Nobody is being "backdoored" here except as required by law. The linked story summary is a troll for mentioning the NSA - it has nothing to do with them, but either the writer doesn't know what they're talking about or they just figured that would get more clicks.
Telecom providers are required to make sure that any voice service they sell is compliant with CALEA. There is no direct CALEA equivalent today for data services, interestingly - this is how far behind the times the Feds can be. And yes everything in LTE is data but for the purposes of the law, anything where you are talking - for example VoIP - is considered a voice service.
CALEA basically means that if you (the telecom) get a wiretap order - signed by a judge - from a law enforcement agency, you need to wiretap and record that user's calls for the specified time period, decrypt them if necessary, and then turn them over to the law enforcement agency. Verizon had to make this service CALEA compliant, or they couldn't have offered it. And remember that CALEA is not about mass wireless surveillance a la NSA but is actually about targeted recordings of specific individuals where there is probable cause enough to get a judge to sign off on the wiretap order. Very different things. You can dislike CALEA but you can't blame Verizon for putting in some magical backdoor - that has absolutely zero to do with the NSA - which they are required by law to have.
However for the privacy-minded it should be noted that the way things work, CALEA only applies to telecom providers. If you bought the same software from a non-telecom source (e.g. the software OEM themselves) and put it on your phone, then CALEA won't help law enforcement because Verizon wouldn't have the key to decrypt your calls with and could only turn over the encrypted stream. So if you are worried about being wiretapped by the police, don't buy your encryption service from your phone company.
Shame on you for making me remember the Jon Katz era of Slashdot. As I recall, it eventually got so bad that turning off Katz stories became an option for users built into the site.
I'm genuinely curious - what does Lightroom do that iPhoto on OS X doesn't? I have extensive (non-professional) photo archives in iTunes for the easy import, automatic facial recognition, ease of posting to social media etc. but if Lightroom does really awesome stuff I would certainly consider switching.
It seems reasonable that we could just eliminate having to carry around physical IDs altogether (at least as a requirement of the law) and have the police taking pictures and/or typing in a name to verify someone's identity.
Neat idea but it misses a lot of practical problems.
Many police cars are equipped with cameras that can read via OCR your license plate (called "Automated License Plate Recognition" or ALPR) and check against a database to see if your car has been reported stolen, is reported in an Amber Alert, etc.
However, the person driving the car is a totally different issue. Let's assume that there's no requirement that you have a personal driver's license.
The officer pulls you over for speeding and he/she says, "name please?" You say "Oliver Klozoff." Without that government-issued ID you can make up any darn name you want to. That officer has no way to get you to produce your real name, even if it is Osama bin Laden and you're driving around the country touring Whataburger locations. Oliver Klozoff isn't an owner of that car? Well, your friend lent it to you for the afternoon, what's wrong with that? So without the fact that driving without a physical license is a crime, the cop has no way to figure out if you are a wanted person or not. Not a great thing for catching wanted people (see Timothy McVeigh and his traffic stop arrest after the Oklahoma City bombing for example).
On the flip side of civil liberties - the officer pulls you over for speeding and he/she takes your picture and runs it against a visual database stored by the DMV. Unfortunately, because it's nighttime and lit only by the officer's flashlight, and you grew a beard since you had your driver's license photo taken and put on some weight, you are no longer recognized as a valid driver in your state. Why not arrest you just to be sure?
You get the idea. Think of a driver's license like a form of two-factor authentication. It's not the physical card itself which is important so much as that it is a token which only you are supposed to have, which links you back to a known set of credentials at the state level which can be attached to a permission to drive, a known wants/warrants record, or so on and so forth. Just like how your physical passport isn't what is important when you enter the country - it's just a good way to get started when they scan it into a database where the real information is stored that can figure out who you are.
What you say is fair, but did this guy agree right away or did they badger him repeatedly until he agreed?
To me, that's part of the point. There's no amount of badgering that should make you even consider doing it. In fact, if someone is badgering you about it an you aren't reporting it to the appropriate authorities then something is wrong with your moral compass.
So this is basically and [sic] artificially generated crime, made by the FBI.
If you are given a US security clearance - after a significant background investigation and detailed indoctrination about exactly how important that it is that you do not tell anyone - not your wife, not your buddies, not your colleagues who don't have the same clearances - about classified material... and then someone claiming to represent a foreign power approaches you about providing classified information to them... and you even take more than half a second to say no, you should not have been in that job in the first place.
This isn't luring someone into adultery, or petty theft, or embezzling or even facilitating Marion Berry smoking crack. This is a dude straight up offering SENSITIVE US DEFENSE INFORMATION to a known frenemy (depending on who's in power this week) FOR MONEY. There is no scenario in which you are a Good Guy who just got entrapped into something you didn't really mean or didn't think was going to hurt anyone.
It's sorta like how I can be sympathetic to men whose jealous significant others hire PIs/escorts to hit on them and lure them into adultery to see if they're susceptible to cheating. But this is more like trying to bait someone into hiring a hit man to kill their wife to see if they would go for it... If you even consider it, buddy you are not a Good Guy and deserve what you get.
No, this magazine actually is a public trust. It has never turned a profit in 100 years. But it has provided a forum for some of the best writers we've ever had.
That sounds awesome and all, but what you're describing is not a business, it's a charity. If they want to convert themselves to a 501(c)3 and take donations like NPR does (which serves a similar niche), then I think that's awesome. But it's not a business, it's a particular type of ego-driven charity bankrolled by the super-wealthy who are happy to lose money being associated with something that gets them invited to smart cocktail parties instead of losing money on something that does things like cure malaria or provide clean drinking water. (See also: "owning professional sports teams.")
I say this as a former professional journalist myself: if your publication is losing money, never get too comfortable and keep your LinkedIn up to date. Because your self-indulgent ownership today may change to an actual business person owner tomorrow, and if they ever do, shit is going to turn 180 degrees immediately in every way you care about. And don't be surprised or upset when it does.
A fair comment and I appreciate your civility (pretty rare on Slashdot these days).
My viewpoint is due to a specific bias of my own: I was a Journalism major in college and worked as a reporter at a couple "mainstream media" (EEEEEVIL!) newspapers before moving into technology. I'm not a deluded idealist viewing journalism from the outside with the "wool pulled over my eyes," I was a practicing reporter for several years.
And you know what? I was taught in college for four years to be above all else unbiased, and I damn well tried my hardest to do that once I got out into the professional journalism world. It's certainly possible that I didn't always succeed, but I always made a good faith effort to do so. No editor ever pressured me to add a slant to my stories, or favor some advertiser or some bullshit or something like that. My paper (the Richmond Times-Dispatch) had an Editorial department that was hard-core conservative, but that group had absolutely zero influence on the actual news reporters and how story ideas were declined/accepted and how those were ultimately presented. And from talking with my former colleagues and friends who continue to be practicing mainstream journalists, that continues to be true even to this day.
If you're a TV reporter for FOX News or a writer for the Huffington Post, then yes your editor will telegraph to you the conclusion that your story is supposed to come to. But there are LOTS of other US journalism outlets where I can say from first-hand experience that bias is NOT a desired outcome, even if you see it there.
No offense - and again I appreciate the civility of your comments even if I disagree with them - but this is one area that I think my several years of practical experience provides me with a little more direct insight than whatever "People's History of..." you have read that posits otherwise.
But you know what? Everyone has their own version of the plural of anecdote being data, so we will all work from our own individual experiences and be justified in doing so. But I wouldn't be so certain about identifying macro trends in your personal experience here.
Well, to those people I'll say this: Welcome to Slashdot. The topic has been posted about to death a billion times before. See that search box next to the logo at the top left of the page? Click there, type the word "Apple" and hit enter. Then read until your heart is content. You're welcome.
Wow.
Just to recap here, you have basically: 1.) said Apple stuff sucks in the middle of a thread almost designed to be a flame war invitation; 2.) refused to explain why you think Apple sucks with any specificity; and 3.) given a follow-up response akin to "I don't have to tell you why I don't like New Zealanders. Just Google 'New Zealand' and read until your heart is content.'"
You, sir/madam either 1.) win the Internet brilliant troll of the year award; or 2.) should ask yourself why you bothered posting not just one comment but also two responses as of this writing where you could have just explained your problems with Apple in less text than it took to explain why it was beneath you to explain why you wouldn't explain what your problem with Apple was why you wouldn't NOMAD DOES NOT COMPUTE.
when journalism as a whole is essentially paid trolling for one agenda or another
If that's what you think, you are reading/watching/listening to the wrong news outlets. It's the same reaction I have when I hear people say "there's no good music anymore" - that's completely untrue. If the radio isn't playing the stuff you like, there are lots of other places you can find good stuff if you just invest the time to look.
There are plenty of high quality news organizations out there today which are dedicated to providing an even-handed, responsible professional journalism. It's true that, as was famously once said, "the only truly objective journalism is sports box scores." And you can - especially if you are looking for it - find some degree of bias in anything. But there's a 180 degree gap from the minor and inadvertent bias you may find in an Associated Press, BBC World, New York Times (or even Al Jazeera - the American not Qatari version) article versus the intentional bias you find in a FOX News or Huffington Post story.
To your previous point, though, I agree that bias-free reporting is not necessarily dull but is - by design - afraid to answer the "why" of the "Five W's" for fear of losing balance. I try to mix my news reading between (generally) unbiased news from NYT or BBC with biased but (from my viewpoint) more insightful sources like The Economist or Slate.
However, I am strongly opposed to the frequent Slashbot trope that "there is no professional journalism left, it's all biased" and hence there is in general no credibility gap between what the NY Times prints in its newspaper about the Ruble crisis vs. what "iwantputinsbaby07" posts to Twitter. Professional journalism is real, and it will always have a place of preferential credibility to unknown sources with unknown motivations. Meanwhile, slanted journalism will still probably generate the most clicks - but at least if you're picking your news sources to be pre-sorted to agree with your opinions, you know what you're buying.
* "wer", adult male (survives in a few words like virile and werewolf)
(Puts on pedantic hat.) You are correct that the Germanic/Old English "were" survives in words like "werewolf" and, for Tolkien fans only, "weregild" (as in "This I will have as weregild for my father's death" from the Silmarillion).
This is a gross oversimplification as any language scholar can tell you, but a fun exercise for any English language speaker is to study the roots of common "vulgar" vs. "high-class" words and find that their roots map very closely to Latin vs. Germanic. Old English was - once the native Celts and Romano-Britons had been displaced - largely a relic of its "Germanic" (Angles, Saxons, Jutes) conquerors and the language of the people. After the Norman Conquest in 1066 (Normans "Nord-mann" being transplanted Vikings who learned French) the language of the nobility in England became French (which was based on Latin) for hundreds of years. While over time the two melded together, you can still (again, oversimplifying) in many cases tell the upper-class terms for things (derived from French/Latin) from the lower-class terms for things (derived from Old English/Germanic). For example:
Lower-class English term: shit (viz. German scheisse); upper-class English term: excrement (viz. French excrement)
Lower-class English term: house (viz. German haus); upper-class English term: mansion (viz. French maison)
It doesn't hold true in all cases but it is in general a pretty fascinating window into the evolution of the English language, FWIW.
As a society its reasonable proposition that we would want our search engines to be competing on simply being the best search engine, without risk of it quietly subverting its integrety to push any other agenda / product / viewpoint / etc.
And this hypothetical search engine makes money how again?
Part of the problem here is a very poorly written (or edited) quote in the summary. The relevant quote from TFA is:
"Trying to combat climate change exclusively with today's renewable energy technologies simply won't work; we need a fundamentally different approach." (emphasis mine)
They aren't saying that today's renewables aren't good or important. They are saying that by themselves it won't get to where it needs to be, because carbon-emitting forms of energy will always be cheaper than the renewables of today (even including incremental improvements on those technologies in the foreseeable future), and the energy industry will always try to give people what they want: the cheapest energy possible. They then go on to posit (again from TFA):
"What's needed are zero-carbon energy sources so cheap that the operators of power plants and industrial facilities alike have an economic rationale for switching over within the next 40 years"
Of course, that's a bit like saying "I don't know how, but somebody should discover magic fairy dust." But they are not saying that they have the solution to the problem; they are saying that we collectively need to invest in finding some new, unknown rabbit to pull out of the hat because our current ones will never achieve their price parity objective.
Then how would people who want their purchases to help benefit this charity know how, when and where to buy it? Part of the rationale of doing something like this is that some consumers will want to modify their purchasing decisions or timing to support a cause they find valuable.
Let's say Crucial.com was going to give a portion of the profits on all RAM purchases on a certain day to the EFF. Wouldn't you rather know when/what products that applies to, rather than have Crucial announce "hey, we gave part of our profits from yesterday to the EFF. Hope you bought then!"
people could legitimately argue "you let that profit making company knowingly use your trademark for 0 dollars, so charging us more would be illegal"
There is nothing illegal about charging people different rates for the same thing unless the way you do it is in violation of regulated industry rules or non-discrimination laws. It is perfectly legal for me to sell identical used cars to you for $1000 and to the next guy for $2000 because you negotiated better. It is illegal for me to charge him $2000 because he's black and $1000 to you because you're white; or for my utility to charge you $200/kWh when the PUC says the maximum retail rate is $.00068/kWh. Similarly, there is nothing wrong for Disney to tell Apple they can put a Mickey Mouse icon for free on the Apple Watch but charge Microsoft $1M to do the same thing on the Microsoft Band. So no trademark legal danger there.
your theory that granting a nonexclusive license for qualifying noncommercial uses will weaken a trademark
Was the day-care center in question non-profit? Otherwise then, no, it is not a noncommercial use. Either way, it's not whether it's commercial or noncommercial use that matters in trademark law. If I'm Disney and a nonprofit children's shelter calls itself the "Bambi Adoption Center," they are still infringing on my trademark just as much as if they were for-profit. I could be nice and let them license the Bambi name for a penny, which is not Disney's strategy... but either way it's still actionable infringement. While commercial/non-commercial may have some meaning in OSS/CCA licensing, it means diddly squat in trademark law.
Why can't we sell this junk to the Ukrainians and make a profit
Fair question but unfortunately the answer is:
We wouldn't make a profit. We might make slightly more than selling it for scrap, but it's not like battle-worn Humvees fetch anywhere near what they cost us... that's why the military is (inappropriately) giving them away to the cops in the US.
Ukraine is not exactly swimming in money to buy these things. Their economy has suffered 10% contraction in the past year and they can't even afford to subsidize the natural gas needed to keep their citizens alive this winter, now that Russia has jacked up the rates.
Selling arms to Ukraine (or fast tracking its entry into NATO) would be a major provocation to Russia and would set the stage for a potential full-on NATO vs. Russia regional conflict. Putin has enough crazy in him that he can't be trusted not to do something extremely stupid that would hurt him more in the long run, but would be painful enough to both sides that there would be no "winner." That's a hornet's nest you don't want to poke until you have exhausted every other conceivable alternative.
Where does this keep coming from? He has not been charged with any crime in the US, nor have any judicial proceedings even been started against him. Sweden can't extradite him for this even if they wanted to. So why do people keep talking about this as a ploy to have him extradited to the U.S.? There is exactly as much proof (or even logic) that this whole thing is a US-led plot as there is that this was a plot by the U.K. to get him to flee there. Or that this was a plot led by Ecuador, Afghanistan or Vanuatu.
Apply Occam's razor (gently). Just maybe this is a guy who had sex with women in Sweden when they didn't want him to, and this is a crime in Sweden, and they want him back there to put him on trial... in Sweden. Just maybe.
it gives them no meaningful bonus of any kind - science or military wise
This is something that has long bothered me: what do they do on the ISS that is "important science" worth all the money and hassle? I can go read a list of experiments on the station, but it all sounds like picayune little science projects to me. Can somebody who knows more about this than me give me some context on what the heck is Really Important about work done on the ISS? Or do we just send people and things to it Because It's There?
the issue of whether the students were legally qualified to sue, known as standing, could be fatal to the studentsâ(TM) suit
Precisely this. The whole case is in an idealistic sense understandable - if you are in college and you aren't challenging the real or imagined injustices of the world in some way, you're missing the whole point of being young enough to still be self-absorbed and righteous, but not old enough to be in the real world. But from a practical view, it's just a bunch of overprivileged Harvard kids looking for something to protest and wasting the time of our overburdened court system in the process. My 18-year-old me would applaud them but my current 40-year-old self thinks they should shut the f**k up and go do something useful instead.
Disclaimer: I know several Harvard alumni and count a few of them as my friends. I am probably unfairly biased against Harvard since in my experience these alums are (sorry friends) not noticeably smarter than everyone else - in some cases less so - in a way that justifies a Harvard degree being an automatic ticket to wealth and insider access. Which, unfortunately, it is.
Fair point, but Seattle is hardly a one-trick pony. Leaving aside Amazon... Microsoft, Boeing and Starbucks HQ are all major employers here. Just in tech alone, you also have Nintendo, Valve, Bungie, Disney Mobile and others here as well as satellite offices for Google, Facebook and (soon) Apple.
I think the point of the article (maybe?) is that Amazon is getting really big in Seattle, and the infrastructure here is already strained from the expanding tech industry. Amazon's growth could be more than the city can handle, dragging down quality of life for everyone.
Overall, the case is getting stranger with every relevation.
No, no it is not. This is a pretty blatant forgery - for a step-by-step walkthrough of what's obviously faked about it (including screenshots of the months-old Google Maps images and others that were used) please visit here.
Giving this any credence by saying the case "gets stranger" is like reading some 9/11 truther's article and saying that it makes the truth behind the attacks "more puzzling." It doesn't. It just shows that some people are either disconnected from the truth or (in this case) willing to actively fabricate things to obscure it.
It's at "Naturally occurring". Analyse that part of the equation.
You seem to think that you understand the politics of Internet peering, but I don't think you actually do. Not trying to be a jerk, but if you haven't worked on this stuff at a large ISP this whole question seems far more black and white than it actually is.
The question of settlement-free peering vs. transit is almost as old as the Internet. Network A is bigger, and Network B is smaller (or Network A has significant in/out flows of traffic while Network B has largely unidirectional traffic). There are not many Network As out there and lots of Network Bs. Network A should not need to spend the money to put in direct links of whatever size to all the Network Bs out there. It makes sense to do so with other networks the size of Network A but not for private connections of whatever size Network B wants. So Network A says to Network B, "No free soup for you. Buy bandwidth from someone who does peer with me (or pays me to peer), or you can pay me to connect directly." If Network B is buying bandwidth from someone who doesn't have big enough connections to Network A (or doesn't want to pay for bigger connections) then there can be congestion.
This is not new. It is not unique to Netflix. It is very common, in fact, with anyone using Netflix's traditional cheap-ass bandwidth provider, Cogent. (I use cheap-ass not as a compliment to Cogent's low rates but as a descriptor of the quality of their peering and transit links.) You can make a reasonable argument that Netflix is unique and should be given a pass on paying for transit because of customers of the ISP wanting that data. But from the ISP's perspective that creates a slippery slope (because everybody's traffic is important to someone) and all the smaller networks will want the same exception... maybe even to the point of being willing to sue over it or stage a damaging publicity war over it like Netflix did. For the big ISPs, they feel the need to hold firm on this question to avoid that slippery slope.
It sucks that peering is inherently political, and besides that nobody likes Comcast. But please stop trying to make the Netflix peering thing sound like something more nefarious than it actually is.
Centuries of study show us that many homeopathic cures do work.
I am not sure that you understand what "study" means in a modern scientific sense. If there are any of those showing the efficacy of homeopathy, please provide links - I am genuinely interested in seeing them (not snide, seriously).
As an example, I have a medical doctor who suggested drinking camomile tea to help me sleep, and it works. He could have prescribed a man made chemical to do the same thing
Now I am not sure that you understand what homeopathy means. Read the linked Wiki page to understand (it involves ingesting ridiculously diluted chemicals to purportedly cure illnesses on the utterly unsubstantiated theories of "like cures like" and "water memory."
I think what you're referring to is naturopathy, which is a whole different kettle of fish. My wife is a big believer in naturopathy, and while I think some of it is touchy-feely new age quackery, there is no dispute that naturally occurring plants, herbs and other medicinal sources can be effective healing tools. So no argument there.
My personal $.02 is that many people who prefer naturopathic medicine and oppose GMOs - my wife among them - do so not from a scientific viewpoint but from a moral viewpoint. Many of us would much rather trust things that grow naturally than are made artificially. But while it may ultimately prove true that some GMOs are harmful, I strongly believe that we should come to that conclusion through scientific study, not because we "feel" that something lab-created is inferior to something made by human science.
Nature made the Black Plague, tobacco, lard and the Destroying Angel mushrooms, too. Just because it's natural doesn't necessarily make it better for you, or make man-created things bad.
Slashdot Mirror
Nobody is being "backdoored" here except as required by law. The linked story summary is a troll for mentioning the NSA - it has nothing to do with them, but either the writer doesn't know what they're talking about or they just figured that would get more clicks.
Telecom providers are required to make sure that any voice service they sell is compliant with CALEA. There is no direct CALEA equivalent today for data services, interestingly - this is how far behind the times the Feds can be. And yes everything in LTE is data but for the purposes of the law, anything where you are talking - for example VoIP - is considered a voice service.
CALEA basically means that if you (the telecom) get a wiretap order - signed by a judge - from a law enforcement agency, you need to wiretap and record that user's calls for the specified time period, decrypt them if necessary, and then turn them over to the law enforcement agency. Verizon had to make this service CALEA compliant, or they couldn't have offered it. And remember that CALEA is not about mass wireless surveillance a la NSA but is actually about targeted recordings of specific individuals where there is probable cause enough to get a judge to sign off on the wiretap order. Very different things. You can dislike CALEA but you can't blame Verizon for putting in some magical backdoor - that has absolutely zero to do with the NSA - which they are required by law to have.
However for the privacy-minded it should be noted that the way things work, CALEA only applies to telecom providers. If you bought the same software from a non-telecom source (e.g. the software OEM themselves) and put it on your phone, then CALEA won't help law enforcement because Verizon wouldn't have the key to decrypt your calls with and could only turn over the encrypted stream. So if you are worried about being wiretapped by the police, don't buy your encryption service from your phone company.
Shame on you for making me remember the Jon Katz era of Slashdot. As I recall, it eventually got so bad that turning off Katz stories became an option for users built into the site.
I'm genuinely curious - what does Lightroom do that iPhoto on OS X doesn't? I have extensive (non-professional) photo archives in iTunes for the easy import, automatic facial recognition, ease of posting to social media etc. but if Lightroom does really awesome stuff I would certainly consider switching.
It seems reasonable that we could just eliminate having to carry around physical IDs altogether (at least as a requirement of the law) and have the police taking pictures and/or typing in a name to verify someone's identity.
Neat idea but it misses a lot of practical problems.
Many police cars are equipped with cameras that can read via OCR your license plate (called "Automated License Plate Recognition" or ALPR) and check against a database to see if your car has been reported stolen, is reported in an Amber Alert, etc.
However, the person driving the car is a totally different issue. Let's assume that there's no requirement that you have a personal driver's license.
The officer pulls you over for speeding and he/she says, "name please?" You say "Oliver Klozoff." Without that government-issued ID you can make up any darn name you want to. That officer has no way to get you to produce your real name, even if it is Osama bin Laden and you're driving around the country touring Whataburger locations. Oliver Klozoff isn't an owner of that car? Well, your friend lent it to you for the afternoon, what's wrong with that? So without the fact that driving without a physical license is a crime, the cop has no way to figure out if you are a wanted person or not. Not a great thing for catching wanted people (see Timothy McVeigh and his traffic stop arrest after the Oklahoma City bombing for example).
On the flip side of civil liberties - the officer pulls you over for speeding and he/she takes your picture and runs it against a visual database stored by the DMV. Unfortunately, because it's nighttime and lit only by the officer's flashlight, and you grew a beard since you had your driver's license photo taken and put on some weight, you are no longer recognized as a valid driver in your state. Why not arrest you just to be sure?
You get the idea. Think of a driver's license like a form of two-factor authentication. It's not the physical card itself which is important so much as that it is a token which only you are supposed to have, which links you back to a known set of credentials at the state level which can be attached to a permission to drive, a known wants/warrants record, or so on and so forth. Just like how your physical passport isn't what is important when you enter the country - it's just a good way to get started when they scan it into a database where the real information is stored that can figure out who you are.
What you say is fair, but did this guy agree right away or did they badger him repeatedly until he agreed?
To me, that's part of the point. There's no amount of badgering that should make you even consider doing it. In fact, if someone is badgering you about it an you aren't reporting it to the appropriate authorities then something is wrong with your moral compass.
So this is basically and [sic] artificially generated crime, made by the FBI.
If you are given a US security clearance - after a significant background investigation and detailed indoctrination about exactly how important that it is that you do not tell anyone - not your wife, not your buddies, not your colleagues who don't have the same clearances - about classified material... and then someone claiming to represent a foreign power approaches you about providing classified information to them... and you even take more than half a second to say no, you should not have been in that job in the first place.
This isn't luring someone into adultery, or petty theft, or embezzling or even facilitating Marion Berry smoking crack. This is a dude straight up offering SENSITIVE US DEFENSE INFORMATION to a known frenemy (depending on who's in power this week) FOR MONEY. There is no scenario in which you are a Good Guy who just got entrapped into something you didn't really mean or didn't think was going to hurt anyone.
It's sorta like how I can be sympathetic to men whose jealous significant others hire PIs/escorts to hit on them and lure them into adultery to see if they're susceptible to cheating. But this is more like trying to bait someone into hiring a hit man to kill their wife to see if they would go for it... If you even consider it, buddy you are not a Good Guy and deserve what you get.
No, this magazine actually is a public trust. It has never turned a profit in 100 years. But it has provided a forum for some of the best writers we've ever had.
That sounds awesome and all, but what you're describing is not a business, it's a charity. If they want to convert themselves to a 501(c)3 and take donations like NPR does (which serves a similar niche), then I think that's awesome. But it's not a business, it's a particular type of ego-driven charity bankrolled by the super-wealthy who are happy to lose money being associated with something that gets them invited to smart cocktail parties instead of losing money on something that does things like cure malaria or provide clean drinking water. (See also: "owning professional sports teams.")
I say this as a former professional journalist myself: if your publication is losing money, never get too comfortable and keep your LinkedIn up to date. Because your self-indulgent ownership today may change to an actual business person owner tomorrow, and if they ever do, shit is going to turn 180 degrees immediately in every way you care about. And don't be surprised or upset when it does.
A fair comment and I appreciate your civility (pretty rare on Slashdot these days).
My viewpoint is due to a specific bias of my own: I was a Journalism major in college and worked as a reporter at a couple "mainstream media" (EEEEEVIL!) newspapers before moving into technology. I'm not a deluded idealist viewing journalism from the outside with the "wool pulled over my eyes," I was a practicing reporter for several years.
And you know what? I was taught in college for four years to be above all else unbiased, and I damn well tried my hardest to do that once I got out into the professional journalism world. It's certainly possible that I didn't always succeed, but I always made a good faith effort to do so. No editor ever pressured me to add a slant to my stories, or favor some advertiser or some bullshit or something like that. My paper (the Richmond Times-Dispatch) had an Editorial department that was hard-core conservative, but that group had absolutely zero influence on the actual news reporters and how story ideas were declined/accepted and how those were ultimately presented. And from talking with my former colleagues and friends who continue to be practicing mainstream journalists, that continues to be true even to this day.
If you're a TV reporter for FOX News or a writer for the Huffington Post, then yes your editor will telegraph to you the conclusion that your story is supposed to come to. But there are LOTS of other US journalism outlets where I can say from first-hand experience that bias is NOT a desired outcome, even if you see it there.
No offense - and again I appreciate the civility of your comments even if I disagree with them - but this is one area that I think my several years of practical experience provides me with a little more direct insight than whatever "People's History of..." you have read that posits otherwise.
I'll spend extra on a dependable product. Apple computers have shown to not be dependable
Perhaps not in your experience. For other people, including me, the opposite has shown to be true.
But you know what? Everyone has their own version of the plural of anecdote being data, so we will all work from our own individual experiences and be justified in doing so. But I wouldn't be so certain about identifying macro trends in your personal experience here.
Well, to those people I'll say this: Welcome to Slashdot. The topic has been posted about to death a billion times before. See that search box next to the logo at the top left of the page? Click there, type the word "Apple" and hit enter. Then read until your heart is content. You're welcome.
Wow.
Just to recap here, you have basically: 1.) said Apple stuff sucks in the middle of a thread almost designed to be a flame war invitation; 2.) refused to explain why you think Apple sucks with any specificity; and 3.) given a follow-up response akin to "I don't have to tell you why I don't like New Zealanders. Just Google 'New Zealand' and read until your heart is content.'"
You, sir/madam either 1.) win the Internet brilliant troll of the year award; or 2.) should ask yourself why you bothered posting not just one comment but also two responses as of this writing where you could have just explained your problems with Apple in less text than it took to explain why it was beneath you to explain why you wouldn't explain what your problem with Apple was why you wouldn't NOMAD DOES NOT COMPUTE.
when journalism as a whole is essentially paid trolling for one agenda or another
If that's what you think, you are reading/watching/listening to the wrong news outlets. It's the same reaction I have when I hear people say "there's no good music anymore" - that's completely untrue. If the radio isn't playing the stuff you like, there are lots of other places you can find good stuff if you just invest the time to look.
There are plenty of high quality news organizations out there today which are dedicated to providing an even-handed, responsible professional journalism. It's true that, as was famously once said, "the only truly objective journalism is sports box scores." And you can - especially if you are looking for it - find some degree of bias in anything. But there's a 180 degree gap from the minor and inadvertent bias you may find in an Associated Press, BBC World, New York Times (or even Al Jazeera - the American not Qatari version) article versus the intentional bias you find in a FOX News or Huffington Post story.
To your previous point, though, I agree that bias-free reporting is not necessarily dull but is - by design - afraid to answer the "why" of the "Five W's" for fear of losing balance. I try to mix my news reading between (generally) unbiased news from NYT or BBC with biased but (from my viewpoint) more insightful sources like The Economist or Slate.
However, I am strongly opposed to the frequent Slashbot trope that "there is no professional journalism left, it's all biased" and hence there is in general no credibility gap between what the NY Times prints in its newspaper about the Ruble crisis vs. what "iwantputinsbaby07" posts to Twitter. Professional journalism is real, and it will always have a place of preferential credibility to unknown sources with unknown motivations. Meanwhile, slanted journalism will still probably generate the most clicks - but at least if you're picking your news sources to be pre-sorted to agree with your opinions, you know what you're buying.
* "wer", adult male (survives in a few words like virile and werewolf)
(Puts on pedantic hat.) You are correct that the Germanic/Old English "were" survives in words like "werewolf" and, for Tolkien fans only, "weregild" (as in "This I will have as weregild for my father's death" from the Silmarillion).
"Virile," however, comes from the Latin "virilis" via French. They are kinda sorta related but not really.
This is a gross oversimplification as any language scholar can tell you, but a fun exercise for any English language speaker is to study the roots of common "vulgar" vs. "high-class" words and find that their roots map very closely to Latin vs. Germanic. Old English was - once the native Celts and Romano-Britons had been displaced - largely a relic of its "Germanic" (Angles, Saxons, Jutes) conquerors and the language of the people. After the Norman Conquest in 1066 (Normans "Nord-mann" being transplanted Vikings who learned French) the language of the nobility in England became French (which was based on Latin) for hundreds of years. While over time the two melded together, you can still (again, oversimplifying) in many cases tell the upper-class terms for things (derived from French/Latin) from the lower-class terms for things (derived from Old English/Germanic). For example:
It doesn't hold true in all cases but it is in general a pretty fascinating window into the evolution of the English language, FWIW.
As a society its reasonable proposition that we would want our search engines to be competing on simply being the best search engine, without risk of it quietly subverting its integrety to push any other agenda / product / viewpoint / etc.
And this hypothetical search engine makes money how again?
Part of the problem here is a very poorly written (or edited) quote in the summary. The relevant quote from TFA is:
"Trying to combat climate change exclusively with today's renewable energy technologies simply won't work; we need a fundamentally different approach." (emphasis mine)
They aren't saying that today's renewables aren't good or important. They are saying that by themselves it won't get to where it needs to be, because carbon-emitting forms of energy will always be cheaper than the renewables of today (even including incremental improvements on those technologies in the foreseeable future), and the energy industry will always try to give people what they want: the cheapest energy possible. They then go on to posit (again from TFA):
"What's needed are zero-carbon energy sources so cheap that the operators of power plants and industrial facilities alike have an economic rationale for switching over within the next 40 years"
Of course, that's a bit like saying "I don't know how, but somebody should discover magic fairy dust." But they are not saying that they have the solution to the problem; they are saying that we collectively need to invest in finding some new, unknown rabbit to pull out of the hat because our current ones will never achieve their price parity objective.
Talk about it AFTER they did it for one
Then how would people who want their purchases to help benefit this charity know how, when and where to buy it? Part of the rationale of doing something like this is that some consumers will want to modify their purchasing decisions or timing to support a cause they find valuable.
Let's say Crucial.com was going to give a portion of the profits on all RAM purchases on a certain day to the EFF. Wouldn't you rather know when/what products that applies to, rather than have Crucial announce "hey, we gave part of our profits from yesterday to the EFF. Hope you bought then!"
Ooh, lots of dubious assertions to riposte. :-)
people could legitimately argue "you let that profit making company knowingly use your trademark for 0 dollars, so charging us more would be illegal"
There is nothing illegal about charging people different rates for the same thing unless the way you do it is in violation of regulated industry rules or non-discrimination laws. It is perfectly legal for me to sell identical used cars to you for $1000 and to the next guy for $2000 because you negotiated better. It is illegal for me to charge him $2000 because he's black and $1000 to you because you're white; or for my utility to charge you $200/kWh when the PUC says the maximum retail rate is $.00068/kWh. Similarly, there is nothing wrong for Disney to tell Apple they can put a Mickey Mouse icon for free on the Apple Watch but charge Microsoft $1M to do the same thing on the Microsoft Band. So no trademark legal danger there.
your theory that granting a nonexclusive license for qualifying noncommercial uses will weaken a trademark
Was the day-care center in question non-profit? Otherwise then, no, it is not a noncommercial use. Either way, it's not whether it's commercial or noncommercial use that matters in trademark law. If I'm Disney and a nonprofit children's shelter calls itself the "Bambi Adoption Center," they are still infringing on my trademark just as much as if they were for-profit. I could be nice and let them license the Bambi name for a penny, which is not Disney's strategy... but either way it's still actionable infringement. While commercial/non-commercial may have some meaning in OSS/CCA licensing, it means diddly squat in trademark law.
Why can't we sell this junk to the Ukrainians and make a profit
Fair question but unfortunately the answer is:
when they finally get him into the U.S.
Where does this keep coming from? He has not been charged with any crime in the US, nor have any judicial proceedings even been started against him. Sweden can't extradite him for this even if they wanted to. So why do people keep talking about this as a ploy to have him extradited to the U.S.? There is exactly as much proof (or even logic) that this whole thing is a US-led plot as there is that this was a plot by the U.K. to get him to flee there. Or that this was a plot led by Ecuador, Afghanistan or Vanuatu.
Apply Occam's razor (gently). Just maybe this is a guy who had sex with women in Sweden when they didn't want him to, and this is a crime in Sweden, and they want him back there to put him on trial... in Sweden. Just maybe.
it gives them no meaningful bonus of any kind - science or military wise
This is something that has long bothered me: what do they do on the ISS that is "important science" worth all the money and hassle? I can go read a list of experiments on the station, but it all sounds like picayune little science projects to me. Can somebody who knows more about this than me give me some context on what the heck is Really Important about work done on the ISS? Or do we just send people and things to it Because It's There?
the issue of whether the students were legally qualified to sue, known as standing, could be fatal to the studentsâ(TM) suit
Precisely this. The whole case is in an idealistic sense understandable - if you are in college and you aren't challenging the real or imagined injustices of the world in some way, you're missing the whole point of being young enough to still be self-absorbed and righteous, but not old enough to be in the real world. But from a practical view, it's just a bunch of overprivileged Harvard kids looking for something to protest and wasting the time of our overburdened court system in the process. My 18-year-old me would applaud them but my current 40-year-old self thinks they should shut the f**k up and go do something useful instead.
Disclaimer: I know several Harvard alumni and count a few of them as my friends. I am probably unfairly biased against Harvard since in my experience these alums are (sorry friends) not noticeably smarter than everyone else - in some cases less so - in a way that justifies a Harvard degree being an automatic ticket to wealth and insider access. Which, unfortunately, it is.
It's not good to put all your eggs in one basket.
Fair point, but Seattle is hardly a one-trick pony. Leaving aside Amazon... Microsoft, Boeing and Starbucks HQ are all major employers here. Just in tech alone, you also have Nintendo, Valve, Bungie, Disney Mobile and others here as well as satellite offices for Google, Facebook and (soon) Apple.
I think the point of the article (maybe?) is that Amazon is getting really big in Seattle, and the infrastructure here is already strained from the expanding tech industry. Amazon's growth could be more than the city can handle, dragging down quality of life for everyone.
Overall, the case is getting stranger with every relevation.
No, no it is not. This is a pretty blatant forgery - for a step-by-step walkthrough of what's obviously faked about it (including screenshots of the months-old Google Maps images and others that were used) please visit here.
Giving this any credence by saying the case "gets stranger" is like reading some 9/11 truther's article and saying that it makes the truth behind the attacks "more puzzling." It doesn't. It just shows that some people are either disconnected from the truth or (in this case) willing to actively fabricate things to obscure it.
So someone is trying to make it look like Russia is releasing this garbage which looks prepared by some Ukrainian half-wit.
Umm... if Russian is not "releasing" this, why is Russian state television showing this and claiming it is real?
DOES NOT COMPUTE... NOMAD ERROR? ERROR? ERROR? EXAMINE.
It's at "Naturally occurring". Analyse that part of the equation.
You seem to think that you understand the politics of Internet peering, but I don't think you actually do. Not trying to be a jerk, but if you haven't worked on this stuff at a large ISP this whole question seems far more black and white than it actually is.
The question of settlement-free peering vs. transit is almost as old as the Internet. Network A is bigger, and Network B is smaller (or Network A has significant in/out flows of traffic while Network B has largely unidirectional traffic). There are not many Network As out there and lots of Network Bs. Network A should not need to spend the money to put in direct links of whatever size to all the Network Bs out there. It makes sense to do so with other networks the size of Network A but not for private connections of whatever size Network B wants. So Network A says to Network B, "No free soup for you. Buy bandwidth from someone who does peer with me (or pays me to peer), or you can pay me to connect directly." If Network B is buying bandwidth from someone who doesn't have big enough connections to Network A (or doesn't want to pay for bigger connections) then there can be congestion.
This is not new. It is not unique to Netflix. It is very common, in fact, with anyone using Netflix's traditional cheap-ass bandwidth provider, Cogent. (I use cheap-ass not as a compliment to Cogent's low rates but as a descriptor of the quality of their peering and transit links.) You can make a reasonable argument that Netflix is unique and should be given a pass on paying for transit because of customers of the ISP wanting that data. But from the ISP's perspective that creates a slippery slope (because everybody's traffic is important to someone) and all the smaller networks will want the same exception... maybe even to the point of being willing to sue over it or stage a damaging publicity war over it like Netflix did. For the big ISPs, they feel the need to hold firm on this question to avoid that slippery slope.
It sucks that peering is inherently political, and besides that nobody likes Comcast. But please stop trying to make the Netflix peering thing sound like something more nefarious than it actually is.
Centuries of study show us that many homeopathic cures do work.
I am not sure that you understand what "study" means in a modern scientific sense. If there are any of those showing the efficacy of homeopathy, please provide links - I am genuinely interested in seeing them (not snide, seriously).
As an example, I have a medical doctor who suggested drinking camomile tea to help me sleep, and it works. He could have prescribed a man made chemical to do the same thing
Now I am not sure that you understand what homeopathy means. Read the linked Wiki page to understand (it involves ingesting ridiculously diluted chemicals to purportedly cure illnesses on the utterly unsubstantiated theories of "like cures like" and "water memory."
I think what you're referring to is naturopathy, which is a whole different kettle of fish. My wife is a big believer in naturopathy, and while I think some of it is touchy-feely new age quackery, there is no dispute that naturally occurring plants, herbs and other medicinal sources can be effective healing tools. So no argument there.
My personal $.02 is that many people who prefer naturopathic medicine and oppose GMOs - my wife among them - do so not from a scientific viewpoint but from a moral viewpoint. Many of us would much rather trust things that grow naturally than are made artificially. But while it may ultimately prove true that some GMOs are harmful, I strongly believe that we should come to that conclusion through scientific study, not because we "feel" that something lab-created is inferior to something made by human science.
Nature made the Black Plague, tobacco, lard and the Destroying Angel mushrooms, too. Just because it's natural doesn't necessarily make it better for you, or make man-created things bad.