Inasmuch as natural gas is usually produced as a by-product of oil getting (you do know that's what those flare pipes are for, right? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_flare) it's not really a stretch to use the term "oil company" in this context.
"As of the end of 2011, 150 × 109 cubic meters (5.3 × 1012 cubic feet) of associated gas are flared annually. That is equivalent to about 25 per cent of the annual natural gas consumption in the United States or about 30 per cent of the annual gas consumption in the European Union.[10] If it were to reach market, this quantity of gas (at a nominal value of $5.62 per 1000 cubic feet) would be worth $29.8 billion USD.[11]"
Further, a company can call itself any fucking thing so long as it's not done with provable intent to defraud. That many "former" oil companies invest in non-oil matters might be legitimately seen to give them let to call themselves "energy" companies and be quite correct in so doing doesn't belie that fact that their largest income is gotten directly from oil. Many of the erstwhile big oil companies invest in many forms of energy production and related infrastructure, from wind to photo-voltaics to geothermal, for instance. Sure, they're "energy companies" - they want to survive peak oil and the ridiculously short-sighted practice of using oil for transportation and such - but my personal wont is to call them oil companies until the bulk of their proceeds are gotten from non-oil stuff. Even then to me they're gonna remain the Seven Sisters [of Oil] that part-ruled the world for a century.
Funny, I figured that as I got older that I would maybe get a few things figured out, come up with some good advice for myself, but these days it mostly boils down to, "Be kind to one another."
Or send in plain-test with a few carefully tchosen outrageous mistpellings so they'll think those are indycators for a key-sequence - a book code, perhaps, or argot. Let 'em go nuts trying to figure out what I'm really saying, or at least do a lookup of all the books in the Library of Congress. It's trivial but still takes time.
No idea, good sir; never seen one that had tax message - but then, I've never asked to see anyone else's card. To me it's a passing curiosity, an oddity but one that atm I've insufficient whathaveyou to go looking.
Best damn summary I've seen anywhere all day. Hat off, man, and thank you for answering many of the questions I had while reading the linked article, although I did manage to come to the same conclusion.
I agree, fund the guy. Even if the trials and attendant research don't pan out, we'll have learned something useful as well - what line not to pursue, at least in that manner. (May be correct virus group but acting in a way in the body that the vaccine doesn't address, for instance.)
I've long subscribed to the notion that whatever humans make they can un-make, re-make, build anew. But that requires a certain clarity of thought, desire, and will to do. I see none of those things in the present situation. I'd like to be wrong about that assessment. I might could live another five years, or thirty; with winning the lottery, perhaps much longer. But as they say, I'm not holding my breath. Yet even in the depth of late-night sad cynicism, I still hope for a pleasant surprise. Screwy, yes?
"the whole that has been dug for it" - nice pun, no matter if unintentional
"I wonder if the NSA has calculated the economic damage[d] they're inflicting on our own country with this insanity."
Good question, leading to the first time I've ever used this: LOL.
Unknown - in all respects. So far it's been restricted to a few small businesses shutting down, and a few contracts either canceled or under re-consideration. For all the talk and bluster going on here and overseas, there's not near enough data to go on yet. When there are lots of re-assignments of servers, hosting, contracts, then we'll have some info to work with. The multi-nationals, including most big banks and pharma, don't really have to care about any of this, they can just shuffle things around. Impact would be in aerospace, some other manufacturing, and info and consumer services that can't shift overseas.
Ain't no such thing as free trade, only a set of restrictions against what is declared to be non-free, and a set of privileges for those who subscribe to a given set of rules. The original notion was not so bad - from examples back in the 1800's where countries mutually removed tariffs, for instance.
There is no free market, likewise; a minor example being Tesla in Texas. (And when I refer to free-market I don't include such gov't regs that act to help insure a level playing field viz. monopoly or interstate trade, or restrict adulteration of food stuffs and the like. A true free market would be outlaw, as Silk Road was in a minor way, or even as some of things Heinlein referred to.)
That's well and good but while it's OK to use existing infrastructure, such may not be reliable.
Mesh takes one just so far; hopping across an ocean is non-trivial. With bulk of traffic now done via fibre, piggy-backing on satellite channels is easily noticeable for any appreciable amount of traffic as well. One is left with trying to be unnoticed over existing fibre channels and maintaining unfettered access thereto. Not saying it can't be done (I don't have the tech chops to know, either way), saying it might not be so easy.
Yes, but that would require a healthy dose of fact-based reality on the part of the vote-pandering corporate whores in the national legislature. Note that it doesn't take even a majority of the members to act this way - just enough to prevent sensible repeal of draconian bullshit.
Though it be contrary to prevailing opinion, it's mine that the majority of Congress' members are fairly ordinary people having a genuine desire to "serve" caught up in a reality distanced from constituents, flavored by privilege and power, who bumble through the business of legislating issues that are filtered by staff, subject to the institution's gamesmanship, amid the vagaries of sound-bite journalism which comprises their voters' opinions. For those actually trying to do a good job of it I have no envy.
Then there are the zealots, and their supporters, of which I think there are too many. It's not that bigotry is unknown to me, than it is I find it so mind-boggling obtuse as to be beyond even my imaging how to deal with it.
Given the scope and intrusiveness of the security theatre bullshit I find it hard to understand why people put up with it, unless it be that it affects people in inverse proportion to their privilege and that those with least have shit for brains. The general populace has rendered itself powerless in less than a generation.
Well, that's one of the show-stoppers to any of this stuff. For most, I doubt it would take more than strong hints of letters to employer, family, friends that you would find embarrassing. Perhaps threat of a visit to your boss by a lawman-type to let him know you were been looked at and could they offer any insights which might be useful?
It's not even really so much the notion that we've become soft (that may be argued, and successfully, but it's still beside the point) as that a man faced with loss of income, blacklisting with prospective employers (even just hints of "official notice" would be sufficient for most), and subsequent loss of ability to provide for loved ones is in all likelihood gonna fold. Most of us would, and readily enough.
Lotta chest-thumping and loads of indignation here and abouts, but threat to family is one heckuva trump card.
Yes. But when I was in school it was expected that students learned certain bits at one level before being passed to the next. None of the schools I attended had any of the divisive "special needs" stuff with its attendant admin overhead. Someone might get held back a grade but for no longer; they were part of a class and most teachers gentled them along. (We're all born somewhere in the scheme of whatever, so there's no sense laying blame to the individual for that.) I certainly would have appreciated extra stuff alongside regular school, though, but in looking back, that might have been a source for additional unwanted consequences.
The only accommodation I ever saw to anything was Virginia building a raft of schools for just seventh and eighth grades to hand the decade of that bulge in the demographic worm. The one I attended show up on Google Maps, but I don't know what it's being used for. (While they weren't intended to last so long, workmanship was pretty good on the three examples I saw.)
Wait - there was one thing. A guy in fifth grade didn't show up for sixth. We found out he lived at home and got some tutoring, which I now realize was likely for some life skills things. I found out later, after high school - which I happened to attend in that same jurisdiction after a few moves - that in that unenlightened time that his parents only had to pay gas money for the tutor; the school board with the consenting vote of the parents decided that it was only fair to share the load of the tutor's expense rather than over-burden the family.
Different times. Today, given all the misspellings and such, I put it down to ignorance, carelessness, and that most folks are moving so quickly that they have no time for proof-reading or even slowing their typing down enough to catch a few things if they can. As an AC in another thread put it, this is all informal speech, so fuck it.
As for World of Warcraft, I much prefer seeing WoW to WW; the latter, to my generation, stands for World War.
I note in the article that many of the machines have been sold to places in the Tropics. If there has not been complete de-forestation, and if there are crops with a lot of waste - cane and sorghum come to mind, I'm having a brain-fart on recalling others - then these would fit right in. Plus, given the generally thin and often poor quality of native post-jungle soils, what hasn't been washed away could benefit nicely from the charcoal. (Conserving, building, and re-building soil is a big problem all over, including the U.S.)
I've noticed the same thing here in the Midwest, where wood and bark chips could be had for the asking, now not so much; you either know somebody or you buy it.
Yes. Between batches the filters need cleaning, for one thing. Still, it's one nifty bit of kit, and these guys look to have done a fine job of it.
For feeding several homes or a small wood or machine shop, you'd want to have several machines, to run in relays to cover each other's downtime. Depending on where one lived, extra juice could be sold back to the grid. A few of these and a Bloom box or the like and one could be the neighborhood power company, if the local law didn't forbid it. For third-world neighborhoods, wherever found, and for supplemental power during natural and other disasters, this stuff would be golden.
Perhaps one problem stems from such a tight commingling of political system with economic system such that flaws or disturbances in one greatly perturbs the other. Are there alternate or less entwined ways that could work?
Not to mention de Tocqueville and others pointing out that when the populace discovers that they can control the purse strings all is eventually lost.
"and required only that the citizenry stay involved"
Oh, yeah, that. At first blush you wouldn't think it would be such a hard thing to do, would you?
I think a large factor was the shift from local self-made entertainments - a festival dance, church social, a shared meal after a barn raising (notice there's a rural bias to some of these) - to other-manufactured ones - motion pictures, concerts (but at least some socializing entre actes), TV, then the socializing more and more stopped, with some exception for the bar and bowling alley, and for some still, church-related things. With less talk, less time for topics to roll around from crops or production line to taxes and politics. Less discussion -> less involvement. Add in the game on TV and a sixer, that's all she wrote.
Thing that's long bothered me, being un-knowledgeable in how this stuff works (IMF, e.g.), is that from source to destination, even if the intent is to help, by the time it gets on the ground, it's twisted - what doesn't get siphoned off into a few bank accounts or turned into off-the-books weaponry. Conundrums that are over my head, mostly.
I guess it's the old story, money and power look out for themselves, everyone else shifts lower on the teats, until those most needy get hindmost.
It's maybe terribly naive of me but I have to wonder if that's all there is, forever, as an axiom of humanity, or, if there are other ways of self-organizing, if they would just be shifting to other equally regressive parameters (might be wrong word choice, there) in their own right. And, if there is indeed a different way (more "enlightened") if it would improve long term species survival or not. Maybe the current system is what will breed enough individuals to handle whatever the Universe holds, do we get that far.
When I was taking Fortran IV and Fast Fortran, eight columns of the card were reserved for those sequence numbers (which the keypunch could automatically do), so no more than 72 were directly available to the user. One reason for 72-column word-wrap, there was a time when that was convenient, since one could reference a line on a terminal screen with what was punched on a card.
Let's see, that's where Oracle says that blending open-source with commercial requires skill levels that aren't abundant so that can make problems (especially for the company who just happens by the way to be selling that commercial package) and that there is no incentive for open-source software to be secure or good because there's no economic incentive.
'Government-sponsored community development approaches to software creation lack the financial incentives of commercial companies to produce low-defect, well-documented code.'
Conveniently avoided is the possibility of, you know, paying open-source developers.... and if it IS sponsored by government, does that not imply, or at least allow, for payments to developers? If yes, that rather blows away that objection as well.
Good summary, as best I understand as a non-pilot but one who's tried to keep up. (I can tell pitch from yaw, and think I remember the rationale for using rudder _and_ ailerons for making a turn; simple stuff.)
Re tech solutions - if I may, I'd add software defects (to cover an otherwise much longer list of stuff.) If I recall correctly, we've got automated take-off and landing routines that are used by more than a few airline pilots because they can save money and aggravation - but I've read of no pilot who completely trusts them nor is not ready at an instant to take over. (A partial exception that I know of is for the F/A-18+ aviators who grasp the handles at the top of the windscreen before the cat shot.)
"The issue is, of course, that Apple controls the CA so in theory if the government ordered them to issue a certificate in your name to the government, the gov could then monitor your communications or forge your identity.
Apple claims not to be able to read iMessages and that appears to be true, and as far as I'm aware not even the Patriot act requires them to issue forged certificates (aka allow the government to impersonate you digitally). So insofar as the law works and is followed, there is no legal authority to compel Apple to issue bunk certificates."
And there's the rub; has the issue of the government being able to compel handing over a cert been settled? (I should maybe know this from the past several month's reading about all this stuff, but am having a brain fart in the recall department.)
The chain of trust is a bitch. I know there's Web of Trust, convergence.io and similar attempts at addressing this in some manner, but don't know enough to reason out if it's worthwhile to try one of these schemes. Being a dumb-cluck luser yet reading about the risks and the realities is not a comfortable place that I find myself in - and there is an entire planet-full of people like me who could benefit from a chance at better security yet with little clue about how to proceed, other than the standard "how to stay safe on the Internet" guides.
Meanwhile, thanks for one of the better, more cogent posts on this. Even I could follow it.
Hey, no prob. But when you apply for something or move somewhere new, maybe run for office, or if in office oppose something, if Someone doesn't like you, said pics show up in a few mailboxes. Are you feeling the love now, Citizen?
Oh, heck yes! Sheesh, I've been arguing that for a few decades now, since PARC and Bell Labs were closed; that would have been to me a valid opportunity for government to help do what companies no longer would; sorry if it seemed differently. (A problem now, in a different venue, is where companies pay their employees so little that they have to rely on government for survival, e.g. food stamps.) Anyway, I should have been more specific.
To me that's a demonstrated need where gov't can, and I think ought to, do where citizens themselves (or via corps.) don't or won't.
(Btw, I've been participating in WorldCommunityGrid since '04; several of the projects have been portions of the Genome project and then on to proteome folding. It seemed to me to be worthwhile doing, and it doesn't cost all that much extra to keep the machine running full-time.)
Also btw, I like your quote. My French is rusty and was never good; so I render it as "Sing and dance, 'cuz that's about all the bastards haven't taken away yet."
Back about '01 I stayed with a friend next state over from the old days so's to attend a reunion; he mentioned that he was a Libertarian. I asked a bit about it, then when I got home spent some time reading up on it at their website and so on. While there were what I saw as some problem areas much of their overall position aligned well with where my head was at, some of it long-standing view. When I visited again in '08 for the next-last reunion of the same group of us, I asked him how the L stuff was going and got the equivalent of 'no comment.' Now, I hadn't kept good track of the L's so did some more reading, and understood why; it was my sense that they'd been co-opted. Not 'changed with the times' but flat-out hi-jacked.
Being so proud of my perspicacity, it took awhile for things to sink in, for me to twig to just how that change fit with other things. It wasn't until I noticed in the MSM how parts of recent history - the past twenty years or so, and some going back to just after WWII - were being re-written on the fly. At least, that's what it looked like to me. Then there was the whole schmeer of what was selected as news compared to other, wider sources.
Anyway, by my usual round-about stupid (asleep, unaware) way of bumbling into things, it finally dawned how wonderful it was that all the usual mess of effective totalitarianism has been avoided owing to nifty new tech and concentration of media - including news presentation, and that presentation allows for easy donning of comfortable blinders.
Back during Vietnam war there was the grunts' version of the pacification push, "Grab 'em by the balls and their hearts and minds will follow." Here and now no ball-grabbing has been necessary. Posit changes in tax breaks or availability of food stamps and all fall in line quite nicely.
It's a comfortable life, Citizen - yes, we've had a rough patch lately, but don't worry, things will get better - and we are looking out for you, never fear.
My head hurts, my heart is broken, and my soul crawled into a hole somewhere and isn't speaking. Other than that, things are just fine. Shit. Yes, well, cheers, and how are you today?
Slashdot Mirror
Inasmuch as natural gas is usually produced as a by-product of oil getting (you do know that's what those flare pipes are for, right? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_flare) it's not really a stretch to use the term "oil company" in this context.
"As of the end of 2011, 150 × 109 cubic meters (5.3 × 1012 cubic feet) of associated gas are flared annually. That is equivalent to about 25 per cent of the annual natural gas consumption in the United States or about 30 per cent of the annual gas consumption in the European Union.[10] If it were to reach market, this quantity of gas (at a nominal value of $5.62 per 1000 cubic feet) would be worth $29.8 billion USD.[11]"
Further, a company can call itself any fucking thing so long as it's not done with provable intent to defraud. That many "former" oil companies invest in non-oil matters might be legitimately seen to give them let to call themselves "energy" companies and be quite correct in so doing doesn't belie that fact that their largest income is gotten directly from oil. Many of the erstwhile big oil companies invest in many forms of energy production and related infrastructure, from wind to photo-voltaics to geothermal, for instance. Sure, they're "energy companies" - they want to survive peak oil and the ridiculously short-sighted practice of using oil for transportation and such - but my personal wont is to call them oil companies until the bulk of their proceeds are gotten from non-oil stuff. Even then to me they're gonna remain the Seven Sisters [of Oil] that part-ruled the world for a century.
Too true, on all counts.
Funny, I figured that as I got older that I would maybe get a few things figured out, come up with some good advice for myself, but these days it mostly boils down to, "Be kind to one another."
Meanwhile, good luck to us all.
Or send in plain-test with a few carefully tchosen outrageous mistpellings so they'll think those are indycators for a key-sequence - a book code, perhaps, or argot. Let 'em go nuts trying to figure out what I'm really saying, or at least do a lookup of all the books in the Library of Congress. It's trivial but still takes time.
No idea, good sir; never seen one that had tax message - but then, I've never asked to see anyone else's card. To me it's a passing curiosity, an oddity but one that atm I've insufficient whathaveyou to go looking.
Best damn summary I've seen anywhere all day. Hat off, man, and thank you for answering many of the questions I had while reading the linked article, although I did manage to come to the same conclusion.
I agree, fund the guy. Even if the trials and attendant research don't pan out, we'll have learned something useful as well - what line not to pursue, at least in that manner. (May be correct virus group but acting in a way in the body that the vaccine doesn't address, for instance.)
I've long subscribed to the notion that whatever humans make they can un-make, re-make, build anew. But that requires a certain clarity of thought, desire, and will to do. I see none of those things in the present situation. I'd like to be wrong about that assessment. I might could live another five years, or thirty; with winning the lottery, perhaps much longer. But as they say, I'm not holding my breath. Yet even in the depth of late-night sad cynicism, I still hope for a pleasant surprise. Screwy, yes?
"the whole that has been dug for it" - nice pun, no matter if unintentional
"I wonder if the NSA has calculated the economic damage[d] they're inflicting on our own country with this insanity."
Good question, leading to the first time I've ever used this: LOL.
Unknown - in all respects. So far it's been restricted to a few small businesses shutting down, and a few contracts either canceled or under re-consideration. For all the talk and bluster going on here and overseas, there's not near enough data to go on yet. When there are lots of re-assignments of servers, hosting, contracts, then we'll have some info to work with. The multi-nationals, including most big banks and pharma, don't really have to care about any of this, they can just shuffle things around. Impact would be in aerospace, some other manufacturing, and info and consumer services that can't shift overseas.
Ain't no such thing as free trade, only a set of restrictions against what is declared to be non-free, and a set of privileges for those who subscribe to a given set of rules. The original notion was not so bad - from examples back in the 1800's where countries mutually removed tariffs, for instance.
There is no free market, likewise; a minor example being Tesla in Texas. (And when I refer to free-market I don't include such gov't regs that act to help insure a level playing field viz. monopoly or interstate trade, or restrict adulteration of food stuffs and the like. A true free market would be outlaw, as Silk Road was in a minor way, or even as some of things Heinlein referred to.)
That's well and good but while it's OK to use existing infrastructure, such may not be reliable.
Mesh takes one just so far; hopping across an ocean is non-trivial. With bulk of traffic now done via fibre, piggy-backing on satellite channels is easily noticeable for any appreciable amount of traffic as well. One is left with trying to be unnoticed over existing fibre channels and maintaining unfettered access thereto. Not saying it can't be done (I don't have the tech chops to know, either way), saying it might not be so easy.
Yes, but that would require a healthy dose of fact-based reality on the part of the vote-pandering corporate whores in the national legislature. Note that it doesn't take even a majority of the members to act this way - just enough to prevent sensible repeal of draconian bullshit.
Though it be contrary to prevailing opinion, it's mine that the majority of Congress' members are fairly ordinary people having a genuine desire to "serve" caught up in a reality distanced from constituents, flavored by privilege and power, who bumble through the business of legislating issues that are filtered by staff, subject to the institution's gamesmanship, amid the vagaries of sound-bite journalism which comprises their voters' opinions. For those actually trying to do a good job of it I have no envy.
Then there are the zealots, and their supporters, of which I think there are too many. It's not that bigotry is unknown to me, than it is I find it so mind-boggling obtuse as to be beyond even my imaging how to deal with it.
Given the scope and intrusiveness of the security theatre bullshit I find it hard to understand why people put up with it, unless it be that it affects people in inverse proportion to their privilege and that those with least have shit for brains. The general populace has rendered itself powerless in less than a generation.
Well, that's one of the show-stoppers to any of this stuff. For most, I doubt it would take more than strong hints of letters to employer, family, friends that you would find embarrassing. Perhaps threat of a visit to your boss by a lawman-type to let him know you were been looked at and could they offer any insights which might be useful?
It's not even really so much the notion that we've become soft (that may be argued, and successfully, but it's still beside the point) as that a man faced with loss of income, blacklisting with prospective employers (even just hints of "official notice" would be sufficient for most), and subsequent loss of ability to provide for loved ones is in all likelihood gonna fold. Most of us would, and readily enough.
Lotta chest-thumping and loads of indignation here and abouts, but threat to family is one heckuva trump card.
Yes. But when I was in school it was expected that students learned certain bits at one level before being passed to the next. None of the schools I attended had any of the divisive "special needs" stuff with its attendant admin overhead. Someone might get held back a grade but for no longer; they were part of a class and most teachers gentled them along. (We're all born somewhere in the scheme of whatever, so there's no sense laying blame to the individual for that.) I certainly would have appreciated extra stuff alongside regular school, though, but in looking back, that might have been a source for additional unwanted consequences.
The only accommodation I ever saw to anything was Virginia building a raft of schools for just seventh and eighth grades to hand the decade of that bulge in the demographic worm. The one I attended show up on Google Maps, but I don't know what it's being used for. (While they weren't intended to last so long, workmanship was pretty good on the three examples I saw.)
Wait - there was one thing. A guy in fifth grade didn't show up for sixth. We found out he lived at home and got some tutoring, which I now realize was likely for some life skills things. I found out later, after high school - which I happened to attend in that same jurisdiction after a few moves - that in that unenlightened time that his parents only had to pay gas money for the tutor; the school board with the consenting vote of the parents decided that it was only fair to share the load of the tutor's expense rather than over-burden the family.
Different times. Today, given all the misspellings and such, I put it down to ignorance, carelessness, and that most folks are moving so quickly that they have no time for proof-reading or even slowing their typing down enough to catch a few things if they can. As an AC in another thread put it, this is all informal speech, so fuck it.
As for World of Warcraft, I much prefer seeing WoW to WW; the latter, to my generation, stands for World War.
Mine's from '58, nothing about tax on it. It's just a plain, ordinary SS card.
I note in the article that many of the machines have been sold to places in the Tropics. If there has not been complete de-forestation, and if there are crops with a lot of waste - cane and sorghum come to mind, I'm having a brain-fart on recalling others - then these would fit right in. Plus, given the generally thin and often poor quality of native post-jungle soils, what hasn't been washed away could benefit nicely from the charcoal. (Conserving, building, and re-building soil is a big problem all over, including the U.S.)
I've noticed the same thing here in the Midwest, where wood and bark chips could be had for the asking, now not so much; you either know somebody or you buy it.
Yes. Between batches the filters need cleaning, for one thing. Still, it's one nifty bit of kit, and these guys look to have done a fine job of it.
For feeding several homes or a small wood or machine shop, you'd want to have several machines, to run in relays to cover each other's downtime. Depending on where one lived, extra juice could be sold back to the grid. A few of these and a Bloom box or the like and one could be the neighborhood power company, if the local law didn't forbid it. For third-world neighborhoods, wherever found, and for supplemental power during natural and other disasters, this stuff would be golden.
Perhaps one problem stems from such a tight commingling of political system with economic system such that flaws or disturbances in one greatly perturbs the other. Are there alternate or less entwined ways that could work?
Not to mention de Tocqueville and others pointing out that when the populace discovers that they can control the purse strings all is eventually lost.
"and required only that the citizenry stay involved"
Oh, yeah, that. At first blush you wouldn't think it would be such a hard thing to do, would you?
I think a large factor was the shift from local self-made entertainments - a festival dance, church social, a shared meal after a barn raising (notice there's a rural bias to some of these) - to other-manufactured ones - motion pictures, concerts (but at least some socializing entre actes), TV, then the socializing more and more stopped, with some exception for the bar and bowling alley, and for some still, church-related things. With less talk, less time for topics to roll around from crops or production line to taxes and politics. Less discussion -> less involvement. Add in the game on TV and a sixer, that's all she wrote.
Somaliland the unknown. Thanks for that.
Thing that's long bothered me, being un-knowledgeable in how this stuff works (IMF, e.g.), is that from source to destination, even if the intent is to help, by the time it gets on the ground, it's twisted - what doesn't get siphoned off into a few bank accounts or turned into off-the-books weaponry. Conundrums that are over my head, mostly.
I guess it's the old story, money and power look out for themselves, everyone else shifts lower on the teats, until those most needy get hindmost.
It's maybe terribly naive of me but I have to wonder if that's all there is, forever, as an axiom of humanity, or, if there are other ways of self-organizing, if they would just be shifting to other equally regressive parameters (might be wrong word choice, there) in their own right. And, if there is indeed a different way (more "enlightened") if it would improve long term species survival or not. Maybe the current system is what will breed enough individuals to handle whatever the Universe holds, do we get that far.
When I was taking Fortran IV and Fast Fortran, eight columns of the card were reserved for those sequence numbers (which the keypunch could automatically do), so no more than 72 were directly available to the user. One reason for 72-column word-wrap, there was a time when that was convenient, since one could reference a line on a terminal screen with what was punched on a card.
Let's see, that's where Oracle says that blending open-source with commercial requires skill levels that aren't abundant so that can make problems (especially for the company who just happens by the way to be selling that commercial package) and that there is no incentive for open-source software to be secure or good because there's no economic incentive.
'Government-sponsored community development approaches to software creation lack the financial incentives of commercial companies to produce low-defect, well-documented code.'
Conveniently avoided is the possibility of, you know, paying open-source developers.... and if it IS sponsored by government, does that not imply, or at least allow, for payments to developers? If yes, that rather blows away that objection as well.
Good summary, as best I understand as a non-pilot but one who's tried to keep up. (I can tell pitch from yaw, and think I remember the rationale for using rudder _and_ ailerons for making a turn; simple stuff.)
Re tech solutions - if I may, I'd add software defects (to cover an otherwise much longer list of stuff.) If I recall correctly, we've got automated take-off and landing routines that are used by more than a few airline pilots because they can save money and aggravation - but I've read of no pilot who completely trusts them nor is not ready at an instant to take over. (A partial exception that I know of is for the F/A-18+ aviators who grasp the handles at the top of the windscreen before the cat shot.)
"The issue is, of course, that Apple controls the CA so in theory if the government ordered them to issue a certificate in your name to the government, the gov could then monitor your communications or forge your identity.
Apple claims not to be able to read iMessages and that appears to be true, and as far as I'm aware not even the Patriot act requires them to issue forged certificates (aka allow the government to impersonate you digitally). So insofar as the law works and is followed, there is no legal authority to compel Apple to issue bunk certificates."
And there's the rub; has the issue of the government being able to compel handing over a cert been settled? (I should maybe know this from the past several month's reading about all this stuff, but am having a brain fart in the recall department.)
The chain of trust is a bitch. I know there's Web of Trust, convergence.io and similar attempts at addressing this in some manner, but don't know enough to reason out if it's worthwhile to try one of these schemes. Being a dumb-cluck luser yet reading about the risks and the realities is not a comfortable place that I find myself in - and there is an entire planet-full of people like me who could benefit from a chance at better security yet with little clue about how to proceed, other than the standard "how to stay safe on the Internet" guides.
Meanwhile, thanks for one of the better, more cogent posts on this. Even I could follow it.
Hey, no prob. But when you apply for something or move somewhere new, maybe run for office, or if in office oppose something, if Someone doesn't like you, said pics show up in a few mailboxes. Are you feeling the love now, Citizen?
Oh, heck yes! Sheesh, I've been arguing that for a few decades now, since PARC and Bell Labs were closed; that would have been to me a valid opportunity for government to help do what companies no longer would; sorry if it seemed differently. (A problem now, in a different venue, is where companies pay their employees so little that they have to rely on government for survival, e.g. food stamps.) Anyway, I should have been more specific.
To me that's a demonstrated need where gov't can, and I think ought to, do where citizens themselves (or via corps.) don't or won't.
(Btw, I've been participating in WorldCommunityGrid since '04; several of the projects have been portions of the Genome project and then on to proteome folding. It seemed to me to be worthwhile doing, and it doesn't cost all that much extra to keep the machine running full-time.)
Also btw, I like your quote. My French is rusty and was never good; so I render it as "Sing and dance, 'cuz that's about all the bastards haven't taken away yet."
Back about '01 I stayed with a friend next state over from the old days so's to attend a reunion; he mentioned that he was a Libertarian. I asked a bit about it, then when I got home spent some time reading up on it at their website and so on. While there were what I saw as some problem areas much of their overall position aligned well with where my head was at, some of it long-standing view. When I visited again in '08 for the next-last reunion of the same group of us, I asked him how the L stuff was going and got the equivalent of 'no comment.' Now, I hadn't kept good track of the L's so did some more reading, and understood why; it was my sense that they'd been co-opted. Not 'changed with the times' but flat-out hi-jacked.
Being so proud of my perspicacity, it took awhile for things to sink in, for me to twig to just how that change fit with other things. It wasn't until I noticed in the MSM how parts of recent history - the past twenty years or so, and some going back to just after WWII - were being re-written on the fly. At least, that's what it looked like to me. Then there was the whole schmeer of what was selected as news compared to other, wider sources.
Anyway, by my usual round-about stupid (asleep, unaware) way of bumbling into things, it finally dawned how wonderful it was that all the usual mess of effective totalitarianism has been avoided owing to nifty new tech and concentration of media - including news presentation, and that presentation allows for easy donning of comfortable blinders.
Back during Vietnam war there was the grunts' version of the pacification push, "Grab 'em by the balls and their hearts and minds will follow." Here and now no ball-grabbing has been necessary. Posit changes in tax breaks or availability of food stamps and all fall in line quite nicely.
It's a comfortable life, Citizen - yes, we've had a rough patch lately, but don't worry, things will get better - and we are looking out for you, never fear.
My head hurts, my heart is broken, and my soul crawled into a hole somewhere and isn't speaking. Other than that, things are just fine. Shit. Yes, well, cheers, and how are you today?