you a virtual hermit with no real contact with humans.
> see who accesses those shiny Tor gateways too.
Yup. People always seem to forget the utility of traffic analysis. Use Tor, encrypt everything, doesn't matter. Just using Tor is going to put you on the short list of people who bear additional attention. Either an paranoid, anarchist or pedo. Odds are more than one of those three. And while the libertarian side of me screams the coldly rational side does have to admit to the reality that it is also true. If I were a cop I'd be making that exact assumption and be right far more often than I was wrong. Playing those odds would lead to a high arrest rate and a promotion.
So how do we fix that problem. Hell, we can't even get more than a percent to even sign email yet with only a little effort from the few developers we could be encrypting most email by default. Default and entirely transparent are the keys to a more secure Internet. Wouldn't even matter a lot if the key management for those 'normals' wasn't perfect. Just getting to a point where most email traffic flowed from server to server unreadable would help. But yes my above observation about traffic analysis would still apply. That could be tackled once we had enough encrypted traffic we could hide things in the stream.
> Meanwhile I have good karma with a default score of 2 for being a complete tool.
Hey, I posted at +3 (Karma + subscriber) unbroken for pretty much the entire time the current slashdot model existed until a couple of months ago when I pissed off an admin or they totally redesigned the moderation system. Since there hasn't been widespread complaining I assume it is just me that is getting the special treatment. Mods can't really hurt you unless you are a totally usless user who never says anything worthwhile. The downmods get cancelled out by upmods on the good stuff and it all works out.
Not unless someone is doing something they shouldn't. Each device is assigned a unique 48bit MAC address at time of manufacture. Each one.
You buy a 24 bit prefix from IEEE (I think) and are then supposed to do your own accounting on the lower 24 bits to be sure you don't duplicate one. If you have ever looked up a MAC to see who made the device, that is how it works. The owner of the prefix is a published record.
> Law enforcement can track you and indict you simply because of a number on the backside of your car! You should probably just leave your car at home.
Yea, that is becoming a major nightmare. Until pervasive cameras it didn't matter much. The could put an APB on a plate number and still not have a very high success rate on the cops finding it. Now with cameras in every intersection that changes. They can get a big chunk of the same info collection that way that cell phone tracking gives them but it isn't quite as good. All tracking cars does is show where the car went, the camers may or may not give a good enough image to prove who was in it. And more than one person can be in a car at the same time. If you have phone data the cars don't add a lot.
Of course they require a lot less legal issues to make use of images already sitting on traffic and homeland security machines so they are starting there. Later they can supplement it with the cell tracks and the merged dataset will be very complete in the picture of where a person goes and what they are doing.
You are half right. Most people assume I'm a bible humping right winger, but in reality I'm an agnostic anti-idiotarian Libertarian. And this crap annoys my Libertarian tendencies. If I didn't need one for work I wouldn't carry a mobile device. But yea the hivemind has started demonstrating their tolerance and diversity bigtime on my ass of late. I just say "bring it bitches." because nothing says "I can't win an argument" like organizing a movement to silence the few of us around here who don't toe the Party line.
The lamers downmodding don't bother me, do wish the admins would lay off though and put my account back to normal. Since pissing one of them off a few months ago karma goes down far faster than it goes up. One downmod is usually enough to kill the posting bonus now. Still manage to average three replies per post though so it hasn't silenced me. Never saw that sort of heavy editorial hand back when Cmdr. Taco ran things so it is a bad sign of things to come.
There, fixed that for ya. Amazing how they managed to get darned near 100% of the population to agree to carry around a tracking device with nary a peep. All it took was to be very careful to NOT talk about the tracking ability, keep news accounts of the police using the cell data off the front page and make the tracker shiny and useful enough. Do those things and not only will everyone carry one they will pay an average of $50/mo for the privledge. Land of the Free indeed.
Won't be long now before they decide they have the hook set deep enough they can start making more overt use of the location/activity data without many people ditching their tracker.
The carriers WILL start renting out access to track data for advertising purposes. They know where and when you are. They will be able to link that beyond your phone. Won't take much computation to get that localized enough to have a good idea which PC you use and then tie it to doubleclick and google's cookies. Then they know EVERYTHING. Combine a tracking cookie to hard billing quality identification data and the possibilities are truly limitless. Sure they COULD do that with Amazon but there is too great a chance of a user revolt. But people won't/can't give up their iShiny.
What law enforcement will do with the data is so obvious and so dark there isn't much point in hammering it again really. Especially combined with security cameras everywhere. Who cares if the image quality isn't good enough for a positive id or you were wearing a hoodie. It gives a time/location and the tracker gives them who was at that spot in spacetime.
Bust a drug dealer and you have probable cause to grab a trace on everyone who came in contact with that person for the last month. Crunch the numbers enough and lots of patterns emerge. Not quite precrime but close enough. You show up as having been in the room with a number of dealers and that will be your ass. Or be around a few people who later get busted for burgulary and how soon until that is cause for a search warrant on your place? Being able to effortlessly work backwards from a bust and turn up clues like that will change the law enforcement game entirely.
And now you see why AT&T yanked all their payphones and for some reason simply refuses to compete in the landline business, even with billions and billions in sunk costs for all that wire going everywhere. Eliminate hardlines and everyone MUST buy a cell. It is already sorta odd to encounter someone who doesn't carry one, eventually it will be reasonable suspicion of criminal activity. Wouldn't suprise me if they become the preferred physical identifier, i.e. 'your papers.'
Yea, that is kinda lame. But it won't bother me because all of the Linux versions gut all of the auto update crap, even the new version available nags.
Without a special flash chip or adding another one your simple electrical fix isn't practical. The ESCD info typically gets reflashed on a pretty regular basis if anything in the machine changes. To save cost it is usually in the same physical flash with the BIOS. Also, your simple jumper would preclude lights out server management.
No, it has to be a gate that can only be cleared by a cold start once flipped on.
You could still allow lights out. Most servers support boot over net so the BIOS is required to have a partial IP stack. Just allow bringing in the new BIOS via tftp from the IPMI remoted BIOS console if nobody is available to insert a USB stick and you don't want to allow reading it out of a FAT partition on the primary drive.. It could print an SHA-256 sum of what it downloaded to ensure you weren't hit by a man in the middle. Hell, it could even check a signature against a key in the current BIOS and warn if it was signed by someone else. Lots of possibilities. But if it is electrically possible to write the BIOS after the bootloaded is executed security isn't really possible.
What about her? She is a bored illionaire who was tapped to lead a doomed company in the almost pitiful hope her media hype can save Yahoo! from it's almost certain fate. It won't; you know that, I know that and she probably knows that. There won't be any needing to pull any allnighters, no death marches to release and if she can't (or doesn't want to) travel for a couple of months it won't really matter because she isn't expected to succeed.
If you are a normal person things are different.
Locking the BIOS with signed updates and crap is exactly the wrong way to go. It means there will still be bugs to exploit. But the forces seeking to lock down the PC will advance yet another step under cover of security theater.
The correct solution is to give the machine a one way gate so that after POST the BIOS can't be updated, period. Electrically impossible. That would require an updater in the BIOS and either storing the extended config now flashed into the same chip with the BIOS to either go elsewhere or the flash chip to be smart enough to have a protected area and an unprotected area and only the protected area be unrevokable without a full reboot. It also should go without saying that the BIOS can't look at the unprotected area before the big switch to prevent buffer overflow attacks from getting into the BIOS while the flash is writable and/or stopping the user from invoking a clear extended data function.
A minimal rescue program in mask ROM would be gravy of course. Lets see the leet warez doodz get past that one. Wouldn't put anything past the NSA though.
> Are you trolling? You actually think its a good idea to waste taxpayer dollars going after weed?
Doesn't really matter what I think. Or you. What matters is Congress has spoken on the issue in the form of making laws. If we don't like them we should take it up with them, I hear there is an election on; now might be a good time. The President doesn't get to decide which laws he will enforce, he swears an oath to faithfully execute the laws of the United States as written. Same goes for 'gay marriage', amnesty for illegals, card check, regulating CO2 as a pollutant and so on. We don't have a king, we have a president. And I can absolutely promise you will instantly agree with me the second Obama leaves office and a Republican administration is sworn in, whether that be this year or some later election.
> Connect the dots for us.
Should be pretty obvious. They are voting for social policy. They either don't believe Obama's (and the rest of the Ds) policies are the reason for the bad economy or don't care about that as much as they care about the social stuff.
> Stuff like the voter id laws
Help me understand. Liberals tend to favor all sort of laws requiring ID. Can't f*cking buy a can of spray paint in Wal*Mart without having a picture ID anymore. Can't board a plane. Can't enter a federal building. Can't drive. Can't buy booze or smokes or a lotto ticket. And to carry a gun you need a second photo ID most places, if you can at all. Shall I continue? Point made? Thought so. So explain why I shouldn't think you guys are lying pieces of crap on this one and are just too scared to admit what you are really on about, you want to protect the sacred right of illegals to vote and for your political machines in the big cities to manufacture as many votes as the Party might require.
> and redistricting
So you are pissed we finally took enough State Legislatures to show you just how unfairly you guys have been playing that little game the last fifty some odd years? Payback too much of a bitch for ya? Well screw you hippie, suck it. In a generation I'll perhaps join you in a call for a more fair system.... but for now enjoy the payback.
> "legalize weed" - not gonna happen. Too bad too.
What other major component of his base has yet to get a major bone thown to them, usually in a totally lawless fashion? Think about it. He announces he is ordering Federal law enforcement resources to be 'redirected' away from enforcing the laws against weed. Lots of blah blah about it being his discretionary authority to direct scarce resources in this time of budget crisis, etc. The message to the college/youth vote will be unmistakable: Romney would instantly reverse this executive order but if I get reelected you can light up forever because after four years weed will be such a open and accepted part of society none would dare revert the change. So you stoners better get off yer ass and put the bong away long enough to drag my sorry ass across the finish line.
It is called a preference cascade. Once you have made the big choice and decided you are going to vote for someone your opinion on their suitability on all of the sub questions tend to fall into line to confirm that major decision. Happens lots of other places as well, nothing unusual.
And we know most of the IT industry is in very blue areas and just from reading /. any outsider can quickly see which way the groupthink goes. Most It types are progressive in their political leanings, favor Obama's redefinition of marriage, attacks on traditional morality and religion and are just waiting on him to legalize weed, probably as soon as the convention. So of course they are chomping at the bit to pull the lever again. Of course they also live in constant fear of being outsourced or rightsized and totally fail to connect their political views to the economic consequences they cause.
> runs on principles, not laws.
Not even in theory. The Kingdom of God would, by definition, operate according to God's Law which is, again by definition, in accord with the laws of nature that He designed into the universe itself. It would of course be perfect and all knowing justice, again by definition.
The Laws of Men are but an imperfect attempt to capture that perfect Natural Law and will always be flawed and in need of continual attempts at further perfection. But you must have Laws and not just principles if men are to know what is and is not permitted. Just gauzy principles lead to the Rule of Men, specifically the Men who decide on a case by case basis if, after the fact, you are to be punished for violating their vision of these principles. That is why the U.S. Founders were so insistent on banning Ex Post Facto laws. It is just that in God's case (and only in His case) His principles are perfectly defined and thus entirely equivalent to perfectly written law.
But short of His Kingdom the perfect knowledge required for a centrally planned society isn't possible and thus any social code written requiring such an impossibility as a build dependency is going to fail to produce the expected results and should suprise nobody when it is implemented anyway and is a disaster.
> Because I recall a lot of Iranians BEGGING for the U.S. to at least express support during the green revolution.
Fool. That was a filthy lie created by the neocons. Obama didn't fall for that obvious gambit. Since he didn't help the Iranians that had to be the correct decision. Remember, when a Democrat is in power dissent is NOT patriotic. The Great Leader cannot be wrong. Please adjust your thinking to eliminate the badfacts leading you to incorrect conclusions.
You seem to be forgetting something fairly important. Our modern notions of ordered liberty, the rule of law (and not of men) equality before the law, even freedom of religion are all the product of the religious men (sorry ladies, that happened later) of the time. It gave the world wonders. Meanwhile every social system constructed by the godless has quickly degenerated into a Hell on Earth. Not saying that it must be so, but to ignore history doesn't sound very 'reality based' to me. At a minimum it should at least cause a bit of pause, some humility and some deep thoughts as to why that is true.
> It CAN be implemented right, it just hasn't been done well so far.
The eternal refrain. A hundred hellholes, mass murdering tyrants, bodies stacked like cordwood, productive economies reduced to ruin never give the true believer pause. Nope, just wasn't done right. Meanwhile the track record for US style ordered liberty is about as close to perfect as can be expected in an imperfect world yet those are just aberations.
Go read Orwell, Hyack or Uncle Milton to learn why it can't ever work. The underlying premise is flawed. No central authority can possess the knowledge required, probably not even if the central authority was a computer. They didn't call it that because it wasn't really invented yet but now we know it as Information Theory.
Free people with free markets and the stable Rule of Law (not the Rule of Men socialism is based on) equally appled produces abundance every time it is tried. Socialism produces decline at best, mass graves at worst. Again, they have both done this every single time they have been tried. You guys talk about being 'reality based', 'rational', 'scientific' etc. yet you refuse to accept the results of hundreds of experimental runs. We spent the entire 20th Century experimenting with various versions of Progressivism, Fascism, Socialism, Communism, Democratic Socialism, Social Democracy and they all either failed horribly or underperformed the more free and market based countries in an almost linear function when liberty is plotted against GDP.
What of course is lying through statistics.
Women who exhibit the same patterns as men tend to earn as much as and often more than men. The trick is finding female oranges to compare to male oranges and not female apples to male oranges.
If a woman has the same educational attainment, works the same job for the same number of hours and years in position their pay is typically the same or better. But that almost never happens.
Women have babies, men don't. All of the differences trace back to that inescapable fact of biology and everything else flows from that. If you don't make it clear you aren't planning on having a baby you won't get picked for any position that can't easily cope with a sudden unplanned absence of up to a year. That right there will explain a fair amount of any measured difference. And of course many women DO actually have babies, which interrupts their career track, especially since many choose to take more time away than the purely medically required absence. Women tend to select careers which provide the work flexibility to permit their family obligations, another significant contributer to measured differences. And while we might argue endlessly whether it is good, correct, etc. there are still more cases of the male partner in a marriage getting a job offer that requires relocation disrupting the female's career track. Add all that up and you have most of the difference.
Now add in the fact, again we can argue endlessly about the rightness of it, whether it can or should be changed by social policy, etc., that men and women have different ideas of what a 'good job' is. Whether they can do it or not, women don't tend to seek jobs in a lot of industries that pay rather well but have difficult working conditions, require erratic schedules with a lot of overtime, etc. This preference is fairly uniform whether the female has children or not, plan on having children, is or is not married, etc. There is also a fairly pronounced difference in the selection of majors and all majors do not pay equally.
This is the same UN that seats Iran on Human Rights organizations to pronounce judgements on free countries. That sees nothing hilarious about appointing Iran to their Commission on Women's Rights. This is the organization this Nobel Laureate turns to for help? Does this poor fool not understand what the U.N. is?
The United Nations was created as a Parliment of Tyrants; by, of and for the unfree hellholes of the world to use as their plaything and propaganda tool. And to siphon as much money out of the 1st world as possible of course by laying on the social justice pity party bull crap heavy and thick. Think about it. When it was created the vast majority of the world's nation states were unfree hellholes, most with a single dicator for life in charge. The people who designed it knew that to be so and explicitly made it one nation state one vote with no counterbalance, no minimum standard of human rights or political freedom to receive full voting rights, no nothing. So the only conclusion to draw from that is the current disfunctional body we see is what they planned on creating. We should then ask some pointed questions:
1. Why? Why did they do what they did. What were their goals? We they simply incompetent on that epic a scale? Doubtful.
2. What now? Is there any point to remaining in the U.N.? Is there any possibility of reform? Really; considering the majority of votes in the General Assembly are still wielded by tyrants and the Security Council is, due to unfree hellholes having a veto, incapable of meaningful action of any kind?
3. What different organizational structure could provide a more useful forum for International cooperation?
Perhaps if this lady were to use the media access granted by her Nobel Prize to instead call for fixing the U.N. we might have a body with the political will to put political pressure on unfree hellholes around the world. But asking the current U.N. to act against it's majority is unlikely to be productive.
> GOP became the party of Filibuster in the Senate.
Exactly. When they became the minority they behaved pretty much indistinguishable from how the Ds behaved when they were in the minority. The only difference is because one side has the commanding heights of the culture/media the talking points change.
D's fillibuster: The fillibuster is a vital part of the checks and balances of power designed by the Founders. It protects the country from the momentary majorities by the forces of intolerance and bigotry when the voters fall for their lies for a brief time.
R's fillibuster: The forces of reaction are abusing our system to prevent the Glorious Leader's Five Year Plan and this anacronism needs to be removed. Heck it wasn't even the old racist white guys you rethuglicans worship who invented the damned thing anyway. First one didn't occur until 1837 and from 1917 to 1949 it required two thirds instead of the current three fifths so it isn't like it has never been adjusted and is holy writ or anything.
> But strictly speaking they are still Zionists, and passionately so.
From dictionary.com:
"Zionism
noun
a worldwide Jewish movement that resulted in the establishment and development of the state of Israel."
So no, don't see how a Christian can technically be a Zionist. But they can support them and most do. Sorta like how Lech Walesa can endorse Romney but isn't a Republican because you have to be a US registered voter for that.