The Admins know that if a management type encrypts his own data and forgets his own password, he still considers them responsible. They are responsible for, if not actually in control of, everything that happens in the computer or on the network. The "it's your own damned fault" argument does not work with management, because management isn't wrong, ever, when they're talking to an underling at the help desk. And yes, Admins could block the feature via Active Directory and lock down everyone's configuration, but if the option is available then managers will hear about it and want it for themselves. They'll think "oh, I'm a security-conscious, forward-looking manager," and you can't exactly tell the boss "Ma'am, I don't really think you're smart enough to remember your own password, and you're a backstabbing jerk, so you'll blame me when you screw this up, so no, you can't install this feature." That sort of statement, though laden with integrity and higher truth, does not portend well for one's career. So IT admins are damn smart to try to get this removed from the OS altogether.
I'd say the bottom line is to learn to speak and act like a suit even when keeping the brainpower of the techie. Suits respect suits, and there is a coded language they use, much like dogs sniffing each other's behinds. Pick up a popular business book some day--the vacuity actually sucks air from the room. But these people are inexplicably good at making money, so go figure. But they do not respect a t-shirted morlock telling them that their latest epiphany/paradigm shift/cheese-moving is impossible, much less an all-around stupid idea. For a tech-head to get along with the business folks, she (or he, if so equipped) must learn to use the vaguely optimistic but non-committal generalizations that suits use. Those vacuous cliches they throw around so much may be grating to sentient mammals, but those cliches are subtly coded messages saying "I'm in the club." I have actually discovered that throwing these cliches around in meetings, while sounding vaguely optimistic about whatever the flavor-of-the-week buzzword is, makes the suits like me more and vastly improves my quality of life. What I can't figure out is if I find this new knowledge to be a ray of sunshine or just depressing as hell. Can people really fall for a string of randomly assembled cliches? Yes. Yes, they can.
...purposefully uses history for every reason other than to teach about the past.
Whether or not this is objectionable hinges on what you think the purpose of school really is. I read part of Gatto's The Underground History of American Education, (which was terrifying) and apparently the purpose of schools has come to be largely brainwashing. I know that's a loaded, pejorative term, but it fits. They were intended to mold children to be obedient, easily managed workers and citizens who would go to work on time and fight in wars when told they should. Hence all the rosy public myths we're basted in as children. Granted, I think all countries do this to their kids to one extent or another, but ugly is still ugly, even if everyone is doing it.
And to tell the truth, we didn't invent this approach. Plutarch, for example, suborns the teaching of history to the teaching of character, and this approach will always get out of hand eventually. People, like it or not, mainly study history with an eye to learning more about the present, so there is usually an agenda present somewhere. But I agree that school textbooks are exceptionally bad. That is true in both history and in much of science--biology has been gutted to appease Creationists, and I'd wager even geology is watered down a bit for the same purpose. Math is the only subject that, as far as I know, can be left alone and taught without controversy.
"Easier" and "better" involve more issues than you've addressed. I love that LaTeX files are plain-text. I love the simplicity and dependability of that. I don't think any ONE tool is perfect for every job. Openoffice is not LaTeX is not InDesign, and so on. But I do know that presentations developed with LateX Beamer (and Powerdot, I think it's called) are more professional and slick than anything I've seen done with Powerpoint or Impress. Using LaTeX at this level may not be as easy as Powerpoint, but if I were inclined to spend a little of my time learning how to be a power-user on something, I think expertise in LaTeX and Beamer (or some other LaTeX presentation package) would be more valuable to me, long-term, than time spent learning Powerpoint or Impress in-depth.
Largely, I think people split up into LaTeX vs. word processor camps along much the same lines as they split into the GUI vs. command-line camps. I think everyone decides with their gut on this, but then tries to concoct arguments so they can seem rational. But what I always encounter in these debates is the tacit assumption that willful ignorance trumps knowledge, and any option that requires learning and planning loses out to the lowest common denominator. People don't want to learn, they resent the implication that they should, they consider you arrogant and elitist for suggesting it as an option, and they'll go to great lengths to convince themselves that the easy, non-thinking, non-learning option is just better. Now, I use LaTeX (and the command line) sparingly, don't know either very well, and I'm all about the easy option. However, I know that I'm lazy, and that me being lazy does not mean that muddling around in OpenOffice is really better, either for the product or for my long-term convenience. I use OpenOffice for my school documents, but I really wish I had an impetus to learn and use LaTeX more. Except for tables. Ugh, the tables!
Yes, the wonderful thing is that, for a small fee, it can be eradicated. Just to make sure it doesn't come back, you can contract a regular repeat of the procedure. The wonderful thing is that this procedure is actually cheaper, both financially and in terms of freedom and dignity, than is the "marriage" procedure you hear about. In this one particular aspect of our lives, the equivalent of "free as in beer" actually costs more in the long-term, and the commercial offerings are more dependable, generally of a higher quality, and you get the added, and not to be underestimated, benefit of novelty.
You might argue that this means we should set the bastards free, but... NO FUCKING WAY
If you want a police state, please move to Saudi Arabia. Please do not turn my country into a police state where government can keep anyone in jail forever without charging them. I LIKE freedom. The number of people killed in 9/11, though tragic, does not warrant making my nation into a totalitarian regime. I mean, hell, that many people die every MONTH in vehicle collisions. 20,000+ people a year die of THE FLU! So no, I don't consider terrorism a sufficiently worrisome problem that I'm willing to empower the government to jail anyone, for any length of time, without having to meet any evidentiary or due process standards. That's a basic safeguard of freedom. Without it, there's precious little to protect anymore. So if you're a totalitarian, fine, I respect that, but please move to a nation that isn't free, so you can feel totally secure, rather than enthusiastically trying to erode what freedom we have left here. Thanks.
Whether it was known or not is irrelevent. The question is: Will random spying prevent future attacks?
And the answer is "no". Any system will have "false positives", "false negatives", "true positives" and "true negatives".
I have to disagree with you on this. Giving the government unlimited authority to surveil, imprison, kill, torture, maim, etc, without any oversight, check, limit, or qualification of any kind very likely would reduce terrorism. Islamicists (or John Birchers, or Grean Peace members, or PETA members, or ACLU members etc) who criticise the government could be tortured to death and dumped in an anonymous grave. Any journalist who said anything bad about the government could be summarily shot, and his family shot as well as an example. Because this would weed out anyone who would criticize the government, it would also weed out the vast majority of those who would do harm. People can't recruit or proseletize if they're just shot the moment they make a peep of discontent.
The Soviet Union under Stalin didn't exactly have a lot of terrorists running around. Neither did Saddam's Iraq, either. Totalitarianism does get rid of this sort of thing. The question his, how close can we get to totalitarianism while still calling it something else? I'd bet close to 50% of Americans would support giving government the powers I've listed above. Eventually, there will be another attack on American soil, and people will again be terrified enough to agree to anything. If the attack is big enough and ugly enough, people might acquiesce to much or all of the above. Why wouldn't they? It's not as if "freedom" is a natural state of society--there's nothing innately free about human beings. For a society to remain free, people have to be passionate about freedom, and at least slightly hostile to government. Fear, especially fear channelled and managed by a government-friendly press, will keep people trusting and credulous of their government, and we will remain in a downward spiral. As you can see, I'm quite the optimist.
The trouble with bringing these people to trial is that there's no assurance that they'll be convicted. They'll look a little stupid if they hold people in jail for years, subject them to what would be known as torture if it were happening in Atlanta or NY, and then there are no charges to file. We're assuming that there is evidence, but I think that's an optimistic assumption. Some of these people were traded for bounty money--some guy brought in someone he assured us was a "big terrorist. big big" and we have him a wad of cash in return. That make an efficient way of filling a jail, but it doesn't constitute evidence that would meet any known standard.
Look at Joseph Padilla - who really thinks he will be convicted when, if ever, he is brought to trial? If there was real evidence, they would've tried him already. What they want is to suspend habeus corpus without it looking like they're suspending habeus corpus, and just lock whoever they want up forever without any oversight or evidentiary standards to meet. But it's hard to crow about freedom when you run a police state, so a bunch of knickers are tied in knots over what to do. And yes, Virginia, detention without trial, without charges, constitutes a police state, even if the cops don't get cool double lightning-bolts on their lapels.
I certainly wouldn't want to be in charge. Now that you've had people in custody for years, subjecting them to torture and humiliation, even if they were originally pure as the driven snow they certainly hate us NOW, so what do you do? Anyone you let go could be a terrorist, even if they weren't originally. It was a lot easier for Stalin. But then again, he was what we call a "bad guy." But as has been pointed out, there was no crime in the Soviet Union. They just shot you. Of course, they shot everyone else, too, but as they say, freedom isn't free.
I wonder if proper body and vehicle armor is cheaper than prosthetics, multiple surgeries, psychological counseling, and a lifetime of subsequent health problems. I also wonder what these soldiers lost their limbs for. Iraq and Afghanistan aren't exactly basions of freedom, are they? Yes, they'll be peaceful one day in the future, as will the entire earth when the sun runs out of hydrogen. I do realize that every time a flower blooms in Iraq it's because of American resolve and committment, while none of the death and destruction is our fault, but still, one wonders what the hell it's all for.
Well, that's sort of what tipped them off. A recently-appointed federal oversight committee reviewed the bibliography he submitted of primary sources for his research, and found that he had many works cited besides the King James Bible. Knowing that the Bible is the only authentic scientific work published to date, they knew right away that the guy was committing fraud of some sort. It only took a little digging to come up with the details.
So that's what we're calling it these days. In reality, they flew someone up there to whack the thingamaflotchit on the side a few times, twist the rabbit-ears to a different position, and if all else failed, a swift kick to the side of the cabinet. All of the above were accompanied by a steady stream of verbal abuse and profanity, followed by pleas of "pretty please, damn you, you piece of..." If there is another way that anything has ever gotten fixed, I am unaware of it. But I guess NASA is facing a budget crisis like everyone else (except Haliburton, natch) so they have to tell us that they "activated" it, via high-tech, very smart methodology and stuff. Thanks for the info, rocket guys. Gotcha. What a bunch of dweebs.
Well, there are other ways to access encrypted data, even if you can't use truecrypt. If you have just a few files, or have them stored in 1 zip file, you can use dscrypt, wildcrypt, privycrypt, or other programs that'll run from a USB stick without needing anything installed on the computer. Those other programs aren't as flexible as OTFE, but they do work in a pinch. Tinyapps (http://tinyapps.org/file.html) links to quite a few small encryption programs, several of which will run without needing to be installed. I still haven't found a PGP/GPG application that'll run without needing to be installed. I'm hoping portablapps.com comes out with a version of Truecrypt and/or GPG, but I'm not sure if that can even be done. Booting into Puppy linux (or DSL, or Knoppix, or any of the livecds) is indeed fantastic, but you can't always do that without rousing suspicion. I'm sure if my systems guys came into my office and I was using Knoppix, they'd be a bit upset, even if I showed them that it wasn't using the HD. Granted, those tiny encryption programs haven't been vetted either, but psychologically the systems guys seem a bit less threatened with unauthorized Windows programs than if you're booting into a completely new OS.
Check out the number of people released from death row every year, often with coerced confessions. Well, also lying witnesses, jailhouse snitches, etc, too, but to say that cops "roughing someone up" is a rare occurrence may be stretching it a bit. I don't think all confessions are coerced, but other things go on, too. How would a jury react to watching cops tell a mother that she would lose her children if she didn't talk, or telling a teenager "we're going to charge YOU if you don't tell us about your friend--we don't care either way, but someone's going down." Is that abuse? Probably not, but it might cast an interesting light on the boy-scout image cops portray on the stand. Juries should see how these things happen. On the other side of the coin, it would also minimize frivolous lawsuits, so save the public some money.
I never said that the current President "can do no good." I never considered him the personification of evil. And Congress did authorize force, though after being misled by selectively quoted intelligence, and that still isn't a "declaration" of war. But all of that is so much fluff--I never said that Congress wasn't complicit.
President Clinton did lie about a blowjob, and I don't care. At all. It's completely insignificant in the balance of world affairs. The current President lies about torture. It wasn't under oath, so isn't impeachable, and that distinction is about as morally insignificant as you can get. It's wrong to torture people and then redefine the term in mid-sentence and then pretend you're being forthright about what you're doing. The way those people are being treated would be called torture if it was happening in our country to our citizens, and we know it. It was called torture before we were doing it, wasn't it? If it was your mother or best friend being interrogated in Dallas with these methods, you'd call it torture.
Where is the moral contumely that we were basting eyeballs-deep in during the Clinton impeachment? Where is the outrage? There isn't any, and you know exactly why--Bush is a Republican, therefore whatever he does is lily-white in the eyes of Republicans. Morality, legality, propriety, everything is subordinate to politics. They'll impeach a sitting President over a blowjob but sit placidly by while a President authorizes torture, secret prisons, indefinite detentions, warrantless wiretaps, etc. So spare me your moral equivocations. I don't care if Clinton got blown on film every Sunday at noon while holding the King James Bible in one hand and a joint in the other--if torture doesn't make your moral compass wake up and take notice, there is something fundamentally wrong with you as a human being.
Perhaps I'm barking up the wrong tree on this, and you are deeply disturbed by what the Administration is doing. If so, you have my apologies. I'm just so sick of the faux moralizing about Clinton, coupled with the complete blindness on issues that really do matter. Blowjobs, even adulterous ones later lovingly covered with perjury, are a miniscule speck, an electron-sized mote, of immorality, compared to torture of human beings. To bring up Clinton and his interns in this context is to color yourself either as a shameless political hack or a pretty despicable human being.
Actually I think the police should be required to record both audio and video of every official interaction with the public. I think every interrogation should be recorded in full, and any breaks in the recording for more than 10-20 seconds (to allow for tape change) should mitigate against any 'confessions' obtained during that interrogation. Yes, I'm serious. This would protect the police who are accused of brutality, assuming they were innocent. The "if you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide," should apply, but only to the government, because government is where the higher potential for abuse and brutality lies. You don't hear cases of 7-8 armed civilians beating the hell out of an unarmed, handcuffed police officer, but flip that around and it's suddenly less remarkable. Recorded interrogations would protect both the police and the accused, and prevent both frivolous lawsuits from the accused and brutality from the police. The only reason the police wouldn't want an uninterrupted record of the interrogation is if they fully intend on doing things that are illegal and unethical, and they want to prevent a judge and/or jury from seeing how they got that "confession."
Apparently you just don't get it. Liberals rarely do, so don't take it personally. The President of the United States cannot do anything illegal, because the very act of commission on his part legitimizes his decision. Because we are in a state of Presidentially-declared war, everything, and I mean everything, he does is under the aegis of the War on Terror. When the President makes a decision, it is within the umbrella of the authority given to him by the necessities of the War on Terror, and that fact retroactively makes his actions legal, regardless of what the text of the law literally says. It's as if his decision actually reached backwards in the space-time continuum, subtly coloring, perhaps even redefining, the meaning of words like "torture," "surveillance," "warrant," etc.
This authority is vital to national security, possibly to our very survival, and the only thing that could possibly void that power would be the election of a candidate from the Democratic party. If that unlikely event were to come to pass, then yes, the President would be capable of committing an illegal act by authorizing actions in violation of written law. In, and only in, a Democrat-run White House is the President capable of authorizing or committing an illegal act.
The mechanism of evolution does not especially encourage changes in a species beyond the absolute bare minimum of what is required
And this is why all intelligent people believe in evolution. We don't really care about the fossil record or nested hierarchies--we're just all about doing the bare minimum. Now if only those religious kooks would stop trying to ruin it for everyone...
There is, in principle, a computable difference between designed and non-designed phenomena.
I think it would be harder to tell than we'd initially think. We have a gut feeling of what appears to be designed, but it's calibrated to a lifetime of 60-70 years, not geologic, much less cosmic, time. You could stumble on a 6-million digit number that was just 0123456789, repeated over and over 600,000 times, and you'd never ever believe in your gut that it was random. But for all your certitude, you could still be looking at a sequence of digits from any irrational number. Your mind would see a deliberately chosen number, though in the larger picture of an irrational number that goes on for an infinite number of digits, all finite sequences are present somewhere. Meaning, that if you luck out and see the "right" section of a random stream of data, your mind can find something to latch onto as a pattern. Check out how many people who are convinced that they've discovered a "pattern" in the stock market, or who believe we could control the weather if only we had enough data.
As for your "computable difference," I'd like to see what data someone could use to compute that. The ID movement sprang de novo from the creationist movement after a few lost Supreme Court cases. Yes, there are umpteen technical-looking articles "proving" that life can't evolve, just as there are umpteen technical-looking articles "proving" that the Earth is only 6000 years old, etc. As a subculture they're interesting, but they have about as much scientific credibility as the UFO-ologists. If a movement wants to actually redefine science so their ideas count as science, that tells you a lot about them, and about how much you should trust their "computations."
The only ID principle I've ever seen is "evolution can't explain anything." I've seen no postulates or hypotheses at all from ID, other than the ones specifically tailored to rebut a tenet of evolutionary theory. There are a lot of buzzwords and technical articles, but all of them that I've seen are just trying to undermine evolutionary theory, rather than making any claims of their own. I see a lot of "we know it was designed, so there must be a designer," but I don't consider that much of an argument, it being so circular. But if you have a list of the "solid principles" of intelligent design, would you mind posting them? I think a lot of people would be curious to see them.
The greatest honor we can give God is to look at his creation and be inspired to imitate it, since it reflects God's likeness.
Are you saying we should create new versions of malaria, polio, and the plague bacillus? Is this really the best of ideas? I mean, daisies are pretty, but I could sort of do without ebola. Or does that border on ingratitude?
I've been trying to figure out a place to tell someone about my favorite OpenOffice feature, and I guess you just nominated your post by mentioning PDF. I can copy/paste a web-page or selection into OpenOffice, and all the HTML links will be preserved. When I export to PDF, all the links are still preserved in the PDF! I've been using PDFcreator and printing to PDF for a couple of years, but that method loses all the links. But there's more...
Also, if I've structured an OpenOffice document by using styles (Heading 1, 2, 3), that creates bookmarks in the PDF document when I export it, even nesting the bookmarks in a hierarchy.
At least for this purpose, which I use a lot, OpenOffice is better than MS Office. I've been trying to figure out how to keep copies of web-pages with the links intact, or to keep a collection of Slashdot and Panda's Thumb posts while keeping the links, and OpenOffice works really well. Also, Openoffice can be run from a USB stick if you download the version from Portableapps.com. That beats the hell out of MS Office.
That has nothing to do with the article at hand. But don't you feel better anyway?
There is no global warming, and only environazis dislike petroleum-based fuel sources. Why do you hate America? The article is about making money and creating the illusion that you got a good deal by "beating" the other guy. Can we please get back to talking about what makes America great, and stop focusing on trendy extremo-far-far-really-left-wing fear-mongering? Why do you want to kill babies? You are a bad person!
Wow, I actually do feel a little better. Maybe there's something to that after all.
Yes, you'd lose your investment. But when people go into business, they are advised to incorporate, for the very reason that it limits liability while retaining the money-making potential. Sole proprietorship is discouraged, explicitly because it doesn't shield an owner (the one making the decisions and the money) from responsibility as well as a corporation. This legal entity exists explicitly for this reason. My only point is that there are other aspects of our culture that undermine the idea of personal responsibility, and the evil "welfare state" isn't the culprit. People want to make decisions and reap rewards while excusing themselves as much as possible for any ill consequences of their own decisions, and we not only allow them to do so, but respect them for their business acumen. Where exactly is one supposed to learn the value of personal responsibility when so few people actually believe in it? For themselves, I mean, not for other people.
Slashdot Mirror
The Admins know that if a management type encrypts his own data and forgets his own password, he still considers them responsible. They are responsible for, if not actually in control of, everything that happens in the computer or on the network. The "it's your own damned fault" argument does not work with management, because management isn't wrong, ever, when they're talking to an underling at the help desk. And yes, Admins could block the feature via Active Directory and lock down everyone's configuration, but if the option is available then managers will hear about it and want it for themselves. They'll think "oh, I'm a security-conscious, forward-looking manager," and you can't exactly tell the boss "Ma'am, I don't really think you're smart enough to remember your own password, and you're a backstabbing jerk, so you'll blame me when you screw this up, so no, you can't install this feature." That sort of statement, though laden with integrity and higher truth, does not portend well for one's career. So IT admins are damn smart to try to get this removed from the OS altogether.
And to tell the truth, we didn't invent this approach. Plutarch, for example, suborns the teaching of history to the teaching of character, and this approach will always get out of hand eventually. People, like it or not, mainly study history with an eye to learning more about the present, so there is usually an agenda present somewhere. But I agree that school textbooks are exceptionally bad. That is true in both history and in much of science--biology has been gutted to appease Creationists, and I'd wager even geology is watered down a bit for the same purpose. Math is the only subject that, as far as I know, can be left alone and taught without controversy.
Largely, I think people split up into LaTeX vs. word processor camps along much the same lines as they split into the GUI vs. command-line camps. I think everyone decides with their gut on this, but then tries to concoct arguments so they can seem rational. But what I always encounter in these debates is the tacit assumption that willful ignorance trumps knowledge, and any option that requires learning and planning loses out to the lowest common denominator. People don't want to learn, they resent the implication that they should, they consider you arrogant and elitist for suggesting it as an option, and they'll go to great lengths to convince themselves that the easy, non-thinking, non-learning option is just better. Now, I use LaTeX (and the command line) sparingly, don't know either very well, and I'm all about the easy option. However, I know that I'm lazy, and that me being lazy does not mean that muddling around in OpenOffice is really better, either for the product or for my long-term convenience. I use OpenOffice for my school documents, but I really wish I had an impetus to learn and use LaTeX more. Except for tables. Ugh, the tables!
Yes, the wonderful thing is that, for a small fee, it can be eradicated. Just to make sure it doesn't come back, you can contract a regular repeat of the procedure. The wonderful thing is that this procedure is actually cheaper, both financially and in terms of freedom and dignity, than is the "marriage" procedure you hear about. In this one particular aspect of our lives, the equivalent of "free as in beer" actually costs more in the long-term, and the commercial offerings are more dependable, generally of a higher quality, and you get the added, and not to be underestimated, benefit of novelty.
The Soviet Union under Stalin didn't exactly have a lot of terrorists running around. Neither did Saddam's Iraq, either. Totalitarianism does get rid of this sort of thing. The question his, how close can we get to totalitarianism while still calling it something else? I'd bet close to 50% of Americans would support giving government the powers I've listed above. Eventually, there will be another attack on American soil, and people will again be terrified enough to agree to anything. If the attack is big enough and ugly enough, people might acquiesce to much or all of the above. Why wouldn't they? It's not as if "freedom" is a natural state of society--there's nothing innately free about human beings. For a society to remain free, people have to be passionate about freedom, and at least slightly hostile to government. Fear, especially fear channelled and managed by a government-friendly press, will keep people trusting and credulous of their government, and we will remain in a downward spiral. As you can see, I'm quite the optimist.
Look at Joseph Padilla - who really thinks he will be convicted when, if ever, he is brought to trial? If there was real evidence, they would've tried him already. What they want is to suspend habeus corpus without it looking like they're suspending habeus corpus, and just lock whoever they want up forever without any oversight or evidentiary standards to meet. But it's hard to crow about freedom when you run a police state, so a bunch of knickers are tied in knots over what to do. And yes, Virginia, detention without trial, without charges, constitutes a police state, even if the cops don't get cool double lightning-bolts on their lapels.
I certainly wouldn't want to be in charge. Now that you've had people in custody for years, subjecting them to torture and humiliation, even if they were originally pure as the driven snow they certainly hate us NOW, so what do you do? Anyone you let go could be a terrorist, even if they weren't originally. It was a lot easier for Stalin. But then again, he was what we call a "bad guy." But as has been pointed out, there was no crime in the Soviet Union. They just shot you. Of course, they shot everyone else, too, but as they say, freedom isn't free.
I wonder if proper body and vehicle armor is cheaper than prosthetics, multiple surgeries, psychological counseling, and a lifetime of subsequent health problems. I also wonder what these soldiers lost their limbs for. Iraq and Afghanistan aren't exactly basions of freedom, are they? Yes, they'll be peaceful one day in the future, as will the entire earth when the sun runs out of hydrogen. I do realize that every time a flower blooms in Iraq it's because of American resolve and committment, while none of the death and destruction is our fault, but still, one wonders what the hell it's all for.
Well, that's sort of what tipped them off. A recently-appointed federal oversight committee reviewed the bibliography he submitted of primary sources for his research, and found that he had many works cited besides the King James Bible. Knowing that the Bible is the only authentic scientific work published to date, they knew right away that the guy was committing fraud of some sort. It only took a little digging to come up with the details.
So that's what we're calling it these days. In reality, they flew someone up there to whack the thingamaflotchit on the side a few times, twist the rabbit-ears to a different position, and if all else failed, a swift kick to the side of the cabinet. All of the above were accompanied by a steady stream of verbal abuse and profanity, followed by pleas of "pretty please, damn you, you piece of..." If there is another way that anything has ever gotten fixed, I am unaware of it. But I guess NASA is facing a budget crisis like everyone else (except Haliburton, natch) so they have to tell us that they "activated" it, via high-tech, very smart methodology and stuff. Thanks for the info, rocket guys. Gotcha. What a bunch of dweebs.
Well, there are other ways to access encrypted data, even if you can't use truecrypt. If you have just a few files, or have them stored in 1 zip file, you can use dscrypt, wildcrypt, privycrypt, or other programs that'll run from a USB stick without needing anything installed on the computer. Those other programs aren't as flexible as OTFE, but they do work in a pinch. Tinyapps (http://tinyapps.org/file.html) links to quite a few small encryption programs, several of which will run without needing to be installed. I still haven't found a PGP/GPG application that'll run without needing to be installed. I'm hoping portablapps.com comes out with a version of Truecrypt and/or GPG, but I'm not sure if that can even be done. Booting into Puppy linux (or DSL, or Knoppix, or any of the livecds) is indeed fantastic, but you can't always do that without rousing suspicion. I'm sure if my systems guys came into my office and I was using Knoppix, they'd be a bit upset, even if I showed them that it wasn't using the HD. Granted, those tiny encryption programs haven't been vetted either, but psychologically the systems guys seem a bit less threatened with unauthorized Windows programs than if you're booting into a completely new OS.
Check out the number of people released from death row every year, often with coerced confessions. Well, also lying witnesses, jailhouse snitches, etc, too, but to say that cops "roughing someone up" is a rare occurrence may be stretching it a bit. I don't think all confessions are coerced, but other things go on, too. How would a jury react to watching cops tell a mother that she would lose her children if she didn't talk, or telling a teenager "we're going to charge YOU if you don't tell us about your friend--we don't care either way, but someone's going down." Is that abuse? Probably not, but it might cast an interesting light on the boy-scout image cops portray on the stand. Juries should see how these things happen. On the other side of the coin, it would also minimize frivolous lawsuits, so save the public some money.
Will they let you install VMWare player, Qemu, or something like that?
President Clinton did lie about a blowjob, and I don't care. At all. It's completely insignificant in the balance of world affairs. The current President lies about torture. It wasn't under oath, so isn't impeachable, and that distinction is about as morally insignificant as you can get. It's wrong to torture people and then redefine the term in mid-sentence and then pretend you're being forthright about what you're doing. The way those people are being treated would be called torture if it was happening in our country to our citizens, and we know it. It was called torture before we were doing it, wasn't it? If it was your mother or best friend being interrogated in Dallas with these methods, you'd call it torture.
Where is the moral contumely that we were basting eyeballs-deep in during the Clinton impeachment? Where is the outrage? There isn't any, and you know exactly why--Bush is a Republican, therefore whatever he does is lily-white in the eyes of Republicans. Morality, legality, propriety, everything is subordinate to politics. They'll impeach a sitting President over a blowjob but sit placidly by while a President authorizes torture, secret prisons, indefinite detentions, warrantless wiretaps, etc. So spare me your moral equivocations. I don't care if Clinton got blown on film every Sunday at noon while holding the King James Bible in one hand and a joint in the other--if torture doesn't make your moral compass wake up and take notice, there is something fundamentally wrong with you as a human being.
Perhaps I'm barking up the wrong tree on this, and you are deeply disturbed by what the Administration is doing. If so, you have my apologies. I'm just so sick of the faux moralizing about Clinton, coupled with the complete blindness on issues that really do matter. Blowjobs, even adulterous ones later lovingly covered with perjury, are a miniscule speck, an electron-sized mote, of immorality, compared to torture of human beings. To bring up Clinton and his interns in this context is to color yourself either as a shameless political hack or a pretty despicable human being.
I said no text! Why did you look? Are you implying something about my integrity?
Actually I think the police should be required to record both audio and video of every official interaction with the public. I think every interrogation should be recorded in full, and any breaks in the recording for more than 10-20 seconds (to allow for tape change) should mitigate against any 'confessions' obtained during that interrogation. Yes, I'm serious. This would protect the police who are accused of brutality, assuming they were innocent. The "if you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide," should apply, but only to the government, because government is where the higher potential for abuse and brutality lies. You don't hear cases of 7-8 armed civilians beating the hell out of an unarmed, handcuffed police officer, but flip that around and it's suddenly less remarkable. Recorded interrogations would protect both the police and the accused, and prevent both frivolous lawsuits from the accused and brutality from the police. The only reason the police wouldn't want an uninterrupted record of the interrogation is if they fully intend on doing things that are illegal and unethical, and they want to prevent a judge and/or jury from seeing how they got that "confession."
This authority is vital to national security, possibly to our very survival, and the only thing that could possibly void that power would be the election of a candidate from the Democratic party. If that unlikely event were to come to pass, then yes, the President would be capable of committing an illegal act by authorizing actions in violation of written law. In, and only in, a Democrat-run White House is the President capable of authorizing or committing an illegal act.
I kid, I kid. Mostly.
As for your "computable difference," I'd like to see what data someone could use to compute that. The ID movement sprang de novo from the creationist movement after a few lost Supreme Court cases. Yes, there are umpteen technical-looking articles "proving" that life can't evolve, just as there are umpteen technical-looking articles "proving" that the Earth is only 6000 years old, etc. As a subculture they're interesting, but they have about as much scientific credibility as the UFO-ologists. If a movement wants to actually redefine science so their ideas count as science, that tells you a lot about them, and about how much you should trust their "computations."
The only ID principle I've ever seen is "evolution can't explain anything." I've seen no postulates or hypotheses at all from ID, other than the ones specifically tailored to rebut a tenet of evolutionary theory. There are a lot of buzzwords and technical articles, but all of them that I've seen are just trying to undermine evolutionary theory, rather than making any claims of their own. I see a lot of "we know it was designed, so there must be a designer," but I don't consider that much of an argument, it being so circular. But if you have a list of the "solid principles" of intelligent design, would you mind posting them? I think a lot of people would be curious to see them.
Also, if I've structured an OpenOffice document by using styles (Heading 1, 2, 3), that creates bookmarks in the PDF document when I export it, even nesting the bookmarks in a hierarchy.
At least for this purpose, which I use a lot, OpenOffice is better than MS Office. I've been trying to figure out how to keep copies of web-pages with the links intact, or to keep a collection of Slashdot and Panda's Thumb posts while keeping the links, and OpenOffice works really well. Also, Openoffice can be run from a USB stick if you download the version from Portableapps.com. That beats the hell out of MS Office.
That has nothing to do with the article at hand. But don't you feel better anyway?
There is no global warming, and only environazis dislike petroleum-based fuel sources. Why do you hate America? The article is about making money and creating the illusion that you got a good deal by "beating" the other guy. Can we please get back to talking about what makes America great, and stop focusing on trendy extremo-far-far-really-left-wing fear-mongering? Why do you want to kill babies? You are a bad person!
Wow, I actually do feel a little better. Maybe there's something to that after all.
Yes, you'd lose your investment. But when people go into business, they are advised to incorporate, for the very reason that it limits liability while retaining the money-making potential. Sole proprietorship is discouraged, explicitly because it doesn't shield an owner (the one making the decisions and the money) from responsibility as well as a corporation. This legal entity exists explicitly for this reason. My only point is that there are other aspects of our culture that undermine the idea of personal responsibility, and the evil "welfare state" isn't the culprit. People want to make decisions and reap rewards while excusing themselves as much as possible for any ill consequences of their own decisions, and we not only allow them to do so, but respect them for their business acumen. Where exactly is one supposed to learn the value of personal responsibility when so few people actually believe in it? For themselves, I mean, not for other people.