Is there anyone, living or dead, that represents your views? David Ben Gurion? Alabama's Bull Connors? FDR? Margaret Thatcher? Danger Mouse? Write them in. If enough people list that name, someone might stop to wonder why.
Ok, you've voted. But you're not done now. None of the parties are representing your views, and this is something you can work on. Write letters. Get involved in local issues. Help Ralph Reed capture another school board. Lobby for better homeless shelters. Whatever. Just accept that your involvement in the political process needs to be more than punching a card every four years followed by an evening of drunken CNN viewing.
With the possible exception of their supreme court nominees, there may be little difference between the corporate lackey on the left and the corporate lackey on the right. This does not excuse you from making a choice.
When your mom/significant other/trustee asks you "Hon, you want Chunky or Creamy peanut butter for lunch?", you have at least four choices.
I'd like chunky.
I'd like creamy.
Fuck that, I want Pad Thai today!
I don't have a preference.
So you think proportional representation, national socialism, or direct democracy with a *nix backend is the way to go. You're unhappy with the current system. So instead of using the limited tools you have at hand, you're going to
deliberately choose not to participate in this election, and make [your] reasons known, rather than shrugging and ignoring it. Perhaps then, the Beltway might really buckle a bit.
Bullshit. Failing to vote doesn't tell those in power "I want to go out for crepes," it wimpers "I guess peanut butter's ok." Unless you have the money to buy a member of the house or senate, voting is one of the most powerfull tools you have to effect change in the system.
You can read about this in a fairly good book by Dan Neil, The Firecracker Boys. An interesting look at our attempts to move beyond civil engineering and into Geographical Engineering.
Yeah, that whole ARPA NET thing hasn't really worked out.
I also find the interstate highway system to be a disapointing second to the fine state maintained roads I've travelled in the wilds of New Hampshire (Live Free or Die!)
The reality is that there is a role for the Federal Government, and that is expressing the will of the people. Does it frequently falter in this role? Yes. Does that mean we should devolve all powers to the states and prepare for a class war between say Alabama and New York? I don't think so.
I may never have had a formal logic class, but I was writing better straw man arguments than you when I was in high school.
A micromanager (easy to be when you have the intellectual ability to know tasks outside your sphere) has the risk of losing sight of the big picture while mired in the details.
Whereas GWB is likely to lose track of the big picture because he set it down, walked away, and couldn't remember where he left it.
I'm tired of hearing how Reagan was great because he was stupid, and how it's time to put another idiot in the white house. You ask wouldn't you feel better knowing that what you see is probably what you'll get? With Gore, or Nader, or McCain, or Bradley, or even god forbid Buchanan, we'd know what we were getting. With Bush, you're betting on the ability of a stupid guy to pick smart advisors. Remember that you are voting for the President, and not the members of the Cabinet.
But the richest 20% are earning 49.4% of the income!
According to US Census Data the richest 5% of Americans earned 21.5% of the income last year, and the richest 20% earned 49.4% of the income. Assuming a linear relationship between these figures (a falacy I'm sure, but I'm making this up as I go along) the top 10% is earning about 35% of the aggregate income. Thus paying a third of the tax burden is not disproportionate. (Note that this is all 1999 data)
I'm heartened to note that you don't immediately corolate disproportionate taxation and unfair taxation. The reality is and has always been that taxation levels are both a revenue tool and a social policy tool. And like any other tool, they can be used for evil (using that hammer to kill someone) or good (using that hammer to fix your NT server).
If either Bush, Cheney, Gore or Lieberman cared a whit about children, they would shriek instead about the paucity of decent Internet access -- and even decent computers -- in America's public elementary and middle schools.
American schools face far greater crises than the availability of decent workstations and fat pipes. The shortage of skilled, motivated, and inspiring teachers springs immediately to mind. Granted it's been a couple of years since high school, but I do seem to remember some of the things that were wrong with my school. It didn't matter that only a few of us could waste time BBSing in the back of the chem lab. The problem was the overabundance of teachers named "coach".
Computer skills training, access on online resources, and enhanced colaboration through the net may compliment efforts to improve our schools. But these are not a complete fix for a system in crisis. And in a year in which vouchers are touted as the solution to all educational problems, anyone who cares a whit about children has a lot more to worry about.
If I buy a bunch of radios from Motorolla directly, I expect that they will throw this data into their marketing database. If I buy those same radios from Akhbar and Jeff's Digital Wireless Hut, I could expect that data would stay with Akhbar and Jeff.
Now I can expect marketing materials from Akhbar and Jeff, and Motorolla, and if they aren't lying about improving the marketing efforts of their other dealers, every other Motorolla dealer in my statistical metropolitan area. Figure that my spam/phone/junk mail volume for radios is going to tripple, and I'm still gonna have people that want to sell me vinyl siding. The harm to me as a consumer and private citizen is clear, and the only benefit is a fat wad of glossy brocures. When I want product info (ie. just before a major purchase) I'll find it myself thanks.
I was working with the USDA Forest Circus when they decided to switch Lotus Notes/Domino as their email system nationally. Notes may be a DB product, but it is certainly marketed as a mail product.
Although I agree that anyone switching to this product strictly for it's mail functions (as they did) is phucked, I have to contest your statement that "there's nothing particularly wrong with Notes/Domino". In spite of the fact that it offers lots of groovy calendaring functions, it's an email client that the users cannot import their personal address books to. Even after I'd converted several outlook and applixware (shudder) address books to tab delimited flat files, the IBM-employee Lotus gurus we'd brought in to facilitate the switchover insisted it couldn't be done.
Did IBM just assume that no one who had used another email client would ever switch to notes? Actually, that may be a fair assessment.
Don't have the pitstop plugin? Can't be bothered to cut and paste every black box on your screen?
Right Click
Find
Enter Value "Top Secret"
Strike Enter Key
I'm not going to jump to the conclusion that someone who has a security clearance is a government lapdog. But it is something to consider. If many reputable academic programs refused to review the program due to the NDA, it's telling that the agency found parties who can be trusted not to spill the beans. Thus an honest and independent review may still be conducted, and the FBI can just sit on the results.
Given that carnivore is a packet sniffer, we can all make some assumptions about what it can do. The real question is what the GUI allows Special Agent Bob of the East Goatlick field office to search for. If he is restricted to filtering for user-specific routing information, then slashdotters should only have to worry about the constitutionaly of using this tool. If he can filter all your ISP's traffic for hacking and "national security related" keywords, then we should all be worried about the constitutionality of using this tool.
In the end it's not the functionality of the software in question, it's the potential for quickly and easily violating the Fourth Ammendment.
Well, it's easy enough to use a SecurID or similar scheme
That's the problem. It's not easy enough to do anything. The hoops you have to jump through to acquire software or hardware on a large scale (ie. agency wide) basis must be impressive. Otherwise the 18 month unsuccessfull trial of Bogus Notes 5.0 would have convinced them not to implement it nationally.
You might be able to pull something together locally by jumping through a different set of contracts and regulations, but you're still screwed. "Oh, our servers are ever so much more secure than the regional office."
That said I agree with you that SecureID type solution would be a positive step. Hopefully someone still in the agency is reading this too.
As a term employee with the Forest Circus I was amazed at how little the employees understood about security. Any password that was not username1 or username2 was a pet/spouse/child's name. And root on the servers was just as simple.
When a temp asks you to restart a printer queue for the second time and you give him the server passwords and door combo, security isn't even a bad joke. Forget about DoD web pages getting "owned". The issue is a vast collection of financial, tax, and research data that's available to any techie who helps fix a federal employee's home computer and asks for a password to "test" the VPN. Until user security is adressed systematically, upgrading the firewalls is a waste of time and resources.
A request, if someone is thinking of writing their own. The old catalog system at the University of Washington Libraries allowed searching on multiple fields. For example, you could combine author "clark" with keyword "trail" to find Lewis & Clark related materials without scrolling past A. Clark's Acrylic Plastic Spherical Pressure Hull For Continental Shelf Depths.
Unfortunately, this functionality is disabled in their new catalog (html or telnet). This is a simple task for any database, but I can't remember a library I've visited in years that allows it.
There have been a couple of comments speculating that it was a "hot run" or a torpedo that started with the tube still closed. If this one of the supercavitation torpedos, it's good to keep in mind that these are ROCKET POWERED.
Firing a rocket in a closed cylinder could conceivably lead to a small explosion without detonating the warhead. Of course, this is just rampant speculation.
I haven't seen such a poorly written straw man argument since I was in high school. Consider an opposite ruling in which the judge wrote:
Plantiffs, on the other hand, are adherents of a movement that believes that information is the sole property of the creator or distributor and that the sound, images, words and data produced by their studios belong not to the purchaser but to the corporation. They argue that the corporation shall define exactly what uses you can make of your own books, movies or CDs. Less radically, they have raised a concern that tools for viewing DVDs on *nix or Be boxes may lead to increased levels of unauthorized reproduction.
The use of inflammatory and misleading prose in the section of the text most likely to be quoted by the media (short paragraphs, no footnotes, no Latin) is hard to construe as anything other than an attempt to direct public sentiment against hackers/crackers, and geeks by association.
My "local" ISP in New Hampshire sat at the end of a single long T1 line from Boston. As you might imagine, this means anything from a guy with a backhoe to Bell Atlantic can knock you offline. Unlike a real colo that would be scrambling to restore service, the help desk guys would deny having connectivity problems even when confronted with traceroute transcripts.
If you could get away with the level of service your ISP provides, you could get away with DSL or a cable modem. Or two coconuts and a string. Of course, now I walk past AboveNet's San Jose facility every day, and wouldn't have to worry about hosting a box with Bob and Dave's Discount Internet Hut.
The fun was in building the cars, not in pushing them around the table top. Years before I'd heard of a crash test dummy I was building lego cars to survive high speed offset head on collisions. Once a design could stand up to multiple "accidents" with the neighbor kids' cars, I'd start worrying about the down-the-stairs-and-jump-the-family-room test.
I think the poster who called for a functional lego car had the right idea. Now that I know what I'm driving to burningman, I just need to come up with buckets of cash to swap for buckets of legos.
Amazon isn't going to start impersonating me and using my limited credit. The greasy looking kid working the counter at hollywood video, however, might use my card to fill in the gaps in his gf's hello kitty collection.
If he's got my fingerprint now instead of my card number, he's got my purchasing power for life.
Slashdot Mirror
Is there anyone, living or dead, that represents your views? David Ben Gurion? Alabama's Bull Connors? FDR? Margaret Thatcher? Danger Mouse? Write them in. If enough people list that name, someone might stop to wonder why.
Ok, you've voted. But you're not done now. None of the parties are representing your views, and this is something you can work on. Write letters. Get involved in local issues. Help Ralph Reed capture another school board. Lobby for better homeless shelters. Whatever. Just accept that your involvement in the political process needs to be more than punching a card every four years followed by an evening of drunken CNN viewing.
With the possible exception of their supreme court nominees, there may be little difference between the corporate lackey on the left and the corporate lackey on the right. This does not excuse you from making a choice.
When your mom/significant other/trustee asks you "Hon, you want Chunky or Creamy peanut butter for lunch?", you have at least four choices.
So you think proportional representation, national socialism, or direct democracy with a *nix backend is the way to go. You're unhappy with the current system. So instead of using the limited tools you have at hand, you're going to deliberately choose not to participate in this election, and make [your] reasons known, rather than shrugging and ignoring it. Perhaps then, the Beltway might really buckle a bit.
Bullshit. Failing to vote doesn't tell those in power "I want to go out for crepes," it wimpers "I guess peanut butter's ok." Unless you have the money to buy a member of the house or senate, voting is one of the most powerfull tools you have to effect change in the system.
You can read about this in a fairly good book by Dan Neil, The Firecracker Boys. An interesting look at our attempts to move beyond civil engineering and into Geographical Engineering.
Yeah, that whole ARPA NET thing hasn't really worked out.
I also find the interstate highway system to be a disapointing second to the fine state maintained roads I've travelled in the wilds of New Hampshire (Live Free or Die!)
The reality is that there is a role for the Federal Government, and that is expressing the will of the people. Does it frequently falter in this role? Yes. Does that mean we should devolve all powers to the states and prepare for a class war between say Alabama and New York? I don't think so.
I may never have had a formal logic class, but I was writing better straw man arguments than you when I was in high school.
A micromanager (easy to be when you have the intellectual ability to know tasks outside your sphere) has the risk of losing sight of the big picture while mired in the details.
Whereas GWB is likely to lose track of the big picture because he set it down, walked away, and couldn't remember where he left it.
I'm tired of hearing how Reagan was great because he was stupid, and how it's time to put another idiot in the white house. You ask wouldn't you feel better knowing that what you see is probably what you'll get? With Gore, or Nader, or McCain, or Bradley, or even god forbid Buchanan, we'd know what we were getting. With Bush, you're betting on the ability of a stupid guy to pick smart advisors. Remember that you are voting for the President, and not the members of the Cabinet.
But the richest 20% are earning 49.4% of the income!
According to US Census Data the richest 5% of Americans earned 21.5% of the income last year, and the richest 20% earned 49.4% of the income. Assuming a linear relationship between these figures (a falacy I'm sure, but I'm making this up as I go along) the top 10% is earning about 35% of the aggregate income. Thus paying a third of the tax burden is not disproportionate. (Note that this is all 1999 data)
I'm heartened to note that you don't immediately corolate disproportionate taxation and unfair taxation. The reality is and has always been that taxation levels are both a revenue tool and a social policy tool. And like any other tool, they can be used for evil (using that hammer to kill someone) or good (using that hammer to fix your NT server).
If either Bush, Cheney, Gore or Lieberman cared a whit about children, they would shriek instead about the paucity of decent Internet access -- and even decent computers -- in America's public elementary and middle schools.
American schools face far greater crises than the availability of decent workstations and fat pipes. The shortage of skilled, motivated, and inspiring teachers springs immediately to mind. Granted it's been a couple of years since high school, but I do seem to remember some of the things that were wrong with my school. It didn't matter that only a few of us could waste time BBSing in the back of the chem lab. The problem was the overabundance of teachers named "coach".
Computer skills training, access on online resources, and enhanced colaboration through the net may compliment efforts to improve our schools. But these are not a complete fix for a system in crisis. And in a year in which vouchers are touted as the solution to all educational problems, anyone who cares a whit about children has a lot more to worry about.
If I buy a bunch of radios from Motorolla directly, I expect that they will throw this data into their marketing database. If I buy those same radios from Akhbar and Jeff's Digital Wireless Hut, I could expect that data would stay with Akhbar and Jeff.
Now I can expect marketing materials from Akhbar and Jeff, and Motorolla, and if they aren't lying about improving the marketing efforts of their other dealers, every other Motorolla dealer in my statistical metropolitan area. Figure that my spam/phone/junk mail volume for radios is going to tripple, and I'm still gonna have people that want to sell me vinyl siding. The harm to me as a consumer and private citizen is clear, and the only benefit is a fat wad of glossy brocures. When I want product info (ie. just before a major purchase) I'll find it myself thanks.
I was working with the USDA Forest Circus when they decided to switch Lotus Notes/Domino as their email system nationally. Notes may be a DB product, but it is certainly marketed as a mail product.
Although I agree that anyone switching to this product strictly for it's mail functions (as they did) is phucked, I have to contest your statement that "there's nothing particularly wrong with Notes/Domino". In spite of the fact that it offers lots of groovy calendaring functions, it's an email client that the users cannot import their personal address books to. Even after I'd converted several outlook and applixware (shudder) address books to tab delimited flat files, the IBM-employee Lotus gurus we'd brought in to facilitate the switchover insisted it couldn't be done.
Did IBM just assume that no one who had used another email client would ever switch to notes? Actually, that may be a fair assessment.
Don't have the pitstop plugin? Can't be bothered to cut and paste every black box on your screen?
I'm not going to jump to the conclusion that someone who has a security clearance is a government lapdog. But it is something to consider. If many reputable academic programs refused to review the program due to the NDA, it's telling that the agency found parties who can be trusted not to spill the beans. Thus an honest and independent review may still be conducted, and the FBI can just sit on the results.
Given that carnivore is a packet sniffer, we can all make some assumptions about what it can do. The real question is what the GUI allows Special Agent Bob of the East Goatlick field office to search for. If he is restricted to filtering for user-specific routing information, then slashdotters should only have to worry about the constitutionaly of using this tool. If he can filter all your ISP's traffic for hacking and "national security related" keywords, then we should all be worried about the constitutionality of using this tool.
In the end it's not the functionality of the software in question, it's the potential for quickly and easily violating the Fourth Ammendment.
Well, it's easy enough to use a SecurID or similar scheme
That's the problem. It's not easy enough to do anything. The hoops you have to jump through to acquire software or hardware on a large scale (ie. agency wide) basis must be impressive. Otherwise the 18 month unsuccessfull trial of Bogus Notes 5.0 would have convinced them not to implement it nationally.
You might be able to pull something together locally by jumping through a different set of contracts and regulations, but you're still screwed. "Oh, our servers are ever so much more secure than the regional office."
That said I agree with you that SecureID type solution would be a positive step. Hopefully someone still in the agency is reading this too.
As a term employee with the Forest Circus I was amazed at how little the employees understood about security. Any password that was not username1 or username2 was a pet/spouse/child's name. And root on the servers was just as simple.
When a temp asks you to restart a printer queue for the second time and you give him the server passwords and door combo, security isn't even a bad joke. Forget about DoD web pages getting "owned". The issue is a vast collection of financial, tax, and research data that's available to any techie who helps fix a federal employee's home computer and asks for a password to "test" the VPN. Until user security is adressed systematically, upgrading the firewalls is a waste of time and resources.
Finally Crystal Pepsi will receive the attention and popularity it so richly deserved. Of course, I'll have to switch from Guiness to Zima.
A request, if someone is thinking of writing their own. The old catalog system at the University of Washington Libraries allowed searching on multiple fields. For example, you could combine author "clark" with keyword "trail" to find Lewis & Clark related materials without scrolling past A. Clark's Acrylic Plastic Spherical Pressure Hull For Continental Shelf Depths.
Unfortunately, this functionality is disabled in their new catalog (html or telnet). This is a simple task for any database, but I can't remember a library I've visited in years that allows it.
There have been a couple of comments speculating that it was a "hot run" or a torpedo that started with the tube still closed. If this one of the supercavitation torpedos, it's good to keep in mind that these are ROCKET POWERED.
Firing a rocket in a closed cylinder could conceivably lead to a small explosion without detonating the warhead. Of course, this is just rampant speculation.
I haven't seen such a poorly written straw man argument since I was in high school. Consider an opposite ruling in which the judge wrote:
Plantiffs, on the other hand, are adherents of a movement that believes that information is the sole property of the creator or distributor and that the sound, images, words and data produced by their studios belong not to the purchaser but to the corporation. They argue that the corporation shall define exactly what uses you can make of your own books, movies or CDs. Less radically, they have raised a concern that tools for viewing DVDs on *nix or Be boxes may lead to increased levels of unauthorized reproduction.
The use of inflammatory and misleading prose in the section of the text most likely to be quoted by the media (short paragraphs, no footnotes, no Latin) is hard to construe as anything other than an attempt to direct public sentiment against hackers/crackers, and geeks by association.
My "local" ISP in New Hampshire sat at the end of a single long T1 line from Boston. As you might imagine, this means anything from a guy with a backhoe to Bell Atlantic can knock you offline. Unlike a real colo that would be scrambling to restore service, the help desk guys would deny having connectivity problems even when confronted with traceroute transcripts.
If you could get away with the level of service your ISP provides, you could get away with DSL or a cable modem. Or two coconuts and a string. Of course, now I walk past AboveNet's San Jose facility every day, and wouldn't have to worry about hosting a box with Bob and Dave's Discount Internet Hut.
The fun was in building the cars, not in pushing them around the table top. Years before I'd heard of a crash test dummy I was building lego cars to survive high speed offset head on collisions. Once a design could stand up to multiple "accidents" with the neighbor kids' cars, I'd start worrying about the down-the-stairs-and-jump-the-family-room test.
I think the poster who called for a functional lego car had the right idea. Now that I know what I'm driving to burningman, I just need to come up with buckets of cash to swap for buckets of legos.
If he's got my fingerprint now instead of my card number, he's got my purchasing power for life.