Well, his intentions were obviously meaningless, since I can apparently still print out my own boarding passes, legit or not.
It's a shame the TSA people think just like you, if people would quit trying to kill the messengers, we might start seeing something that looked more like security and less like cronies securing contracts.
But you can't catch the people you really need to watch; the people who control the surveillance network.
No, but you can make them liable for it. For instance, when a cop covers up their dashboard cam (or just turns it off in places where they're allowed to) and something happens, or when all of the footage in the subway station where the cops just shot some Brazilian guy mysteriously disappears, the people who were responsible for that should immediately and irrevocably lose their jobs. Sure, you might get a few bad apples, but once they fuck with the system once, they should be discarded. Add personal lawsuits to make sure that borderline cases don't get any ideas.
Police unions will never buy it though. Especially if you're permitted to sue the cop directly, and not just suck taxpayer money up by suing the office.
The United States of America was founded by people who wanted a Godly nation
The first amendment was not written for shits and giggles. The separation of church and state was and still is of vital importance to both the church and the state. Did you know that at the time people were thinking about the Bill of Rights, Virginia was jailing Baptists for the crime of being Baptist? Godly men indeed!
Considering that Excel is the dominant spreadsheet product
Maybe Microsoft felt that Excel had already reached the maximum mindshare and that advertising wouldn't do anything for them anymore. After all, if everyone thinks spreadsheet: Excel, then paying google to tell people spreadsheet: Excel doesn't help.
"A speculum was needed to hold the eyes open to produce this type of injury because even under anesthesia, the monkeys blinked, protecting the cornea," the report says.
I'm sure the interrogation specialists are taking notes right this instant.
I refer to the situation where on accepting a contract, a person immediately accepts debt for the equipent or time or services that are provided up-front.
In the US, we called that indentured servitude. The people were generally considered "free" (even the Constitution counted them as free Persons), and the system actually worked well enough that it wasn't really an issue until corporations started abusing their employees with company stores and such that it became a real problem in the US. (While indentured servitude as such was eventually banned, it took unionization to break the company store.)
Thinking about it, I would take the least suitable code from the previous year, give it out with the syllabus, and tell everyone to start from that point, that'll make sure everyone's on the same foot and gets the same experience out of the situation (so even if some guy can write excellent and maintainable code, he still has to learn to read someone else's crap). It'd also solve the issue of new students coming in partway through the sequence.
you'll see that we were talking about a specific program.
Sorry, I just jumped in with my two cents and missed that part. Looking back, I'll have to say the university I graduated from keeps pretty good tabs on me, after all, if I landed some six figure job, how else would the alumni association know to badger me about it?
It's no wonder the university degree is not worth what it used to be.
Well, I'm not an employer, and since graduating I've managed to hold one job doing software development for several years now, so the only experience I have is my own experience with my own computer science degree.
The value of that degree to me is immeasurable. To all the companies I applied to that claimed they wanted a college degree? Not so much. I contend that even though the university's computer science program did not provide the "X years of experience with foo" that those companies actually wanted, the degree program worked exactly as intended, as it has given me the skills to obtain that experience on my own if that's what it takes to make "businessmen with heads thoroughly up their asses" read my resume. (Sadly, the other 299 million people in this country have to work for someone other than you or GE or IBM.)
For the rest of the sciences and probably most of the liberal arts though, you're probably right, I don't have any experience with those to claim otherwise.
If I ask you to specify the size and shape of a reactor for safely preparing ammonium nitrate from certain readily available stock chemicals, and you get it just right, why may I not conclude you know (certain aspects of) chemical engineering pretty well?
And if I'm an electrical engineer, why would I know this? Why would I take your test? The point of the grandparent was that there are too many possible variations, either the tests would take days to complete, with the best students scoring a maximum of about 3%, or there would be hundreds of different tests that would all have to be individually maintained.
Of course, there's also the opinion that the university is NOT there to teach students C++, it's there to teach students how computers work, how computers are programmed, how systems are modeled, etc. Any feedback system that went to the employers and asked them what they want would have to be strongly tempered to resist turning out students that don't know anything but the latest whizbang language from 4 years ago.
Well, maybe your local authorities have done more to earn your trust. We've barely just finished dealing with the HPD crime lab lying on the stand about around 200 DNA tests. Yet somehow the prosecutors never seem to have time to charge anyone with perjury, even when we have labnotes that directly contradict the testimony some of the HPD members gave on the stand. Total casualty: one lab worker lost her job. For a couple of months. Then the union got her job reinstated. Of course, the prosecutors aren't the only ones in on the circus, one Josiah Sutton was found guilty of being one of two rapists of a woman based on (what turned out to be faulty) DNA evidence and identification by the victim. Retests showed that the woman was indeed raped by two men, but neither of them was Sutton. Sutton was released, but the District Attorney refused to give an "innocence" pardon, despite the DNA evidence (apparently DNA is 100% foolproof when it's on the prosecutors' side, but...).
Of course, that's only one of the recent WTFs, before that was the infamous K-Mart raid where cops showed up to bust some street racing, only there were no street racers, so they arrested every shopper at the K-Mart they were at, then when that didn't make them feel big enough, they moved on to the restaurant next door and arrested everyone eating there as well. The punishment? The guy in charge got a raise from the mayor (who had just hit his term limit and was literally walking out the door. He fled and spent his last week in office in Africa rather than face his fellow Houstonians) and retired the next day on his newly boosted pension. Oh, and the several hundred people who were arrested had to all individually sue the city to have their arrest purged from the record, on my dime to boot.
There's also a well publicized case of a cop tasering a football player for being argumentative at a traffic stop. He was then arrested for resisting arrest. His charge? Resisting arrest. As far as I can tell from any of the media reports, he wasn't actually being arrested for anything except resisting arrest (last I heard you don't arrest people for moving violations, but maybe I'm just not up to date on these things). Funny, that. Incidentally, a judge dismissed the resisting arrest charges. At least our current mayor is actually proposing an investigation, though time will tell if it actually happens or if anything will change if the investigation determines something needs to be done.
The alternative is to riddle another human being with bullets
Given that they apparently intend to use it against the civilians in Iraq to separate "tourists from the terrorists", the alternative you're looking for is "riddle an entire crowd of people with bullets". I'm sure using it against civilians will work wonders for our image.
But wait! The range is classified, but apparently they intend to be able to use it from airborne vehicles, so it has to be fairly good (if it was short range, any helicopter hovering at 100 feet would be an easy target if there was actually a real, armed terrorist in the crowd. If you see news reports of helicopters using it from just off the top of a building, think about the risk the pilot must be putting themselves in to do this. Or not.) So now you'll have the crowd you're trying to disperse, and then the Iraqis at the corner cafe a few blocks away get zapped. I'm sure that they will be calm, rational people just like you and go "well, I'm glad they didn't just blow us all up".
Do you have any idea what goes on when a prisoner is tortured for information?
Yeah, they'll say anything that they think will make the pain stop. This has been known for centuries, and borne out through tests that only recently have been condemned as unethical treatment of test subjects. But hey, what's the point of having a color-coded alert system if you can't at least pretend you have a reason to raise it?
you über-pacifists are never satisfied
Nobody's worried about the army using guns on terrorists. The thing is that the army wants a weapon that it can use against everyone. And if it becomes approved for use in the US, it's not going to be as a weapon to use against the "bad guys", it's going to be for use against everyone.
That wasn't what he was complaining about. He was complaining that companies started demanding degrees as proof of "training" (as opposed to proof of the ability to learn skills) and many colleges obliged by providing the training that the companies wanted.
Also, if you think that's not what companies want when they ask for a BS or a MS in Computer Science, how many of those job postings did not tack "and years of experience in..." onto a degree requirement if they were looking for a graduate that had a degree that proves that they had a variety of disciplines and a love of learning that the candidate could then use to get up to speed in... quickly?
Your faith in your government is nothing short of astounding.
Cops here in Houston bring in a guy. Guy claims the cops beat him, cops claim they found him that way. Well, we've got footage from the cop cars, right? Well, the cops turned the cameras off for some reason. But that's ok, because "the deputy did nothing wrong".
Why can the cops turn their car cameras off? Why do you think this switch will be "monitored"? Why do you believe that anyone is going to have to explain to any superior as to why they needed continuous fire, or why they used the thing on the bunch of kids waiting in line for a game their little timmy wanted for christmas in the first place?
converting most of the record profits into the personal wealth of the shareholders instead of recapitalizing smacks of abandonment of the efficiency ideals of capitalism.
Well duh, if they recapitalized into more refineries and more wells, there'd be more oil and fuel, thus supply would be greater, driving the prices they can charge back down.
Instead they've discovered the real efficiency ideal of capitalism: by doing less work with less expense (drilling, refining) they make more money because of the reduced supply that directly results. Thus capitalism is working exactly as advertised.
There are controls on this, of course, people are now driving less and buying smaller and/or more fuel-efficient cars, so there is actually some elasticity on the demand side of things, it just takes time for people to "recapitalize" on their end. Eventually their profits will be back down from people buying less fuel at the higher rates.
If Sony were allowing people to store all their betamax tapes of copied films in a Sony warehouse the case may have had a different outcome.
How would Sony know that a betamax tape in a crate being shipped in for storage was a copied film or not, short of watching every single minute of every single tape? That's the very point of the Safe Harbor provision of the DMCA. Companies can go about their business regarding user-posted content, and if they meet certain criteria then they have no responsibility for the behavior of the users.
Clearly this case will revolve around whether MySpace obeyed the safe harbor criteria, and whether they are making money (wait, are they even making money?) because of the infringements or because of their service, and whether the language in the DMCA cares which it is.
of course the laws were different back then.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
It is the GPL license of Linux that has forced companies like IBM, Intel, Sun, SGI, etc. to contribute valuable codes like enterprise-level schedulers and >128-way SMP support, RCU, great compiler optimizations, etc.
Forced? So it held a gun to their back and forced them to use GCC, the linux kernel, and so on, rather than writing their own?
If spending millions on writing your own operating system is just too expensive for you, maybe you too would find trading "valuable" 128-way SMP code for a ready-made platform a bargain.
Prevent? How? "Don't hang out on IRC from your server's IP?" "When you get an email demanding $50000, pay up?" "Reach through the intertubes and strangle the guy that's about to send the packets to you?"
They might be "easy to deal with": call your upstream provider and hope that they'll shut it off (or call their upstream provider) rather than go "kaching!" and let your bandwidth bill rack up.
when claiming something is obvious, it begs the question "how come you didn't think of it then?"
Because whether or not I "thought of it" has nothing to do with whether or not it's obvious.
If I walked up to ten random people and said "When it rains, water floods the ditch where I keep my TV and ruins it, what should I do to keep the TV safe?" How many of them do you think will say "move it somewhere else!" Does the fact that they never had to save a TV that was in the middle of a ditch or had their TV short out in the rain make the answer any less obvious?
Slashdot Mirror
Well, his intentions were obviously meaningless, since I can apparently still print out my own boarding passes, legit or not.
It's a shame the TSA people think just like you, if people would quit trying to kill the messengers, we might start seeing something that looked more like security and less like cronies securing contracts.
But you can't catch the people you really need to watch; the people who control the surveillance network.
No, but you can make them liable for it. For instance, when a cop covers up their dashboard cam (or just turns it off in places where they're allowed to) and something happens, or when all of the footage in the subway station where the cops just shot some Brazilian guy mysteriously disappears, the people who were responsible for that should immediately and irrevocably lose their jobs. Sure, you might get a few bad apples, but once they fuck with the system once, they should be discarded. Add personal lawsuits to make sure that borderline cases don't get any ideas.
Police unions will never buy it though. Especially if you're permitted to sue the cop directly, and not just suck taxpayer money up by suing the office.
Nobody gets attached to the bees, so there's no hard feelings should the bomb blow them up.
i ffing.bees.reut/index.html
Seriously, though http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/science/11/28/bombsn
The United States of America was founded by people who wanted a Godly nation
The first amendment was not written for shits and giggles. The separation of church and state was and still is of vital importance to both the church and the state. Did you know that at the time people were thinking about the Bill of Rights, Virginia was jailing Baptists for the crime of being Baptist? Godly men indeed!
Considering that Excel is the dominant spreadsheet product
Maybe Microsoft felt that Excel had already reached the maximum mindshare and that advertising wouldn't do anything for them anymore. After all, if everyone thinks spreadsheet: Excel, then paying google to tell people spreadsheet: Excel doesn't help.
What's the difference between Congress and the Library of Congress?
At the Library, you get in real trouble for licking the pages!
"A speculum was needed to hold the eyes open to produce this type of injury because even under anesthesia, the monkeys blinked, protecting the cornea," the report says.
I'm sure the interrogation specialists are taking notes right this instant.
I refer to the situation where on accepting a contract, a person immediately accepts debt for the equipent or time or services that are provided up-front.
In the US, we called that indentured servitude. The people were generally considered "free" (even the Constitution counted them as free Persons), and the system actually worked well enough that it wasn't really an issue until corporations started abusing their employees with company stores and such that it became a real problem in the US. (While indentured servitude as such was eventually banned, it took unionization to break the company store.)
Thinking about it, I would take the least suitable code from the previous year, give it out with the syllabus, and tell everyone to start from that point, that'll make sure everyone's on the same foot and gets the same experience out of the situation (so even if some guy can write excellent and maintainable code, he still has to learn to read someone else's crap). It'd also solve the issue of new students coming in partway through the sequence.
you'll see that we were talking about a specific program.
Sorry, I just jumped in with my two cents and missed that part. Looking back, I'll have to say the university I graduated from keeps pretty good tabs on me, after all, if I landed some six figure job, how else would the alumni association know to badger me about it?
It's no wonder the university degree is not worth what it used to be.
Well, I'm not an employer, and since graduating I've managed to hold one job doing software development for several years now, so the only experience I have is my own experience with my own computer science degree.
The value of that degree to me is immeasurable. To all the companies I applied to that claimed they wanted a college degree? Not so much. I contend that even though the university's computer science program did not provide the "X years of experience with foo" that those companies actually wanted, the degree program worked exactly as intended, as it has given me the skills to obtain that experience on my own if that's what it takes to make "businessmen with heads thoroughly up their asses" read my resume. (Sadly, the other 299 million people in this country have to work for someone other than you or GE or IBM.)
For the rest of the sciences and probably most of the liberal arts though, you're probably right, I don't have any experience with those to claim otherwise.
If I ask you to specify the size and shape of a reactor for safely preparing ammonium nitrate from certain readily available stock chemicals, and you get it just right, why may I not conclude you know (certain aspects of) chemical engineering pretty well?
And if I'm an electrical engineer, why would I know this? Why would I take your test? The point of the grandparent was that there are too many possible variations, either the tests would take days to complete, with the best students scoring a maximum of about 3%, or there would be hundreds of different tests that would all have to be individually maintained.
Of course, there's also the opinion that the university is NOT there to teach students C++, it's there to teach students how computers work, how computers are programmed, how systems are modeled, etc. Any feedback system that went to the employers and asked them what they want would have to be strongly tempered to resist turning out students that don't know anything but the latest whizbang language from 4 years ago.
then we leave it to our legal system.
Well, maybe your local authorities have done more to earn your trust. We've barely just finished dealing with the HPD crime lab lying on the stand about around 200 DNA tests. Yet somehow the prosecutors never seem to have time to charge anyone with perjury, even when we have labnotes that directly contradict the testimony some of the HPD members gave on the stand. Total casualty: one lab worker lost her job. For a couple of months. Then the union got her job reinstated. Of course, the prosecutors aren't the only ones in on the circus, one Josiah Sutton was found guilty of being one of two rapists of a woman based on (what turned out to be faulty) DNA evidence and identification by the victim. Retests showed that the woman was indeed raped by two men, but neither of them was Sutton. Sutton was released, but the District Attorney refused to give an "innocence" pardon, despite the DNA evidence (apparently DNA is 100% foolproof when it's on the prosecutors' side, but...).
Of course, that's only one of the recent WTFs, before that was the infamous K-Mart raid where cops showed up to bust some street racing, only there were no street racers, so they arrested every shopper at the K-Mart they were at, then when that didn't make them feel big enough, they moved on to the restaurant next door and arrested everyone eating there as well. The punishment? The guy in charge got a raise from the mayor (who had just hit his term limit and was literally walking out the door. He fled and spent his last week in office in Africa rather than face his fellow Houstonians) and retired the next day on his newly boosted pension. Oh, and the several hundred people who were arrested had to all individually sue the city to have their arrest purged from the record, on my dime to boot.
There's also a well publicized case of a cop tasering a football player for being argumentative at a traffic stop. He was then arrested for resisting arrest. His charge? Resisting arrest. As far as I can tell from any of the media reports, he wasn't actually being arrested for anything except resisting arrest (last I heard you don't arrest people for moving violations, but maybe I'm just not up to date on these things). Funny, that. Incidentally, a judge dismissed the resisting arrest charges. At least our current mayor is actually proposing an investigation, though time will tell if it actually happens or if anything will change if the investigation determines something needs to be done.
The alternative is to riddle another human being with bullets
Given that they apparently intend to use it against the civilians in Iraq to separate "tourists from the terrorists", the alternative you're looking for is "riddle an entire crowd of people with bullets". I'm sure using it against civilians will work wonders for our image.
But wait! The range is classified, but apparently they intend to be able to use it from airborne vehicles, so it has to be fairly good (if it was short range, any helicopter hovering at 100 feet would be an easy target if there was actually a real, armed terrorist in the crowd. If you see news reports of helicopters using it from just off the top of a building, think about the risk the pilot must be putting themselves in to do this. Or not.) So now you'll have the crowd you're trying to disperse, and then the Iraqis at the corner cafe a few blocks away get zapped. I'm sure that they will be calm, rational people just like you and go "well, I'm glad they didn't just blow us all up".
Do you have any idea what goes on when a prisoner is tortured for information?
Yeah, they'll say anything that they think will make the pain stop. This has been known for centuries, and borne out through tests that only recently have been condemned as unethical treatment of test subjects. But hey, what's the point of having a color-coded alert system if you can't at least pretend you have a reason to raise it?
you über-pacifists are never satisfied
Nobody's worried about the army using guns on terrorists. The thing is that the army wants a weapon that it can use against everyone. And if it becomes approved for use in the US, it's not going to be as a weapon to use against the "bad guys", it's going to be for use against everyone.
How is that wrong exactly?
..." onto a degree requirement if they were looking for a graduate that had a degree that proves that they had a variety of disciplines and a love of learning that the candidate could then use to get up to speed in ... quickly?
That wasn't what he was complaining about. He was complaining that companies started demanding degrees as proof of "training" (as opposed to proof of the ability to learn skills) and many colleges obliged by providing the training that the companies wanted.
Also, if you think that's not what companies want when they ask for a BS or a MS in Computer Science, how many of those job postings did not tack "and years of experience in
this switch would be monitored
Your faith in your government is nothing short of astounding.
Cops here in Houston bring in a guy. Guy claims the cops beat him, cops claim they found him that way. Well, we've got footage from the cop cars, right? Well, the cops turned the cameras off for some reason. But that's ok, because "the deputy did nothing wrong".
Why can the cops turn their car cameras off? Why do you think this switch will be "monitored"? Why do you believe that anyone is going to have to explain to any superior as to why they needed continuous fire, or why they used the thing on the bunch of kids waiting in line for a game their little timmy wanted for christmas in the first place?
converting most of the record profits into the personal wealth of the shareholders instead of recapitalizing smacks of abandonment of the efficiency ideals of capitalism.
Well duh, if they recapitalized into more refineries and more wells, there'd be more oil and fuel, thus supply would be greater, driving the prices they can charge back down.
Instead they've discovered the real efficiency ideal of capitalism: by doing less work with less expense (drilling, refining) they make more money because of the reduced supply that directly results. Thus capitalism is working exactly as advertised.
There are controls on this, of course, people are now driving less and buying smaller and/or more fuel-efficient cars, so there is actually some elasticity on the demand side of things, it just takes time for people to "recapitalize" on their end. Eventually their profits will be back down from people buying less fuel at the higher rates.
If Sony were allowing people to store all their betamax tapes of copied films in a Sony warehouse the case may have had a different outcome.
How would Sony know that a betamax tape in a crate being shipped in for storage was a copied film or not, short of watching every single minute of every single tape? That's the very point of the Safe Harbor provision of the DMCA. Companies can go about their business regarding user-posted content, and if they meet certain criteria then they have no responsibility for the behavior of the users.
Clearly this case will revolve around whether MySpace obeyed the safe harbor criteria, and whether they are making money (wait, are they even making money?) because of the infringements or because of their service, and whether the language in the DMCA cares which it is.
of course the laws were different back then.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
We can with 96.55% confidence say that a graduating cadet will be failing at his job in five years
Oddly, it only asks one question:
"Is the police department where the cadet will be working unionized?"
The government has a way of inflating values on damage like this to make the charges more than what they should be
Not to mention they typically charge for "fixing the hole" when they should have fixed the hole on their own dime in advance.
Cervantes I wasn't expecting
Nobody expects the Spanish Author!
It is the GPL license of Linux that has forced companies like IBM, Intel, Sun, SGI, etc. to contribute valuable codes like enterprise-level schedulers and >128-way SMP support, RCU, great compiler optimizations, etc.
Forced? So it held a gun to their back and forced them to use GCC, the linux kernel, and so on, rather than writing their own?
If spending millions on writing your own operating system is just too expensive for you, maybe you too would find trading "valuable" 128-way SMP code for a ready-made platform a bargain.
the realities of life - it's unfair
Yeah yeah, "life's unfair," hear that all the time.
Funny thing is, when a game isn't fair, people take their ball and go home. Why should life be any different? Think about that for a bit.
DOS attacks are easy to pervent.
Prevent? How? "Don't hang out on IRC from your server's IP?" "When you get an email demanding $50000, pay up?" "Reach through the intertubes and strangle the guy that's about to send the packets to you?"
They might be "easy to deal with": call your upstream provider and hope that they'll shut it off (or call their upstream provider) rather than go "kaching!" and let your bandwidth bill rack up.
(The molecule would "eat" it's own host up.)
This might be of interest to you.
when claiming something is obvious, it begs the question "how come you didn't think of it then?"
Because whether or not I "thought of it" has nothing to do with whether or not it's obvious.
If I walked up to ten random people and said "When it rains, water floods the ditch where I keep my TV and ruins it, what should I do to keep the TV safe?" How many of them do you think will say "move it somewhere else!" Does the fact that they never had to save a TV that was in the middle of a ditch or had their TV short out in the rain make the answer any less obvious?