Oh yeah, let's just pick and choose the freedoms we want to let others defend. That'll work great.
I assume you've never heard:
First they came for the........
It's kinda sad how hard it is to vigorously defend our rights.
Most of the bill of rights state things in terms of "Congress shall make no law" but yet Congress spends a lot of time trying to make rights restricting laws anyway.
First they came for the First Amendment, and set up "free speech zones", but I did not speak out because I'm just a gun nut Then they came for the Fourth Amendment, and started random searches within 100 miles of the border, but I did not speak out because I'm just a gun nut Then they came for the Fifth Amendment, took laptops and demanded the password, but I did not speak out because I'm just a gun nut Then they came for the Sixth Amendment, and held people without a trial for years, but I did not speak out because I'm just a gun nut Then they came for the Second Amendment, but nobody cared, because I'm just a gun nut and people are more worried about the fact the constitution is weaker than wet toilet paper
From the point of view of most Europeans where guns are generally banned you all look crazy. We don't have guns and yet somehow aren't being robbed, raped and murdered nearly as much as you guys. At no time in our history would guns have helped us rise up against the government either.
If Boudica had had guns, things might have turned out differently. I'm assuming in this scenario the romans didn't of course.
AR-15 fires from a locking closed bolt. The worst case stress placed on it's lower receiver is the recoil loading the buffer tube threads and the spring tension of the fire control group.
Everything on an AR-15 that deals with explosive pressures is made of steel. Plastic/composite parts are not critical components and are primarily used to locate components like the trigger and hammer.
Hand-wringing over material strength defects is a waste of time because the failure mode is a malfunction that harmlessly disables function of the firearm.
When I'm in a firefight, the last thing I want is my weapon "harmlessly" disabling it's function.
There are lots of other government transfer programs that tax the young to pay for the old. It only "works" until the demographic shift inherent to an ageing population gets bad enough that there aren't enough young people paying taxes to support the old people. Then you either move the age to qualify for benefits up or you run up massive deficits.
This is exactly the same no matter how you fund it, publicly or privately. In a perfect capitalist system, the baby boomers have all saved lots of piece of paper saying $100. They reach 65, and all demand that the youth accept these pieces of paper in exchange for doing work for them.
The youth decide they spend far too many hours as a country looking after old people, and not enough time looking after themselves. As such, they charge the old people more, and pay themselves more.
A piece of paper saying $100 is worthless. I will fix your broken leg, but you have give me a cow in exchange. That's not a practical way of conducting business in most countries, so we use things as barter. Dollars, Euros, shiny gems, whatever.
Once you leave the workforce, you're relying on your shiny gems maintaining their value. If inflation means these drop in value, tough.
Fundamentally, if you increase the resources looking after non-functioning people in society (majorly disabled, rich retirees, unemployed benefit scroungers), the rest suffer. The solution is to reduce the number of non-functioning people, either by raising retirement age, or by reducing the money and time you spend on them.
You live in Scotland, or are you a typical American that's decided because his great grandfather once read a book on kilts that he's Scottish?
No true Scotsman lives in America?
Someone defining themselves as French would presumably be raised in France. Someone defining themselves as Canadian would presumably be raised in Canada. Someone defining themselves as Scotland would presumably be raised in Scotland.
Someone who's "1/4 French" is not French. They have a French grandparent.
The Department of Education told him that it "did not request or require that the routers for the state's schools have internal dual power supplies. Education would not have made this requirement because unless a school has two power sources the feature of dual power supplies would have no use."
Quality network engineer you have there, Dept. of Education.
In all seriousness, this is not new. DHHR in WV just fired some folks because they went public with information about a contract that was awarded to a contractor under mysterious circumstances. As a West Virginian, the answer is plain. Look for the money, tickets, campaign contributions. This is nothing new for the state, unfortunately.
Ahh, the old dual power supply con.
If I buy two routers (for resilance), why the hell does each one need a dual power supply? If I only have one router, what happens when something other than the PSU breaks (or indeed the power supply to the room dies)
There are two situations.
One, you can cope with the loss of function provided by a single device because people will just use another one. A printer for example.
In that case, if the device dies because the power supply goes, or it gets misconfigured, or someone drops an elephant on it, you know what the problem is, and your resilience plan (use the printer next door) can cope.
If the function the device needs to perform is critical and you can't cope with the loss of it, you need to duplicate the hardware and have automatic failover, for example have 2 routers running HSRP and OSPF or whatever you use.
There's no benefit in 2 PSUs when you have two routers. If you have 2 mains supplies, put one on A, one on B. If the power supply in the router dies, you lose the router, and your resilience kicks in. There's no benefit in having 2 psus in the printer -- you still need the backup if the printer dies.
There's a very slim number of cases where you have a device that needs the added resilience from a spare power supply, but don't have the budget to duplicate the entire device.
Sorry, but getting a couple of $400 mikrotiks will satisfy the routing needed for the average school. A bunch of fairly dumb $120 gigabit switches will satisfy the access layer. If it breaks, get local smart hands to move all the cables from switch A to a powered, but not connected, switch B. No vlans to watch out for, all ports are enabled, and the lesson resumes 5 minutes later.
Complex solutions tend to be * expensive to install * expensive when they go wrong
You mistakenly believe that force of law is effective in privacy rights. http://www.dhs.gov/
If you want your car to be invisible to electronic monitoring, you must drive a car with no electronic capability. I suggest one of these http://www.legendaryfind.com/
Does your car have a license plate? ANPR will track that just fine.
I completely agree. Same in corporations. The people with the purse strings will lap up the sales pitch from companies like ATOS and Capita, and flush the money down the toilet.
In parallel, the people that have responsibility for IT in the company have it locked down tighter than fort knox. At least on paper. Noone is allowed to create useful tools to fix problems in their department, it needs to go out to tender via a central funding pot.
Eventually you get people that, on paper, are "sales", but in reality are the department "techie", who will build his own infrastructure running on tin cans and 3G dongles, outside of the corporate IT structure. This is great, the problem is the 4 centralised masterminds in your university of old aren't there to provide the guidance and oversight, so eventually department techie makes a misstep and the company gets big problems.
Corporate IT needs to die, to be reborn with most of the work coming from people that are in the business.
I work on collaborative academic research projects. Rightly or wrongly some of these use free tools like Google docs for information sharing.across organisations and countries. It might not just be undergrad students but also paid employees not able to access important shared documents.
I'd prefer it we used some better shared work environment but by crickey have you ever tried as a non computing specialist academic to persuade your central IT department that they should use the workspace environment that some other university's IT department wants to use instead of the local preference? Geek fight supreme. None of the IT departments in the different organisations want to back down and use somebody else's preferred option, and if your PhD isn't in Computing they sure aren't going to take your advice... so often academics say "sod the IT departments, let's all just use this free software we all know how to use and bypass the IT departments who aren't interested in supporting collaborations...
This is nothing to do with universities, it happens in corporations too. IT departments think they're in charge, while the business works around them to get stuff done.
Unfortunately this all comes to a head when there's a data protection leak. I lay the blame at the door of IT, who will no doubt claim they're underfunded and understaffed, for not providing the right tools in the right timeframe.
Duke 3D was waaay more sophisticated than Wolfenstein. While it did employ similar dated rendering techniques and the need for sprites, it did offer full range of motion along all three dimensions, actual floors and ceilings, interactive environments, the ability to look around using a mouse, and the ability to have passages that could overlap one another. Doom couldn't even do that.
The Quakes were technologically superior, by far. Three dimensional rendering in the truest sense, greater lighting effects, antialiasing (I think that came about with Quake 2, but correct me if I'm wrong). Network play out the wazoo. Even the audio capabilities were incredible. (I used to love putting different CD's in the drive to change up the soundtrack. Megadeth's "Rust in Peace" goes very well with Quake.)
But despite all that, I always had more fun with Duke 3D than I did with Quake. It just had a more colorful personality and it had more creative levels. Quake was always so... brown and gray.
The amount of weekends I spent with a friend, 2 computers, and a null modem cable, so much fun. We even built a map of our school with build. And we showed it off during open evenings. Probably get arrested nowadays.
Was Malda given the chop? He was supposed to be some kind of Web 2.0 guru for them/ If they gave up on that mirage, his position is precarious. He's unlikely to be welcomed back here as editor. Though we will probably see more of him as a contributor as you cant spend all your life consuming drugs and hookers..
It would be good if he started a new blog, slashdot back to basics. I guess he signed a non-compete agreement.
What's with the Russian dashcams anyway? I saw that spectacular Russian plane crash last month on some driver's camera in addition to the more recent recent meteorite.
Porn.
In Russia, you often get hot girls baring all at traffic, sometimes even more;)
The problem with this is that the world is so litigation happy right now, that when a meteorite 'slips through the net' and kills one person, the workers at the observatories might get sued into oblivion.
Let's burn down the observatory so this never happens again!
If God had a message where he wanted to tell us that we're doing something wrong, what it is that we're doing wrong, why it's wrong, and what the right way is, maybe he would choose a better medium for his message than sending a random meteor to cause a sonic boom that breaks windows and injures a thousand people. Like, for example, appearing and actually speaking the message, so that there is no room for miscommunication.
Organised religion has too much to lose, and will spin any message that god gave out. Omniscience and Omnipotence have no chance against PR companies.
What interests me the most here is why wasn't this all over the news? We see posts about twice a year talking about the next "near miss" we're going to have. So what happened with this one? Didn't they catch it? Or did they catch it, realize it was going to hit, and decide not to tell anybody?
Because these incidents are fairly common and don't cause any harm. Objects this small are too small to track, and not worth tracking either. This object was probably no bigger than a car. The dangerous ones are as big as mountains...and bigger
Obviously the mountain sized ones (or even swimming pool sized ones) are terrible, but this one wasn't exactly a flash bang - look at Images 3, 4, 6 and 8
um.. we have about 50 channels or so on broadcast TV now and countless bullshit channels
And program quality has dropped down to Anerican levels, yes. The relationbetween program quality and number of channels has again been proven to be inversely proportional.
Worse, the BBC is now in a deep financial crisis from having to fill up multiple channels instead of just two, quality ones.
Not really. TV wise, the BBC funds BBC1, BBC2, and News Channel. BBC3, BBC4, CBBC, Cbeebies are part time channels occupying 2 full time slots.
Radio wise, digitial has added Radio 6, 1Extra, 4Extra and Asian Network. All of which are fairly cheap (I think the budget for the 1 extra is less than the budget for radio1's breakfast show)
There's also BBC World, which is supposed to be fully funded, however shares a lot of infrastructure with News Channel and national news. On the flip side, the advertising brings in money to invest in proper BBC.
Much of the new content on digital are repeats at a more convienent time. Childrens TV has moved from BBC1 afternoons to CBBC, and BBC1 mornings to cbeebies, and is now repeated.
The BBC has a financial problem because * The license fee has been frozen for some years, with inflation meaning it's gone down in real terms * The BBC had to fund part of the digital switchover * Most recently (from next year), the World Service and Monitoring have become funded by the license fee, not by a government grant
There's then ridiculous decisions taken years ago that wasted so much money. The original iplayer with that stupid windows-only download program and the sell off of BBC Technology to Siemens (now atos) rather than taking a loan are two things that spring to mind.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh yeah, let's just pick and choose the freedoms we want to let others defend. That'll work great.
I assume you've never heard:
First they came for the ........
It's kinda sad how hard it is to vigorously defend our rights.
Most of the bill of rights state things in terms of "Congress shall make no law" but yet Congress spends a lot of time trying to make rights restricting laws anyway.
First they came for the First Amendment, and set up "free speech zones", but I did not speak out because I'm just a gun nut
Then they came for the Fourth Amendment, and started random searches within 100 miles of the border, but I did not speak out because I'm just a gun nut
Then they came for the Fifth Amendment, took laptops and demanded the password, but I did not speak out because I'm just a gun nut
Then they came for the Sixth Amendment, and held people without a trial for years, but I did not speak out because I'm just a gun nut
Then they came for the Second Amendment, but nobody cared, because I'm just a gun nut and people are more worried about the fact the constitution is weaker than wet toilet paper
From the point of view of most Europeans where guns are generally banned you all look crazy. We don't have guns and yet somehow aren't being robbed, raped and murdered nearly as much as you guys. At no time in our history would guns have helped us rise up against the government either.
If Boudica had had guns, things might have turned out differently. I'm assuming in this scenario the romans didn't of course.
AR-15 fires from a locking closed bolt. The worst case stress placed on it's lower receiver is the recoil loading the buffer tube threads and the spring tension of the fire control group.
Everything on an AR-15 that deals with explosive pressures is made of steel. Plastic/composite parts are not critical components and are primarily used to locate components like the trigger and hammer.
Hand-wringing over material strength defects is a waste of time because the failure mode is a malfunction that harmlessly disables function of the firearm.
When I'm in a firefight, the last thing I want is my weapon "harmlessly" disabling it's function.
There are lots of other government transfer programs that tax the young to pay for the old. It only "works" until the demographic shift inherent to an ageing population gets bad enough that there aren't enough young people paying taxes to support the old people. Then you either move the age to qualify for benefits up or you run up massive deficits.
This is exactly the same no matter how you fund it, publicly or privately. In a perfect capitalist system, the baby boomers have all saved lots of piece of paper saying $100. They reach 65, and all demand that the youth accept these pieces of paper in exchange for doing work for them.
The youth decide they spend far too many hours as a country looking after old people, and not enough time looking after themselves. As such, they charge the old people more, and pay themselves more.
A piece of paper saying $100 is worthless. I will fix your broken leg, but you have give me a cow in exchange. That's not a practical way of conducting business in most countries, so we use things as barter. Dollars, Euros, shiny gems, whatever.
Once you leave the workforce, you're relying on your shiny gems maintaining their value. If inflation means these drop in value, tough.
Fundamentally, if you increase the resources looking after non-functioning people in society (majorly disabled, rich retirees, unemployed benefit scroungers), the rest suffer. The solution is to reduce the number of non-functioning people, either by raising retirement age, or by reducing the money and time you spend on them.
Rail against the out-of-control government that gives us the TSA, the Patriot Act, and summarily executes US citizens.
Then cheer it on when it takes over 1/6 of the US economy?
And you claim to care about your rights and freedoms?
WHY THE FUCK DO YOU WANT TO GIVE THAT OVERWEENING GOVERNMENT THAT MUCH *MORE* POWER?!?!?!
UK Economy: $2.4 trillion
UK Heath expenditure: under $200 billion.
That's 1/12th of the economy, sounds like you overspend on your health system. Shouldn't the competition keep prices down?
4) Pay for step 2
That's why I pay taxes. Same as providing roads, picking up trash, looking after aircraft in flight, providing education, etc.
1) feel ill
2) go to doctor
3) get better
What does an insurance company have to do with it?
You live in Scotland, or are you a typical American that's decided because his great grandfather once read a book on kilts that he's Scottish?
No true Scotsman lives in America?
Someone defining themselves as French would presumably be raised in France.
Someone defining themselves as Canadian would presumably be raised in Canada.
Someone defining themselves as Scotland would presumably be raised in Scotland.
Someone who's "1/4 French" is not French. They have a French grandparent.
The Department of Education told him that it "did not request or require that the routers for the state's schools have internal dual power supplies. Education would not have made this requirement because unless a school has two power sources the feature of dual power supplies would have no use."
Quality network engineer you have there, Dept. of Education.
In all seriousness, this is not new. DHHR in WV just fired some folks because they went public with information about a contract that was awarded to a contractor under mysterious circumstances. As a West Virginian, the answer is plain. Look for the money, tickets, campaign contributions. This is nothing new for the state, unfortunately.
Ahh, the old dual power supply con.
If I buy two routers (for resilance), why the hell does each one need a dual power supply? If I only have one router, what happens when something other than the PSU breaks (or indeed the power supply to the room dies)
There are two situations.
One, you can cope with the loss of function provided by a single device because people will just use another one. A printer for example.
In that case, if the device dies because the power supply goes, or it gets misconfigured, or someone drops an elephant on it, you know what the problem is, and your resilience plan (use the printer next door) can cope.
If the function the device needs to perform is critical and you can't cope with the loss of it, you need to duplicate the hardware and have automatic failover, for example have 2 routers running HSRP and OSPF or whatever you use.
There's no benefit in 2 PSUs when you have two routers. If you have 2 mains supplies, put one on A, one on B. If the power supply in the router dies, you lose the router, and your resilience kicks in. There's no benefit in having 2 psus in the printer -- you still need the backup if the printer dies.
There's a very slim number of cases where you have a device that needs the added resilience from a spare power supply, but don't have the budget to duplicate the entire device.
Sorry, but getting a couple of $400 mikrotiks will satisfy the routing needed for the average school. A bunch of fairly dumb $120 gigabit switches will satisfy the access layer. If it breaks, get local smart hands to move all the cables from switch A to a powered, but not connected, switch B. No vlans to watch out for, all ports are enabled, and the lesson resumes 5 minutes later.
Complex solutions tend to be
* expensive to install
* expensive when they go wrong
You should see the things the DoD buys, often to never be used.
You don't actually think they spend $20,000 on a hammer, $30,000 on a toilet seat, do you?
Except it did NOT need to cost as close the 24 mil as possible, it needed to cost as little as possible while still accomplishing the task.
The state was free to burn the rest of the 24 mil on more useful things.
You have no idea how public, or large corporation, funding works. Either that or you're being sarcastic.
I'm Scottish and it understands me remarkably well.
You live in Scotland, or are you a typical American that's decided because his great grandfather once read a book on kilts that he's Scottish?
You mistakenly believe that force of law is effective in privacy rights. http://www.dhs.gov/
If you want your car to be invisible to electronic monitoring, you must drive a car with no electronic capability. I suggest one of these http://www.legendaryfind.com/
Does your car have a license plate? ANPR will track that just fine.
I completely agree. Same in corporations. The people with the purse strings will lap up the sales pitch from companies like ATOS and Capita, and flush the money down the toilet.
In parallel, the people that have responsibility for IT in the company have it locked down tighter than fort knox. At least on paper. Noone is allowed to create useful tools to fix problems in their department, it needs to go out to tender via a central funding pot.
Eventually you get people that, on paper, are "sales", but in reality are the department "techie", who will build his own infrastructure running on tin cans and 3G dongles, outside of the corporate IT structure. This is great, the problem is the 4 centralised masterminds in your university of old aren't there to provide the guidance and oversight, so eventually department techie makes a misstep and the company gets big problems.
Corporate IT needs to die, to be reborn with most of the work coming from people that are in the business.
I work on collaborative academic research projects. Rightly or wrongly some of these use free tools like Google docs for information sharing.across organisations and countries. It might not just be undergrad students but also paid employees not able to access important shared documents.
I'd prefer it we used some better shared work environment but by crickey have you ever tried as a non computing specialist academic to persuade your central IT department that they should use the workspace environment that some other university's IT department wants to use instead of the local preference? Geek fight supreme. None of the IT departments in the different organisations want to back down and use somebody else's preferred option, and if your PhD isn't in Computing they sure aren't going to take your advice... so often academics say "sod the IT departments, let's all just use this free software we all know how to use and bypass the IT departments who aren't interested in supporting collaborations...
This is nothing to do with universities, it happens in corporations too. IT departments think they're in charge, while the business works around them to get stuff done.
Unfortunately this all comes to a head when there's a data protection leak. I lay the blame at the door of IT, who will no doubt claim they're underfunded and understaffed, for not providing the right tools in the right timeframe.
It's mainly an attitude problem.
Find a job more suited to your lack of ability already (though I admit it's going to be hard to find a job that requires less).
Timothy has been with slashdot for so long that he is no longer qualified to do anything else.
He never had any abilities, how do you think he got the job in the first place?
Duke 3D was waaay more sophisticated than Wolfenstein. While it did employ similar dated rendering techniques and the need for sprites, it did offer full range of motion along all three dimensions, actual floors and ceilings, interactive environments, the ability to look around using a mouse, and the ability to have passages that could overlap one another. Doom couldn't even do that.
The Quakes were technologically superior, by far. Three dimensional rendering in the truest sense, greater lighting effects, antialiasing (I think that came about with Quake 2, but correct me if I'm wrong). Network play out the wazoo. Even the audio capabilities were incredible. (I used to love putting different CD's in the drive to change up the soundtrack. Megadeth's "Rust in Peace" goes very well with Quake.)
But despite all that, I always had more fun with Duke 3D than I did with Quake. It just had a more colorful personality and it had more creative levels. Quake was always so... brown and gray.
The amount of weekends I spent with a friend, 2 computers, and a null modem cable, so much fun. We even built a map of our school with build. And we showed it off during open evenings. Probably get arrested nowadays.
Laser trip mines.Oh yes.
Was Malda given the chop? He was supposed to be some kind of Web 2.0 guru for them/ If they gave up on that mirage, his position is precarious. He's unlikely to be welcomed back here as editor. Though we will probably see more of him as a contributor as you cant spend all your life consuming drugs and hookers..
It would be good if he started a new blog, slashdot back to basics. I guess he signed a non-compete agreement.
What's with the Russian dashcams anyway? I saw that spectacular Russian plane crash last month on some driver's camera in addition to the more recent recent meteorite.
Porn.
In Russia, you often get hot girls baring all at traffic, sometimes even more ;)
Yes... the bar is being lowered, yes it is!
Good news for short people that want a beer
The problem with this is that the world is so litigation happy right now, that when a meteorite 'slips through the net' and kills one person, the workers at the observatories might get sued into oblivion.
Let's burn down the observatory so this never happens again!
Most likely just one of those tiny little things, the ones which we can't detect until they are nearly upon us.
Space is better armed and far sneakier than we'll ever be.
Surely this is a perfect example of why I need to keep a few assault rifles and an RPG at home.
If God had a message where he wanted to tell us that we're doing something wrong, what it is that we're doing wrong, why it's wrong, and what the right way is, maybe he would choose a better medium for his message than sending a random meteor to cause a sonic boom that breaks windows and injures a thousand people. Like, for example, appearing and actually speaking the message, so that there is no room for miscommunication.
Organised religion has too much to lose, and will spin any message that god gave out. Omniscience and Omnipotence have no chance against PR companies.
What interests me the most here is why wasn't this all over the news? We see posts about twice a year talking about the next "near miss" we're going to have. So what happened with this one? Didn't they catch it? Or did they catch it, realize it was going to hit, and decide not to tell anybody?
Because these incidents are fairly common and don't cause any harm. Objects this small are too small to track, and not worth tracking either. This object was probably no bigger than a car. The dangerous ones are as big as mountains...and bigger
Obviously the mountain sized ones (or even swimming pool sized ones) are terrible, but this one wasn't exactly a flash bang - look at Images 3, 4, 6 and 8
um.. we have about 50 channels or so on broadcast TV now and countless bullshit channels
And program quality has dropped down to Anerican levels, yes. The relationbetween program quality and number of channels has again been proven to be inversely proportional.
Worse, the BBC is now in a deep financial crisis from having to fill up multiple channels instead of just two, quality ones.
Not really. TV wise, the BBC funds BBC1, BBC2, and News Channel. BBC3, BBC4, CBBC, Cbeebies are part time channels occupying 2 full time slots.
Radio wise, digitial has added Radio 6, 1Extra, 4Extra and Asian Network. All of which are fairly cheap (I think the budget for the 1 extra is less than the budget for radio1's breakfast show)
There's also BBC World, which is supposed to be fully funded, however shares a lot of infrastructure with News Channel and national news. On the flip side, the advertising brings in money to invest in proper BBC.
Much of the new content on digital are repeats at a more convienent time. Childrens TV has moved from BBC1 afternoons to CBBC, and BBC1 mornings to cbeebies, and is now repeated.
The BBC has a financial problem because
* The license fee has been frozen for some years, with inflation meaning it's gone down in real terms
* The BBC had to fund part of the digital switchover
* Most recently (from next year), the World Service and Monitoring have become funded by the license fee, not by a government grant
There's then ridiculous decisions taken years ago that wasted so much money. The original iplayer with that stupid windows-only download program and the sell off of BBC Technology to Siemens (now atos) rather than taking a loan are two things that spring to mind.