To say it gives bad results is an understatement. I just plugged in my zipcode. The map doesn't even correctly show the area of that zip code. So that is epic fail number one. Then it lists one company AT&T that does offer service here and one I have never heard of that might actually offer service. Then it omits the local cable company that has been doing the Internet for a decade under the various names cable companies shift among and has been operating under for at least three or four years. Then they also omit Centenial Wireless who I know offers a wireless net option locally. Useless, like just about everything the Feral Government tries to do these days.
> Based on the number of crimes revealed by the leaks, the word for whomever is responsible for the leaks is "whistleblower".
You guys keep saying that as if by repetition it will become, if not true, at least 'Truthy.' Name one. Saw a lot of methods and sources spilled. Say a lot of fairly ordinary acts of Statecraft spilled. Saw a lot of private assessments being sent in from the field to the State Dept, which is a big part of what we have embassies for. So enlighten us, oh wise one.
And IF you manage that, you can then go for the bonus points and explain how just dumping hundreds of thousands of pages that obviously were NOT evidence of wrongdoing but the release was harmful to US interests was the right way to deal with any hypothetical wrongdoing. And after that you can explain to us all how black is white and get killed in the next zebra crossing because you will almost certainly have to depart reality to pull that one off.
> attempts to deny one of his countrymen due process
Not at all, looks like you have a reading comprehension problem though. Reread the original post. I clearly said that, like all cases, the jury will have to proceed from a presumption of innocence. Where you apparently got confused was when I then said that like in many other celebrated cases where guilt really isn't in doubt enough for us in the general public to feel a need to postpone judgement for purposes of policy debate, he can be be considered guilty as hell. Didn't hear any 'we have to await a verdict' silliness about any other major assassin, or mass murderer. Laughner? GUILTY. Mcveigh? GUILTY Cho (Virginia tech) GUILTY, all the first day their name is released.
It is only traitors of a certain stripe that get that consideration from a certain segment of the political spectrum. Manning. Rosenberg. Because they believe they didn't do anything wrong, but know they dare not speak that aloud. Go ahead, deny it, I dare you. Then there are the monsters who are held up as heros by the same deranged gang. Ones with horrific body counts like Che, Castro, Mao, Stalin. Also little petty cop killers like Mumia Abu-Jamal. Not just unreasoning madness, a determined attempt to deny reason itself.
> But in the rest of your post, you are attacking a person holding a candle in the darkness...
Manning was a PFC. He took an oath and broke it for none of the historically acceptable reasons. It is hard to believe that better men than him have already died as a result of his actions and beyond the realm of reason to believe that men won't die in the future as a result.
There is a long tradition where a soldier should refuse some orders. Where blowing the whistle on certain wrongdoing trumps he military chain of command. Nothing so far in the Wikileaks datadump rises to that bar. He did what he did out of hatred of his own team and if that isn't treason, please share your definition. PFC Manning deserves a fair and open trial. Then assuming there isn't a Perry Mason moment he rates one blindfold, one smoke, a brick wall and a regulation firing squad. Because you can't maintain a military organization with rules and this guy broke pretty much all of the important ones.
I'm really confused with the lack of clarity on this point by the blue team. You guys hold it a matter of religious doctrine that Cheney should still be sent to prison for (not) oytting Plame who wasn't even covert anymore. But Lionize Manning for outting a number of people and secrets still being counted up. The NY Times just outted a CIA op sitting in a Pakistani prison and nary a peep from you guys. Btw, in a sane world we would be making every effort to locate the responsible person for that and getting them up against the wall. Here in bizarro world the NY Times will probably get another major award thye can put on the shelf besides Duranty's Pulitzer.
> revealing what was hidden (no matter what the reason he did it).
Statecraft can't exist without nation states being able to keep some secrets. Like or dislike, that is reality unless you have a radical new idea on the issue. Military organizations likewise must keep some things secret, even more in time of war like now. Yes there is a conflict there with the notion that all just power derives from the consent of the governed when the governed by definition can't know all of the facts. At our current level of philosophical understanding we lack a good clearcut rule to resolve that conflict so we are left with ad hock solutions to each problem as it arises.
> Your judgment is clouded by your belief that law is infallible, that the government keeping secrets from us is in our best interests.
No, I believe in the Constitutional Republic (or what is left of it) and that we elect leaders to wield the sovereign powers reserved to nation states. If we don't trust the current batch we work to replace them. The Blue Team won that argument in 2006 and 2008 and mismanaged things to such an extent the Red Team cleaned house in 2010 and will quite likely do so again in 2012. One of the things we entrust them with is the authority to keep secrets, to decide what to keep secret. I didn't vote for President Obama and will be doing everything in my power to remove him in 2012, but until he is removed he is POTUS and must have the power that matches the responsibilities of the office. Otherwise we don't have the Rule of Law anymore. It isn't in PFC Manning's job description to make those decisions so barring a exceptional case, which his has yet to even make a good case for being, he must be tried and shot to send a message that his sort of action won't be accepted. The guy is an enlisted man, he doesn't even have a commission from Congress. He hasn't been empowered to make decisions of any sort on behalf of the Republic.
> This would be a great opportunity for some actual journalism..
Yea, that would be a refreshing change. But journalism is dead. Even if a news outlet still had the resources to invest in actual fact gathering vs reprinting press releases or just letting a press flack have a few minutes of airime or a few inches of column space, they are philosophically opposed to truthseeking. Truth is a social construct now.
But consider some notions in this case that the slashdot hivemind will mod me into oblivion for mentioning. Or can you idjits deal with alien notions while constructing your Truth?
We are dealing with a case of someone who has pretty much confessed. At any rate is caught dead to rights, so wailing about innocent until proven guilty in this case is about as much a pro forma thing as saying Jared Laughner is innocent until convicted. The word we are looking for here is TRAITOR. Yes the jury has to go in with an open mind when the case eventually makes its way to a trial, but the rest of us can pretty safely just call a spade a spade and a traitor a traitor. The only defenses I have even seen put forward boil down to basically "But..... BUUUSH! He was GAAAAAY! Death to America!"
So now we have a skeevy group of anarchists and progressive/marxist activists raising money in this traitor's name. Is it too much of a stretch to imagine that this group of misfits might be suspected of, and Paypal might have evidence of, some dubious activity going on with that money? Or that Paypal has simply made a business decision that being associated with a group of misfits defending a traitor isn't what they want to be known for? But no, we have to jump straight to the conspiracy theory version where Paypal is in the grip of dark neocon powers trying to keep the brave rebels down.
> I agree with everything else you say, but humans do not actually get that low an error rate in conversations.
Conversation and giving commands to a computer are different. Even at 1% it would require the computer to speak back and confirm almost every command. And unless it was spot on knowing when it is being addressed by, and by whom, you will need a PTT and headset. And unless it is able to listen accurately in almost any circumstance you still have to have the keyboard handy.
Right now I can be carrying on a conversation with a person in meatspace or on the phone and still use a computer via keyboard/mouse. For a speech interface to compete with that it would have to be smart enough to know when I'm talking to it. Even better, for a phone conversation, it should be able to edit out (or at least suppress a lot of dB) my conversation with it from the stream going to the other person.
> I think that the truth of the matter is we won't get serious support until someone comes up with a form of DRM that actually works.
I can tell you how to make a 'good enough' DRM.... but you won't like it.
Step one, USB dongle. With non-trivial stuff going on in it. Knock secret knock and it gives out key pieces of the executable or key data tables at various times during game play. If the dongle isn't there, no problem you get a demo version.
Step two, dongle is there but not right (i.e. cloned or emulated only 99.99% accurate) and you destroy the host machine. Nuke the recovery partition, flash the BIOS with zeros, the works. Think that couldn't happen? Look at the Xbox and PS3 where if they decide you have tampered they essentially render the hardware useless by banning its serial number. The dongle isn't a HID, Mass Storage or any other common type so random apps/drivers should do no more than enumerate it or otherwise read the top USB tables. So if you try very hard to probe the dongle it either shuts down, it does subtle malfunctions.
Step three, produce your own cracked copies that work for a month or two and seed them widely. If you were a little scared of the legal consequences of nuking hardware only have that 'feature' accessable in the cracked copies.
Do as many crackdowns as you like, enough people will keep downloading or sneakernetting because they aren't afraid of the law. Hell, murder doesn't get you much time for a first offense without added agrevating conditions. Make em fear something more tangible and it stops.
And unreliable. And doesn't follow the user from workstation to workstation. It isn't a matter of cost though. Network mounted home directories are about moving to the closest machine, logging in and getting to work. And when a machine has a hardware problem being able to quickly drop a spare into the spot and troubleshoot at leisure.
Dunno, got one situation that a reboot fixes and I have looked.... and used Google, etc. So I present it as a question to Slashdot. Prove it can be solved without a reboot.
Servers runs a RHEL3 clone. Workstations run a RHEL5 clone. My laptop runs Fedora 12. We have a couple of Tcl/Tk scripts on the servers that we display remotely to the workstations and my laptop via ssh X forwarding. Everything is happy, happy, joy, joy... except when it isn't.
Suddenly some remote X stops working, in particular the Tk ones stop. Basic xterms and even Firefox will start over the remote link perfectly. Even better, they almost always display on my laptop, even when everyone else in the building is sticking their head in the door complaining they can't it to work, which makes it even more fun for me to troubleshoot. I have poked around. I have twiddled server tuning knobs, even ran strace on the apps. They seem to hang on the pipe to X but can't see why. Rebooting will always fix it. One of the servers will usually recover in a few minutes without a reboot if we can afford to wait it out, the other doesn't do it as often but when it happens a reboot is the only way back... and the Tk app that fails on it is our timeclock app so waiting isn't a good option. But the machine with the timeclock also serves out home directories to every staff workstation and hosts the virtual machines that run our library automation system and it bites us hard to have to shut that all down. Thankfully that machine only exhibits the problem a couple of times a year.
> Take it offline off hours, give it a reboot and make sure that it comes up, > services start, and it re-joins its place in the network properly.
That isn't enough. You have to simulate an entire network restart to simulate a long power failure. Discover how your UPSs behave and simulate a full unattended restart. Amazing how many small glitches you can find where a key machine comes up too late to provide DHCP or DNS and that cascades to the NFS server not being available, etc. Server grade hardware can take a long time to start, long enough for less robust clients to time out waiting on it.
I finally scripted a bootwait service to drop on key machines to pause their start sequence until other key machines respond.
These are teething issues. And it apparently worked for the smaller traders/vendors so it looks more like a problem at the trader's end in that they didn't get their crap straight. But when changing out a large system like that it isn't that incredible there were problems not caught in testing.
> I don't blame Linux at all, but nor was I partisan fool enough to blame Windows or.NET for a poor implementation of a trading tool.
Of course Linux isn't to blame, unless they turn up kernel or other low level library problems, that system is a mass of spanking new code running atop linux. But we already know Linux can handle the transactional load reliability requirements and real time needs of a stock exchange since several are already doing it. The question is whether the guys working for the London Exchange have good enough code-fu.
But apparently they blamed the performance of.NET/Windows or the cost benefit of.NET/Windows otherwise they wouldn't have embarked on an expensive rip and replace operation in the first place. Personally I'm shocked.NET ever managed such a task in the first place, even poorly.
>...we have hitherto allowed you to continue preaching...
And with those words we have the rest of the story. They claim the authority to "allow" others to speak. In other words they are our master and will decide who is allowed to speak and are willing to use force to enforce their edicts. Scratch a progressive, find a fascist. Every. Time.
Exactly. The prices on tablets are a total ripoff. Compare and contrast a netbook with a tabet.
Netbook: Price $300-$400 Display 10.1" 1024x600 no touchscreen Big ass battery Big ass Intel x86 CPU/Chipset Hard Drive Keyboard, hinge, notebook form factor Several USB ports, full size SD slot Windows Tax
Tablet Price 500+ Display 7-10" with touchscreen, usually the more expensive capacitive tech Rinky dink battery Puny ARM SoC 2-16GB Flash One piece case, at most one mini-USB (with luck supporting HOST mode, often only DEVICE), micro SD Android Acelerometer 3G or 4G cell modem if sold with data plan
Am I the only one who look at those lists and sees the pricetag totally out of line with what is in the box?
Because HIPPA was intended to provide the appearance of security without actually doing much of anything that would cause actual pain to the medical industry. Sure doctors and nurses are forced to jump through hoops, all part of the security theater. Had they been serious, one of the first requirements would have been to ban Windows from touching patient data if there was any possible point of connection between any machine on the same network and the Internet. Because Windows itself still admits in it's EULA that it is not intended for any work requiring a high level of safety. It was designed as a desktop single user OS and after several rewrites (that had to keep backward compatibility intact) is still crippled.
But requiring all medical information systems to run on Trusted Solaris, Trusted AIX, etc. would have been painful in the extreme, requiring a rip and replace since pretty much 100% of the industry was on Windows based vertical apps at the time HIPPA passed. So they went for security theater, just like TSA did.
> Glenn Beck's ratings are still above the competition..
Which is all that really matters in media. Are you winning your timeslot? Does your show cost so much more that that isn't enough to save your show? Beck passes those tests, thus isn't likely to be cancelled.
> but they are ALSO in freefall: down 30% since the beginning of the year
Last year was the coming out of the Tea Party as a force, an election year and only Beck's second year on Fox. Ratings were almost certain to go down from a high like that. It will be more interesting to watch his ratings as the '12 cycle starts ramping up. Especially if the Repubs pick a candidate he goes rogue elephant on.
> People don't understand that rapid bears are very dangerous because not only do > you need to outrun the slowest runner, but you also need to outrun the bear itself.
Nah, those of us on the Right understand that the rapid bear ain't been born that can outrun a bullet.:)
> They just say that other people shouldn't do it. THAT is a republican!
Not quite. When a Republican gets caught (as in Rep Lee last week) being a scummy perv they get retired in disgrace. When a Democrat gets caught living in a gay brothel and later buggering a Fannie Mae exec he 'oversees' as part of his official duties he remains a venerated party elder. That is the difference. When a Democratic President gets caught repeatedly sexually harrassing the hired help and anything else semi-cute and chubby he can get his grabby hands on the NOW gang throws every previous stated principle to the wind and issues the 'one grope rule' because power was more important than principle.
You see Republicans know the shit they are doing is wrong but are just damned sinners like the rest of us. When they get caught they typically either have the decency (or party loyalty) to go away or the Party manages to rid itself of them because their voters will punish public immorality. Democrats, from the rank and file to the leaders, don't believe in any morality beyond the Will to Power.
Neither am I. Because the LP is a bunch of clueless idiotarian libertarians more concerned with hitting the bong than becoming a serious political party.
And just to ensure this turns into a total flamefest...:)
Whadda you fairy Apple Zealots think of both Glenn Beck and Rush being such rabid Apple fanboys?
Libertarians, Gays, Apple, Beck AND Rush in one post. Had I posted a bit earlier this could have been a two hundred post deep festival of wasted electron posts.
> Point of fact - they cannot and never will. The reason is simple: Conservatives have a set of values that are specific and easy to articulate.
No, the progressives also have a core set of values that are equally specific and easy to articulate. Their problem is most realize that to speak of those core values in a public forum is suicide. And that is the difference. A gaff for a progressive is when they accidentally speak the Truth. The less experienced and less media savvy among them make the mistake of saying what progressives really stand for once in awhile..... and those accidents are the raw footage that drives the Glenn Beck program.:)
So progressives waffle, doublespeak and otherwise try to push their agenda while never really saying what that agenda is or engaging in any sort of discussion of how the positions they take in public aren't compatible with each other. Without having had the entire mass media on their side they wouldn't have ever had a chance, but having that advantage they have come very close to establishing their People's Republic here in the US. But they lost their media monopoly with Rush, Fox and the Internet back in the 1990's and their victory is no longer preordained, just the way to bet.
> Which of course makes no sense since they are in fact, muslims and are in fact in control.
No, what you write doesn't make sense. Because, no the 'muslims' weren't in control and aren't yet. Mubarak is a muslim but governed as a standard issue secular dictator. The fact he was a practicing Muslim no more made Eqypt a theocracy than JFK made the Pope the effective POTUS. The fear is that the Mullahs will, via the Muslim Brotherhood, end up in control of Egypt in much the same way they hijacked the revolution in Iran decades ago.
But many questions are raised by current events, perhaps someone can answer some.
Observation 1. In 2009 it was official US policy not to interfere with the internal affairs of Iran, instead turning our back on them and letting the Iranian regime kill, jail, torture, etc. the protesters and violently put down the uprising.
Observation 2. When this 'spontaneous' uprising started in Egypt our government was quick to take sides and meddle in Egypt's internal affairs, demanding 'regime change'.
So what is the proper lesson to be learned?
1. It is better to be an enemy of the US than an ally since we feel free to throw friendly tyrants under the bus at the first sign of trouble.
2. Glenn Beck is right, this was a long arranged project and thus the Administration was not acting from surprise.
3. That Beck has failed to see how far down the rabbit hole really goes. Obama's policy is the anti-JFK. That he will support any foe, oppose any friend of the US and Freedom.
4. That Obama is on the side of the Muslim Brotherhood. Choose your theory as to why, there are at least two good ones and probably more.
Seriously, this should have been exactly backwards. We should have been doing everything possible to undermine Iran because, seriously, a bunch of madmen trying to build nuke because they believe in Chaos being the way to summon the 12'th Iman is about as worst case scenario as it gets, any 'regime change' from that is likely to be an improvement. Meanwhile the best one can say of Egypt is that there is a chance things won't go tits up when things settle out there. Not a good chance mine you, just a chance.
> What Gore says is backed by 32 National Science Academies, there is no scientific organization which disagrees.
Which besides being a textbook appeal to authority argument, is a circular argument. In today's politically driven scientific world (follow the funding) the working definition of "Climatologist" is "Someone who studies the climate and Man's deleterious impact upon it by actions such as carbon emission, deforestation, etc." i.e. the definition assumes the result. So anyone who disagrees with the AGW theory can be written off as not being a Climatologist and thus safely ignored.
> My family and I watch almost every NOVA, NOVA Science NOW, and Nature because of the excellent educational content.
And those are a) popular programs that would have zero problem surviving in a competitive world and b) most episodes are co-produced with entities such as the BBC. So Nature moves from your PBS station to BBC-America and NOVA moves to DIscovery. Sesame Street moves to the highest bidder between Disney and NICK. Explain again why taxpayers are subsidising the Henson media empire and the BBC?
Assuming you can manage to give an explanation for the general case, now explain why we should be borrowing money from China to do it? That gets to the heart of the question. We are broke. We are bleeding red ink from every pore. If the CPB can't be cut as part of a fiscal crisis then there is zero chance to save the Republic because we need to cut a lot closer to the bone than fluff like CPB. We need to be eliminating entire cabinet level trees from the org chart. While it would be folly to incur the long term expenses from cutting and running from the two wars ongoing, we should be talking about downsizing the military. Why are we still in Europe? Hitler ain't coming back and the Red Menace is defeated, eliminating the reason for NATO's existence. If Europe isn't willing to pony up the cash to build enough of a military to keep Russia in line then to hell with them. But like all government operations it continues on long after it's purpose disappeared. And so on.
> Many people are mistrusting of Google because of the way it handles search results and collects data/personal information. > Glenn Beck's argument is that it is "in bed with the government (where here, "the government" means "Obama and the > Democrats") and is thus, evil.
And here you demonstrate beyond doubt that you are projecting your own practices in that you are parroting the selective quoting of others and did not, in fact, watch the Feb 14 episode of Beck's program in question. While laying out the case that the State Dept and Google (along with the usual Beck suspects and some new players almost sure to become regulars....) have been in bed together working on staging the revolt in Egypt he clearly and pointedly noted that the effort appears to have begun in 2008 under the Bush II Administration and was continued with increasing gusto after Obama and SecState Clinton took over. If you bothered to actually watch a few episodes you would know Beck rails (and did before moving to Fox in Jan 2009) against Bush pretty hard.
He made the observation to avoid Google in reference to a list of previously unknown groups tied to the Egypt affair and is asking viewers to crowdsource his research efforts to discover who/what they are and where they fit into his big picture of the 'Dark Forces.' And since we KNOW Google can and has changed search results for political / business reasons in the past it within the realm of reason to believe there is a good chance that any really juicy stuff will go down the memory hole within hours of his program airing. Not saying it WILL happen, just saying that if you buy the first part of the argument the second part about not trustiing Google doesn't require believing anything new.
Slashdot Mirror
To say it gives bad results is an understatement. I just plugged in my zipcode. The map doesn't even correctly show the area of that zip code. So that is epic fail number one. Then it lists one company AT&T that does offer service here and one I have never heard of that might actually offer service. Then it omits the local cable company that has been doing the Internet for a decade under the various names cable companies shift among and has been operating under for at least three or four years. Then they also omit Centenial Wireless who I know offers a wireless net option locally. Useless, like just about everything the Feral Government tries to do these days.
> Based on the number of crimes revealed by the leaks, the word for whomever is responsible for the leaks is "whistleblower".
You guys keep saying that as if by repetition it will become, if not true, at least 'Truthy.' Name one. Saw a lot of methods and sources spilled. Say a lot of fairly ordinary acts of Statecraft spilled. Saw a lot of private assessments being sent in from the field to the State Dept, which is a big part of what we have embassies for. So enlighten us, oh wise one.
And IF you manage that, you can then go for the bonus points and explain how just dumping hundreds of thousands of pages that obviously were NOT evidence of wrongdoing but the release was harmful to US interests was the right way to deal with any hypothetical wrongdoing. And after that you can explain to us all how black is white and get killed in the next zebra crossing because you will almost certainly have to depart reality to pull that one off.
> attempts to deny one of his countrymen due process
Not at all, looks like you have a reading comprehension problem though. Reread the original post. I clearly said that, like all cases, the jury will have to proceed from a presumption of innocence. Where you apparently got confused was when I then said that like in many other celebrated cases where guilt really isn't in doubt enough for us in the general public to feel a need to postpone judgement for purposes of policy debate, he can be be considered guilty as hell. Didn't hear any 'we have to await a verdict' silliness about any other major assassin, or mass murderer. Laughner? GUILTY. Mcveigh? GUILTY Cho (Virginia tech) GUILTY, all the first day their name is released.
It is only traitors of a certain stripe that get that consideration from a certain segment of the political spectrum. Manning. Rosenberg. Because they believe they didn't do anything wrong, but know they dare not speak that aloud. Go ahead, deny it, I dare you. Then there are the monsters who are held up as heros by the same deranged gang. Ones with horrific body counts like Che, Castro, Mao, Stalin. Also little petty cop killers like Mumia Abu-Jamal. Not just unreasoning madness, a determined attempt to deny reason itself.
> But in the rest of your post, you are attacking a person holding a candle in the darkness...
Manning was a PFC. He took an oath and broke it for none of the historically acceptable reasons. It is hard to believe that better men than him have already died as a result of his actions and beyond the realm of reason to believe that men won't die in the future as a result.
There is a long tradition where a soldier should refuse some orders. Where blowing the whistle on certain wrongdoing trumps he military chain of command. Nothing so far in the Wikileaks datadump rises to that bar. He did what he did out of hatred of his own team and if that isn't treason, please share your definition. PFC Manning deserves a fair and open trial. Then assuming there isn't a Perry Mason moment he rates one blindfold, one smoke, a brick wall and a regulation firing squad. Because you can't maintain a military organization with rules and this guy broke pretty much all of the important ones.
I'm really confused with the lack of clarity on this point by the blue team. You guys hold it a matter of religious doctrine that Cheney should still be sent to prison for (not) oytting Plame who wasn't even covert anymore. But Lionize Manning for outting a number of people and secrets still being counted up. The NY Times just outted a CIA op sitting in a Pakistani prison and nary a peep from you guys. Btw, in a sane world we would be making every effort to locate the responsible person for that and getting them up against the wall. Here in bizarro world the NY Times will probably get another major award thye can put on the shelf besides Duranty's Pulitzer.
> revealing what was hidden (no matter what the reason he did it).
Statecraft can't exist without nation states being able to keep some secrets. Like or dislike, that is reality unless you have a radical new idea on the issue. Military organizations likewise must keep some things secret, even more in time of war like now. Yes there is a conflict there with the notion that all just power derives from the consent of the governed when the governed by definition can't know all of the facts. At our current level of philosophical understanding we lack a good clearcut rule to resolve that conflict so we are left with ad hock solutions to each problem as it arises.
> Your judgment is clouded by your belief that law is infallible, that the government keeping secrets from us is in our best interests.
No, I believe in the Constitutional Republic (or what is left of it) and that we elect leaders to wield the sovereign powers reserved to nation states. If we don't trust the current batch we work to replace them. The Blue Team won that argument in 2006 and 2008 and mismanaged things to such an extent the Red Team cleaned house in 2010 and will quite likely do so again in 2012. One of the things we entrust them with is the authority to keep secrets, to decide what to keep secret. I didn't vote for President Obama and will be doing everything in my power to remove him in 2012, but until he is removed he is POTUS and must have the power that matches the responsibilities of the office. Otherwise we don't have the Rule of Law anymore. It isn't in PFC Manning's job description to make those decisions so barring a exceptional case, which his has yet to even make a good case for being, he must be tried and shot to send a message that his sort of action won't be accepted. The guy is an enlisted man, he doesn't even have a commission from Congress. He hasn't been empowered to make decisions of any sort on behalf of the Republic.
> This would be a great opportunity for some actual journalism..
Yea, that would be a refreshing change. But journalism is dead. Even if a news outlet still had the resources to invest in actual fact gathering vs reprinting press releases or just letting a press flack have a few minutes of airime or a few inches of column space, they are philosophically opposed to truthseeking. Truth is a social construct now.
But consider some notions in this case that the slashdot hivemind will mod me into oblivion for mentioning. Or can you idjits deal with alien notions while constructing your Truth?
We are dealing with a case of someone who has pretty much confessed. At any rate is caught dead to rights, so wailing about innocent until proven guilty in this case is about as much a pro forma thing as saying Jared Laughner is innocent until convicted. The word we are looking for here is TRAITOR. Yes the jury has to go in with an open mind when the case eventually makes its way to a trial, but the rest of us can pretty safely just call a spade a spade and a traitor a traitor. The only defenses I have even seen put forward boil down to basically "But..... BUUUSH! He was GAAAAAY! Death to America!"
So now we have a skeevy group of anarchists and progressive/marxist activists raising money in this traitor's name. Is it too much of a stretch to imagine that this group of misfits might be suspected of, and Paypal might have evidence of, some dubious activity going on with that money? Or that Paypal has simply made a business decision that being associated with a group of misfits defending a traitor isn't what they want to be known for? But no, we have to jump straight to the conspiracy theory version where Paypal is in the grip of dark neocon powers trying to keep the brave rebels down.
> I agree with everything else you say, but humans do not actually get that low an error rate in conversations.
Conversation and giving commands to a computer are different. Even at 1% it would require the computer to speak back and confirm almost every command. And unless it was spot on knowing when it is being addressed by, and by whom, you will need a PTT and headset. And unless it is able to listen accurately in almost any circumstance you still have to have the keyboard handy.
Right now I can be carrying on a conversation with a person in meatspace or on the phone and still use a computer via keyboard/mouse. For a speech interface to compete with that it would have to be smart enough to know when I'm talking to it. Even better, for a phone conversation, it should be able to edit out (or at least suppress a lot of dB) my conversation with it from the stream going to the other person.
Someday speech will be an important input method. But not any time soon.
If you have to wear a microphone it isn't ready yet.
If you have to use a PTT switch it isn't ready yet.
If you have to repeat or cancel more than 1% of the things you say it isn't ready yet.
If you have to spend as much time proofreading dictation it has taken down and correcting the mistakes, it isn't ready yet.
If you have to speak in an unnatural way it isn't ready yet.
If it won't work in almost any environment it isn't ready yet.
> I think that the truth of the matter is we won't get serious support until someone comes up with a form of DRM that actually works.
I can tell you how to make a 'good enough' DRM.... but you won't like it.
Step one, USB dongle. With non-trivial stuff going on in it. Knock secret knock and it gives out key pieces of the executable or key data tables at various times during game play. If the dongle isn't there, no problem you get a demo version.
Step two, dongle is there but not right (i.e. cloned or emulated only 99.99% accurate) and you destroy the host machine. Nuke the recovery partition, flash the BIOS with zeros, the works. Think that couldn't happen? Look at the Xbox and PS3 where if they decide you have tampered they essentially render the hardware useless by banning its serial number. The dongle isn't a HID, Mass Storage or any other common type so random apps/drivers should do no more than enumerate it or otherwise read the top USB tables. So if you try very hard to probe the dongle it either shuts down, it does subtle malfunctions.
Step three, produce your own cracked copies that work for a month or two and seed them widely. If you were a little scared of the legal consequences of nuking hardware only have that 'feature' accessable in the cracked copies.
Do as many crackdowns as you like, enough people will keep downloading or sneakernetting because they aren't afraid of the law. Hell, murder doesn't get you much time for a first offense without added agrevating conditions. Make em fear something more tangible and it stops.
> The way I see it, disk is cheap...
And unreliable. And doesn't follow the user from workstation to workstation. It isn't a matter of cost though. Network mounted home directories are about moving to the closest machine, logging in and getting to work. And when a machine has a hardware problem being able to quickly drop a spare into the spot and troubleshoot at leisure.
Dunno, got one situation that a reboot fixes and I have looked.... and used Google, etc. So I present it as a question to Slashdot. Prove it can be solved without a reboot.
Servers runs a RHEL3 clone. Workstations run a RHEL5 clone. My laptop runs Fedora 12. We have a couple of Tcl/Tk scripts on the servers that we display remotely to the workstations and my laptop via ssh X forwarding. Everything is happy, happy, joy, joy... except when it isn't.
Suddenly some remote X stops working, in particular the Tk ones stop. Basic xterms and even Firefox will start over the remote link perfectly. Even better, they almost always display on my laptop, even when everyone else in the building is sticking their head in the door complaining they can't it to work, which makes it even more fun for me to troubleshoot. I have poked around. I have twiddled server tuning knobs, even ran strace on the apps. They seem to hang on the pipe to X but can't see why. Rebooting will always fix it. One of the servers will usually recover in a few minutes without a reboot if we can afford to wait it out, the other doesn't do it as often but when it happens a reboot is the only way back... and the Tk app that fails on it is our timeclock app so waiting isn't a good option. But the machine with the timeclock also serves out home directories to every staff workstation and hosts the virtual machines that run our library automation system and it bites us hard to have to shut that all down. Thankfully that machine only exhibits the problem a couple of times a year.
> Take it offline off hours, give it a reboot and make sure that it comes up,
> services start, and it re-joins its place in the network properly.
That isn't enough. You have to simulate an entire network restart to simulate a long power failure. Discover how your UPSs behave and simulate a full unattended restart. Amazing how many small glitches you can find where a key machine comes up too late to provide DHCP or DNS and that cascades to the NFS server not being available, etc. Server grade hardware can take a long time to start, long enough for less robust clients to time out waiting on it.
I finally scripted a bootwait service to drop on key machines to pause their start sequence until other key machines respond.
These are teething issues. And it apparently worked for the smaller traders/vendors so it looks more like a problem at the trader's end in that they didn't get their crap straight. But when changing out a large system like that it isn't that incredible there were problems not caught in testing.
> I don't blame Linux at all, but nor was I partisan fool enough to blame Windows or .NET for a poor implementation of a trading tool.
Of course Linux isn't to blame, unless they turn up kernel or other low level library problems, that system is a mass of spanking new code running atop linux. But we already know Linux can handle the transactional load reliability requirements and real time needs of a stock exchange since several are already doing it. The question is whether the guys working for the London Exchange have good enough code-fu.
But apparently they blamed the performance of .NET/Windows or the cost benefit of .NET/Windows otherwise they wouldn't have embarked on an expensive rip and replace operation in the first place. Personally I'm shocked .NET ever managed such a task in the first place, even poorly.
> Since when have Anonymous been progressives?
Are they working toward the same goals as the rest of the Progressive coalition? Yes.
Do the 'usual suspects' in the Progressive movement adore and defend Anonymous? Yes.
Will the progressives put the idiots in Anonymous up against the wall the second they come to power? Yes.
There are a lot of fellow travellers and useful idiots marching along to the ovens with the Progressives.
> ...we have hitherto allowed you to continue preaching...
And with those words we have the rest of the story. They claim the authority to "allow" others to speak. In other words they are our master and will decide who is allowed to speak and are willing to use force to enforce their edicts. Scratch a progressive, find a fascist. Every. Time.
Exactly. The prices on tablets are a total ripoff. Compare and contrast a netbook with a tabet.
Netbook:
Price $300-$400
Display 10.1" 1024x600 no touchscreen
Big ass battery
Big ass Intel x86 CPU/Chipset
Hard Drive
Keyboard, hinge, notebook form factor
Several USB ports, full size SD slot
Windows Tax
Tablet
Price 500+
Display 7-10" with touchscreen, usually the more expensive capacitive tech
Rinky dink battery
Puny ARM SoC
2-16GB Flash
One piece case, at most one mini-USB (with luck supporting HOST mode, often only DEVICE), micro SD
Android
Acelerometer
3G or 4G cell modem if sold with data plan
Am I the only one who look at those lists and sees the pricetag totally out of line with what is in the box?
> How is this legal?
Because HIPPA was intended to provide the appearance of security without actually doing much of anything that would cause actual pain to the medical industry. Sure doctors and nurses are forced to jump through hoops, all part of the security theater. Had they been serious, one of the first requirements would have been to ban Windows from touching patient data if there was any possible point of connection between any machine on the same network and the Internet. Because Windows itself still admits in it's EULA that it is not intended for any work requiring a high level of safety. It was designed as a desktop single user OS and after several rewrites (that had to keep backward compatibility intact) is still crippled.
But requiring all medical information systems to run on Trusted Solaris, Trusted AIX, etc. would have been painful in the extreme, requiring a rip and replace since pretty much 100% of the industry was on Windows based vertical apps at the time HIPPA passed. So they went for security theater, just like TSA did.
> Glenn Beck's ratings are still above the competition..
Which is all that really matters in media. Are you winning your timeslot? Does your show cost so much more that that isn't enough to save your show? Beck passes those tests, thus isn't likely to be cancelled.
> but they are ALSO in freefall: down 30% since the beginning of the year
Last year was the coming out of the Tea Party as a force, an election year and only Beck's second year on Fox. Ratings were almost certain to go down from a high like that. It will be more interesting to watch his ratings as the '12 cycle starts ramping up. Especially if the Repubs pick a candidate he goes rogue elephant on.
> People don't understand that rapid bears are very dangerous because not only do
> you need to outrun the slowest runner, but you also need to outrun the bear itself.
Nah, those of us on the Right understand that the rapid bear ain't been born that can outrun a bullet. :)
> They just say that other people shouldn't do it. THAT is a republican!
Not quite. When a Republican gets caught (as in Rep Lee last week) being a scummy perv they get retired in disgrace. When a Democrat gets caught living in a gay brothel and later buggering a Fannie Mae exec he 'oversees' as part of his official duties he remains a venerated party elder. That is the difference. When a Democratic President gets caught repeatedly sexually harrassing the hired help and anything else semi-cute and chubby he can get his grabby hands on the NOW gang throws every previous stated principle to the wind and issues the 'one grope rule' because power was more important than principle.
You see Republicans know the shit they are doing is wrong but are just damned sinners like the rest of us. When they get caught they typically either have the decency (or party loyalty) to go away or the Party manages to rid itself of them because their voters will punish public immorality. Democrats, from the rank and file to the leaders, don't believe in any morality beyond the Will to Power.
> he is not registered as a Libertarian.
Neither am I. Because the LP is a bunch of clueless idiotarian libertarians more concerned with hitting the bong than becoming a serious political party.
And just to ensure this turns into a total flamefest... :)
Whadda you fairy Apple Zealots think of both Glenn Beck and Rush being such rabid Apple fanboys?
Libertarians, Gays, Apple, Beck AND Rush in one post. Had I posted a bit earlier this could have been a two hundred post deep festival of wasted electron posts.
> Point of fact - they cannot and never will. The reason is simple: Conservatives have a set of values that are specific and easy to articulate.
No, the progressives also have a core set of values that are equally specific and easy to articulate. Their problem is most realize that to speak of those core values in a public forum is suicide. And that is the difference. A gaff for a progressive is when they accidentally speak the Truth. The less experienced and less media savvy among them make the mistake of saying what progressives really stand for once in awhile..... and those accidents are the raw footage that drives the Glenn Beck program. :)
So progressives waffle, doublespeak and otherwise try to push their agenda while never really saying what that agenda is or engaging in any sort of discussion of how the positions they take in public aren't compatible with each other. Without having had the entire mass media on their side they wouldn't have ever had a chance, but having that advantage they have come very close to establishing their People's Republic here in the US. But they lost their media monopoly with Rush, Fox and the Internet back in the 1990's and their victory is no longer preordained, just the way to bet.
> Which of course makes no sense since they are in fact, muslims and are in fact in control.
No, what you write doesn't make sense. Because, no the 'muslims' weren't in control and aren't yet. Mubarak is a muslim but governed as a standard issue secular dictator. The fact he was a practicing Muslim no more made Eqypt a theocracy than JFK made the Pope the effective POTUS. The fear is that the Mullahs will, via the Muslim Brotherhood, end up in control of Egypt in much the same way they hijacked the revolution in Iran decades ago.
But many questions are raised by current events, perhaps someone can answer some.
Observation 1. In 2009 it was official US policy not to interfere with the internal affairs of Iran, instead turning our back on them and letting the Iranian regime kill, jail, torture, etc. the protesters and violently put down the uprising.
Observation 2. When this 'spontaneous' uprising started in Egypt our government was quick to take sides and meddle in Egypt's internal affairs, demanding 'regime change'.
So what is the proper lesson to be learned?
1. It is better to be an enemy of the US than an ally since we feel free to throw friendly tyrants under the bus at the first sign of trouble.
2. Glenn Beck is right, this was a long arranged project and thus the Administration was not acting from surprise.
3. That Beck has failed to see how far down the rabbit hole really goes. Obama's policy is the anti-JFK. That he will support any foe, oppose any friend of the US and Freedom.
4. That Obama is on the side of the Muslim Brotherhood. Choose your theory as to why, there are at least two good ones and probably more.
Seriously, this should have been exactly backwards. We should have been doing everything possible to undermine Iran because, seriously, a bunch of madmen trying to build nuke because they believe in Chaos being the way to summon the 12'th Iman is about as worst case scenario as it gets, any 'regime change' from that is likely to be an improvement. Meanwhile the best one can say of Egypt is that there is a chance things won't go tits up when things settle out there. Not a good chance mine you, just a chance.
> What Gore says is backed by 32 National Science Academies, there is no scientific organization which disagrees.
Which besides being a textbook appeal to authority argument, is a circular argument. In today's politically driven scientific world (follow the funding) the working definition of "Climatologist" is "Someone who studies the climate and Man's deleterious impact upon it by actions such as carbon emission, deforestation, etc." i.e. the definition assumes the result. So anyone who disagrees with the AGW theory can be written off as not being a Climatologist and thus safely ignored.
> My family and I watch almost every NOVA, NOVA Science NOW, and Nature because of the excellent educational content.
And those are a) popular programs that would have zero problem surviving in a competitive world and b) most episodes are co-produced with entities such as the BBC. So Nature moves from your PBS station to BBC-America and NOVA moves to DIscovery. Sesame Street moves to the highest bidder between Disney and NICK. Explain again why taxpayers are subsidising the Henson media empire and the BBC?
Assuming you can manage to give an explanation for the general case, now explain why we should be borrowing money from China to do it? That gets to the heart of the question. We are broke. We are bleeding red ink from every pore. If the CPB can't be cut as part of a fiscal crisis then there is zero chance to save the Republic because we need to cut a lot closer to the bone than fluff like CPB. We need to be eliminating entire cabinet level trees from the org chart. While it would be folly to incur the long term expenses from cutting and running from the two wars ongoing, we should be talking about downsizing the military. Why are we still in Europe? Hitler ain't coming back and the Red Menace is defeated, eliminating the reason for NATO's existence. If Europe isn't willing to pony up the cash to build enough of a military to keep Russia in line then to hell with them. But like all government operations it continues on long after it's purpose disappeared. And so on.
> Many people are mistrusting of Google because of the way it handles search results and collects data/personal information.
> Glenn Beck's argument is that it is "in bed with the government (where here, "the government" means "Obama and the
> Democrats") and is thus, evil.
And here you demonstrate beyond doubt that you are projecting your own practices in that you are parroting the selective quoting of others and did not, in fact, watch the Feb 14 episode of Beck's program in question. While laying out the case that the State Dept and Google (along with the usual Beck suspects and some new players almost sure to become regulars....) have been in bed together working on staging the revolt in Egypt he clearly and pointedly noted that the effort appears to have begun in 2008 under the Bush II Administration and was continued with increasing gusto after Obama and SecState Clinton took over. If you bothered to actually watch a few episodes you would know Beck rails (and did before moving to Fox in Jan 2009) against Bush pretty hard.
He made the observation to avoid Google in reference to a list of previously unknown groups tied to the Egypt affair and is asking viewers to crowdsource his research efforts to discover who/what they are and where they fit into his big picture of the 'Dark Forces.' And since we KNOW Google can and has changed search results for political / business reasons in the past it within the realm of reason to believe there is a good chance that any really juicy stuff will go down the memory hole within hours of his program airing. Not saying it WILL happen, just saying that if you buy the first part of the argument the second part about not trustiing Google doesn't require believing anything new.