i use it to shave my face and it's the best. it's sort of scented, so you end up smelling like shaved pussy, and there are worse things to smell like:-)
That's why I wash up after sex anyway. I don't mind smelling like vanilla, but that other scent is kinda difficult to explain to others.
I am detecting a pattern here though... Al Gore seems to find a good idea in progress, champion it, and (at least awkwardly) take some type of credit for it... in this case he is a bit behind the X-prize foundation [xprize.org] and NASA with its COTS Program [wikipedia.org] and Centennial Challenges [nasa.gov]. (I'll leave out his recent championing of Global Warming since he has a pretty well established environmental record)
Um, maybe our problem with Gore is that we don't typically "reward" politicans when the real achievement seems to be by another team and all the politican did was not kill off the program through laws or regulations that he could have introduced. If Gore was actually the project lead for one of these programs, then we'd give him credit for the team's achievements. Just not killing the program or supporting from way behind isn't enough to get most people to support you.
I pity you. Truly. To have so little regard for human rights and decency that you think putting this guy in a place where he will probably be raped reapeatedly, beaten and stand a greatly increased chance of developing a chemical dependency degrades us all, including you.
All for sharing a 1s and 0s.
Was he wrong? Undoubtedly. But until the law catches up with this class of crime, this is simply mob justice.
I disagree with that it's "mob justice." Mainly because if it was mob justice the mob would go over the RIAA or MPAA or several other annoying copyright holders and apply their "justice" to those individuals rather to this guy. From scaning slashdot, it sounds like it was a warez site. Has anyone keep up with the overall number of Warez related arrests and convictions over the last 10-15 years? I'm getting curious to look it if its even possible. Warez or copyright crimes aren't something that the crime stats sort by. The software or media companies generally work with FBI or other national level police orgs tracking down entire Warez groups at a time when possible. I didn't read the article. It sounds fishy that only one arrest was made if it was an actual Warez arrest. Maybe they wanted to use this guy to bring others down, but with BT he just didn't know anyone else.
It's going to be funny when no one rushs out to buy either a HD DVD or BlueRay player and then return the freebie discs to the store that they purchased their product from and tell the store: "These "free DVDs" don't work I'm returning them for DVDs that work." When BestBuy folks try to explain that these HD-DVDs or BluRay free movies require the purchase of a very expensive player, consumers are going to either toss them mostly in the trash, toos them in a box just in case they ever buy one in the future, or just return the product and say that the store shouldn't carry DVDs that don't work in DVD players. Acting like a calm, dumb job average consumer will get best results from slashdotters. If you try to do this, don't even mention that you know what HD-DVD or BluRay is and that you know the formats don't work in a DVD player. Just state and repeat taht these DVDs don't work in standard DVD players and keep on requesting DVDs that work in a standard DVD player. The less you appear to know about electronics the better.
Sounds like what happened with Windows 2000. Service pack 5 never materialised, but a security roll-up package was released to somewhat satisfy major customers. My guess is that the same thing will happen with Windows XP. A security roll-up package will be released at some point because the number of post-SP2 patches is approaching insane amounts. But other than that, Microsoft will be far, far too busy pushing Longhorn Server out of the door.
Is it just me or does it seems like if MS just did scurity roll-up packages on a quarterly basis most corporate folks would be happy with them. It's the pain of a thousand cuts that's the problem. I've been setting up some brand new Latitudes. They had 55 MS updates. I'm thankful that it just required a single restart. (I'm kinda pissed that Dell couldn't bother installing MS security updates before shiping a new laptop though.) It's not bad at work since we have all the MS stuff pre-downloaded on a server. It's a pain at home though where you have to wait for that stuff to be downloaded seperately.
A lifetime ago, the ideal was that a "good" girl would wait until marriage, but in practice many women with normal libidos compromised on waiting until engagement. This led (duh) to guys proposing in order to get laid and then for some reason changing their mind about actually getting married. Laws were actually passed to protect women against having sex with dishonest people.
The ring, then, he argues, was a nonrefundable deposit to provide some evidence that the guy would actually go through with the marriage.
Whatever happened to dowrys and paying the guy to take the girl away? It seems like our modern concepts of "love" marriages made this problem. If we switched to arranged marriages or where family money was involved we'd see this whole wedding ring fad go away. Of course, then we could also see things where the girl's dad gets several guys to work at reduced wages to "earn" his daughter's hand.
Women, well at least my wife, don't necessarily want natural diamonds. They want to feel special and see the look of jealousy on the faces of other women. Having said that, there are always the snooty girls who won't wear anything other than a natural diamond. The're usually the ones who will leave you because their new man has a bigger house, better car, and bigger bank ballance than you.
What's really funny is finding one of those women that's a liberal and then after you see and verify that yes it's a DeBeers diamond seeing her reaction when you inform her that she supports slavery with a DeBeers diamonds. The look in her face is worth what ever she may have paid for the worthless rock. What's even better is if you can inform her infront of other dehard liberals. It's like the gift that keeps on giving.
Ding!. The DeBeers cartel has over a 400 yrs supply of diamond stock. If artificial diamond tech takes off and they can't get a stranglehold, that stock becomes essentially worthless.
I'm just waiting for diamond sheeet rock though. Who needs shinies on your wife's hand when you can have shiny walls? Actually, I hate my wife's diamond ring with a passion. If I knew then what I know now, I'd have just gotten a simple smooth gold band. Why? Diamond rings hurt! Have you ever had your wife rub her hand over you with a diamond ring on? Ouch! A simple gold ring is pretty enough and all it really is a symbol marking a bond. If you can't enough inmate encounters with the shinies on, why bother? Oh, yes I forgot to get those inmate encounters in the first place. Never mind.
This is the Internet, not a damn kindergarten. People are going to say things you don't like, and you can't stop them. Live with it. If they show up at your front door or start harassing you, there are already laws to handle that.
It's hard to tell sometimes; very, very hard to tell. I think that some people where better behaved in kindergarten than on the internet though. Having the threat of a teacher with a paddle makes all the difference to some peoples social abilites.
It's true that racist blogs and propaganda do alot of harm, and in a perfect world there wouldn't be racism at all. But to take away someones free speech 'just because' is equally bad.
Um, I have to ask. What harm is done by racist blogs or racist propaganda? I know that casual racism has always annoyed me, but could you give some actual examples. There is a part of me that thinks that we are wrong for trying to treat everyone equally no matter what.
Why? Well, that part of me says that you should pull strings for your family or friends before strangers. Most places have rules where its a strict no-no to pull any strings to get a family member in. Pulling a string for a friend or an exisiting employee is usually seen as o.k. or building a network of contacts.
I don't think any sub group of humanity is any better than any of the others. Now, does that mean that I'd want to associate with people of different sub groups just because of that? Um, nope. By perference, I and most humans lean towards forming groups that are similiar to themselves. I don't think that's a bad thing in and of itself though.
Why do we have seperate male and female bathrooms usually? If we really wanted to treat everyone equally, then we'd force all bathrooms and changing rooms to be unisex. I predict that in 10K years if humanity still exists that we will still have racism in various forms.
By the way, in the US - which is just about as liberal as it gets when it comes to free speech - you are allowed to say anything you want about a group, but you are never allowed to call for violence. For instance, you can say "White people are evil and stupid." You cannot say, "Everyone go out and kill a white man." I used white people because I'm white:)
What does being white have to do with anything? I'm white too and I've heard those remarks from people of all races. I think that is more along the lines of "Humans are evil and stupid." I don't even want to imply that "Everyone should go out and kill evil stupid humans." Mainly because only those stupid evil humans would actually follow an implied message like that. I used to hold humanity in higher reguard. That's was way back in junior high when I didn't really care about history or politics. Examine both; humans are stupid and evil. Humans will also stand by while a small select groups purge individuals of groups that they dislike themselves.
However trivial up-front costs may be, and however many people are certified as trustworthy by some "authority", I think calling the GP's comment BS is disingenuous, to say the least.
Um, I'd think that paying $100-$500 to make sure that new employee hasn't brought down a major company or been involved with some data theft would be worth it if it saves your company thousands to maybe a million down the line.
You know the example that really popped into my head is that IT should be a job field where you expected to get a deep background check at every new company that you work for. Working for McDonalds or Walmart doesn't as a cashier doesn't require you go through a criminal history, finical background checks, and other evals to make sure you'll stay employed and won't steal company secrets. If I was hiring you for Walmart's or McDonald's datacenter workforce though I'd expect every single one of them to have a criminal history run on them at an absolute min. It's just a factored in cost of doing business. If you don't take the factor into account when you actually hit the big leagues and stop being a small business and start being a medium to large sized business these things could back to haunt you. I guess you could always just buy insurance for trusted valuable employees that may act against company policy against the long term profitabity of the company.
You can keep your generator(s) running indefinitely. Certainly longer than any predictable power outage, but if you're running on batteries you're against the clock. What are you going to do when they start to run down - nip over to the 7-11 and buy all the AAs they've got?
Um, don't forget fuel for those generators! During an interview at one company a question about the companies on-site generators poped up. The company folks related a humorus tale of having the generator running, but having a very difficult time finding a fuel truck to keep it fueled. The problem was that there was an ice storm through out the state and there was zero travel on the interstates so there wasn't any fuel that they could buy and use right then. The lesson was stock up and have fuel trucks waiting on site with enough fuel for about a week of fuel. Unlikely that you'll ever use a week of fuel during one event and that most power outages would be under 2 hours, but for a data center that services the entire nation or globe it is unacceptable that just because you have 5 ft of snow on the ground and no power at the data center that the entire company be down. That's also why most of them have atleast 2 data centers running things as well. Just in case one goes down because of hurricane, torando, flood, earthquake, or mudslides you'd have a backup.
I think some massive global migration would be good for us overall. The hurricane caused our first real widespread migration this generation in the US.
I disagree. There was considerable outmigration from California in the last 10 or 20 years. And there's a lot of people who are high mobility. For example, there's a growing population of retirement aged travellers living partially or fully out of an RV.
Could you envision a city purpose built for 100 million migrate workers? We just don't think on that level, yet. That's probably a really bad idea. The concentration of infrastructure and population would make a very tempting military target. I recommend some degree of decentralization.
Um, ok. You don't like my 100 million migrate worker city idea. How about 1,000 of these http://www.freedomship.com/freedomship/overview/de sign.shtml ? They are supposed to house 100,000K each. I'd want them to be defended with a navy though so let's say 100 navy ships as well. Now we just need to power the things with nuclear reactors and have some hydroponics and we'd be set with a mobile nation.
Clearances are expensive and time-consuming, many companies cannot afford to do it unless it is a stipulation of their contract (eg defense contractors). And you can also bet that it will cut your available workforce significantly.
Um, BS. Of course it depends on what level of clearance and what type of background checks that you need to do, but it shouldn't have to be expensive. I don't know about you, but for every IT job that I interviewed for they did a complete background check on me. I eventually got a job at a police department and their job application basically wanted to know your complete life from junior high on up. They do that for everyone that they interview reguardless of position. It takes 6-9 months to get hired on in our records department and get registered and have complete entire classes before their given access to some systems. Why shouldn't it be that easy/difficult to have business class clearances? I'll admit that for military level clearances it is expensive, but for just running proper background checks and given everyone access cards to entry into the building isn't very expensive if factored in. What's expensive is factoring it in after your business has been running for awhile.
Frankly, I say it's a nightmare for a small company when a big boss reads shit like this, freaks out, and all of a sudden you have to spend the next week trying to implement some goofy policy that will either be totally ignored, or tossed aside when it becomes a hassle. For larger companies, yes, internal security is no laughing matter. For small companies, when there's one, maybe 2 admins running the show, it's a wasted expense. They don't need intricate security policies. They need nothing more than, "Okay, I can access everything, everyone else can access their own shit. Done."
And this is what is really wrong with IT now. In 100-200 years maybe when the industry starts to get alittle mature things will change, but currently the one or two computer guys have access to everything school of thought is really what's wrong with the entire industry. I'll consider this industry to be growing up when any small business could hire/fire/transfer admins with complete confidence that the new guy has complete access and the old guy has zero access without carrying home backups or enough info to successfully compete with the company. We just aren't there, yet. I know that I'm trust worthy, but I wouldn't trust any other IT person. I wouldn't trust Bill Gates or Linus to be left with ulitmate unchecked power over all my machines. Why would I want a setup where just 1 guy may or may not have complete control/access to the small network? Of course you need to define "small business." If you are talking about 10 networked computers and one temp. computer contracter guy that comes in to set things up or do windows up dates every 3 months or so, then your reasoning makes sense, but is still off. That computer guy no matter how trusted shouldn't have complete control over the network. What happens when that trusted computer guy is killed by a drunk driver, and then you have to hire a new guy?
All we need is a model to read us slashdot headlines and postings that are about modded high. I think this could work well for some people. I'd rather get my news from anime characters than Peter Jennings. Here is a question what talking head/oracle would you feel most comfortable recieving your news/media format in?
I hate radio news people that try to funny and interupt the music for their morning programs. I wouldn't really want to listen to slashdot being read to me. I can read faster than I can listen. I can scroll down a page and use tabs to have just the threads that I know that I'm interested in open. I wouldn't mind an actual AI program that was really helpful finding "new" news that I may be interested in. I don't want just another talking head though reading scripted entertainment news to me.
There's a chance that it will improve again, but currently there's a (grassroots/astroturf?) fear campaign against foreigners, mostly focussed on islamic cultured or coloured people, but americans as well (your current president isn't helping your reputation!).
Well, it's nice to know that racism is alive and well. I find it highly ironic that those wishing to leave the country for political reasons are being treated bad because the Dutch couldn't do anything against those that really anger them.;) If the US president came to Holland there wouldn't be any hassle. Of course, he wouldn't be staying for more than a week or two so maybe that's all the Dutch and stand of foreigners. I would think that any high ranking foreigner would be given the red carpet treatment if only because it would be the quickest way to get rid of them.
Interestingly, it's only when you re-enter the United States as an American citizen that you are subject to the most harassment, at least at O'Hare and Kennedy. They are not afraid to use dogs to sniff you while you're waiting on your luggage. They will whip out the rubber gloves when handling your property, and they will give you that knowing look like "Give us any trouble, and these can be used for you."
But thrown into quarantine? Laptop and briefcase-toting American businessmen? Please get a clue.
I'd think that the dogs and more searching was first for looking for drug runners. There was a funny comment about traveling with a USB thumb drive in private normally unsearchable parts. If the guy had drugs on him, the dogs would have most likely detected him. They would have attempted to detect internally carried drugs. Alot of mental effort has already been applied by drug runners and other smugglers onto how to bulk carry consealed items across the border. Customs has been searching for those guys for years. Adding electronic smuggling doesn't surprise me. I doubt they'll be very succesful though.
Personally, it made me happy to know the government spent time and resources copying and possibly picking through my innocuous files while there were other people out there busy with bringing an end to a government that found such activity useful.
Actually, the "funny" part is that they really are trying their best. The sad part is its more likely that they could copy all data on the HDs, but not really look at all the data on all of them for a good long time. I could even envision them keeping copies around for years until they get an automated near AI level search to look through millions of HD images. I'd feel bad for that program/AI. I've tried running some of these software applications for local police department eval. I'm not thriled with idea of doing it in bulk. If we ever come across laptops that have been secured we just send it to the FBI. It takes them months to get to anything. They have a huge backlog of things of this nature waiting to be processed. (I'm talking more along the lines of actual ciminal cases and not just random searches though.) I couldn't believe spending the money or effort looking through. I could see just copying it and detaining the laptop for a week to a month just to seem like you are doing something though.
Some will reply and tell me this is crazy. How it can never work. That somehow we just have to have walls. Why? And if walls are so good and necessary, would you support building them between the States? Why not?
Don't be silly, that would be wasteful. I just need a wall around my home property and another around the perimeter to my town. We could most likely only afford something like a 5-8 foot fence, which should be easy to get across and its not like we'd block the public roads. I have thought about building a 20 ft slick wall or maybe a canal between the US and Mexico. Honestly, I'd rather that the US just invaded down to Panama and build a federal highway all the way there, but that's not likely. You make it seem like companies/corporations are the ones keeping people throughout the world in place. I'd say that's more along the lines of a function of governments though. I think that governments don't want to loose there citizens to other governments. Would China or India be interested if 100-200 million of their citizens could freely immigrate to the US? I think some massive global migration would be good for us overall. The hurricane caused our first real widespread migration this generation in the US. I think that for the most part people don't move that far in general. I've generally stayed within a 4 state area with about a dozen trips to 2 additional states. Usually though that's traveling to visit family that causes me to travel. Usually I stay with a 30 minute by car area of town. My wife is a traveler by nature and she'd be perfectly at home in an RV traveling for the rest of her life and seeing new places. To be honest, I wouldn't take an international job or travel into an area where English wasn't the major langauge. This is part laziness on my side and part keeping my personal comfort. Would your average Indian or Chinese person actually want to move and live in the US? Most likely not. (It would be one of those wild dreams, but if you really pressed them on it they'd be more interested to visit and come back home with local wealth rather than living here in proverty. Open borders and easy freedom of movement may bring out the creation of really large population US cities. Could you envision a city purpose built for 100 million migrate workers? We just don't think on that level, yet.
In both of the Canadian searches, I was asked questions specifically based on email messages cached in my mail client. That was awful disturbing. In the "long search" case they apparently also spent most of their time browsing the iPhoto and Photoshop albums and asked me a lot of questions about other places I had been.
Sounds like it is time not to travel with the laptop across borders. I know this could become some what annoying for home users, but for the business set it will become mandatory that any laptop that they carry outside of the office isn't capable of holding any company information. Logging on through VPN is somewhat common now a days, but for the small business or select folks they don't usually have to VPN in if they keep it all on the laptop. They'll use webmail, but won't have a VPN setup, which means everything is on that laptop. Well, business data theft reasons alone is why I wouldn't want my employees carrying laptops through points that will be searched. We may start seeing pre-cleaned class of laptop just to pass through these sorts of checks. Any business and techy savy user will just VPN to a their home server for access to important securable information.
Names are by no means unique identifiers in China -- there are only a hundred or so family names in common use and the characters used in people's names are often recycled. With the population of China being as large as it is, even if you use your real name there could easily be 50 people in your area who have exactly the same name.
Now if they were requiring that a person register with their ID number -- everyone in China has one -- that would be something. It surprises me, actually, that they're not doing that. I wonder why?
Social pressure. Don't underestimate the impact of Chang's mom's out there if they get an e-mail from the Chinese government that their child/teenager has been logged using more than recommended online video games or browsing porn or other content that Chang's mom may not like. Here is the good part. Only one Chang either used alot of video game time, browsed for porn, or actually posted some mild radical content. They e-mail out the offical e-mail to all 50-100 Chang's moms in the given area. The plan would be never to actually do anything, but let the mom's or whomever is encharge of those names know that one of them was miss behaving. Unlike the US where we'd want to find the exact person and punish just them, the Chinese will let social pressure work as some one has dishonored the name of Chang so all Changs will have to be extremely better behaved to regain their personal honor and will keep an eye out for others with a similar name that may be acting up. That doesn't work if you have some one that really doesn't care if they dishonor their name, but the Chinese as a group have social means of keeping every one walking in step on the same path.
I'd expect the next big wave of social networking software to come from China or India.
Slashdot Mirror
i use it to shave my face and it's the best. it's sort of scented, so you end up smelling like shaved pussy, and there are worse things to smell like :-)
That's why I wash up after sex anyway. I don't mind smelling like vanilla, but that other scent is kinda difficult to explain to others.
I am detecting a pattern here though... Al Gore seems to find a good idea in progress, champion it, and (at least awkwardly) take some type of credit for it... in this case he is a bit behind the X-prize foundation [xprize.org] and NASA with its COTS Program [wikipedia.org] and Centennial Challenges [nasa.gov]. (I'll leave out his recent championing of Global Warming since he has a pretty well established environmental record)
Um, maybe our problem with Gore is that we don't typically "reward" politicans when the real achievement seems to be by another team and all the politican did was not kill off the program through laws or regulations that he could have introduced. If Gore was actually the project lead for one of these programs, then we'd give him credit for the team's achievements. Just not killing the program or supporting from way behind isn't enough to get most people to support you.
I pity you. Truly. To have so little regard for human rights and decency that you think putting this guy in a place where he will probably be raped reapeatedly, beaten and stand a greatly increased chance of developing a chemical dependency degrades us all, including you.
All for sharing a 1s and 0s.
Was he wrong? Undoubtedly. But until the law catches up with this class of crime, this is simply mob justice.
I disagree with that it's "mob justice." Mainly because if it was mob justice the mob would go over the RIAA or MPAA or several other annoying copyright holders and apply their "justice" to those individuals rather to this guy. From scaning slashdot, it sounds like it was a warez site. Has anyone keep up with the overall number of Warez related arrests and convictions over the last 10-15 years? I'm getting curious to look it if its even possible. Warez or copyright crimes aren't something that the crime stats sort by. The software or media companies generally work with FBI or other national level police orgs tracking down entire Warez groups at a time when possible. I didn't read the article. It sounds fishy that only one arrest was made if it was an actual Warez arrest. Maybe they wanted to use this guy to bring others down, but with BT he just didn't know anyone else.
Jail? For adminning an indexing site?
When are they going to lock up the Google admins?!?
Shh, don't give 'em any ideas!
It's going to be funny when no one rushs out to buy either a HD DVD or BlueRay player and then return the freebie discs to the store that they purchased their product from and tell the store: "These "free DVDs" don't work I'm returning them for DVDs that work." When BestBuy folks try to explain that these HD-DVDs or BluRay free movies require the purchase of a very expensive player, consumers are going to either toss them mostly in the trash, toos them in a box just in case they ever buy one in the future, or just return the product and say that the store shouldn't carry DVDs that don't work in DVD players. Acting like a calm, dumb job average consumer will get best results from slashdotters. If you try to do this, don't even mention that you know what HD-DVD or BluRay is and that you know the formats don't work in a DVD player. Just state and repeat taht these DVDs don't work in standard DVD players and keep on requesting DVDs that work in a standard DVD player. The less you appear to know about electronics the better.
Sounds like what happened with Windows 2000. Service pack 5 never materialised, but a security roll-up package was released to somewhat satisfy major customers. My guess is that the same thing will happen with Windows XP. A security roll-up package will be released at some point because the number of post-SP2 patches is approaching insane amounts. But other than that, Microsoft will be far, far too busy pushing Longhorn Server out of the door.
Is it just me or does it seems like if MS just did scurity roll-up packages on a quarterly basis most corporate folks would be happy with them. It's the pain of a thousand cuts that's the problem. I've been setting up some brand new Latitudes. They had 55 MS updates. I'm thankful that it just required a single restart. (I'm kinda pissed that Dell couldn't bother installing MS security updates before shiping a new laptop though.) It's not bad at work since we have all the MS stuff pre-downloaded on a server. It's a pain at home though where you have to wait for that stuff to be downloaded seperately.
A lifetime ago, the ideal was that a "good" girl would wait until marriage, but in practice many women with normal libidos compromised on waiting until engagement. This led (duh) to guys proposing in order to get laid and then for some reason changing their mind about actually getting married. Laws were actually passed to protect women against having sex with dishonest people.
The ring, then, he argues, was a nonrefundable deposit to provide some evidence that the guy would actually go through with the marriage.
Whatever happened to dowrys and paying the guy to take the girl away? It seems like our modern concepts of "love" marriages made this problem. If we switched to arranged marriages or where family money was involved we'd see this whole wedding ring fad go away. Of course, then we could also see things where the girl's dad gets several guys to work at reduced wages to "earn" his daughter's hand.
Women, well at least my wife, don't necessarily want natural diamonds. They want to feel special and see the look of jealousy on the faces of other women. Having said that, there are always the snooty girls who won't wear anything other than a natural diamond. The're usually the ones who will leave you because their new man has a bigger house, better car, and bigger bank ballance than you.
What's really funny is finding one of those women that's a liberal and then after you see and verify that yes it's a DeBeers diamond seeing her reaction when you inform her that she supports slavery with a DeBeers diamonds. The look in her face is worth what ever she may have paid for the worthless rock. What's even better is if you can inform her infront of other dehard liberals. It's like the gift that keeps on giving.
Ding!. The DeBeers cartel has over a 400 yrs supply of diamond stock. If artificial diamond tech takes off and they can't get a stranglehold, that stock becomes essentially worthless.
I'm just waiting for diamond sheeet rock though. Who needs shinies on your wife's hand when you can have shiny walls? Actually, I hate my wife's diamond ring with a passion. If I knew then what I know now, I'd have just gotten a simple smooth gold band. Why? Diamond rings hurt! Have you ever had your wife rub her hand over you with a diamond ring on? Ouch! A simple gold ring is pretty enough and all it really is a symbol marking a bond. If you can't enough inmate encounters with the shinies on, why bother? Oh, yes I forgot to get those inmate encounters in the first place. Never mind.
This is the Internet, not a damn kindergarten. People are going to say things you don't like, and you can't stop them. Live with it. If they show up at your front door or start harassing you, there are already laws to handle that.
It's hard to tell sometimes; very, very hard to tell. I think that some people where better behaved in kindergarten than on the internet though. Having the threat of a teacher with a paddle makes all the difference to some peoples social abilites.
It's true that racist blogs and propaganda do alot of harm, and in a perfect world there wouldn't be racism at all. But to take away someones free speech 'just because' is equally bad.
Um, I have to ask. What harm is done by racist blogs or racist propaganda? I know that casual racism has always annoyed me, but could you give some actual examples. There is a part of me that thinks that we are wrong for trying to treat everyone equally no matter what.
Why? Well, that part of me says that you should pull strings for your family or friends before strangers. Most places have rules where its a strict no-no to pull any strings to get a family member in. Pulling a string for a friend or an exisiting employee is usually seen as o.k. or building a network of contacts.
I don't think any sub group of humanity is any better than any of the others. Now, does that mean that I'd want to associate with people of different sub groups just because of that? Um, nope. By perference, I and most humans lean towards forming groups that are similiar to themselves. I don't think that's a bad thing in and of itself though.
Why do we have seperate male and female bathrooms usually? If we really wanted to treat everyone equally, then we'd force all bathrooms and changing rooms to be unisex. I predict that in 10K years if humanity still exists that we will still have racism in various forms.
By the way, in the US - which is just about as liberal as it gets when it comes to free speech - you are allowed to say anything you want about a group, but you are never allowed to call for violence. For instance, you can say "White people are evil and stupid." You cannot say, "Everyone go out and kill a white man." I used white people because I'm white :)
What does being white have to do with anything? I'm white too and I've heard those remarks from people of all races. I think that is more along the lines of "Humans are evil and stupid." I don't even want to imply that "Everyone should go out and kill evil stupid humans." Mainly because only those stupid evil humans would actually follow an implied message like that. I used to hold humanity in higher reguard. That's was way back in junior high when I didn't really care about history or politics. Examine both; humans are stupid and evil. Humans will also stand by while a small select groups purge individuals of groups that they dislike themselves.
However trivial up-front costs may be, and however many people are certified as trustworthy by some "authority", I think calling the GP's comment BS is disingenuous, to say the least.
Um, I'd think that paying $100-$500 to make sure that new employee hasn't brought down a major company or been involved with some data theft would be worth it if it saves your company thousands to maybe a million down the line.
You know the example that really popped into my head is that IT should be a job field where you expected to get a deep background check at every new company that you work for. Working for McDonalds or Walmart doesn't as a cashier doesn't require you go through a criminal history, finical background checks, and other evals to make sure you'll stay employed and won't steal company secrets. If I was hiring you for Walmart's or McDonald's datacenter workforce though I'd expect every single one of them to have a criminal history run on them at an absolute min. It's just a factored in cost of doing business. If you don't take the factor into account when you actually hit the big leagues and stop being a small business and start being a medium to large sized business these things could back to haunt you. I guess you could always just buy insurance for trusted valuable employees that may act against company policy against the long term profitabity of the company.
You can keep your generator(s) running indefinitely. Certainly longer than any predictable power outage, but if you're running on batteries you're against the clock. What are you going to do when they start to run down - nip over to the 7-11 and buy all the AAs they've got?
Um, don't forget fuel for those generators! During an interview at one company a question about the companies on-site generators poped up. The company folks related a humorus tale of having the generator running, but having a very difficult time finding a fuel truck to keep it fueled. The problem was that there was an ice storm through out the state and there was zero travel on the interstates so there wasn't any fuel that they could buy and use right then. The lesson was stock up and have fuel trucks waiting on site with enough fuel for about a week of fuel. Unlikely that you'll ever use a week of fuel during one event and that most power outages would be under 2 hours, but for a data center that services the entire nation or globe it is unacceptable that just because you have 5 ft of snow on the ground and no power at the data center that the entire company be down. That's also why most of them have atleast 2 data centers running things as well. Just in case one goes down because of hurricane, torando, flood, earthquake, or mudslides you'd have a backup.
I think some massive global migration would be good for us overall. The hurricane caused our first real widespread migration this generation in the US.
e sign.shtml ? They are supposed to house 100,000K each. I'd want them to be defended with a navy though so let's say 100 navy ships as well. Now we just need to power the things with nuclear reactors and have some hydroponics and we'd be set with a mobile nation.
I disagree. There was considerable outmigration from California in the last 10 or 20 years. And there's a lot of people who are high mobility. For example, there's a growing population of retirement aged travellers living partially or fully out of an RV.
Could you envision a city purpose built for 100 million migrate workers? We just don't think on that level, yet.
That's probably a really bad idea. The concentration of infrastructure and population would make a very tempting military target. I recommend some degree of decentralization.
Um, ok. You don't like my 100 million migrate worker city idea. How about 1,000 of these http://www.freedomship.com/freedomship/overview/d
Clearances are expensive and time-consuming, many companies cannot afford to do it unless it is a stipulation of their contract (eg defense contractors). And you can also bet that it will cut your available workforce significantly.
Um, BS. Of course it depends on what level of clearance and what type of background checks that you need to do, but it shouldn't have to be expensive. I don't know about you, but for every IT job that I interviewed for they did a complete background check on me. I eventually got a job at a police department and their job application basically wanted to know your complete life from junior high on up. They do that for everyone that they interview reguardless of position. It takes 6-9 months to get hired on in our records department and get registered and have complete entire classes before their given access to some systems. Why shouldn't it be that easy/difficult to have business class clearances? I'll admit that for military level clearances it is expensive, but for just running proper background checks and given everyone access cards to entry into the building isn't very expensive if factored in. What's expensive is factoring it in after your business has been running for awhile.
Frankly, I say it's a nightmare for a small company when a big boss reads shit like this, freaks out, and all of a sudden you have to spend the next week trying to implement some goofy policy that will either be totally ignored, or tossed aside when it becomes a hassle. For larger companies, yes, internal security is no laughing matter. For small companies, when there's one, maybe 2 admins running the show, it's a wasted expense. They don't need intricate security policies. They need nothing more than, "Okay, I can access everything, everyone else can access their own shit. Done."
And this is what is really wrong with IT now. In 100-200 years maybe when the industry starts to get alittle mature things will change, but currently the one or two computer guys have access to everything school of thought is really what's wrong with the entire industry. I'll consider this industry to be growing up when any small business could hire/fire/transfer admins with complete confidence that the new guy has complete access and the old guy has zero access without carrying home backups or enough info to successfully compete with the company. We just aren't there, yet. I know that I'm trust worthy, but I wouldn't trust any other IT person. I wouldn't trust Bill Gates or Linus to be left with ulitmate unchecked power over all my machines. Why would I want a setup where just 1 guy may or may not have complete control/access to the small network? Of course you need to define "small business." If you are talking about 10 networked computers and one temp. computer contracter guy that comes in to set things up or do windows up dates every 3 months or so, then your reasoning makes sense, but is still off. That computer guy no matter how trusted shouldn't have complete control over the network. What happens when that trusted computer guy is killed by a drunk driver, and then you have to hire a new guy?
All we need is a model to read us slashdot headlines and postings that are about modded high. I think this could work well for some people. I'd rather get my news from anime characters than Peter Jennings. Here is a question what talking head/oracle would you feel most comfortable recieving your news/media format in?
I hate radio news people that try to funny and interupt the music for their morning programs. I wouldn't really want to listen to slashdot being read to me. I can read faster than I can listen. I can scroll down a page and use tabs to have just the threads that I know that I'm interested in open. I wouldn't mind an actual AI program that was really helpful finding "new" news that I may be interested in. I don't want just another talking head though reading scripted entertainment news to me.
Shush you idiot! Don't you understand what parent post is doing? /. the truth! They'll start coming here en-masse!
Don't bloody tell everyone on
So has this entire thread's secret context been to keep most slashdotters in the US rather than slashdotting another country?
There's a chance that it will improve again, but currently there's a (grassroots/astroturf?) fear campaign against foreigners, mostly focussed on islamic cultured or coloured people, but americans as well (your current president isn't helping your reputation!).
;) If the US president came to Holland there wouldn't be any hassle. Of course, he wouldn't be staying for more than a week or two so maybe that's all the Dutch and stand of foreigners. I would think that any high ranking foreigner would be given the red carpet treatment if only because it would be the quickest way to get rid of them.
Well, it's nice to know that racism is alive and well. I find it highly ironic that those wishing to leave the country for political reasons are being treated bad because the Dutch couldn't do anything against those that really anger them.
Interestingly, it's only when you re-enter the United States as an American citizen that you are subject to the most harassment, at least at O'Hare and Kennedy. They are not afraid to use dogs to sniff you while you're waiting on your luggage. They will whip out the rubber gloves when handling your property, and they will give you that knowing look like "Give us any trouble, and these can be used for you."
But thrown into quarantine? Laptop and briefcase-toting American businessmen? Please get a clue.
I'd think that the dogs and more searching was first for looking for drug runners. There was a funny comment about traveling with a USB thumb drive in private normally unsearchable parts. If the guy had drugs on him, the dogs would have most likely detected him. They would have attempted to detect internally carried drugs. Alot of mental effort has already been applied by drug runners and other smugglers onto how to bulk carry consealed items across the border. Customs has been searching for those guys for years. Adding electronic smuggling doesn't surprise me. I doubt they'll be very succesful though.
Personally, it made me happy to know the government spent time and resources copying and possibly picking through my innocuous files while there were other people out there busy with bringing an end to a government that found such activity useful.
Actually, the "funny" part is that they really are trying their best. The sad part is its more likely that they could copy all data on the HDs, but not really look at all the data on all of them for a good long time. I could even envision them keeping copies around for years until they get an automated near AI level search to look through millions of HD images. I'd feel bad for that program/AI. I've tried running some of these software applications for local police department eval. I'm not thriled with idea of doing it in bulk. If we ever come across laptops that have been secured we just send it to the FBI. It takes them months to get to anything. They have a huge backlog of things of this nature waiting to be processed. (I'm talking more along the lines of actual ciminal cases and not just random searches though.) I couldn't believe spending the money or effort looking through. I could see just copying it and detaining the laptop for a week to a month just to seem like you are doing something though.
Some will reply and tell me this is crazy. How it can never work. That somehow we just have to have walls. Why? And if walls are so good and necessary, would you support building them between the States? Why not?
Don't be silly, that would be wasteful. I just need a wall around my home property and another around the perimeter to my town. We could most likely only afford something like a 5-8 foot fence, which should be easy to get across and its not like we'd block the public roads. I have thought about building a 20 ft slick wall or maybe a canal between the US and Mexico. Honestly, I'd rather that the US just invaded down to Panama and build a federal highway all the way there, but that's not likely. You make it seem like companies/corporations are the ones keeping people throughout the world in place. I'd say that's more along the lines of a function of governments though. I think that governments don't want to loose there citizens to other governments. Would China or India be interested if 100-200 million of their citizens could freely immigrate to the US? I think some massive global migration would be good for us overall. The hurricane caused our first real widespread migration this generation in the US. I think that for the most part people don't move that far in general. I've generally stayed within a 4 state area with about a dozen trips to 2 additional states. Usually though that's traveling to visit family that causes me to travel. Usually I stay with a 30 minute by car area of town. My wife is a traveler by nature and she'd be perfectly at home in an RV traveling for the rest of her life and seeing new places. To be honest, I wouldn't take an international job or travel into an area where English wasn't the major langauge. This is part laziness on my side and part keeping my personal comfort. Would your average Indian or Chinese person actually want to move and live in the US? Most likely not. (It would be one of those wild dreams, but if you really pressed them on it they'd be more interested to visit and come back home with local wealth rather than living here in proverty. Open borders and easy freedom of movement may bring out the creation of really large population US cities. Could you envision a city purpose built for 100 million migrate workers? We just don't think on that level, yet.
In both of the Canadian searches, I was asked questions specifically based on email messages cached in my mail client. That was awful disturbing.
In the "long search" case they apparently also spent most of their time browsing the iPhoto and Photoshop albums and asked me a lot of questions about other places I had been.
Sounds like it is time not to travel with the laptop across borders. I know this could become some what annoying for home users, but for the business set it will become mandatory that any laptop that they carry outside of the office isn't capable of holding any company information. Logging on through VPN is somewhat common now a days, but for the small business or select folks they don't usually have to VPN in if they keep it all on the laptop. They'll use webmail, but won't have a VPN setup, which means everything is on that laptop. Well, business data theft reasons alone is why I wouldn't want my employees carrying laptops through points that will be searched. We may start seeing pre-cleaned class of laptop just to pass through these sorts of checks. Any business and techy savy user will just VPN to a their home server for access to important securable information.
Names are by no means unique identifiers in China -- there are only a hundred or so family names in common use and the characters used in people's names are often recycled. With the population of China being as large as it is, even if you use your real name there could easily be 50 people in your area who have exactly the same name.
Now if they were requiring that a person register with their ID number -- everyone in China has one -- that would be something. It surprises me, actually, that they're not doing that. I wonder why?
Social pressure. Don't underestimate the impact of Chang's mom's out there if they get an e-mail from the Chinese government that their child/teenager has been logged using more than recommended online video games or browsing porn or other content that Chang's mom may not like. Here is the good part. Only one Chang either used alot of video game time, browsed for porn, or actually posted some mild radical content. They e-mail out the offical e-mail to all 50-100 Chang's moms in the given area. The plan would be never to actually do anything, but let the mom's or whomever is encharge of those names know that one of them was miss behaving. Unlike the US where we'd want to find the exact person and punish just them, the Chinese will let social pressure work as some one has dishonored the name of Chang so all Changs will have to be extremely better behaved to regain their personal honor and will keep an eye out for others with a similar name that may be acting up. That doesn't work if you have some one that really doesn't care if they dishonor their name, but the Chinese as a group have social means of keeping every one walking in step on the same path.
I'd expect the next big wave of social networking software to come from China or India.