They won't go quietly, that's for certain. They're going to try to put a stop to things they don't like. They may find more success in some places than others, but overall, scientific and technological progress doesn't stop. If one country tries to dig in its heels, someone else is going to keep forging ahead, and gain an advantage over that country. They're not going to win, not on their terms.
In the longer term, they largely face two choices - adapt, or withdraw from society. I think you'll see a lot of groups, especially smaller ones, picking the latter route, a la the Amish. Larger ones, such as the Catholic Church, or the LDS Church, will probably be the ones that adapt, even if in fits and starts, and will probably focus on the parts of the religion like "don't be complete shits to your fellow human beings."
I also think that, if we ever get to the point where colonization of space becomes a feasible thing, you'll see lots of religious groups heading out to settle, just like they did in times past.
While complete legalization has its downsides, the current drug prohibition and resulting paramilitary law enforcement response, not to mention everything else associated with the "War on Drugs" is far, far worse on so many levels. I'd go so far as to say the only way you could even remotely consider the War on Drugs as successful would be if your goal was to criminalize large swathes of the population, while putting them under a militarized, invasive police state where things like privacy and other rights are on the road to becoming a distant memory.
Yes, there would be problems with addiction, just like there are now with alcohol and tobacco. It would also be far, far less costly to deal with those than with the negative affects of drug prohibition.
Companies, rushing to get things out to market, not bothering to do enough testing, nevermind rigorously ensuring that they've secured their products? Inconceivable! Next you'll probably try and tell me that they'll threaten to sue security researchers that expose the inevitable flaws rather than simply fixing them.
And to clarify, that doesn't mean that the seizure of the laptop or the resulting search of the hard drive was or should have been legal, just that the copying was standard forensic practice for doing so. Just because the cop wears gloves and avoids getting fingerprints on your car doesn't mean that he wasn't illegally searching it in the first place.
Ironically though, this is pretty standard forensic practice. If you look at the active original, there's all kinds of possibility of tampering that could go on, even unwittingly. It's akin to trampling through a potential crime scene with no gloves, hair nets, etc, possibly while bleeding profusely over everything in sight.
Instead, computer forensic investigators are supposed to create an image of the disk, and then they can look through that image. This is also for the defendent's protection too, since this way if the prosecution does something shady, the defense can use its own copy to point that out.
One bit of advice I've heard is that all men have roughly the same rejection rates - the successful ones just try more often than not, because there's really no opportunity cost for asking other than what you yourself assign to it, and the rather minor amount of time it took to ask (which is even less now with the advent of the internet).
It's also important to note that historically blacks and other minorities had much, much harder times getting home loans, including being denied FDIC aid (look up "Redlining" for more information on the practice). Laws like the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 were designed to help fix that by encouraging lenders to make loans to previously disadvantaged sorts. This isn't why the bubble was caused, or burst though, despite the efforts of several commentators and pundits to put the blame on 30 year old laws rather than financial deregulation and fuckery from the past 10 years).
The problem was that certain banks (like Countrywide, among others) realized that they could give these loans to people, and not care about whether they were going to get paid back, as noted before, both due to Government guarantees, and because some of the shell game stuff Wall Street invented to package the bad loans as securities (Credit Default Swaps, etc).
And at the end of the day, when the house of cards came tumbling down, the Government had to bail them out lest the economy implode with them. And yet, we really haven't done nearly enough to prevent them from doing it yet again.
That's because the U.S. Democratic party is not a left-wing party, it's merely to the left of its only viable opposition at this point. In practice it is much more of a Centrist or Center-Right party, from a European standpoint.
Not to mention the music. Think about it - what good musicians would wind up in Heaven, as opposed to not?
To reference Good Omens:
Listen," said Crowley urgently, "the point is that when the bird has worn the mountain down to nothing, right, then-"
Aziraphale opened his mouth. Crowley just knew he was going to make some point about the relative hardness of birds' beaks and granite mountains, and plunged on quickly.
"-then you still won't have finished watching The Sound of Music."
Aziraphale froze.
"And you'll enjoy it," Crowley said relentlessly. "You really will."
"My dear boy-"
"You won't have a choice."
"Listen-"
"Heaven has no taste."
"Now-"
"And not one single sushi restaurant."
A look of pain crossed the angel's suddenly very serious face.”
And to clarify again, my point is less about the document itself, and more to suggest that no one should read anything special into some arbitrary date supposedly associated with potentially leaked material.
I have no idea, having not seen the document, its cover sheet, classification, or any of that, so I can neither confirm nor deny anything about the TPP.
That said, declassification dates on a classified document are not a hard and fast thing. The President has the authority to declassify anything he wants to, and at times in the past this has happened for one reason or another. It's pretty rare, but it has happened. There are also various other methods for declassifying something that have nothing to do with the date.
That said, nothing guarantees something does get declassified on that date. Really, it's more of a "review this material for declassification on this date." Some stuff can stay secret for decades and decades, whether because it's still somehow relevant to national security, or for whatever other reason the review committee doesn't approve it.
So, your mileage may vary; but to me this sounds less like a "Keep this absolutely secret for four years after!" and more like standard operating procedure to slap a declassification (review) date on a document.
So, instead of a minor blip of a story that some piece of gear has a vulnerability, that then gets patched and largely ignored amid the chorus of other similar stories, you've now elevated the tale of your gear's vulnerability to the front page of various tech sites, not because it's a vulnerability, but because you threatened legal action to prevent disclosure of the vulnerability.
That's some great work at shooting yourselves in the foot. I would have thought more people get that by this point in the internet age, but apparently not.
Gohmert reminds me of a certain quote from GLaDOS:
"He's not just a regular moron. He's the product of the greatest minds of a generation working together with the express purpose of building the dumbest moron who ever lived."
There's quite a bit of demand, especially if you have useful experience, education, certifications, any of the things that they can sell. That's what makes it different - in government contracting, YOU are what the company is selling, to the government. Also, because it's the government, there tends to be a lot more restrictions on who can be hired in terms of citizenship. Things like "U.S. Citizens only" isn't uncommon because of security concerns, so you don't have to worry that you'll be replaced with an H-1B.
There are downsides to that too - any IT that deals with Defense or National Security stuff is going to require getting (or better yet already having) a security clearance. You're probably also going to be stuck in the DC area, which while not as bad as San Francisco or New York City in many ways, is still an expensive area, and traffic is an issue depending on where you live compared to where you work.
But as far as over 40s, I knew tons of people who were working as contractors in their 50s and 60s, many of whom were already retired from the military or government, but who for whatever reason still wanted or needed to work. They'd make lots of money because the government agencies, and therefore the contracting companies, valued that knowledge.
That, and if you find yourself still looking to work in IT after 40 or so, consider federal government contracting. There, your experience will be an asset, because the companies can charge the government more for someone with more experience and qualifications, so that "high cost" isn't necessarily a bad thing. Now, that doesn't mean it will necessarily go to you, and they'll certainly be looking to pay you only as much as they can get away with, but it won't be nearly as bad as with a company where they don't value your experience.
Yeah, it seems a little too specific to me. It's akin to saying "There's going to be another Columbine" when you're actually at or very near to Columbine High School. Also, it's important to note that Yik Yak works in terms of vicinity - this is someone in the local area of the college, not halfway around the globe.
Second, nobody is going to see Pearl Harbor references in the same way, because that's about something entirely different. Probably the only place you'll hear Pearl Harbor references these days is with "Cyber" in front of it, coming from someone trying to turn up the FUD in congressional hearings.
To add, the fixation on income tax is because it's the main tax that most people are familiar with, but it's also a major distraction from the fact that the tax the truly rich mostly pay, Capital Gains, is far, far lower - 20% for long term at the top bracket (and the people rich enough to pay that have accountants to make sure their income falls in that category, rather than short term, among other things).
It's not a lie, it's a distraction by statistic. Look at it again - "almost half the people in this country pay no income tax" which is true......except the statement was used to imply that "pays no income tax" means "pays no tax, at all" which is quite clearly NOT the case.
It's sort of like how Apple used to state in their ads how "Macs aren't affected by Windows viruses and malware!" Apple knew very well that Macs are no more affected by Windows malware any more than Windows machines would be affected by malicious code written for Mac/Linux/etc, so the statement is factually true. What they also know is that the average person hearing that statement doesn't realize the underlying nuance, and instead hears "Macs are immune to viruses!"
To get back to taxes, there's almost no one who doesn't pay any tax at all, whatsoever. Some people pay more, some people pay less. The fact that some people don't make enough income to get taxed on it shouldn't be what concerns us, it's that people who earn money through work pay a top marginal rate almost twice what the rate is for money earned by capital gains.
REG: Right. You're in. Listen. The only people we hate more than the Romans are the fucking Judean People's Front. P.F.J.: Yeah... JUDITH: Splitters. P.F.J.: Splitters... FRANCIS: And the Judean Popular People's Front. P.F.J.: Yeah. Oh, yeah. Splitters. Splitters... LORETTA: And the People's Front of Judea. P.F.J.: Yeah. Splitters. Splitters... REG: What? LORETTA: The People's Front of Judea. Splitters. REG: We're the People's Front of Judea! LORETTA: Oh. I thought we were the Popular Front. REG: People's Front! C-huh. FRANCIS: Whatever happened to the Popular Front, Reg? REG: He's over there. P.F.J.: Splitter!
Some time ago, there was a group of people that was sick and tired of having to put up with arbitrary and tyrannical behavior on the behalf of their government. They said to hell with it, and decided that there needed to be a check on the power of government, and said, hey, how about we try this democracy thing? If someone is corrupt, not serving the needs of the people, or is otherwise out of line, the people can vote them out.
Now, while it's certainly arguable that the check on government, specifically politicians, is not properly working as intended at the moment, I've yet to hear a better suggestion from the laissez-faire free market proponents.
Capital Gains is taxed lower than income, unless it's short term gains (i.e. day trading or the like), and you can bet that anyone who's significantly wealthy enough can manage to hire people to make sure and avoid that.
The fact that people fixate on income is a fallacy, because regular income isn't where the truly rich get their money, nor is it even the work those people do. No, that's the money your money makes once you already have money.
Note that I'm not suggesting that soaking the rich is some panacea, or that being rich is an inherently bad thing etc etc, merely pointing out that income taxes are only a part of the puzzle, and not the one that applies when we're talking about the rich.
It's very, VERY important to pay attention to the terms when someone starts flashing around statistics. For one, it's very easy to talk about something else entirely, but make it seem like you're offering a contrast rather than comparing apples and oranges.
For instance, "top 5% of earners pay 60% of income tax" is true, but entirely misleading, because we're only talking about INCOME tax. That's the people who get paychecks. We're not talking about the truly rich, who don't have to work for a living, they make their money in investments - that is, capital gains. Now, capital gains is taxed, but at a much lower rate. This is why Warren Buffett pays a lower tax rate than his secretary. There are also other taxes that people pay, but income and capital gains are the biggest chunks when we're talking about an individual (depending on where you live at least, some states don't have an income tax and use sales/etc tax instead, so YMMV).
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They won't go quietly, that's for certain. They're going to try to put a stop to things they don't like. They may find more success in some places than others, but overall, scientific and technological progress doesn't stop. If one country tries to dig in its heels, someone else is going to keep forging ahead, and gain an advantage over that country. They're not going to win, not on their terms.
In the longer term, they largely face two choices - adapt, or withdraw from society. I think you'll see a lot of groups, especially smaller ones, picking the latter route, a la the Amish. Larger ones, such as the Catholic Church, or the LDS Church, will probably be the ones that adapt, even if in fits and starts, and will probably focus on the parts of the religion like "don't be complete shits to your fellow human beings."
I also think that, if we ever get to the point where colonization of space becomes a feasible thing, you'll see lots of religious groups heading out to settle, just like they did in times past.
While complete legalization has its downsides, the current drug prohibition and resulting paramilitary law enforcement response, not to mention everything else associated with the "War on Drugs" is far, far worse on so many levels. I'd go so far as to say the only way you could even remotely consider the War on Drugs as successful would be if your goal was to criminalize large swathes of the population, while putting them under a militarized, invasive police state where things like privacy and other rights are on the road to becoming a distant memory.
Yes, there would be problems with addiction, just like there are now with alcohol and tobacco. It would also be far, far less costly to deal with those than with the negative affects of drug prohibition.
Companies, rushing to get things out to market, not bothering to do enough testing, nevermind rigorously ensuring that they've secured their products?
Inconceivable!
Next you'll probably try and tell me that they'll threaten to sue security researchers that expose the inevitable flaws rather than simply fixing them.
And to clarify, that doesn't mean that the seizure of the laptop or the resulting search of the hard drive was or should have been legal, just that the copying was standard forensic practice for doing so. Just because the cop wears gloves and avoids getting fingerprints on your car doesn't mean that he wasn't illegally searching it in the first place.
Funny how that works.
Ironically though, this is pretty standard forensic practice. If you look at the active original, there's all kinds of possibility of tampering that could go on, even unwittingly. It's akin to trampling through a potential crime scene with no gloves, hair nets, etc, possibly while bleeding profusely over everything in sight.
Instead, computer forensic investigators are supposed to create an image of the disk, and then they can look through that image. This is also for the defendent's protection too, since this way if the prosecution does something shady, the defense can use its own copy to point that out.
One bit of advice I've heard is that all men have roughly the same rejection rates - the successful ones just try more often than not, because there's really no opportunity cost for asking other than what you yourself assign to it, and the rather minor amount of time it took to ask (which is even less now with the advent of the internet).
You do? I'm so sorry to hear that - is it serious?
It's also important to note that historically blacks and other minorities had much, much harder times getting home loans, including being denied FDIC aid (look up "Redlining" for more information on the practice). Laws like the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 were designed to help fix that by encouraging lenders to make loans to previously disadvantaged sorts. This isn't why the bubble was caused, or burst though, despite the efforts of several commentators and pundits to put the blame on 30 year old laws rather than financial deregulation and fuckery from the past 10 years).
The problem was that certain banks (like Countrywide, among others) realized that they could give these loans to people, and not care about whether they were going to get paid back, as noted before, both due to Government guarantees, and because some of the shell game stuff Wall Street invented to package the bad loans as securities (Credit Default Swaps, etc).
And at the end of the day, when the house of cards came tumbling down, the Government had to bail them out lest the economy implode with them. And yet, we really haven't done nearly enough to prevent them from doing it yet again.
That's because the U.S. Democratic party is not a left-wing party, it's merely to the left of its only viable opposition at this point. In practice it is much more of a Centrist or Center-Right party, from a European standpoint.
Not to mention the music. Think about it - what good musicians would wind up in Heaven, as opposed to not?
To reference Good Omens:
Listen," said Crowley urgently, "the point is that when the bird has worn the mountain down to nothing, right, then-"
Aziraphale opened his mouth. Crowley just knew he was going to make some point about the relative hardness of birds' beaks and granite mountains, and plunged on quickly.
"-then you still won't have finished watching The Sound of Music."
Aziraphale froze.
"And you'll enjoy it," Crowley said relentlessly. "You really will."
"My dear boy-"
"You won't have a choice."
"Listen-"
"Heaven has no taste."
"Now-"
"And not one single sushi restaurant."
A look of pain crossed the angel's suddenly very serious face.”
And to clarify again, my point is less about the document itself, and more to suggest that no one should read anything special into some arbitrary date supposedly associated with potentially leaked material.
I have no idea, having not seen the document, its cover sheet, classification, or any of that, so I can neither confirm nor deny anything about the TPP.
That said, declassification dates on a classified document are not a hard and fast thing. The President has the authority to declassify anything he wants to, and at times in the past this has happened for one reason or another. It's pretty rare, but it has happened. There are also various other methods for declassifying something that have nothing to do with the date.
That said, nothing guarantees something does get declassified on that date. Really, it's more of a "review this material for declassification on this date." Some stuff can stay secret for decades and decades, whether because it's still somehow relevant to national security, or for whatever other reason the review committee doesn't approve it.
So, your mileage may vary; but to me this sounds less like a "Keep this absolutely secret for four years after!" and more like standard operating procedure to slap a declassification (review) date on a document.
So, instead of a minor blip of a story that some piece of gear has a vulnerability, that then gets patched and largely ignored amid the chorus of other similar stories, you've now elevated the tale of your gear's vulnerability to the front page of various tech sites, not because it's a vulnerability, but because you threatened legal action to prevent disclosure of the vulnerability.
That's some great work at shooting yourselves in the foot. I would have thought more people get that by this point in the internet age, but apparently not.
Or just have it print "Help, I'm trapped in the network" repeatedly.
At the start of a long weekend when no one's in the school computer lab.
Gohmert reminds me of a certain quote from GLaDOS:
"He's not just a regular moron. He's the product of the greatest minds of a generation working together with the express purpose of building the dumbest moron who ever lived."
There's quite a bit of demand, especially if you have useful experience, education, certifications, any of the things that they can sell. That's what makes it different - in government contracting, YOU are what the company is selling, to the government. Also, because it's the government, there tends to be a lot more restrictions on who can be hired in terms of citizenship. Things like "U.S. Citizens only" isn't uncommon because of security concerns, so you don't have to worry that you'll be replaced with an H-1B.
There are downsides to that too - any IT that deals with Defense or National Security stuff is going to require getting (or better yet already having) a security clearance. You're probably also going to be stuck in the DC area, which while not as bad as San Francisco or New York City in many ways, is still an expensive area, and traffic is an issue depending on where you live compared to where you work.
But as far as over 40s, I knew tons of people who were working as contractors in their 50s and 60s, many of whom were already retired from the military or government, but who for whatever reason still wanted or needed to work. They'd make lots of money because the government agencies, and therefore the contracting companies, valued that knowledge.
That, and if you find yourself still looking to work in IT after 40 or so, consider federal government contracting. There, your experience will be an asset, because the companies can charge the government more for someone with more experience and qualifications, so that "high cost" isn't necessarily a bad thing. Now, that doesn't mean it will necessarily go to you, and they'll certainly be looking to pay you only as much as they can get away with, but it won't be nearly as bad as with a company where they don't value your experience.
Yeah, it seems a little too specific to me. It's akin to saying "There's going to be another Columbine" when you're actually at or very near to Columbine High School. Also, it's important to note that Yik Yak works in terms of vicinity - this is someone in the local area of the college, not halfway around the globe.
Second, nobody is going to see Pearl Harbor references in the same way, because that's about something entirely different. Probably the only place you'll hear Pearl Harbor references these days is with "Cyber" in front of it, coming from someone trying to turn up the FUD in congressional hearings.
To add, the fixation on income tax is because it's the main tax that most people are familiar with, but it's also a major distraction from the fact that the tax the truly rich mostly pay, Capital Gains, is far, far lower - 20% for long term at the top bracket (and the people rich enough to pay that have accountants to make sure their income falls in that category, rather than short term, among other things).
Sorry, parent made most of the same points, it's just late and I'm tired.
It's not a lie, it's a distraction by statistic. Look at it again - "almost half the people in this country pay no income tax" which is true... ...except the statement was used to imply that "pays no income tax" means "pays no tax, at all" which is quite clearly NOT the case.
It's sort of like how Apple used to state in their ads how "Macs aren't affected by Windows viruses and malware!" Apple knew very well that Macs are no more affected by Windows malware any more than Windows machines would be affected by malicious code written for Mac/Linux/etc, so the statement is factually true. What they also know is that the average person hearing that statement doesn't realize the underlying nuance, and instead hears "Macs are immune to viruses!"
To get back to taxes, there's almost no one who doesn't pay any tax at all, whatsoever. Some people pay more, some people pay less. The fact that some people don't make enough income to get taxed on it shouldn't be what concerns us, it's that people who earn money through work pay a top marginal rate almost twice what the rate is for money earned by capital gains.
REG: Right. You're in. Listen. The only people we hate more than the Romans are the fucking Judean People's Front.
P.F.J.: Yeah...
JUDITH: Splitters.
P.F.J.: Splitters...
FRANCIS: And the Judean Popular People's Front.
P.F.J.: Yeah. Oh, yeah. Splitters. Splitters...
LORETTA: And the People's Front of Judea.
P.F.J.: Yeah. Splitters. Splitters...
REG: What?
LORETTA: The People's Front of Judea. Splitters.
REG: We're the People's Front of Judea!
LORETTA: Oh. I thought we were the Popular Front.
REG: People's Front! C-huh.
FRANCIS: Whatever happened to the Popular Front, Reg?
REG: He's over there.
P.F.J.: Splitter!
Some time ago, there was a group of people that was sick and tired of having to put up with arbitrary and tyrannical behavior on the behalf of their government. They said to hell with it, and decided that there needed to be a check on the power of government, and said, hey, how about we try this democracy thing? If someone is corrupt, not serving the needs of the people, or is otherwise out of line, the people can vote them out.
Now, while it's certainly arguable that the check on government, specifically politicians, is not properly working as intended at the moment, I've yet to hear a better suggestion from the laissez-faire free market proponents.
Capital Gains is taxed lower than income, unless it's short term gains (i.e. day trading or the like), and you can bet that anyone who's significantly wealthy enough can manage to hire people to make sure and avoid that.
The fact that people fixate on income is a fallacy, because regular income isn't where the truly rich get their money, nor is it even the work those people do. No, that's the money your money makes once you already have money.
Note that I'm not suggesting that soaking the rich is some panacea, or that being rich is an inherently bad thing etc etc, merely pointing out that income taxes are only a part of the puzzle, and not the one that applies when we're talking about the rich.
It's very, VERY important to pay attention to the terms when someone starts flashing around statistics. For one, it's very easy to talk about something else entirely, but make it seem like you're offering a contrast rather than comparing apples and oranges.
For instance, "top 5% of earners pay 60% of income tax" is true, but entirely misleading, because we're only talking about INCOME tax. That's the people who get paychecks. We're not talking about the truly rich, who don't have to work for a living, they make their money in investments - that is, capital gains. Now, capital gains is taxed, but at a much lower rate. This is why Warren Buffett pays a lower tax rate than his secretary. There are also other taxes that people pay, but income and capital gains are the biggest chunks when we're talking about an individual (depending on where you live at least, some states don't have an income tax and use sales/etc tax instead, so YMMV).