What seems to be the matter here, and what's really riled up the Labor leader of Tyneside Council, Iain Malcom -- is the actions of an anonymous blogger -- Mr Monkey -- on his blog, rather than Twitter. Twitter is a sideshow. Mr Monkey has thrown most of his dookie on his blog, not on Twitter, but the ever-vengeful Iain Malcolm has seen fit to go after Twitter.
By the looks of it, Iain Malcom is a bit of a psychopath, who's waging a war against said anonymous blogger, at public expense. Mr Monkey runs a highly inflammatory blog, which has made unsubstantiated allegations against Mr Malcolm and his cronies, and so Iain Malcolm has been goaded into behaving unethically, by misusing public funds to lean on Twitter to find Mr Monkey so he can crush him in court.
Even if Mr Monkey is lying, I absolutely despite bullies and psychopaths, so I'm hoping that this will ultimately blow back on Iain Malcolm. His actions in this debacle, makes him seem like an extremely unsavoury character, who should probably be kept as far away from political power as possible as it is.
You don't have to visit "bad neighbourhoods" to be hit by drive-by downloads anymore. 10 years ago -- maybe. Now -- no. The crooks have been using botnets to automatically scan for, and hack tens of thousands of vulnerable websites at a time (via SQL injection), and inject malicious iframes, for several years now.
If you're surfing the web with any OS at all with any kind of vulnerablility exposed on the client side, and your configuration is common enough for the people who write the exploit packs to write an exploit for, you're basically screwed.
Being a geek is no license to behave like an egotistical, entitled little princess or a common criminal. Too many geeks thinks because they work with teh technology, that normal rules and niceties don't apply to them.
What this guy did was criminal damage, and by rights, he probably should have served time. I've seen people getting done for much less.
Thank you. I wish I had mod points to vote you up. There are too many basement-dwelling Internet libertarians who think that posting shit on the Internet will change the world.
Folks, wanna see how to really change the world? Follow the example of the brave men and women who are literally putting their bodies on the line to oppose tyranny and injustice in the Middle East. Not the semi-literate, Jon Katz-reading retards who hang out on places like Slashdot.
Amazon are evil, greedy control freaks. I havent' spent a cent with them since they were caught remotely stealing from their Kindle users.
I complained, and such is the utter contempt they have for their paying customers, I got a lame excuse for a form letter, so I've sworn off them forever.
I'm reminded of the sad stories about the father of the thermonuclear bomb, Edward Teller, as an old man, shuffling about the place with hand-built models, trying to sell the idea of building ever-bigger fusion weapons, oblivious to the fact that he was just being humored and smiled at, by the youngsters who by then, had realised that one would bring to bear far more destructive power with 10x1MT weapons, than with a single 10MT weapon.
It's true: everyone has a use-by date, the point where we outlive our usefulness to the world and just get in the way. That's what retirement is for. There are a myriad of reasons why strip-mining the Moon for He-3 is a dumb idea; the old man's lost his marbles and needs to quit.
So why are we letting these irresponsible asshats play dice with peoples' lives again?
As bad as these criminal lawbreakers, are the mindless internet libertarian drones who support them.
Assange and his supporters need to be rounded up and swiftly punished before they trigger major damage and loss of life. This insane lunatic is a danger to everyone in the West, and our lives and futures are too valuable to leave in the hand of a paranoid schitzophrenic ex-con.
The Internet just makes it easier for the criminally stupid to get together into echo chambers and reinforce their own stupid and illogical beliefs.
False balance in the media is partly responsible. As is the rather stupid common mistaken belief that just because the US has free speech, then everyone ought to voice their stupid uninformed opinions as loudly and often as possible.
I have an alphabetical file, indexed by category. I maintain an index of category headings, to deal with the problem of losing track of something, if there's multiple ways of filing it. The index is totally ad-hoc (although I suppose a real librarian might file, based on a standardized set of headings).
For tax records, I maintain yearly files, retained for only 7 years. Anything older gets fed into a shredder.
Bank statements are filed, but occasionally, I scan into PDF format and then shred them. I don't, as yet, have any way of converting them into electronic format; which is too bad, because I've played with the idea of running some analytics over my spending and saving habits (and working out much money I blow on junk food every month). I'd love to have able to have bills and bank statements delivered in some kind of secure, standard format, but I don't think anybody (banks or utilities) can be arsed making life easier for their customers.
Forget Helium-3 as an energy source. We can't even build a working D-T fusion reactor yet, let alone something that can burn He3. Talk to me in fifty years, when we have DEMO built, and can demonstrate a working fusion power plant, before we even consider the idea.
The He3 argument has been used by a lot of people as a (silly) argument for a human presence on the Moon for quite a while, and it's not a very good one. We can't burn He3 yet, it's not economical to ship (it's an isotope of helium, it takes up lots of space and is not dense at all, or would have to be expensively cryogenically cooled). It's an economic non-starter.
There are better fuel sources on the Moon anyway. If we were to build science bases or observatories on the Moon, we would need a reliable power source to last through the two-week lunar nights. There's quite a bit of extractable thorium on the Moon, and compact molten-salt reactors like LFTR would likely do the job nicely, with far less technical risk. Not sure if studies have been done, on whether or not we can mine, refine and use thorium without it leaving the Moon, but it seems more practical than assembling a 10000 ton fusion reactor + associated plant from parts shipped from Earth.
There ARE loads of things we could do on the Moon. Mining helium-3 isn't one of them.
If I had a dollar for every time I've read somebody try and justify their criminal activity by believing they're better than some other criminal. That's why paedophiles have such a hard time in prison: all the other criminals need to feel superior, while still remaining a complete and total waste of space. This happens so often, that this cognitive bias needs a name.
What's really interesting for me, is the Communists' ever tightening grip over their own people and their growing paranoia. They have massive problems and massive internal contradictions, and rather than doing what the rest of the (non-dysfunctional) world does, and let people air their grievances and have their say, they're bottling up the rage and discontent.
I would liken it to a broken pressure cooker left on a stove. Democracy, and freedom of speech and assembly are like the pressure-release valve. I DON'T want to be anywhere near it when the thing finally explodes. And despite my own personal disgust of the immorality that pervades mainland Chinese society, I really do feel sorry for the average Chinese guy in the street, who has been shit-on by their government for millenia, and will suffer as this mess eventually unravels.
Sounds like some Chinese Communist has a massive hate-on for the Brits.
Well, it's pretty hard to respect other 'cultures' (if you consider the moral squalor, oppression and violence that the Chinese Communist Party has visited upon it's own people -- and soon, the world, a "culture"), when those cultures seek to repeat the same mistakes the West and others have done so over history. We like to think that we now know better, and know we can do better. But the Commies don't give a stuff about morals, people, the environment, ANYTHING.
I think the triumph of Chinese "culture" (really, Communist Party hegemony), will be a massive disaster for the world.
The Chinese have no morals at all, so they use all these old white-guilt canards to justify their extremely immoral actions. Nobody believes Communist Party propaganda. Not the Chinese people, or the round-eyed barbarians either.
compulsive liars, cheats and thieves who will do absolutely anything to win. And it's ingrained behaviour that will never change. Even 200 years ago, British traders knew very well that the Chinese simply couldn't be trusted.
Which is why when the West declines and the Chinese rule the world, we're all fucked.
I'm amused at the clueless person who wrote this story. They apparently consider something 'difficult to understand', so they then turn around and sooth their bruised ego, by claiming that their ignorance is as good as somebody else's knowledge.
Well, I've got news for you bucko. Sure, there's a lot to learn (get off your butt, stop reading Derrida, and do the study), but just because few people take the time to understand something, doesn't make the process that produced that knowledge any less valid (and by all accounts, the scientific method is one of humanity's greatest achievements). That process is extremely robust, and has produced everything modern that we take for granted.
Clearly, somebody here is very uninformed, and needs to learn much more about how the world works.
Slashdot Mirror
Arabs are spiteful wankers.
Any questions?
What seems to be the matter here, and what's really riled up the Labor leader of Tyneside Council, Iain Malcom -- is the actions of an anonymous blogger -- Mr Monkey -- on his blog, rather than Twitter. Twitter is a sideshow. Mr Monkey has thrown most of his dookie on his blog, not on Twitter, but the ever-vengeful Iain Malcolm has seen fit to go after Twitter.
By the looks of it, Iain Malcom is a bit of a psychopath, who's waging a war against said anonymous blogger, at public expense. Mr Monkey runs a highly inflammatory blog, which has made unsubstantiated allegations against Mr Malcolm and his cronies, and so Iain Malcolm has been goaded into behaving unethically, by misusing public funds to lean on Twitter to find Mr Monkey so he can crush him in court.
Even if Mr Monkey is lying, I absolutely despite bullies and psychopaths, so I'm hoping that this will ultimately blow back on Iain Malcolm. His actions in this debacle, makes him seem like an extremely unsavoury character, who should probably be kept as far away from political power as possible as it is.
You don't have to visit "bad neighbourhoods" to be hit by drive-by downloads anymore. 10 years ago -- maybe. Now -- no. The crooks have been using botnets to automatically scan for, and hack tens of thousands of vulnerable websites at a time (via SQL injection), and inject malicious iframes, for several years now.
If you're surfing the web with any OS at all with any kind of vulnerablility exposed on the client side, and your configuration is common enough for the people who write the exploit packs to write an exploit for, you're basically screwed.
Oh, my bad -- he IS serving time. Not that he doesn't deserve to, for what is an open-and-shut case of common criminality.
Being a geek is no license to behave like an egotistical, entitled little princess or a common criminal. Too many geeks thinks because they work with teh technology, that normal rules and niceties don't apply to them.
What this guy did was criminal damage, and by rights, he probably should have served time. I've seen people getting done for much less.
Over my head... I don't see any telltale signs that GP is any different from any random nutter on the Internet.
You're completely nuts.
This won't get abused AT ALL, I'm sure.
Thank you. I wish I had mod points to vote you up. There are too many basement-dwelling Internet libertarians who think that posting shit on the Internet will change the world.
Folks, wanna see how to really change the world? Follow the example of the brave men and women who are literally putting their bodies on the line to oppose tyranny and injustice in the Middle East. Not the semi-literate, Jon Katz-reading retards who hang out on places like Slashdot.
Amazon are evil, greedy control freaks. I havent' spent a cent with them since they were caught remotely stealing from their Kindle users.
I complained, and such is the utter contempt they have for their paying customers, I got a lame excuse for a form letter, so I've sworn off them forever.
Screw Amazon.
Proof that you don't have to be white to be an uncultured, racist asshole.
I'm reminded of the sad stories about the father of the thermonuclear bomb, Edward Teller, as an old man, shuffling about the place with hand-built models, trying to sell the idea of building ever-bigger fusion weapons, oblivious to the fact that he was just being humored and smiled at, by the youngsters who by then, had realised that one would bring to bear far more destructive power with 10x1MT weapons, than with a single 10MT weapon.
It's true: everyone has a use-by date, the point where we outlive our usefulness to the world and just get in the way. That's what retirement is for. There are a myriad of reasons why strip-mining the Moon for He-3 is a dumb idea; the old man's lost his marbles and needs to quit.
So why are we letting these irresponsible asshats play dice with peoples' lives again?
As bad as these criminal lawbreakers, are the mindless internet libertarian drones who support them.
Assange and his supporters need to be rounded up and swiftly punished before they trigger major damage and loss of life. This insane lunatic is a danger to everyone in the West, and our lives and futures are too valuable to leave in the hand of a paranoid schitzophrenic ex-con.
The Internet just makes it easier for the criminally stupid to get together into echo chambers and reinforce their own stupid and illogical beliefs.
False balance in the media is partly responsible. As is the rather stupid common mistaken belief that just because the US has free speech, then everyone ought to voice their stupid uninformed opinions as loudly and often as possible.
I have an alphabetical file, indexed by category. I maintain an index of category headings, to deal with the problem of losing track of something, if there's multiple ways of filing it. The index is totally ad-hoc (although I suppose a real librarian might file, based on a standardized set of headings).
For tax records, I maintain yearly files, retained for only 7 years. Anything older gets fed into a shredder.
Bank statements are filed, but occasionally, I scan into PDF format and then shred them. I don't, as yet, have any way of converting them into electronic format; which is too bad, because I've played with the idea of running some analytics over my spending and saving habits (and working out much money I blow on junk food every month). I'd love to have able to have bills and bank statements delivered in some kind of secure, standard format, but I don't think anybody (banks or utilities) can be arsed making life easier for their customers.
Maybe it'll take the American equivalent of China's "patriotic hacker" movement, to educate the Chinese of the error of their ways.
Forget Helium-3 as an energy source. We can't even build a working D-T fusion reactor yet, let alone something that can burn He3. Talk to me in fifty years, when we have DEMO built, and can demonstrate a working fusion power plant, before we even consider the idea.
The He3 argument has been used by a lot of people as a (silly) argument for a human presence on the Moon for quite a while, and it's not a very good one. We can't burn He3 yet, it's not economical to ship (it's an isotope of helium, it takes up lots of space and is not dense at all, or would have to be expensively cryogenically cooled). It's an economic non-starter.
There are better fuel sources on the Moon anyway. If we were to build science bases or observatories on the Moon, we would need a reliable power source to last through the two-week lunar nights. There's quite a bit of extractable thorium on the Moon, and compact molten-salt reactors like LFTR would likely do the job nicely, with far less technical risk. Not sure if studies have been done, on whether or not we can mine, refine and use thorium without it leaving the Moon, but it seems more practical than assembling a 10000 ton fusion reactor + associated plant from parts shipped from Earth.
There ARE loads of things we could do on the Moon. Mining helium-3 isn't one of them.
If I had a dollar for every time I've read somebody try and justify their criminal activity by believing they're better than some other criminal. That's why paedophiles have such a hard time in prison: all the other criminals need to feel superior, while still remaining a complete and total waste of space. This happens so often, that this cognitive bias needs a name.
What's really interesting for me, is the Communists' ever tightening grip over their own people and their growing paranoia. They have massive problems and massive internal contradictions, and rather than doing what the rest of the (non-dysfunctional) world does, and let people air their grievances and have their say, they're bottling up the rage and discontent.
I would liken it to a broken pressure cooker left on a stove. Democracy, and freedom of speech and assembly are like the pressure-release valve. I DON'T want to be anywhere near it when the thing finally explodes. And despite my own personal disgust of the immorality that pervades mainland Chinese society, I really do feel sorry for the average Chinese guy in the street, who has been shit-on by their government for millenia, and will suffer as this mess eventually unravels.
Sounds like some Chinese Communist has a massive hate-on for the Brits.
Well, it's pretty hard to respect other 'cultures' (if you consider the moral squalor, oppression and violence that the Chinese Communist Party has visited upon it's own people -- and soon, the world, a "culture"), when those cultures seek to repeat the same mistakes the West and others have done so over history. We like to think that we now know better, and know we can do better. But the Commies don't give a stuff about morals, people, the environment, ANYTHING.
I think the triumph of Chinese "culture" (really, Communist Party hegemony), will be a massive disaster for the world.
Racism racism racism *fingers in ears* RACISM RACISM la la la la I CAN'T HEAR YOU RACISM RACISM RABBLE RABBLE
That the spivs on Wall Street stand a chance of doing hard time. The murderous fascists in Beijing aren't even accountable to God.
The Chinese have no morals at all, so they use all these old white-guilt canards to justify their extremely immoral actions. Nobody believes Communist Party propaganda. Not the Chinese people, or the round-eyed barbarians either.
compulsive liars, cheats and thieves who will do absolutely anything to win. And it's ingrained behaviour that will never change. Even 200 years ago, British traders knew very well that the Chinese simply couldn't be trusted.
Which is why when the West declines and the Chinese rule the world, we're all fucked.
I'm amused at the clueless person who wrote this story. They apparently consider something 'difficult to understand', so they then turn around and sooth their bruised ego, by claiming that their ignorance is as good as somebody else's knowledge.
Well, I've got news for you bucko. Sure, there's a lot to learn (get off your butt, stop reading Derrida, and do the study), but just because few people take the time to understand something, doesn't make the process that produced that knowledge any less valid (and by all accounts, the scientific method is one of humanity's greatest achievements). That process is extremely robust, and has produced everything modern that we take for granted.
Clearly, somebody here is very uninformed, and needs to learn much more about how the world works.