Just so you know, making ridiculous attempts to turn an issue into an absolute binary is actually counterproductive in the long term for you. Gun control, like many issues, is not an absolute binary of "Total Freedom" or "Complete Ban". There are many, many reasonable positions in between, and just because I may happen to think that we shouldn't have fully automatic weapons available in vending machines on the street corner doesn't mean that I want some draconian style gun ban. When you treat considerations and measures that are arguably reasonable with hysterical responses that conflate them with total gun bans, all you're doing is pushing those people towards that very viewpoint. It may not be immediate or even fast, but at some point some of them will start to say "you know, what would be so bad about that anyway, if the only alternative is something I already think isn't so great?" It's the same thing with so many other issues, too.
Not every suggestion about regulation of guns, gun sales, or the like is a slippery slope intended to turn us into Britain or Australia, never-mind China. It's certainly fine to disagree there, or for that matter, to disagree with Clinton on things she proposes - but is it that much to ask for calm and rational opposition and discussion, let alone opposition to things she's -actually- proposing rather than what Right Wing media claims she wants to but won't talk about?
These companies, and the companies that hire them, are performing an end run around the restrictions of the law that completely subverts the intent. Specifically, they do this by acting as a middleman, so that a company like Disney (http://money.cnn.com/2016/01/25/technology/disney-h1b-workers/) or SoCal Edison (http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-edison-layoffs-20150211-story.html) doesn't actually 'replace' a US worker with an H-1B. Instead, they simply subcontract out the positions (or the entire department) to a company like one of these, who just happens to employ H-1B visa holders working at a cheaper rate.
This is the loophole that needs to be closed. These companies constitute the lion's share of H-1Bs, and make a mockery of the ones who are actually higher-paid expert workers in critical demand.
It's also nonsensical, because material that is over the classification of the system being on a server happens all the time in military/government work. I saw it happen several times. They yank any of the computers with the material off the network, and remove the material using approved methods. They also conduct an investigation to establish why it got there in the first place. If the answer is something like "it was a mistake" or "I didn't realize that was classified at the time", or basically anything other than trying to be the next Snowden or selling it to China/Russia, then the person who SENT the material gets a slap on the wrist, a note put in their file that they committed a security violation, and they have to retake a few hours of OPSEC training. If they get enough security violations (for this or other things), they could have their clearance revoked.
But the people who received it? Nothing happens to them, unless they were doing something with the information they weren't supposed to, like printing it out and handing it to people on the street or something.
There are valid reasons that an intelligence agency might have a standalone computer with a direct connection to the internet, not on the same network with any of the other computers, such as needing to go look at otherwise blocked websites belonging to bad guys. There are also ways to get this approved, too. However, those computers would be for use by analysts, and highly supervised, not something in the office of the boss for his use.
Furthermore, the notion that he would want to use those for communication for "opsec" is silly - you could make the same (bad) argument for Clinton. The only benefit it would provide is security through obscurity. Meanwhile, he's got other, vastly more secure options, like classified networks.
Now, you're certainly right that government and military IT can do some boneheaded things, but as the head of an agency like DIA, he'd have enough influence to get most problems fixed pronto. I don't know if you've ever been in the military, let alone military comms, but when the Old Man's system isn't working, it is a grade-A emergency, and people get a huge fire lit under their butts. The higher up he is, the bigger the fire, and a three star agency head would be a pretty big fire. All it takes is one bad OER/NCOER to tank your career.
I don't see where Tesla blamed the customers for this. I don't see where Tesla said anything in TFA, actually. This is also a proof of concept attack, not a real-world one. Tesla also has a (serious) bug bounty program, which is more than can be said of many other car manufacturers. Hell, Tesla even brought one of its cars to Defcon in 2015 and had it on the main floor, inviting people to try and hack it as advertisement for said program.
If there's one thing I can guarantee, it's that there will be vulnerabilities in stuff, even stupid ones. This isn't a story unless Tesla somehow refuses to pay or refuses to fix it, which TFA says -nothing- about. I'm sort of surprised that they didn't reach out to get a response from Tesla, even a milquetoast "we're looking into it" or something.
Are you really surprised? The opposition to global warming was never founded on the basis of pretty much anything but economic concerns, especially by the fossil fuel industry, because there's a LOT of money in it. At the very least, that's where the money to oppose it comes from. It's really not at all surprising to me that there are a few who think Elon Musk is a threat, probably more because of his push for Solar Power and usable Electric Cars/infrastructure.
"The Establishment" is hardly a unified thing. Such as it is, they're pretty much getting what they want regardless. Trump won't be pardoning Edward Snowden or ending mass surveillance any more than Clinton would have. It's not like he's some third party renegade - yes, he was an outsider, but he won partly because he made deals with the Republican party, even if he didn't run explicitly on that. Look at who he's appointing - and look at the Republicans in Congress. If they pass a bunch of tax cuts and slash the social safety net, do you think he's going to say no? Of course not. About the only thing that may really change is the attitude towards trade deals, but even there, I suspect what will simply happen is that he'll make new, different deals, and say they're somehow better than Obama's (despite being largely the same on anything related to intellectual property rights, etc).
What -is- interesting to me, though, is watching what's currently happening on the left. For those who haven't been paying attention, the Sanders-ite/Establishment fight seems to have moved to the battle over who will head the DNC. The two main candidates represent both of those wings of the party, from what I've seen (Ellison being an early Sanders backer, while Perez was an Obama cabinet secretary). We may well see an upending of the old establishment there, at least in part, in the wake of Clinton's loss.
Not by the initial group, no, but others such as Nate Silver and Nate Cohn who looked at the data said that the differences could be accounted for by factoring in demographic differences.could likely account for it.
That said, at some point we're going to need to take measures to make sure that hacking/cheating/rigging doesn't occur, even if only to head off these kinds of accusations. We should not simply blindly trust that an unaudited computer system does what we're told it should. This is something we should put in place for future elections, at the very least, because even if no one actually does try to cheat, it's far too easy to undermine the legitimacy of an election if there's no way to confirm the results are fair. Random audits, such as suggested by Ron Rivest and Phil Stark, would be a good step towards that end: http://www.usatoday.com/story/...
For a while after that, he changed his twitter picture to that of him holding a long-haired white cat, so at least he has a sense of humor about it... well, that or he really is one:
"Do you expect me to talk, Elon?"
"No, Mister Bond, I expect you to buy my electric car."
You're thinking of the US cost. That's going to be a lot different on an island like this in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Take that $2.50 per gallon, and multiply it by the cost of shipping to Samoa. At an offhand guess, you're talking anywhere from 5 to 10 times as expensive.
I'm against voter ID laws because what evidence I've seen is that the problem they purport to solve is vanishingly small, and in practice the effect and intent is to decrease turnout in specifically targeted groups (namely, those that vote largely for one party rather than the other).
On the other hand, I think that establishing full audit trails for elections are a good thing. We should not blindly trust that electronic systems do what we're told they do - we need ways to verify that (and that goes for so many things other than voting too). I'd be perfectly happy to have voter audit methods as well - and we can easily come up with ways to do that which don't prevent legitimate voters from casting a ballot. Have them sign an affidavit, and take their picture. If you insist on ID cards, make the voter ID itself come with a picture, and don't charge money for them. That way everyone who's registered to vote automatically has a valid ID.
Really, the absolute last thing I want in my games is overlap with reality. I play games (in part) to get away from reality.
What I think he's really talking about, when you read between the lines, is cross-marketing. "Hey, let's run a cross promotion where if you buy product X, you get some benefit in the game (and we get kickbacks)." We've seen it before in certain limited areas (like buy Mt. Dew, get double xp in CoD or whatever), but games where it becomes all but necessary to play? No thanks.
While the 140 character limit certainly does hinder nuance and full expression, the coarsening of civil discourse in open space is much more far reaching than that. Look at just about any unmoderated comments section on the web for a prime example. I'd bring up Penny Arcade's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, but anonymity seems to be only part of the equation. I would argue rather that it is the increased degree of removal from immediate social consequence that enables and encourages people to be flaming shitbags to each other on the internet.
We have certain expectations of polite behavior in person, and someone who violates those norms gets punished by the way everyone around reacts to them. This doesn't carry over to the internet though - worse, you can probably find people who will support you in your asshole-ish behavior.
The last time voter turnout was over 65% was in 1908, and it hasn't been over 60% since 1968. What's really ironic? After the Voting Rights Act and the repeal of the Jim Crow laws removed obstacles to voting, participation/turnout still has declined. It usually hovers around the low 50s for presidential, and lower for the congressional mid term elections. 2008 was a high point, with ~57%.
What's even more curious is that the entire gun system itself may soon be obsolete, as the Navy's eventual plan is to replace it with a railgun: http://thediplomat.com/2016/03...
Given all the things that Erdogan has done in the wake of the 'coup', it makes me wonder whether it was actually a coup attempt, or just Erdogan's version of the Reichstag fire.
Probably the best way forward would be for Parliament to pass something that grants the PM the ability to invoke Article 50, but only if she gets Europe to agree to "Soft" Brexit terms first - meaning that the EU would then tell May to get bent, and Brexit wouldn't happen. Parliament could likely get away with this, because the Hard Brexit contingent is a distinct minority, and if the Soft Brexit preference types had to choose between Hard Brexit and Remain, you'd have an overall majority for Remain.
And yet Ars Technica claimed in an article that there were indeed ransom demands made to Dyn. That seems to be at odds with Flashpoint's statement. http://arstechnica.com/informa...
Given the links between the Mirai DDoS on Brian Krebs, and Dyn's involvement in helping him research that, I wouldn't at all be surprised if it wasn't the same or related groups of cybercriminals responsible for both.
Slashdot Mirror
Just so you know, making ridiculous attempts to turn an issue into an absolute binary is actually counterproductive in the long term for you. Gun control, like many issues, is not an absolute binary of "Total Freedom" or "Complete Ban". There are many, many reasonable positions in between, and just because I may happen to think that we shouldn't have fully automatic weapons available in vending machines on the street corner doesn't mean that I want some draconian style gun ban. When you treat considerations and measures that are arguably reasonable with hysterical responses that conflate them with total gun bans, all you're doing is pushing those people towards that very viewpoint. It may not be immediate or even fast, but at some point some of them will start to say "you know, what would be so bad about that anyway, if the only alternative is something I already think isn't so great?" It's the same thing with so many other issues, too.
Not every suggestion about regulation of guns, gun sales, or the like is a slippery slope intended to turn us into Britain or Australia, never-mind China. It's certainly fine to disagree there, or for that matter, to disagree with Clinton on things she proposes - but is it that much to ask for calm and rational opposition and discussion, let alone opposition to things she's -actually- proposing rather than what Right Wing media claims she wants to but won't talk about?
Don't worry, Trump has already promised to fix that.
You don't even need to do that - just consider how many of those 'American' launches are using Russian engines.
Really though, both Russia and the USA should be keeping an eye on the Chinese, who are getting set to outpace everyone in terms of launches soon.
This, exactly.
These companies, and the companies that hire them, are performing an end run around the restrictions of the law that completely subverts the intent. Specifically, they do this by acting as a middleman, so that a company like Disney (http://money.cnn.com/2016/01/25/technology/disney-h1b-workers/) or SoCal Edison (http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-edison-layoffs-20150211-story.html) doesn't actually 'replace' a US worker with an H-1B. Instead, they simply subcontract out the positions (or the entire department) to a company like one of these, who just happens to employ H-1B visa holders working at a cheaper rate.
This is the loophole that needs to be closed. These companies constitute the lion's share of H-1Bs, and make a mockery of the ones who are actually higher-paid expert workers in critical demand.
Just wait, it'll happen. They'll give it a high tech name though - like say "Skynet".
It's also nonsensical, because material that is over the classification of the system being on a server happens all the time in military/government work. I saw it happen several times. They yank any of the computers with the material off the network, and remove the material using approved methods. They also conduct an investigation to establish why it got there in the first place. If the answer is something like "it was a mistake" or "I didn't realize that was classified at the time", or basically anything other than trying to be the next Snowden or selling it to China/Russia, then the person who SENT the material gets a slap on the wrist, a note put in their file that they committed a security violation, and they have to retake a few hours of OPSEC training. If they get enough security violations (for this or other things), they could have their clearance revoked.
But the people who received it? Nothing happens to them, unless they were doing something with the information they weren't supposed to, like printing it out and handing it to people on the street or something.
There are valid reasons that an intelligence agency might have a standalone computer with a direct connection to the internet, not on the same network with any of the other computers, such as needing to go look at otherwise blocked websites belonging to bad guys. There are also ways to get this approved, too. However, those computers would be for use by analysts, and highly supervised, not something in the office of the boss for his use.
Furthermore, the notion that he would want to use those for communication for "opsec" is silly - you could make the same (bad) argument for Clinton. The only benefit it would provide is security through obscurity. Meanwhile, he's got other, vastly more secure options, like classified networks.
Now, you're certainly right that government and military IT can do some boneheaded things, but as the head of an agency like DIA, he'd have enough influence to get most problems fixed pronto. I don't know if you've ever been in the military, let alone military comms, but when the Old Man's system isn't working, it is a grade-A emergency, and people get a huge fire lit under their butts. The higher up he is, the bigger the fire, and a three star agency head would be a pretty big fire. All it takes is one bad OER/NCOER to tank your career.
I don't see where Tesla blamed the customers for this. I don't see where Tesla said anything in TFA, actually. This is also a proof of concept attack, not a real-world one. Tesla also has a (serious) bug bounty program, which is more than can be said of many other car manufacturers. Hell, Tesla even brought one of its cars to Defcon in 2015 and had it on the main floor, inviting people to try and hack it as advertisement for said program.
If there's one thing I can guarantee, it's that there will be vulnerabilities in stuff, even stupid ones. This isn't a story unless Tesla somehow refuses to pay or refuses to fix it, which TFA says -nothing- about. I'm sort of surprised that they didn't reach out to get a response from Tesla, even a milquetoast "we're looking into it" or something.
Yes - whether or not you agree with the subsidies themselves, Elon would be an idiot not to take advantage of them.
Are you really surprised? The opposition to global warming was never founded on the basis of pretty much anything but economic concerns, especially by the fossil fuel industry, because there's a LOT of money in it. At the very least, that's where the money to oppose it comes from. It's really not at all surprising to me that there are a few who think Elon Musk is a threat, probably more because of his push for Solar Power and usable Electric Cars/infrastructure.
"The Establishment" is hardly a unified thing. Such as it is, they're pretty much getting what they want regardless. Trump won't be pardoning Edward Snowden or ending mass surveillance any more than Clinton would have. It's not like he's some third party renegade - yes, he was an outsider, but he won partly because he made deals with the Republican party, even if he didn't run explicitly on that. Look at who he's appointing - and look at the Republicans in Congress. If they pass a bunch of tax cuts and slash the social safety net, do you think he's going to say no? Of course not. About the only thing that may really change is the attitude towards trade deals, but even there, I suspect what will simply happen is that he'll make new, different deals, and say they're somehow better than Obama's (despite being largely the same on anything related to intellectual property rights, etc).
What -is- interesting to me, though, is watching what's currently happening on the left. For those who haven't been paying attention, the Sanders-ite/Establishment fight seems to have moved to the battle over who will head the DNC. The two main candidates represent both of those wings of the party, from what I've seen (Ellison being an early Sanders backer, while Perez was an Obama cabinet secretary). We may well see an upending of the old establishment there, at least in part, in the wake of Clinton's loss.
Not by the initial group, no, but others such as Nate Silver and Nate Cohn who looked at the data said that the differences could be accounted for by factoring in demographic differences.could likely account for it.
That said, at some point we're going to need to take measures to make sure that hacking/cheating/rigging doesn't occur, even if only to head off these kinds of accusations. We should not simply blindly trust that an unaudited computer system does what we're told it should. This is something we should put in place for future elections, at the very least, because even if no one actually does try to cheat, it's far too easy to undermine the legitimacy of an election if there's no way to confirm the results are fair. Random audits, such as suggested by Ron Rivest and Phil Stark, would be a good step towards that end:
http://www.usatoday.com/story/...
Don't forget about his plan to nuke the Martian polar ice caps:
http://www.theverge.com/2015/1...
For a while after that, he changed his twitter picture to that of him holding a long-haired white cat, so at least he has a sense of humor about it... well, that or he really is one:
"Do you expect me to talk, Elon?"
"No, Mister Bond, I expect you to buy my electric car."
You're thinking of the US cost. That's going to be a lot different on an island like this in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Take that $2.50 per gallon, and multiply it by the cost of shipping to Samoa. At an offhand guess, you're talking anywhere from 5 to 10 times as expensive.
I'm against voter ID laws because what evidence I've seen is that the problem they purport to solve is vanishingly small, and in practice the effect and intent is to decrease turnout in specifically targeted groups (namely, those that vote largely for one party rather than the other).
On the other hand, I think that establishing full audit trails for elections are a good thing. We should not blindly trust that electronic systems do what we're told they do - we need ways to verify that (and that goes for so many things other than voting too). I'd be perfectly happy to have voter audit methods as well - and we can easily come up with ways to do that which don't prevent legitimate voters from casting a ballot. Have them sign an affidavit, and take their picture. If you insist on ID cards, make the voter ID itself come with a picture, and don't charge money for them. That way everyone who's registered to vote automatically has a valid ID.
What about Department of Secure Homeland Internet Things?
Really, the absolute last thing I want in my games is overlap with reality. I play games (in part) to get away from reality.
What I think he's really talking about, when you read between the lines, is cross-marketing. "Hey, let's run a cross promotion where if you buy product X, you get some benefit in the game (and we get kickbacks)." We've seen it before in certain limited areas (like buy Mt. Dew, get double xp in CoD or whatever), but games where it becomes all but necessary to play? No thanks.
While the 140 character limit certainly does hinder nuance and full expression, the coarsening of civil discourse in open space is much more far reaching than that. Look at just about any unmoderated comments section on the web for a prime example. I'd bring up Penny Arcade's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, but anonymity seems to be only part of the equation. I would argue rather that it is the increased degree of removal from immediate social consequence that enables and encourages people to be flaming shitbags to each other on the internet.
We have certain expectations of polite behavior in person, and someone who violates those norms gets punished by the way everyone around reacts to them. This doesn't carry over to the internet though - worse, you can probably find people who will support you in your asshole-ish behavior.
You think Facebook only collects information on people who create accounts?
That's adorable.
https://www.theguardian.com/te...
That's nothing new, though:
The last time voter turnout was over 65% was in 1908, and it hasn't been over 60% since 1968. What's really ironic? After the Voting Rights Act and the repeal of the Jim Crow laws removed obstacles to voting, participation/turnout still has declined. It usually hovers around the low 50s for presidential, and lower for the congressional mid term elections. 2008 was a high point, with ~57%.
What's even more curious is that the entire gun system itself may soon be obsolete, as the Navy's eventual plan is to replace it with a railgun:
http://thediplomat.com/2016/03...
Given all the things that Erdogan has done in the wake of the 'coup', it makes me wonder whether it was actually a coup attempt, or just Erdogan's version of the Reichstag fire.
Probably the best way forward would be for Parliament to pass something that grants the PM the ability to invoke Article 50, but only if she gets Europe to agree to "Soft" Brexit terms first - meaning that the EU would then tell May to get bent, and Brexit wouldn't happen. Parliament could likely get away with this, because the Hard Brexit contingent is a distinct minority, and if the Soft Brexit preference types had to choose between Hard Brexit and Remain, you'd have an overall majority for Remain.
And yet Ars Technica claimed in an article that there were indeed ransom demands made to Dyn. That seems to be at odds with Flashpoint's statement.
http://arstechnica.com/informa...
Given the links between the Mirai DDoS on Brian Krebs, and Dyn's involvement in helping him research that, I wouldn't at all be surprised if it wasn't the same or related groups of cybercriminals responsible for both.
Sounds like it's still a better option than Comcast.