Our combat helicopters are mostly dark green, but not training on privacy issues seems like a good step towards painting them black.
Actually, the paint they use on military vehicles is formulated such that is looks black in low-light conditions. So when people claim to have seen a "black helicopter", they've most likely seen an olive-drab one in the dark.
I can run but after 8 years of running in the Army, I'm sick of it.
Say it, brother. I'm run out. For me, the stupid running cadences won't go away. To this day if I have to run to catch a plane or something, the MP3 player in my head starts up with "C-130 Rolling down the strip..." Argh...
This is, perhaps, overly conservative. The US Army and Marine Corps routinely render thousands of fresh-off-the-couch slackers capable of running 5+ miles in as little as five weeks, and the vast majority of them suffer no injuries whatsoever.
Of all the rebuttals, this one is the best. It's not about whose book is right, or who's going to hell ("I believe the correct answer was Mormon"), it's about who is nice and good. I don't really care what people believe so long as they
Don't bother trying to make me believe the same thing, no matter how much your book says I'm going to suffer
Be nice to other people, including your elders, your children, and future generations.
Like my grandfather told me once over shots of Jaegermeister at Christmas, "don't just use someone else's religion, make up one for yourself. You already know what's Right and what's Wrong-- the rest is just silliness"
...I believe in God and Jesus...There's alot of us out here proclaiming the Good News
Your point would have been so much better if you'd just been able to avoid the "Jesus" and "Good News" bits. If you'd left out those two little peculiar bits of irrelevant, religion-specific trivia, you'd have made a satisfactory argument in defense of faith in general. Instead, you sound like one of those Christian nut-jobs who think it's OK to go around asking strangers if they've "taken Jesus Christ as their savior".
Unfortunately, the odds of Congressmen having to face the monster they created are zero. As much as I hate the IRS - they're just the guys running the trains and seeing to it that the gold teeth are accounted for. The real villians in the story of high tax compliance costs are the ones who issue the orders that we get into the fucking boxcars.
Wow. Good analogy. I'm gonna remember it and use it next time someone gets me riled up about taxation again (happens every 13 weeks, heh).
In other words, I doubt they have any techniques that allow them to take the entire firehose of email and sip out a manageable amount based just on the text. Which means that they're almost certainly not really reading your email, and you can include "I'm going to blow up the President" all you like without incurring the slightest notice, unless they've got some other bead on you already.
This is absolutely correct. The biggest headache in intelligence gathering is task cueing. There will never be enough resources available to the NSA to monitor everybody's email, so they have to actually do a little think-work and figure out who and where their intel is most likely to come from. Right off the bat they can elimanate 75% of the population of any target area without difficulty. Your mom, my mom, and that nice old lady down the street are unlikely to be sources of ANYTHING. Likewise, the entire tinfoil-hat crowd can be crossed off the list, mostly because they're way too squirrely to be recruited by anyone serious. The fact that our IP addresses aren't in Pakistan and no Pakistan IP addresses have sent us email (or logged on to hotmail using our ID + PW) also gets most of us off the list.
I used to work as an intelligence analyst in the army and in my experience a good 80% of our time was spent figuring out what we didn't need to listen to. Finding 5 important communications scattered throughout list of 500 is a hell of a lot easier than finding 10 in a list of 5000.
Though it really surprises me that the NSA would actually take responsibility for passing along tips.
Generally they just pass stuff to the other three letter organizations and they take it from there.
I suspect that with all the attention being paid to the traditional lack of cooperation between the various TLA orgs, they're probably falling all over themselves now to show how cooperative they can be. NSA has always been a little better than the others, as this is its primary function-- it doesn't use (ahem) "field operatives" to the same degree that the FBI and CIA does. The real head-butting goes on between the FBI and CIA. The culture of "cops" vs. that of "spooks" creates a lot of friction. They've never worked well together.
Do you really expect to be able to manufacture your own car copying a Ferrari design and not being sued by Ferrari?
Your correction to the analogy is flawed too...
Cars can't be copyrighted. If you copy, say, a 1982 Ferrari part-for-part, the Ferrari company has no legal recourse. Your attempt to debunk his correction is flawed. The original attempt to cast copyright infringement in the same light as theft was lame to begin with; let it go.
Hey, space-available tickets are a very good deal for the airlines and the employees who work for them.
What you say is true, but you completely missed the point. By giving space-available tickets to an ex-employee, they opened themselves up to this sort of stuff. He wasn't saying that SA tackets are a dumb idea, only that it's dumb to give them to someone who doesn't work for the company anymore.
You haven't worked much in this country, have you?
The above is called normal employment here.
You try to do your job, but brain-dead management does not allow you to have the tools, the training, the time, the budget, the competent co-workers, whatever, to do said job. Then they fire you when the fault was entirely theirs.
This is commonplace in American business.
Get a clue.
While you correctly describe a common situation, what you've described does not match "the above". Unless all those people were hired as trainers, your situation is inapplicable. Besides, as the original poster noted, nobody has been fired for not training their replacement.
Actually, we do take in whole words at a time when we already know the word, but it's largely based on recognizing the letters at the endpoints. Taht is the mian rseoan tihs snctecne is sltil smwoaht rdaelbe. I'm sorry to say that there's little objective information to go on as far as condemning "whole language"
Well, the problem isn't limited to "word" vs. "letters" thing. Whole Language says that words only have the meanings that the reader brings to them, and that so long as the internal symbology is consistent, no "interpretation" of a given word is wrong. It's someone's crazy PhD thesis turned curriculum. Personally, I'd say that it's a pretty objective condemnation of whole language when they say that a child seeing the word "daddy" pronounces it "father".
the phonics "movement" is often fueled by these right-wing conservatives who also assail anything associated with "new math" (which was awful.. back in the 70's, but they're not over it) to the point of resisting anything but long division and column multiplication. I suspect that as usual, the truth lives in the middle, blisfully ignorant of ideological extremes.
This does indeed seem to be the case. I think, though, that one must start closer to one end of the spectrum (phonics and rote-learning) and leave complex philosophy about word meaning for later, when kids can read.
If anybody bothers to RTFA you'll notice that "fact" isn't in there. Only one person interviewed expressed the opinion that she felt she might be fired without severence. Something, if you look at the current political landscape, I find difficult to believe. If it did happen and the company didn't have the proverbial 2" binder with complaints about her performance I see lawsuit.
Exactly. If they could fire you without severance for not training your replacement (when "trainer" isn't your job), then all they'd need to do to reduce layoff costs would be to assign everyone an impossible task (translate this manual to sanskrit!) then fire them for non-performance of duties. The dope who thought she'd be instantly canned is, well, a dope.
This hogwash is the kind of pointless, ludicrous nonsense thought up by the same kind of jackass nutcase fools who come up with shit like the "whole language" method of teaching children to read*. They start with a totally unsubstantiated premise which, in their ignorance, they take as fact and base an entire line of reasoning upon it. Eventually, they end up with a sophisticated (and usually expensive) system that doesn't really do anything, much to their surprise. What am I supposed to do with a whole raft of pictures keyed to each individual sentence? What possible use is this, besides targeted marketing?
What they've come up with is an ingenious method of directing advertisements, but they've completely failed to provide any reason for consumers to use it. Hey, I've got an even better idea! Let's give away a set-top box that hooks up to your cable/satellite receiver and overlays small ads while you watch TV! Advertisers will love it because they can target ads based on what people are watching. Now all we have to do it get people to hook this box up to their TV. Perhaps if we have it overlay the time and temperature as well, people will want it for its utility....yeah...that's it...
* "whole language" is where you don't teach kids to read at the phonetic/letter level, but instead just let them learn whole words "naturally" by following along in their own book while the teacher reads aloud. If this seems ridiculous and nonsensical, that's because it is. It was dreamed up by a fool who "observed" that when one reads, one doesn't sound out individual letters, and then assemble the letters into words; no, one just reads words. The logical flaw here is the assumption that there is no letter-level parsing when, in fact, there is-- it's just not noticable as a distinct step because we do it so efficiently.
Re:There's even a port of the 2.6 kernel...
on
Linux for iPod Matures
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· Score: 5, Funny
Find yourself a not too humid day about 30 C outside at noon. (If you're near me in New Holland you'll have to wait a few months to try this I'm afraid. Rather closer to Old Holland about the same...
Is that the New Holland in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Illinois, or (bog forbid) South Dakota? I know someone in New Holland, Ohio. Not that you'd probably know him, even if you were in Ohio. Reminds me somewhat of my first trip to Germany, and people would ask where I lived in the US. I'd say "California" and they'd immediately say "ah, Venice Beach". Then I'd say "yeah, near there; 30 kilometers north", but this hardly registered for them. All they wanted to talk about was Venice Beach. So, before my next trip to Germany, I actually moved to within a block of Venice Beach. Then, when they asked me where I lived I could just say "Venice Beach". It made me extraordinarily popular. I don't know what it is, but Germans really seem to like Venice Beach.
I concur most wholeheartedly with this sentiment. Write down what? It's all little things that, unless you have need of them, don't even occur to you adn likely have very little meaning. Did you read a book to learn to ride a bicycle? We can't spend our lives trying to record everything in books. That's like making a movie out of a book to preserve the book because nobody reads anymore. It just doesn't translate.
Yes, but releasing this tool into the wild certainly would damage Apple's ability to claim it has an effective DRM solution when they talk to the RIAA.
Aye, but Apple's claims aren't property, they're just "claims". They could also claim to have the world's bestest 256-bit computer, but they ccouldn't then accuse Sun of "vandalism" for releasing a better 256-bit computer...Intellectual property isn't property, that's why we have copyright law...
Seems something like this happened not so long ago in California and somebody got upset.
"My deck chairs! My deck chairs! People will know how I've arranged my deck chairs!"
Heh. Streisand is such an obnoxious crap bag. I can stand aristocratic arrogance so long as those practicing it don't claim they're "just like regular people". For her, the comment that did it to me was a quote from her along the lines of "My husband and I are just like regular folks. Sometimes we'll just pack a bag, hop in the car and drive the highways for a week or two, staying in motels and eating at diners." Sorry lady, but "regular folks" can't just hop in their cars and go road tripping for days at a time. We have regular jobs. Driving around in a brand new Lincoln Navigator with a stack of platinum mastercards in your pocket and nothing but a hairdresser's appointment two weeks away to worry about isn't how the rest of us do it.
Ironically, for a magazine that runs so many good articles on privacy issues, they whored my address to anyone and everyone. I never got so much crap junkmail as after I started a subscription. And tenacious bulkmailers, sending thick wads every other month or so for years.
While I can understand the reasoning behind the stunt, they might want to take a long hard look in the mirror first before preaching.
Perhaps this is their way of illustrating just how bad an idea it is to give anyone your address...Teaching by demonstration, if you will...
Really, there's no economic benefit to a rail line that connects two points that are closer by sea.
I don't know if you can make a blanket statement like that. I'm trying to think of examples, and the St. Lawrence Seaway is one example. Lot's of shipping happens their, sure, but I suspect a lot of freight travels that route as well (from Detroit, say, to cities like Toronto, Montreal, etc.).
Very true; I should have spoken more narrowly. There is, clearly, a point of diminishing returns, beneath which keeping it all-rail is more economical. I think we can safely assume, though, that a rail line under the Bering Strait is well beyond that point, even for shipping cargo from (say) Vladivostok to Vancouver.
Physical source of true randomness:
1) For N seconds, observe a radioactive isotope with a half-life of N seconds...
But couldn't that only be considered "true randomness" if the decay happened for no reason? I postulate that nothing happens for no reason, and that the only thing that makes such radioisotope decay appear random is our inability to observe the cause of said decay. Then again, from our standpoint I suppose it could be considered "true randomness", but only because we have no means of stepping outside our universe, putting it up on the lift, and looking underneath...
So my (classic) question still stands. Is there such thing as random?
Well, given that "random" is entirely a matter of perception, there really can be no platonic-ideal of randomness. Reality simply is what it is, and everything that happens, happens for one reason or another whether there's someone there to see it or not. It's essentially the same as the "tree falls in the woods" question*.
Are we destined for our fate? Or do we choose our paths?
Yes. (ha ha) The way I look at it, we choose our own paths, but when all is said and done we can only chooseone path. The whole question of predestination brings up (again) the matter of perception... Personally, I lean more towards the "free will" view, as the "fate" one always seems to imply some omniscient entity guiding the outcome and I find that notion silly.
Here's irony for you: Are we destined to prove whether or not random exists?
I think if we can prove that we exist, we can safely assume randomness does too.
As for 17 being the most random number, does that mean it is the most likely (or even the least likely) result when observing random events? Does that not make it un-random? (Random being an equal likelihood of any result.)
Hey, if a quick survey of google says 17 is more random than any other number, surely it has to be true! I think the notion of a "Most Random Number" is meant to be oxymoronic.
* in truth, a tree falling where nothing can hear it makes no sound at all, as "sound" implies the presence of a sensory device/organ designed to detect vibrations in whatever medium they are in contact with. No ears, no sound. Philosophers always try to exploit over-broad language.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, the paint they use on military vehicles is formulated such that is looks black in low-light conditions. So when people claim to have seen a "black helicopter", they've most likely seen an olive-drab one in the dark.
Sorry. Silly trivia tangent...
Say it, brother. I'm run out. For me, the stupid running cadences won't go away. To this day if I have to run to catch a plane or something, the MP3 player in my head starts up with "C-130 Rolling down the strip..." Argh...
here's my closing italics tag. Sorry.
This is, perhaps, overly conservative. The US Army and Marine Corps routinely render thousands of fresh-off-the-couch slackers capable of running 5+ miles in as little as five weeks, and the vast majority of them suffer no injuries whatsoever.
Like my grandfather told me once over shots of Jaegermeister at Christmas, "don't just use someone else's religion, make up one for yourself. You already know what's Right and what's Wrong-- the rest is just silliness"
Your point would have been so much better if you'd just been able to avoid the "Jesus" and "Good News" bits. If you'd left out those two little peculiar bits of irrelevant, religion-specific trivia, you'd have made a satisfactory argument in defense of faith in general. Instead, you sound like one of those Christian nut-jobs who think it's OK to go around asking strangers if they've "taken Jesus Christ as their savior".
Wow. Good analogy. I'm gonna remember it and use it next time someone gets me riled up about taxation again (happens every 13 weeks, heh).
This is absolutely correct. The biggest headache in intelligence gathering is task cueing. There will never be enough resources available to the NSA to monitor everybody's email, so they have to actually do a little think-work and figure out who and where their intel is most likely to come from. Right off the bat they can elimanate 75% of the population of any target area without difficulty. Your mom, my mom, and that nice old lady down the street are unlikely to be sources of ANYTHING. Likewise, the entire tinfoil-hat crowd can be crossed off the list, mostly because they're way too squirrely to be recruited by anyone serious. The fact that our IP addresses aren't in Pakistan and no Pakistan IP addresses have sent us email (or logged on to hotmail using our ID + PW) also gets most of us off the list.
I used to work as an intelligence analyst in the army and in my experience a good 80% of our time was spent figuring out what we didn't need to listen to. Finding 5 important communications scattered throughout list of 500 is a hell of a lot easier than finding 10 in a list of 5000.
Generally they just pass stuff to the other three letter organizations and they take it from there.
I suspect that with all the attention being paid to the traditional lack of cooperation between the various TLA orgs, they're probably falling all over themselves now to show how cooperative they can be. NSA has always been a little better than the others, as this is its primary function-- it doesn't use (ahem) "field operatives" to the same degree that the FBI and CIA does. The real head-butting goes on between the FBI and CIA. The culture of "cops" vs. that of "spooks" creates a lot of friction. They've never worked well together.
Your correction to the analogy is flawed too...
Cars can't be copyrighted. If you copy, say, a 1982 Ferrari part-for-part, the Ferrari company has no legal recourse. Your attempt to debunk his correction is flawed. The original attempt to cast copyright infringement in the same light as theft was lame to begin with; let it go.
What you say is true, but you completely missed the point. By giving space-available tickets to an ex-employee, they opened themselves up to this sort of stuff. He wasn't saying that SA tackets are a dumb idea, only that it's dumb to give them to someone who doesn't work for the company anymore.
While you correctly describe a common situation, what you've described does not match "the above". Unless all those people were hired as trainers, your situation is inapplicable. Besides, as the original poster noted, nobody has been fired for not training their replacement.
Well, the problem isn't limited to "word" vs. "letters" thing. Whole Language says that words only have the meanings that the reader brings to them, and that so long as the internal symbology is consistent, no "interpretation" of a given word is wrong. It's someone's crazy PhD thesis turned curriculum. Personally, I'd say that it's a pretty objective condemnation of whole language when they say that a child seeing the word "daddy" pronounces it "father".
the phonics "movement" is often fueled by these right-wing conservatives who also assail anything associated with "new math" (which was awful .. back in the 70's, but they're not over it) to the point of resisting anything but long division and column multiplication. I suspect that as usual, the truth lives in the middle, blisfully ignorant of ideological extremes.
This does indeed seem to be the case. I think, though, that one must start closer to one end of the spectrum (phonics and rote-learning) and leave complex philosophy about word meaning for later, when kids can read.
Exactly. If they could fire you without severance for not training your replacement (when "trainer" isn't your job), then all they'd need to do to reduce layoff costs would be to assign everyone an impossible task (translate this manual to sanskrit!) then fire them for non-performance of duties. The dope who thought she'd be instantly canned is, well, a dope.
What they've come up with is an ingenious method of directing advertisements, but they've completely failed to provide any reason for consumers to use it. Hey, I've got an even better idea! Let's give away a set-top box that hooks up to your cable/satellite receiver and overlays small ads while you watch TV! Advertisers will love it because they can target ads based on what people are watching. Now all we have to do it get people to hook this box up to their TV. Perhaps if we have it overlay the time and temperature as well, people will want it for its utility....yeah...that's it...
* "whole language" is where you don't teach kids to read at the phonetic/letter level, but instead just let them learn whole words "naturally" by following along in their own book while the teacher reads aloud. If this seems ridiculous and nonsensical, that's because it is. It was dreamed up by a fool who "observed" that when one reads, one doesn't sound out individual letters, and then assemble the letters into words; no, one just reads words. The logical flaw here is the assumption that there is no letter-level parsing when, in fact, there is-- it's just not noticable as a distinct step because we do it so efficiently.
Is that the New Holland in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Illinois, or (bog forbid) South Dakota? I know someone in New Holland, Ohio. Not that you'd probably know him, even if you were in Ohio. Reminds me somewhat of my first trip to Germany, and people would ask where I lived in the US. I'd say "California" and they'd immediately say "ah, Venice Beach". Then I'd say "yeah, near there; 30 kilometers north", but this hardly registered for them. All they wanted to talk about was Venice Beach. So, before my next trip to Germany, I actually moved to within a block of Venice Beach. Then, when they asked me where I lived I could just say "Venice Beach". It made me extraordinarily popular. I don't know what it is, but Germans really seem to like Venice Beach.
Help. Rambling...
Because you know, people in Somalia are avid readers of Time Magazine and follow closely the Rolex Invention awards...
I concur most wholeheartedly with this sentiment. Write down what? It's all little things that, unless you have need of them, don't even occur to you adn likely have very little meaning. Did you read a book to learn to ride a bicycle? We can't spend our lives trying to record everything in books. That's like making a movie out of a book to preserve the book because nobody reads anymore. It just doesn't translate.
Aye, but Apple's claims aren't property, they're just "claims". They could also claim to have the world's bestest 256-bit computer, but they ccouldn't then accuse Sun of "vandalism" for releasing a better 256-bit computer...Intellectual property isn't property, that's why we have copyright law...
"My deck chairs! My deck chairs! People will know how I've arranged my deck chairs!"
Heh. Streisand is such an obnoxious crap bag. I can stand aristocratic arrogance so long as those practicing it don't claim they're "just like regular people". For her, the comment that did it to me was a quote from her along the lines of "My husband and I are just like regular folks. Sometimes we'll just pack a bag, hop in the car and drive the highways for a week or two, staying in motels and eating at diners." Sorry lady, but "regular folks" can't just hop in their cars and go road tripping for days at a time. We have regular jobs. Driving around in a brand new Lincoln Navigator with a stack of platinum mastercards in your pocket and nothing but a hairdresser's appointment two weeks away to worry about isn't how the rest of us do it.
Perhaps this is their way of illustrating just how bad an idea it is to give anyone your address...Teaching by demonstration, if you will...
I don't know if you can make a blanket statement like that. I'm trying to think of examples, and the St. Lawrence Seaway is one example. Lot's of shipping happens their, sure, but I suspect a lot of freight travels that route as well (from Detroit, say, to cities like Toronto, Montreal, etc.).
Very true; I should have spoken more narrowly. There is, clearly, a point of diminishing returns, beneath which keeping it all-rail is more economical. I think we can safely assume, though, that a rail line under the Bering Strait is well beyond that point, even for shipping cargo from (say) Vladivostok to Vancouver.
But couldn't that only be considered "true randomness" if the decay happened for no reason? I postulate that nothing happens for no reason, and that the only thing that makes such radioisotope decay appear random is our inability to observe the cause of said decay. Then again, from our standpoint I suppose it could be considered "true randomness", but only because we have no means of stepping outside our universe, putting it up on the lift, and looking underneath...
Well, given that "random" is entirely a matter of perception, there really can be no platonic-ideal of randomness. Reality simply is what it is, and everything that happens, happens for one reason or another whether there's someone there to see it or not. It's essentially the same as the "tree falls in the woods" question*.
Are we destined for our fate? Or do we choose our paths?
Yes. (ha ha) The way I look at it, we choose our own paths, but when all is said and done we can only chooseone path. The whole question of predestination brings up (again) the matter of perception... Personally, I lean more towards the "free will" view, as the "fate" one always seems to imply some omniscient entity guiding the outcome and I find that notion silly.
Here's irony for you: Are we destined to prove whether or not random exists?
I think if we can prove that we exist, we can safely assume randomness does too.
As for 17 being the most random number, does that mean it is the most likely (or even the least likely) result when observing random events? Does that not make it un-random? (Random being an equal likelihood of any result.)
Hey, if a quick survey of google says 17 is more random than any other number, surely it has to be true! I think the notion of a "Most Random Number" is meant to be oxymoronic.
* in truth, a tree falling where nothing can hear it makes no sound at all, as "sound" implies the presence of a sensory device/organ designed to detect vibrations in whatever medium they are in contact with. No ears, no sound. Philosophers always try to exploit over-broad language.