As I was skimming Slashdot I saw a headline that contained "Bush" and "Indicted" and I thought it was for war crimes. My first thought was, "I hope they get Obama too" but sadly, it was not to be.
It reminds me of an acquaintance who claimed to have worked at a red light camera company, where he bragged about at random times, the traffic signal light could flash red just for 50-100 ms, snap a picture, then change back to green. That way, they could keep the flow of red light camera tickets going but without being caught on driver dash cams with extremely short (or no) yellow lights.
Probably the best way tourists can fight back is to blacklist towns doing those shenanigans, but with larger cities like NYC, that can't really be done.
The best way to fight back is to blacklist everybody who has ever been employed by a red light camera company.
Use LinkedIn to track them down, create a public website where you name and shame them.
If you can find out where they live, confront them at their houses in front of their families and neighbors.
Until there's a social cost which makes acting like an amoral mercenary unprofitable, the number of amoral mercenaries will continue to increase.
Unfortunately very little of our "justice" system is geared towards real accountability and equality.
The court system is theater designed to give the peasants the illusion of justice.
It's sole purpose is to increase margins for the ruling class - people who believe they are free require the rulers to expend fewer resources to keep them compliant and productive.
If the kernel developers allowed bugs to be clearly marked as security vunerabilities, then it would be trivial to use the Git commit history to identify the individuals who are merging these exploits into the kernel.
Manuals generally can't be updated unless new sections are added or pages added.
Actually most technical manuals onboard ships that are still kept in paper form are designed to be easily updated. The pages aren't glued in place - they are three-hole punched and kept in binders. When an update to the manual comes out, they only need to distribute the specific pages which have changed. Each page has a revision number on it, and the manuals will contain a "List of effective pages" noting the most current version of every page in the manual.
This means you can now assign people to do nothing but go through paper manuals page-by-page and verify that every page is present and at the correct revision.
It's about time for someone to host a Github clone as a Tor hidden service for the explicit purpose of allowing people to share source code without having to worry about being punished by the imaginary property police.
In the UK, "Give Way" (i.e. "yield") signs outnumber them 100-to-1 or more. You normally only find Stop signs at blind junctions (mostly in places where the road layout hasn't changed since the middle ages).
Invert that ratio and you get the US.
Basically, traffic laws in the US are optimised to generate maximum fine revenue for the local police so they are designed to create as many violations as possible with no regard for safety. At the extreme end of the scale you've got red light cameras which might as well be called "murder cameras" for the number of people they kill.
The evidence is very clear that if you actually want safety on roads the way to get it is with fewer or no rules and signs, but since that directly contradicts the reveune purpose of having the signs and rules it would take a regime change to see that happen.
When you have a free and unlimited open faucet, you use water for any old thing that comes to mind - Drinking, bathing, slip-n'-slides, washing the car, making rainbows with mist, growing a climate-inappropriate groundcover plant, whatever strikes your fancy.
When you have a $200/month water bill associated with that faucet, you damned well make sure it goes to the necessities, and you find a way to shower in under five minutes
The hilarious part about the situation is the amount of overlap between conservationists and socialists.
"Water needs to be free (subsidized) because it's a human right!"
"Oh shit, when we artificially lower the price of things people use too much of those things. Since it was our attempt to micromanage resource allocation that caused the problem in the first place, we better double down with even more micromanagement by implementing rationing so that everybody will stop using as much of the resource that we forcefully made too inexpensive."
The chain of trust is broken because cryptographers, a class of developers with a long track record of being utterly incapable of building software that's usable for regular humans, has been left in charge of building iit.
You, sir, are a buffoon. A buffoon who allows families like mine - private school educated, holidays around the world, continuing to live off investments like my parents for the last 2-3 decades - to exploit dullards like yourself. You want something better, you do need to organise your labour. And I am quite okay if you do, because I could have way less and still enjoy a very comfortable lifestyle. As it is, though, you are too easy to fool into giving me even more.
"Last Friday may turn out to have marked the beginning of Silicon Valley's organized labor movement" should read "Last Friday may turn out to have marked the end of Silicon Valley." Once "organized labor" successfully infects an industry, it turns in to a dead industry walking.
Since tech startups are particularly location-independent, expect to see more of them started elsewhere (and outside the United States entirely) and fewer of them to start in Silicon Valley.
You almost had something useful to say here until you ruined it with the third word.
The correct answer is to just stop voting.
The people whose religion involves dancing around carve tree stumps to makes the rains start at least get some exercise out of the deal. Voting just wastes your time and attention.
What's really tragic is that you call me an asshole for telling you that Santa Claus isn't real, Jesus isn't watching you masturbate from heaven, and the Constitution is just a moldy old piece of paper instead of being mad at all the liars and charlatans in the world who infect children with dangerous mythology in the first place.
Ok, how do I know this "will of the majority exists?" Can I measure it? Can I talk to the will of the majority to ask what it wants, or do I have to rely on priests^H^H^H^H^H^H^H politicians to interpret it for me and tell me what it is?
It is a Token or symbol that the power to govern was given by the will of the people.
People create Governments, not the other way around.
I admit that your religion has a pretty creation myth, but it's got as much to do with reality as a tree stump carving depicting that the sun rises because a giant space coyote eats the sun at night and vomits it up in the morning.
If it was truly the case that governments are formed by "the people", instead of being violently and deceptively imposed by a ruling class onto their subjects, don't you think it's a bit odd that George Washington had to raise an army signifigantly larger than the one used to expell the British in order to neutralize popular resistance to that government's actions?
It's not the paper itself that grants them their power, but the agreement behind it. If the physical paper the constitution is written on were destroyed, the constitution itself would still be in effect.
Now we're getting somewhere.
If the Supreme Court gets their power from an agreement, who are the parties involved in that agreement?
Spoiler alert: your answer is invalid if it posits that dead people are the source of the power (dead people can't do anything because they are dead), or if it includes people who, if they were all hit by a bus tomorrow, would not reduce the Supreme Court's capacity to enforce their rulings.
That old piece of paper circumscribes the governing law of the land. The Supreme Court absolutely is bound by it. In fact their authority comes from it and it is their solemn duty to interpret it and use it to throw out improper legislation.
You understand that words mean things, right?
When you say that Supreme Court is "absolutely bound" by something, that's a testible hypothesis, no less so than if I said a brick is absolutely bound by gravity. If a brick could just decide to hover in midair then that would falsify my claim that it was bound by gravity.
Likewise, if you claim that a piece of paper binds people, and those people can be observed to do whatever they want regardless of what is written on said paper, and the paper responds to this violation by doing absolutely nothing at all since it is, in fact, just a piece of paper, then by what possible universe could you say that piece of paper is binding them?
To all those who would cavalierly tear up the Constitution, beware the wrath of patriots.
That would be hilarious if it wasn't so pathetically sad.
Slashdot Mirror
Could Google be any more transparent as a willing and eager participant of the surveillance state?
It'd be nice if they'd at least pretend to hide what they are doing, so as to not so blatently insult our intelligence.
As I was skimming Slashdot I saw a headline that contained "Bush" and "Indicted" and I thought it was for war crimes. My first thought was, "I hope they get Obama too" but sadly, it was not to be.
It reminds me of an acquaintance who claimed to have worked at a red light camera company, where he bragged about at random times, the traffic signal light could flash red just for 50-100 ms, snap a picture, then change back to green. That way, they could keep the flow of red light camera tickets going but without being caught on driver dash cams with extremely short (or no) yellow lights.
Probably the best way tourists can fight back is to blacklist towns doing those shenanigans, but with larger cities like NYC, that can't really be done.
The best way to fight back is to blacklist everybody who has ever been employed by a red light camera company.
Use LinkedIn to track them down, create a public website where you name and shame them.
If you can find out where they live, confront them at their houses in front of their families and neighbors.
Until there's a social cost which makes acting like an amoral mercenary unprofitable, the number of amoral mercenaries will continue to increase.
The court system is theater designed to give the peasants the illusion of justice.
It's sole purpose is to increase margins for the ruling class - people who believe they are free require the rulers to expend fewer resources to keep them compliant and productive.
Is that what's come to now? Anybody who promotes (actual) security best practices is going to be accused of being a terrorist?
If the kernel developers allowed bugs to be clearly marked as security vunerabilities, then it would be trivial to use the Git commit history to identify the individuals who are merging these exploits into the kernel.
2010 called and they want their FUD back.
Bitcoin payment processors solved this problem a long time ago.
Manuals generally can't be updated unless new sections are added or pages added.
Actually most technical manuals onboard ships that are still kept in paper form are designed to be easily updated. The pages aren't glued in place - they are three-hole punched and kept in binders. When an update to the manual comes out, they only need to distribute the specific pages which have changed. Each page has a revision number on it, and the manuals will contain a "List of effective pages" noting the most current version of every page in the manual.
This means you can now assign people to do nothing but go through paper manuals page-by-page and verify that every page is present and at the correct revision.
It's about time for someone to host a Github clone as a Tor hidden service for the explicit purpose of allowing people to share source code without having to worry about being punished by the imaginary property police.
How common are Stop signs in the US?
In the UK, "Give Way" (i.e. "yield") signs outnumber them 100-to-1 or more. You normally only find Stop signs at blind junctions (mostly in places where the road layout hasn't changed since the middle ages).
Invert that ratio and you get the US.
Basically, traffic laws in the US are optimised to generate maximum fine revenue for the local police so they are designed to create as many violations as possible with no regard for safety. At the extreme end of the scale you've got red light cameras which might as well be called "murder cameras" for the number of people they kill.
The evidence is very clear that if you actually want safety on roads the way to get it is with fewer or no rules and signs, but since that directly contradicts the reveune purpose of having the signs and rules it would take a regime change to see that happen.
The hilarious part about the situation is the amount of overlap between conservationists and socialists.
"Water needs to be free (subsidized) because it's a human right!"
"Oh shit, when we artificially lower the price of things people use too much of those things. Since it was our attempt to micromanage resource allocation that caused the problem in the first place, we better double down with even more micromanagement by implementing rationing so that everybody will stop using as much of the resource that we forcefully made too inexpensive."
That is exactly the attitide that keeps personal cryptography in the usability dark ages.
Congratulations, you're personally helping to reduce the security of billions of internet users around the world.
The chain of trust is broken because cryptographers, a class of developers with a long track record of being utterly incapable of building software that's usable for regular humans, has been left in charge of building iit.
When the problem is taken up by other, more UX knowledgable, developers we'll get a solution to the problem.
You, sir, are a buffoon. A buffoon who allows families like mine - private school educated, holidays around the world, continuing to live off investments like my parents for the last 2-3 decades - to exploit dullards like yourself. You want something better, you do need to organise your labour. And I am quite okay if you do, because I could have way less and still enjoy a very comfortable lifestyle. As it is, though, you are too easy to fool into giving me even more.
Thanks for the laugh. I needed that.
"Last Friday may turn out to have marked the beginning of Silicon Valley's organized labor movement" should read "Last Friday may turn out to have marked the end of Silicon Valley." Once "organized labor" successfully infects an industry, it turns in to a dead industry walking.
Since tech startups are particularly location-independent, expect to see more of them started elsewhere (and outside the United States entirely) and fewer of them to start in Silicon Valley.
How will stop voting improve the situation?
It will reveal the truth: absolutely nothing will change regardless of if anyone votes or not.
stop voting for Republicans
You almost had something useful to say here until you ruined it with the third word.
The correct answer is to just stop voting.
The people whose religion involves dancing around carve tree stumps to makes the rains start at least get some exercise out of the deal. Voting just wastes your time and attention.
And this is why I don't like talking with religious people.
What's really tragic is that you call me an asshole for telling you that Santa Claus isn't real, Jesus isn't watching you masturbate from heaven, and the Constitution is just a moldy old piece of paper instead of being mad at all the liars and charlatans in the world who infect children with dangerous mythology in the first place.
Ok, how do I know this "will of the majority exists?" Can I measure it? Can I talk to the will of the majority to ask what it wants, or do I have to rely on priests^H^H^H^H^H^H^H politicians to interpret it for me and tell me what it is?
It is a Token or symbol that the power to govern was given by the will of the people.
People create Governments, not the other way around.
I admit that your religion has a pretty creation myth, but it's got as much to do with reality as a tree stump carving depicting that the sun rises because a giant space coyote eats the sun at night and vomits it up in the morning.
If it was truly the case that governments are formed by "the people", instead of being violently and deceptively imposed by a ruling class onto their subjects, don't you think it's a bit odd that George Washington had to raise an army signifigantly larger than the one used to expell the British in order to neutralize popular resistance to that government's actions?
It's not the paper itself that grants them their power, but the agreement behind it. If the physical paper the constitution is written on were destroyed, the constitution itself would still be in effect.
Now we're getting somewhere.
If the Supreme Court gets their power from an agreement, who are the parties involved in that agreement?
Spoiler alert: your answer is invalid if it posits that dead people are the source of the power (dead people can't do anything because they are dead), or if it includes people who, if they were all hit by a bus tomorrow, would not reduce the Supreme Court's capacity to enforce their rulings.
You understand that words mean things, right?
When you say that Supreme Court is "absolutely bound" by something, that's a testible hypothesis, no less so than if I said a brick is absolutely bound by gravity. If a brick could just decide to hover in midair then that would falsify my claim that it was bound by gravity.
Likewise, if you claim that a piece of paper binds people, and those people can be observed to do whatever they want regardless of what is written on said paper, and the paper responds to this violation by doing absolutely nothing at all since it is, in fact, just a piece of paper, then by what possible universe could you say that piece of paper is binding them?
That would be hilarious if it wasn't so pathetically sad.
My condolences for your Tourette Syndrome. That looks like a particularlly nasty case.
What's tragic is that in the 21st century we still live in a world where people believe in fantasy.
That fact that you can say that some people derive power from a piece of paper in apparent seriousness is the tragedy.
I don't want to live on a planet where people believe in magic paper.