Whatever. "I am the head of the Executive Branch. I will use my crackberry, and you will find a way to make me untraceable just the same as you found a way for me to walk down a D.C. street without getting shot. Is that clear?" "Yes Mr. President."
The end.
Probably the solution is as simple as, "Don't use your Blackberry's wireless connection." But I don't know; that's what security experts are for. Everyday I see Congressmen using cellphones; if those can be secure enough to carry day-to-day government business, why not other wireless devices?
Chickenhead congressmen aren't really privy to the sort of information the president is. And securing a crackberry is like trying to secure a paper bag. No president is going to be so stupid as to demand that. The government doesn't control RIM, so they are in no position to change the nature of the communications protocol, no matter what the president demands. A crackberry can't be made secure. That's why they have companies like General Dynamics making Sectera secure phones.
Perhaps if they resolved their rectal-cranial inversion and made an accessible, easy to use, accurate product their PageRank might improve?
Also, if it was free instead of being a subscription based service, it might be more popular. It's an inescapable fact of economics. All other things being roughly equal, a free alternative will beat one that costs money... And for what "people" want, Wikipedia and Britannica are essentially equal. No one's looking for exhaustive scientific research on a subject. They're looking for the atomic number of Tin, or how many eggs a chicken lays per week. Who the fuck is going to pay $70 a year for that?
Until a FPS can accurately reproduce the nervous, crampy tug-of-war sensation you get trying to hold still and point your rifle at your adversary's center of mass...
Uh, your imagination can do that, if you just let it.
True. I've just never been a big FPS player, so I never progress beyond "mild agitation" before I move on to something else.
(Cue "Imagination" song from South Park here. Imagine it annoying you in the background as you read my comment. Works best as a montage. You gotta have a montage.)
inhuman monster!
When I am playing FPSes (I used to play quite a bit of TacOps) I cringe, duck, and so on. I'm sure I'd be more efficient if I stayed cold when I played but it's not as much fun. Get worked up!
Heh. I'm already too twitchy. My nerves are pretty well shot from my wasted youth in the Army. I savor my life of quiet desperation now.
by the folks who made it possible to save the world from alien invasion in UFO: Enemy Unknown.
William
The LS:N "waypoints/orders...execute!" combat system is interesting (and in some ways more realistic), but I think LS:N is missing what made UFO such a cool game. It really was the story, the RPG element, that made X-Com so good. Your troops had names, and stats that developed, and the overarching UFO invasion story with its ever-increasing urgency gave the whole thing sense of continuity. Dopes like me with overactive imaginations would even invent personalities for the characters, and move them on the combat map accordingly. Laser Squad:Nemesis? You pick your troops like egg rolls from a bad Chinese buffet--- they're all generic: "I'll take four grenadiers, two commanders, two medics, two snipers, and as many grunts as I have points left for". Perhaps it also has something to do with the fact that I don't really care much for online play against other humans, but I found that LS:N ceased to amuse me after playing a half dozen of the canned maps.
If that's the case, then please send me all the source code to every Open Source program the "Intelligence Community" uses. I mean, it's truly Open, right?
Don't be daft. It's "open source" in that the client--- in this case the US gov't--- has complete access to the source code, not that every drooling twit with a web browser can download a tar.gz of it from the DOD. The "open" in "open source" has always been relative to the end user.
What you don't realize is that once the administrator saw the photos, he was legally bound to report it. Educators are required to report any and all evidence of abuse, not matter how ridiculous that evidence is. As someone who works for a school district, you should know that. You are probably bound by those rules too.
Yep, I'm bound by those same fucked up rules. I would not, however, be so fucking stupid as to admit I had seen those photos, and since there's no way to prove I had, nothing could be done to me. This administrator could've taken that way out, but as I said earlier, they're probably too fucking stupid to have even considered anything beyond executing the software of district policy in their little 640K heads.
Where do you think that sort of policy came from? Same kind of idiots higher up in the chain. Granted, by letter of such policy the administrator has no alternative, but a reasonable person could plausibly deny having seen any pictures on the phone at all. No, this was not some unwilling accomplice to the reporting, it was a willing lap-dog suck up loser going along with the policy because they thought they were "doing the right thing". Fuck those droids. They're idiots.
Please tell me that an Ewok Tv Tray is a real piece of merchandise, and you didn't just make it up... I totally want one.
Sorry, I think I pulled that one out of my ass. I remembered the E.T. tv tray my brother went nuts over and got on eBay, and changed it to "Ewok" to fit the Star Wars theme.
I strongly doubt I'm alone in thinking a real life killing is quite different from killing in an FPS
In the case of sniping, or anything out beyond about 150m, it's actually remarkably similar. Training generally reduces it to a simple technical task (which is the point of said training). Now, face-to-face close combat, at less than 50m, that's different. Until a FPS can accurately reproduce the nervous, crampy tug-of-war sensation you get trying to hold still and point your rifle at your adversary's center of mass while simultaneously trying to squeeze yourself down to the smallest possible target while moving away from the rounds hitting the berm behind to you, it's all just a silly game.
But do you want a government who will make sure there's a hospital to fix your broken skull? And a government who will make sure there's quick transportation and trained EMTs?
Hard to say. Some argue that such services wouldn't exist if the government weren't providing them, but that's not necessarily true. Firefighting services in the unincorporated county lands where my father lives in Arizona are largely subscription funded. You call the fire department because your house is on fire and you haven't paid for the service, they do show up... but only to make sure everyone's out of the house and your service-paying neighbor's house doesn't burn down. You can beg and throw cash at them, but they'll watch your house burn down. Hard to say to what degree this approach could be applied to emergency medical services. Actually, it already is that way, to some degree. Here in Los Angeles they'll haul you to the closest hospital, but if they find out you have no insurance, you'll be given the minimum medical attention necessary to stabilize you, then you'll be thrown in an ambulance and driven up to forty miles to County-USC hospital--- the only remaining public hospital--- to wait for hours in line next to all the other poor folks waiting to have their stabs, gunshots, and assorted poor-folk injuries taken care of on the county's dime.
At the time of writing, "provide for the common defense" was funding to maintain the Army and Navy to whatever degree necessary to defend the country from (say) British invasion. "Promote the general welfare" meant exercising their specific enumerated powers such that the situation of the nation improved, i.e. negotiating favorable trade treaties, building useful postal roads, setting copyright and patent terms such that both the public domain and the creators benefit*. The notion that "welfare" == "government handout" is a direct outgrowth of LBJ's Great Society programs. It was never intended to mean anything of the kind.
*they screwed the pooch on this one pretty badly right off the bat with the 1831 copyright act.
Other Constitutional Law scholars would point out that the Founding Fathers certainly did not expect that their 12-page document would be exclusive and exhaustive, but should rather be interpreted as rough guidelines with a few explicit points
Unfortunately, much of the federal government is run by the extreme end of that camp, which takes "interpretation" to include everything from ignoring context to leveraging semantic drift. It's not even limited to particular political polarizations. Lefty-libs like to turn a blind eye to the 2nd Amd, while Law-n-order-Righties see the 4th Amd as a perforated screen with more exceptions than rules. The stricties are unfortunately more correct than not--- their only real sin being the mistaken belief that the Constitution does not allow for the "fabrication" of unenumerated rights, which the 9th Amd clearly covers.
Oh, I don't know.... He's pretty effectively proven that skill in the field of linguistics doesn't automatically translate to political or economic brilliance. Fairly good illustration of the dangers of combining extreme specialization with a sense of personal infallibility.
Do you consider it immoral, too, to take advantage of the results of what you consider immoral? I suppose you refuse to use velcro, drive through the wilderness avoiding all routes, simply refuse all foods marked with the evil FDA mark and so on, right?
It's not immoral to eat the meals served to you in the prison where you were unjustly imprisoned. The situation is analogous. I would eat non-FDA approved processed foods, drive on only privately built and maintained roads, and use only the Velcro that comes from the alternate universe where it was invented by a Swiss guy in his garage and not from a NASA lab*.... but it's not fucking possible because the system has monopolized these product spaces with its regulations.
Murder is something the federal government deals with, no?
Only on federal property, across state lines, committed against federal employees, or the like. All other murder is handled by the states where the killing happens.
Never mind the fact that "murder" is the unlawful taking of human life and Roe v. Wade essentially established it as a lawful act... but that's a separate issue
Also, pretty much every commerce decision is interstate commerce now-a-days. In fact, absent the Amish, I'm hard-pressed to think of a counterexample.
Pot grown in California, dispensed in California-legal medical marijuana dispensaries, to California residents with prescriptions from doctors in California. There isn't a single bit of interstate commerce going on there, unless you gratuitously torture the definition to the point of irrelevance*. This has not, however, stopped the DEA from raiding said dispensaries in direct violation of the US Constitution. The fact is, the federal government likes to pretend that it's exercising these myriad powers under the heading of "interstate commerce", but the California medical marijuana vs the DEA issue demonstrates that the feds do not concern themselves with the constitution, but just do as they please, banking on blindly waving the interstate commerce clause as if it's carte blanche.
* Sample arguments I've heard floated to justify the DEA's raids: The fertilizer used to grow the pot came from Indiana! The electricity for the grow light came from Washington state! The orange pill bottles used by the dispensary were ordered by mail from Nevada! A cancer patient drove to Arizona and got high there once! By any of these bullshit definitions, me paying my kid 50 cents to mow the lawn is interstate commerce because the lubricating oil in the mower came from a refinery in Alabama.
Govt. wasteful spending is the biggest cause of inflation. That is what's wrong with the whole "stimulus" crapshoot.
Unfortunately, it's also a sad fact that the only thing that has any chance of making the national debt manageable is that very same inflation. Government wants inflation (albeit preferably at a steady, predictable rate). Take a look at the debt we incurred (as a % of GDP) at the tail end of WW2. The debt essentially faded into nothingness while GDP grew only gradually, the majority of its growth being largely as a result of inflation. What it comes down to is that if you can tread water long enough, floating your debt close to the rate of inflation, you (theoretically) can bank on paying it back when your revenues grow with GDP. This assumes GDP will grow forever in the long term, though, which is the same sort of thinking that resulted in overvalued real estate and overvalued stocks. Fortunately, if GDP crashes like the housing market did, we'll likely be reduced to burning our government bonds for heat in the winter and our W-2's as cleaning patches for the rifles we defend our survivalist bunkers with anyway, so who cares...
Intellectual Property is not durable goods according to their logic of which is pulled straight out of their ass.
No it's pulled straight out of the fucking Constitution. "Intellectual property" isn't property at all, it's a a deal between the producers of works of art whereby they gain a temporary monopoly on reproduction, and the public domain gains the work at the end of that term.
I don't think this will apply to books. How many book-related 'special fan material' do you have? To how many book concerts did you go this year?
This is exactly the problem facing publsihing (and authors) today.
Books have the distinct advantage that nothing has been invented yet that approaches the convenience, durability, and utility of a good solid book. I have an old Rocket eBook loaded with 100's of titles by Lewis Carroll, Twain, etc. that I carry around in my van for camping trips, but 9 times out of 10 I end up stopping at some little independent book store in a small town along the way to buy 2 or 3 paper books. I just don't see anything coming down the pike that'll compare favorably to sitting against a rock in the middle of nowhere and whipping out a paperback copy of Deathworld.
I think you are forgetting about the rights of the copyright holder. the fact that there MAY in THEORY be some benefit to your sharing a file does not mean its ok to do so.
By sharing other peoples content you are taking away their right to control how it is distributed. Nobody has appointed you as PR manager for a record company.
Not all laws are just. Now you're entering a separate debate, i.e. "how bad must a law be before disobedience is justified?"
Slashdot Mirror
Whatever. "I am the head of the Executive Branch. I will use my crackberry, and you will find a way to make me untraceable just the same as you found a way for me to walk down a D.C. street without getting shot. Is that clear?" "Yes Mr. President."
The end.
Probably the solution is as simple as, "Don't use your Blackberry's wireless connection." But I don't know; that's what security experts are for. Everyday I see Congressmen using cellphones; if those can be secure enough to carry day-to-day government business, why not other wireless devices?
Chickenhead congressmen aren't really privy to the sort of information the president is. And securing a crackberry is like trying to secure a paper bag. No president is going to be so stupid as to demand that. The government doesn't control RIM, so they are in no position to change the nature of the communications protocol, no matter what the president demands. A crackberry can't be made secure. That's why they have companies like General Dynamics making Sectera secure phones.
Perhaps if they resolved their rectal-cranial inversion and made an accessible, easy to use, accurate product their PageRank might improve?
Also, if it was free instead of being a subscription based service, it might be more popular. It's an inescapable fact of economics. All other things being roughly equal, a free alternative will beat one that costs money... And for what "people" want, Wikipedia and Britannica are essentially equal. No one's looking for exhaustive scientific research on a subject. They're looking for the atomic number of Tin, or how many eggs a chicken lays per week. Who the fuck is going to pay $70 a year for that?
according to the article. Wikipedia says 1606.
I daresay the aborigines would reckon the date a bit earlier...
(copyrights precede free speech in the constitution)
Physically preceding in the text doesn't determine precedence in law, Einstein.
Until a FPS can accurately reproduce the nervous, crampy tug-of-war sensation you get trying to hold still and point your rifle at your adversary's center of mass...
Uh, your imagination can do that, if you just let it.
True. I've just never been a big FPS player, so I never progress beyond "mild agitation" before I move on to something else.
(Cue "Imagination" song from South Park here. Imagine it annoying you in the background as you read my comment. Works best as a montage. You gotta have a montage.)
inhuman monster!
When I am playing FPSes (I used to play quite a bit of TacOps) I cringe, duck, and so on. I'm sure I'd be more efficient if I stayed cold when I played but it's not as much fun. Get worked up!
Heh. I'm already too twitchy. My nerves are pretty well shot from my wasted youth in the Army. I savor my life of quiet desperation now.
Lasersquad Nemesis:
http://www.lasersquadnemesis.com/
by the folks who made it possible to save the world from alien invasion in UFO: Enemy Unknown.
William
The LS:N "waypoints/orders...execute!" combat system is interesting (and in some ways more realistic), but I think LS:N is missing what made UFO such a cool game. It really was the story, the RPG element, that made X-Com so good. Your troops had names, and stats that developed, and the overarching UFO invasion story with its ever-increasing urgency gave the whole thing sense of continuity. Dopes like me with overactive imaginations would even invent personalities for the characters, and move them on the combat map accordingly. Laser Squad:Nemesis? You pick your troops like egg rolls from a bad Chinese buffet--- they're all generic: "I'll take four grenadiers, two commanders, two medics, two snipers, and as many grunts as I have points left for". Perhaps it also has something to do with the fact that I don't really care much for online play against other humans, but I found that LS:N ceased to amuse me after playing a half dozen of the canned maps.
If that's the case, then please send me all the source code to every Open Source program the "Intelligence Community" uses. I mean, it's truly Open, right?
Don't be daft. It's "open source" in that the client--- in this case the US gov't--- has complete access to the source code, not that every drooling twit with a web browser can download a tar.gz of it from the DOD. The "open" in "open source" has always been relative to the end user.
What you don't realize is that once the administrator saw the photos, he was legally bound to report it. Educators are required to report any and all evidence of abuse, not matter how ridiculous that evidence is. As someone who works for a school district, you should know that. You are probably bound by those rules too.
Yep, I'm bound by those same fucked up rules. I would not, however, be so fucking stupid as to admit I had seen those photos, and since there's no way to prove I had, nothing could be done to me. This administrator could've taken that way out, but as I said earlier, they're probably too fucking stupid to have even considered anything beyond executing the software of district policy in their little 640K heads.
Where do you think that sort of policy came from? Same kind of idiots higher up in the chain. Granted, by letter of such policy the administrator has no alternative, but a reasonable person could plausibly deny having seen any pictures on the phone at all. No, this was not some unwilling accomplice to the reporting, it was a willing lap-dog suck up loser going along with the policy because they thought they were "doing the right thing". Fuck those droids. They're idiots.
did some googling.... there apparently IS a "Return of the Jedi" TV tray, but I can't find a picture of it.
Please tell me that an Ewok Tv Tray is a real piece of merchandise, and you didn't just make it up... I totally want one.
Sorry, I think I pulled that one out of my ass. I remembered the E.T. tv tray my brother went nuts over and got on eBay, and changed it to "Ewok" to fit the Star Wars theme.
I strongly doubt I'm alone in thinking a real life killing is quite different from killing in an FPS
In the case of sniping, or anything out beyond about 150m, it's actually remarkably similar. Training generally reduces it to a simple technical task (which is the point of said training). Now, face-to-face close combat, at less than 50m, that's different. Until a FPS can accurately reproduce the nervous, crampy tug-of-war sensation you get trying to hold still and point your rifle at your adversary's center of mass while simultaneously trying to squeeze yourself down to the smallest possible target while moving away from the rounds hitting the berm behind to you, it's all just a silly game.
But do you want a government who will make sure there's a hospital to fix your broken skull? And a government who will make sure there's quick transportation and trained EMTs?
Hard to say. Some argue that such services wouldn't exist if the government weren't providing them, but that's not necessarily true. Firefighting services in the unincorporated county lands where my father lives in Arizona are largely subscription funded. You call the fire department because your house is on fire and you haven't paid for the service, they do show up... but only to make sure everyone's out of the house and your service-paying neighbor's house doesn't burn down. You can beg and throw cash at them, but they'll watch your house burn down. Hard to say to what degree this approach could be applied to emergency medical services. Actually, it already is that way, to some degree. Here in Los Angeles they'll haul you to the closest hospital, but if they find out you have no insurance, you'll be given the minimum medical attention necessary to stabilize you, then you'll be thrown in an ambulance and driven up to forty miles to County-USC hospital--- the only remaining public hospital--- to wait for hours in line next to all the other poor folks waiting to have their stabs, gunshots, and assorted poor-folk injuries taken care of on the county's dime.
Whoosh!
This just in! Despite absurd optimism from some folks, the world did not change the instant Obama was sworn in!
I'm sure this varies by state but your blanket statement rings hollow to me in NY.
California is the same. Used to be "line up and pray your papers were in order", and now it's the "take a number" system. Works quite well.
define "defense and general welfare."
At the time of writing, "provide for the common defense" was funding to maintain the Army and Navy to whatever degree necessary to defend the country from (say) British invasion. "Promote the general welfare" meant exercising their specific enumerated powers such that the situation of the nation improved, i.e. negotiating favorable trade treaties, building useful postal roads, setting copyright and patent terms such that both the public domain and the creators benefit*. The notion that "welfare" == "government handout" is a direct outgrowth of LBJ's Great Society programs. It was never intended to mean anything of the kind.
*they screwed the pooch on this one pretty badly right off the bat with the 1831 copyright act.
Other Constitutional Law scholars would point out that the Founding Fathers certainly did not expect that their 12-page document would be exclusive and exhaustive, but should rather be interpreted as rough guidelines with a few explicit points
Unfortunately, much of the federal government is run by the extreme end of that camp, which takes "interpretation" to include everything from ignoring context to leveraging semantic drift. It's not even limited to particular political polarizations. Lefty-libs like to turn a blind eye to the 2nd Amd, while Law-n-order-Righties see the 4th Amd as a perforated screen with more exceptions than rules. The stricties are unfortunately more correct than not--- their only real sin being the mistaken belief that the Constitution does not allow for the "fabrication" of unenumerated rights, which the 9th Amd clearly covers.
Oh, I don't know.... He's pretty effectively proven that skill in the field of linguistics doesn't automatically translate to political or economic brilliance. Fairly good illustration of the dangers of combining extreme specialization with a sense of personal infallibility.
Do you consider it immoral, too, to take advantage of the results of what you consider immoral? I suppose you refuse to use velcro, drive through the wilderness avoiding all routes, simply refuse all foods marked with the evil FDA mark and so on, right?
It's not immoral to eat the meals served to you in the prison where you were unjustly imprisoned. The situation is analogous. I would eat non-FDA approved processed foods, drive on only privately built and maintained roads, and use only the Velcro that comes from the alternate universe where it was invented by a Swiss guy in his garage and not from a NASA lab*.... but it's not fucking possible because the system has monopolized these product spaces with its regulations.
* oh wait... Velcro was invented by a Swiss guy in 1941 and not NASA. Research your examples better, dumbass.
Murder is something the federal government deals with, no?
Only on federal property, across state lines, committed against federal employees, or the like. All other murder is handled by the states where the killing happens.
Never mind the fact that "murder" is the unlawful taking of human life and Roe v. Wade essentially established it as a lawful act... but that's a separate issue
Also, pretty much every commerce decision is interstate commerce now-a-days. In fact, absent the Amish, I'm hard-pressed to think of a counterexample.
Pot grown in California, dispensed in California-legal medical marijuana dispensaries, to California residents with prescriptions from doctors in California. There isn't a single bit of interstate commerce going on there, unless you gratuitously torture the definition to the point of irrelevance*. This has not, however, stopped the DEA from raiding said dispensaries in direct violation of the US Constitution. The fact is, the federal government likes to pretend that it's exercising these myriad powers under the heading of "interstate commerce", but the California medical marijuana vs the DEA issue demonstrates that the feds do not concern themselves with the constitution, but just do as they please, banking on blindly waving the interstate commerce clause as if it's carte blanche.
* Sample arguments I've heard floated to justify the DEA's raids: The fertilizer used to grow the pot came from Indiana! The electricity for the grow light came from Washington state! The orange pill bottles used by the dispensary were ordered by mail from Nevada! A cancer patient drove to Arizona and got high there once! By any of these bullshit definitions, me paying my kid 50 cents to mow the lawn is interstate commerce because the lubricating oil in the mower came from a refinery in Alabama.
Govt. wasteful spending is the biggest cause of inflation. That is what's wrong with the whole "stimulus" crapshoot.
Unfortunately, it's also a sad fact that the only thing that has any chance of making the national debt manageable is that very same inflation. Government wants inflation (albeit preferably at a steady, predictable rate). Take a look at the debt we incurred (as a % of GDP) at the tail end of WW2. The debt essentially faded into nothingness while GDP grew only gradually, the majority of its growth being largely as a result of inflation. What it comes down to is that if you can tread water long enough, floating your debt close to the rate of inflation, you (theoretically) can bank on paying it back when your revenues grow with GDP. This assumes GDP will grow forever in the long term, though, which is the same sort of thinking that resulted in overvalued real estate and overvalued stocks. Fortunately, if GDP crashes like the housing market did, we'll likely be reduced to burning our government bonds for heat in the winter and our W-2's as cleaning patches for the rifles we defend our survivalist bunkers with anyway, so who cares...
Intellectual Property is not durable goods according to their logic of which is pulled straight out of their ass.
No it's pulled straight out of the fucking Constitution. "Intellectual property" isn't property at all, it's a a deal between the producers of works of art whereby they gain a temporary monopoly on reproduction, and the public domain gains the work at the end of that term.
> probably for books and movies too
I don't think this will apply to books. How many book-related 'special fan material' do you have? To how many book concerts did you go this year?
This is exactly the problem facing publsihing (and authors) today.
Books have the distinct advantage that nothing has been invented yet that approaches the convenience, durability, and utility of a good solid book. I have an old Rocket eBook loaded with 100's of titles by Lewis Carroll, Twain, etc. that I carry around in my van for camping trips, but 9 times out of 10 I end up stopping at some little independent book store in a small town along the way to buy 2 or 3 paper books. I just don't see anything coming down the pike that'll compare favorably to sitting against a rock in the middle of nowhere and whipping out a paperback copy of Deathworld.
I think you are forgetting about the rights of the copyright holder. the fact that there MAY in THEORY be some benefit to your sharing a file does not mean its ok to do so.
By sharing other peoples content you are taking away their right to control how it is distributed. Nobody has appointed you as PR manager for a record company.
Not all laws are just. Now you're entering a separate debate, i.e. "how bad must a law be before disobedience is justified?"