So half of them weren't even fired - they were allowed to resign. Sure, no more security clearance, but nothing to stop them just going to the private sector.
I imagine the NSA wanted to keep things quiet, and letting someone resign is a lot easier to cover up.
I have a macbook pro. Apple are loathe to break the smoothness of their cases with something so practical as a vent hole - as best I can figure out, this thing sucks air in through the cracks around the keys and exausts it through a slit concealed by the lid hinge. It can get very hot if you close the lid, as this blocks the keyboard circulation.
Perhaps true, but I'm not sure it matters that much: eSATA or Thunderbolt, unless you're connecting to a rather large RAID 0 array or some very, very high-end flash hardware the drives themselves will be the bottleneck. The latest eSATA can do well over one giga*byte* per second. Not many drives will hit that.
1 in 40,000 that we know of. The real number may be many times that. There's also minimal sanction: They get fired, but that's it. For an act like that, there really ought to be criminal charges.
Snowden wasn't a high-up NSA officer. He was a lowly contractor, and could only sneak out so much of that little he did have access to. For all that he has revealed, it's almost certainly just a tiny fraction of what the NSA is up to. There are probably all manner of even worse things they were so secret about Snowden didn't have access. I wouldn't be at all surprised if they were involved in manipulating elections around the world to favor US-friendly politicians, or stealing commercially sensitive information from non-American companies and handing it over to American (we all know China does the same!), or such scandalous activities as that.
You could still call it the 'Land of the free-er-than-most.'
There isn't really much to judge the 'brave' on any more. No domestic wars in living memory, no wilderness in need of conquoring, no natives left to forceibly display. Life is quite comfortable for most, so there just isn't any need for brave.
If Obama announced his intention to limit the powers of the NSA and impose more oversight from congress and the courts, then you can be confident that within a week there will be a republican-sponsored bill to remove what oversight they already have. It's a game of two sides: What one does, the other automatically opposes.
If they had prevented any terrorist attacks, they'd be shouting it from the rooftops right now in an attempt to win more political support and counter any representatives who question their broad spying progams.
Read the rest of the comment. That was the point. It isn't always the case that someone else aquired those assets, but it very often is, and it can take a lot of research to determine who they ended up with after thirty years of business dealings.
But exactly which breaker do you have to aim for to cause it to cascade? Causing a small outage is easy: Shoot things until the lights go off. Taking power down to half a state or more is another thing altogether. It may look easy to you, but it isn't to someone who has only a theoretical understanding of power grids in general. It's not easy to know which breakers just cut off power to a small area and which ones would cause a line to go down and the load to fail-over to another, near-overload line.
Replacing the breakers isn't a huge time-taking repair. Load parts onto truck, man drives truck to substation, man spends a couple of hours at most fixing things up.
Knock a pylon down - and that should be doable using only a little climbing gear and readily-available petrol-driven power tools or cutters - and it'll take lots of heavy metal, a crane, potentially days or a week or work and a whole crew. By which time you've knocked down ten more.
To trigger a cascade failure would require an intimate knowledge of the grid's normal operation. It could be done, but only if you've a man on the inside with years of experience.
An attacker would be better off using google's aerial view to identify the major lines into a city and just knocking down a few pylons on each one.
Never mind the guns. Pylon, meet cutting disc. Or cutting torch. I imagine re-erecting one of those would take a couple of days - and it should only take minutes to bring one down.
In much the same way as possessing more than a set (small) amount of some narcotics is considered intent to supply, or giving someone a copyright-infringing work in exchange for another makes it a for-profit commercial operation. It's just a bit of legal trickery put in to allow prosecutors to justify harsher sentencing without seeming too overtly draconian.
Some of the offers are complicated. A common one here in the UK is 'buy three items, cheapest free.' In an offer like that it'd be impossible to determine what the discount is until the order is ready to finalise.
The only analogy I can see that applies would be if a brick-and-mortar store gave a discount due to a procedural error - perhaps someone mistakenly sending the January sales order in March rather than the annual tax reminder, or a junior employee putting up the wrong sign and casheers assuming they were just out of the loop. That's basically what's happening here: Someone screws up and a sale is put into effect that wasn't supposed to happen.
We still won't shut up about their quite humiliating defeat at Agincourt, and that was six hundred years ago. They outnumbered us substantially, and we were fighting on their own ground with an army exausted and cut off from supplies - and still managed to slaughter nine thousand of so of their soldiers, while losing little more than a hundred of our own.
That only exempts them from the anti-circumvention provisions. Plain old copyright law still applies.
A lot of the old games will have effectively lapsed now simply because their owning legal entities ceased to exist, but confirming that poses quite a challenge itsself. Just because the publisher is out of business doesn't mean the game is in the public domain - there may well have been a selling-off of rights during bankruptcy, or another company may have aquired the defunct publisher.
How hard? Well, let us say you have a game called The Lords of Midnight, published by Beyond Software. You look it up, and Beyond Software is long defunct. Game good for the taking, right? Well, no: Beyond Software was aquired by Telecomsoft, so you need to look them up too. Also defunct. Good? No, because Telecomsoft (Better known as 'Firebird') was actually owned by BT, the British telephone company, who (AFAIK) still retain the copyright. That was an easy case, it was all documented on wikipedia and the companies involved are very well-known. Identifying the true owner of something more obscure is a much more difficult prospect.
Legally, it isn't a grey area: It's civil infringement at the very least. The only area in which the 'not freely available' may come into play would be deciding upon the damages. If there is any copy-prevention technology involved or if you accept payment in any manner for distributing the roms, including accepting other infringing data in return (ie, using a torrent client) then it's also a criminal offense in the US under the DMCA and NET Act respectively.
On the other hand, screw the law. It's an unfair, counterproductive, rampantly abused law resulting only from a century of corporate lobbying and I have no respect for it whatsoever.
Actually I was arguing that if everyone does it, all must do it. As with any other area of protectionism. It's your basic game theory:
- If no-one does it, all achieve modest success (ie, cultural influence) - If some do it and some don't, those who do achieve great success at the expense of those who do not. - Therefore if some start doing it, everyone else has to join in to achieve an even playing field again.
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So half of them weren't even fired - they were allowed to resign. Sure, no more security clearance, but nothing to stop them just going to the private sector.
I imagine the NSA wanted to keep things quiet, and letting someone resign is a lot easier to cover up.
I have a macbook pro in my lap. I just examined the bottom. It's a seamless, unbroken plate of metal. Maybe your model is different.
I have a macbook pro. Apple are loathe to break the smoothness of their cases with something so practical as a vent hole - as best I can figure out, this thing sucks air in through the cracks around the keys and exausts it through a slit concealed by the lid hinge. It can get very hot if you close the lid, as this blocks the keyboard circulation.
Correction: I misread something. The fastest eSATA is actually only 600MB/s. Still doesn't matter: You'd need multiple SSDs in parallel to hit that.
Perhaps true, but I'm not sure it matters that much: eSATA or Thunderbolt, unless you're connecting to a rather large RAID 0 array or some very, very high-end flash hardware the drives themselves will be the bottleneck. The latest eSATA can do well over one giga*byte* per second. Not many drives will hit that.
1 in 40,000 that we know of. The real number may be many times that. There's also minimal sanction: They get fired, but that's it. For an act like that, there really ought to be criminal charges.
Snowden wasn't a high-up NSA officer. He was a lowly contractor, and could only sneak out so much of that little he did have access to. For all that he has revealed, it's almost certainly just a tiny fraction of what the NSA is up to. There are probably all manner of even worse things they were so secret about Snowden didn't have access. I wouldn't be at all surprised if they were involved in manipulating elections around the world to favor US-friendly politicians, or stealing commercially sensitive information from non-American companies and handing it over to American (we all know China does the same!), or such scandalous activities as that.
You could still call it the 'Land of the free-er-than-most.'
There isn't really much to judge the 'brave' on any more. No domestic wars in living memory, no wilderness in need of conquoring, no natives left to forceibly display. Life is quite comfortable for most, so there just isn't any need for brave.
No abuses?
One word:
Loveint
Politics is compliacted.
If Obama announced his intention to limit the powers of the NSA and impose more oversight from congress and the courts, then you can be confident that within a week there will be a republican-sponsored bill to remove what oversight they already have. It's a game of two sides: What one does, the other automatically opposes.
Don't. You can get gas-powered friers. Use those, put a canister of propane in the middle.
Then turn it on by remote control from a safe distance. Such that you have to watch it through a telescope.
If they had prevented any terrorist attacks, they'd be shouting it from the rooftops right now in an attempt to win more political support and counter any representatives who question their broad spying progams.
Read the rest of the comment. That was the point. It isn't always the case that someone else aquired those assets, but it very often is, and it can take a lot of research to determine who they ended up with after thirty years of business dealings.
But exactly which breaker do you have to aim for to cause it to cascade? Causing a small outage is easy: Shoot things until the lights go off. Taking power down to half a state or more is another thing altogether. It may look easy to you, but it isn't to someone who has only a theoretical understanding of power grids in general. It's not easy to know which breakers just cut off power to a small area and which ones would cause a line to go down and the load to fail-over to another, near-overload line.
Replacing the breakers isn't a huge time-taking repair. Load parts onto truck, man drives truck to substation, man spends a couple of hours at most fixing things up.
Knock a pylon down - and that should be doable using only a little climbing gear and readily-available petrol-driven power tools or cutters - and it'll take lots of heavy metal, a crane, potentially days or a week or work and a whole crew. By which time you've knocked down ten more.
To trigger a cascade failure would require an intimate knowledge of the grid's normal operation. It could be done, but only if you've a man on the inside with years of experience.
An attacker would be better off using google's aerial view to identify the major lines into a city and just knocking down a few pylons on each one.
Never mind the guns. Pylon, meet cutting disc. Or cutting torch. I imagine re-erecting one of those would take a couple of days - and it should only take minutes to bring one down.
In much the same way as possessing more than a set (small) amount of some narcotics is considered intent to supply, or giving someone a copyright-infringing work in exchange for another makes it a for-profit commercial operation. It's just a bit of legal trickery put in to allow prosecutors to justify harsher sentencing without seeming too overtly draconian.
Some of the offers are complicated. A common one here in the UK is 'buy three items, cheapest free.' In an offer like that it'd be impossible to determine what the discount is until the order is ready to finalise.
The only analogy I can see that applies would be if a brick-and-mortar store gave a discount due to a procedural error - perhaps someone mistakenly sending the January sales order in March rather than the annual tax reminder, or a junior employee putting up the wrong sign and casheers assuming they were just out of the loop. That's basically what's happening here: Someone screws up and a sale is put into effect that wasn't supposed to happen.
I'm British. We *invented* bashing the French.
We still won't shut up about their quite humiliating defeat at Agincourt, and that was six hundred years ago. They outnumbered us substantially, and we were fighting on their own ground with an army exausted and cut off from supplies - and still managed to slaughter nine thousand of so of their soldiers, while losing little more than a hundred of our own.
Nope. In such an event, the copyright holder simply sues for statutory damages instead.
That only exempts them from the anti-circumvention provisions. Plain old copyright law still applies.
A lot of the old games will have effectively lapsed now simply because their owning legal entities ceased to exist, but confirming that poses quite a challenge itsself. Just because the publisher is out of business doesn't mean the game is in the public domain - there may well have been a selling-off of rights during bankruptcy, or another company may have aquired the defunct publisher.
How hard? Well, let us say you have a game called The Lords of Midnight, published by Beyond Software. You look it up, and Beyond Software is long defunct. Game good for the taking, right? Well, no: Beyond Software was aquired by Telecomsoft, so you need to look them up too. Also defunct. Good? No, because Telecomsoft (Better known as 'Firebird') was actually owned by BT, the British telephone company, who (AFAIK) still retain the copyright. That was an easy case, it was all documented on wikipedia and the companies involved are very well-known. Identifying the true owner of something more obscure is a much more difficult prospect.
Legally, it isn't a grey area: It's civil infringement at the very least. The only area in which the 'not freely available' may come into play would be deciding upon the damages. If there is any copy-prevention technology involved or if you accept payment in any manner for distributing the roms, including accepting other infringing data in return (ie, using a torrent client) then it's also a criminal offense in the US under the DMCA and NET Act respectively.
On the other hand, screw the law. It's an unfair, counterproductive, rampantly abused law resulting only from a century of corporate lobbying and I have no respect for it whatsoever.
Actually I was arguing that if everyone does it, all must do it. As with any other area of protectionism. It's your basic game theory:
- If no-one does it, all achieve modest success (ie, cultural influence)
- If some do it and some don't, those who do achieve great success at the expense of those who do not.
- Therefore if some start doing it, everyone else has to join in to achieve an even playing field again.