I know this is a joke, but it's more than relevant.
I am guessing the people getting off in this case are getting off more for lack of evidence rather than exoneration. Plus logic dictates that with this number of people it's not the first time it ever happened.
What upsets me most personally about the United States is that we've developed a culture where doing the right thing is NEVER rewarded and doing the WRONG thing usually is. We've got a political culture right now where a politician MUST be a huxster or they can't compete. The US Government does suck at every level, but it's an outgrowth of the sickness of the culture itself. Nice guys don't finish last; nice guys don't finish AT ALL.
The heartening result is that Harvard takes cheating seriously. They suspended about 60 students over it and a bunch of others are on probation -- probably because they couldn't prove those students cheated.
The EU is apparently having too much time making up problems. Just about EVERY appliance in a kitchen is more dangerous than a MacPro. Have you every used a kitchen mixer? Rotating blades hooked up to a high power motor, no protection, no case... We have a number of MacPros. You really have to open up the case and want to stick your finger in there. Even if you would, these motors are low power. The potential injury would be minimal compared to a mixer. This makes no sense. Is the European Union turning into Fire Marshall Bill?
Try Google maps and zoom in on either the US-Mexico border or the US-Canada border just about anywhere and you will see how easy it would be to walk across the border and meet a car or truck.
Seriously, where is there any evidence that the US government routinely or even occasionally rummages through the files of Americans without probable cause and a warrant? I see a lot of people posting assertions that the government does this all the time to everybody but have yet to see any evidence of widespread prying into the files of Americans.
For the most part, citizenship is not an issue. The FBI needs the same sorts of warrants to investigate a person in the USA whether or not that person is a citizen.
Also, I find the notion that the FBI, NSA or CIA would take a deep and personal interest in the data of each and every person in the world wildly fanciful. As if they have millions analysts sifting through the mountains of data that the world produces every day...
Of course they don't do that. They don't have the capacity to look at more than a tiny fraction of the world's data and they never will.
But they want you to think that they have and maintain and are building capacity that will allow them to see and analyze every computer transaction in the world, break into any system any time they want and rummage through your data to their heart's content. (Like the government computer geeks do on TV shows.) Because if you think that, you will be discouraged from trying to commit a crime or try to conceal information from the United States. So the dupes on here who obsess about US government spying are really only furthering the government's agenda.
But they also want you to think you have nothing to fear if you're not doing anything wrong. That's not quite true either. You can damn well get crossways with them without even trying and end up in a big mess.
Now many will say "doom and gloom nonsense", and those people are simply ignorant. They have no idea how much snooping the NSA currently does on them, nor how much that will expand this summer when the new super computer complex opens (which has been designed for exactly the purpose of snooping and reporting on citizens). They have no idea how much of that data is requested and granted currently (in secrecy) to other government agencies, like the CIA, FBI, TSA, DHS, DOJ, ATF, etc.. Nobody in the public does, because our government refuses to provide any information at all.
Therefore, by your own statements, you don't know either. But that doesn't stop you from presenting your opinion about it as if it were fact.
Right now the Americans see themselves on a moral high ground for opposing child labor. Currently, that is one of few labor laws that means anything. However there are plenty of politicians - slashdot idol ron paul amongst them - who would like to overturn those laws as well. In the name of "liberty" they want to remove "market restrictions" to "grow industry". This will, of course, only reduce the wages across the board for working class people while making companies more profitable and increasing executive compensation. They also want to increase the rights of the wealthy and reduce those of the poor. While some conservatives claim they want to stop the "class warfare", this pushes it to a terrible conclusion.
In other words, under the guise of liberty - but with the true goal of profit - some people aspire to bring fascism for the people.
I wouldn't call that facism, exactly. Just an undoing of labor laws taking us back to the working conditions of the late 19th century
But I wonder who these people think their customers would be in their brave new world of economic freedom.
I don't have real faith in any company that chooses to insert religious references in the name of their business. To me it just seems like a cheap attempt to get you to think they must be virtuous because they call themselves godly. And we know how reliable that has been, historically.
Now I suppose I'd make an exception if they were "Real Faith Bible Printing" or "Real Faith Clerical Vestments." Then it's just plain old marketing because you expect the name of the business to have something to do with the product. But when the product is circuit boards or auto repair... not so much.
No. No digital representation of a date can represent values before 1900, nor is it even mathematically possible.
Really? Are you sure about that? Not mathmatically possible? I guess negative numbers don't exist in your realm.
<david_attenborough_voice>A spectacular example of a Whoosh in the wild! Let's be careful not to disturb it</david_attenborough_voice>
The original comment was tongue-in-cheek. But most computer date representation systems are prospective from modern zero date.
For example, Unix time was originally coded as elapsed whole seconds since midnight January 01, 1970 and represented time as an UNSIGNED 32-bit integer. Such systems still exist and will roll over on 2038. More modern timekeeping systems use 64-bit integers to represent time and date. I'm not sure whether they interpret them as unsigned or signed. If they interpret them as signed, there is certainly an opportunity to represent dates before 1970 and I can think of no reason not to do so since a 63-bit second count will not have a rollover problem in the next 292 billion years. I'm personally comfortable with putting the problem off that long if it also gets me a nice representation of the day on which I was born, which is before the Unix epoch.
NTP uses the same epoch date as Unix but uses the top 32 bits as seconds and the lower 32 bits as fractional seconds. It thus cannot uniquely represent dates before 1970 or after 2038.
Windows uses some different time representation systems but they suffer from similar deficiencies.
And with all that, supposing you do use a system that can represent negative numbers, you don't have to go that far back before you run into other problems. The first is what to do about leap-seconds. I'd say that once you go back before the adoption of atomic time standards, you should count days as being 86400 seconds long by definition of the ante-atomic second. That gets you back to the next problem date, which is adoption time zones synchronized to Greenwich Time or local adoption of the Gregorian Calendar. Depending on where you are, either may have happened before the other. Greenwich synchronization adds an error of up to several hours depending on location. Gregorian calendar adoption caused a slip of several days to the calendar; the later the adoption, the more days of slip. And that gets you back, at best, to 1582 A.D. Computer representation of the date is thus a very messy business back to 1582, subject to the vagaries and religion of the country under consideration. (Protestant and Orthodox countries tended to hold out against the tide of popery and non-Christian countries weren't interested in any kind of Roman dates.)
And that gets us on the Julian Calendar, which is usable back to it its introduction in 45 BC. But it was only used in the Roman Empire and its historical descendants including Christendom. That's as far as the West goes. You can then switch locally to the Jewish calendar, which represents dates back to 3670 or so BCE. But it has lot of slop in it. It's a lunisolar calendar so precise date synchronization with any modern system depends on precise knowledge of historic (and prehistoric) lunar phase with respect to the Earth's prehistoric rate of rotation. Also, the cycles were determined by observation in ancient times and we don't know whether they were always observed on the right day with respect to the lunar phase because some months would have started on a cloudy day, preventing official observation. And though that calendar can represent dates back 5773 years from today, it may not have been in use that long.
In the East, e.g. China, they had their own calendar system and the first opportunity to align it to a Western system was fairly recent. The Chinese system is lunisolar, similar to the Hebrew system, so it has the same kind of imprecision. What's worse, people recorded regnal years of the Emperors (or worse, some local potentate) and you have to know when each monarch took the throne to figure when things happened. And that only gets you back to 862 or so. Before that, people generally didn't write down what year things happened at all.
USA needs to remove "land of the free" from their national anthem as they are plunging down the international listings of freedom.
Why? Citizens in the US have more freedom than anywhere else on the planet.
Don't forget, people are not citizens any more, corporations are citizens but people aren't. People are items with a value, there to be used.
This was presaged by corporate adoption of the term human resources to refer to what had previously been termed personnel. You are a resource, to be exploited like any other kind of resource.
Unlocking doesn't just apply to smart phones. It applies to most cell phones. They are "locked" (digitally preconfigured in a not-easy-to-modify-way) to use only one service. It locks you in to using only that service with that phone. If you are dissatisfied with your service, you can't take that phone to another service provider without first unlocking it.
It's an anti-competitive practice that should be banned. You should be able to take any phone to any service provider that uses a compatible system and have them configure it to use their service.
Of course, if you use a cheap phone, this kind of lock-in doesn't really provide much of a barrier to switching carriers, and may carriers give you a cheap phone when you sign up to use their service.
I guess the first three apply if there's at least a thousand miles of ocean between you and them and it's not the 21st century. East Germany was crushed and occupied as long as the Soviets wanted to hold it.
Also, the first three revolutions were fought by people who stood up in large numbers in public and demanded recognition of their rights. SOPA wasn't stopped by internet vandals. It was stopped because millions of people stood up and publicly said "We don't want this!".
A few guys hiding out under a cloak of anonymity are not going to overturn any power structure by breaking a few laws or making some information public. They just make themselves targets of investigation and give the big guys somebody to point at and say, "See there what irresponsible vandals these guys are? THAT'S why we need to punish them." They also by donning the "Anonymous" mantle, they associate themselves with the thieves and other vandals who also use that name to diffuse responsibility for their mostly ignoble actions.
yeah, did that. It's still not clear what the blackmailers want, exactly and therefore not clear whether it is "right." Is is "right" to comply with blackmailers in principle? I would say not, and I would say that such stunts have zero likelihood of getting sentencing guidelines made less strict for computer crime. If anything, it will make the people on the commission even more determined to deal with "these people" in a draconian manner.
Seriously, isn't it written somewhere, "Never try to threaten the guy who's holding the big guns?" It's tactically a bad move.
But they don't realy raise prices to cover the credit card fee. People buy way more stuff if they have a credit card. This is just a new way for you to be screwed.
But if you are offered 1/3 of what a factory worker gets, what are you going to do? And how do you justify spending years earning a degree that qualifies you to work at the bottom of the pay scale?
Slashdot Mirror
I know this is a joke, but it's more than relevant.
I am guessing the people getting off in this case are getting off more for lack of evidence rather than exoneration. Plus logic dictates that with this number of people it's not the first time it ever happened.
What upsets me most personally about the United States is that we've developed a culture where doing the right thing is NEVER rewarded and doing the WRONG thing usually is. We've got a political culture right now where a politician MUST be a huxster or they can't compete. The US Government does suck at every level, but it's an outgrowth of the sickness of the culture itself. Nice guys don't finish last; nice guys don't finish AT ALL.
The heartening result is that Harvard takes cheating seriously. They suspended about 60 students over it and a bunch of others are on probation -- probably because they couldn't prove those students cheated.
The EU is apparently having too much time making up problems. Just about EVERY appliance in a kitchen is more dangerous than a MacPro. Have you every used a kitchen mixer? Rotating blades hooked up to a high power motor, no protection, no case... We have a number of MacPros. You really have to open up the case and want to stick your finger in there. Even if you would, these motors are low power. The potential injury would be minimal compared to a mixer. This makes no sense. Is the European Union turning into Fire Marshall Bill?
That happened a long time ago.
What are you on about? The government talks about this all the time.
Try Google maps and zoom in on either the US-Mexico border or the US-Canada border just about anywhere and you will see how easy it would be to walk across the border and meet a car or truck.
Seriously, where is there any evidence that the US government routinely or even occasionally rummages through the files of Americans without probable cause and a warrant? I see a lot of people posting assertions that the government does this all the time to everybody but have yet to see any evidence of widespread prying into the files of Americans.
For the most part, citizenship is not an issue. The FBI needs the same sorts of warrants to investigate a person in the USA whether or not that person is a citizen.
Also, I find the notion that the FBI, NSA or CIA would take a deep and personal interest in the data of each and every person in the world wildly fanciful. As if they have millions analysts sifting through the mountains of data that the world produces every day...
Of course they don't do that. They don't have the capacity to look at more than a tiny fraction of the world's data and they never will.
But they want you to think that they have and maintain and are building capacity that will allow them to see and analyze every computer transaction in the world, break into any system any time they want and rummage through your data to their heart's content. (Like the government computer geeks do on TV shows.) Because if you think that, you will be discouraged from trying to commit a crime or try to conceal information from the United States. So the dupes on here who obsess about US government spying are really only furthering the government's agenda.
But they also want you to think you have nothing to fear if you're not doing anything wrong. That's not quite true either. You can damn well get crossways with them without even trying and end up in a big mess.
Now many will say "doom and gloom nonsense", and those people are simply ignorant. They have no idea how much snooping the NSA currently does on them, nor how much that will expand this summer when the new super computer complex opens (which has been designed for exactly the purpose of snooping and reporting on citizens). They have no idea how much of that data is requested and granted currently (in secrecy) to other government agencies, like the CIA, FBI, TSA, DHS, DOJ, ATF, etc.. Nobody in the public does, because our government refuses to provide any information at all.
Therefore, by your own statements, you don't know either. But that doesn't stop you from presenting your opinion about it as if it were fact.
Got news for him, even if you ARE a US citizen they look at whatever you have stored.
Where is evidence?
You are correct, and that means Unix dates can represent dates back to 1902.
Yeah, that's reassuring. Makes me want to use them for contract assembly all the more!
In China, isn't education free (government provided) and compulsory? Or did that end with Communism?
Right now the Americans see themselves on a moral high ground for opposing child labor. Currently, that is one of few labor laws that means anything. However there are plenty of politicians - slashdot idol ron paul amongst them - who would like to overturn those laws as well. In the name of "liberty" they want to remove "market restrictions" to "grow industry". This will, of course, only reduce the wages across the board for working class people while making companies more profitable and increasing executive compensation. They also want to increase the rights of the wealthy and reduce those of the poor. While some conservatives claim they want to stop the "class warfare", this pushes it to a terrible conclusion. In other words, under the guise of liberty - but with the true goal of profit - some people aspire to bring fascism for the people.
I wouldn't call that facism, exactly. Just an undoing of labor laws taking us back to the working conditions of the late 19th century
But I wonder who these people think their customers would be in their brave new world of economic freedom.
I don't have real faith in any company that chooses to insert religious references in the name of their business. To me it just seems like a cheap attempt to get you to think they must be virtuous because they call themselves godly. And we know how reliable that has been, historically.
Now I suppose I'd make an exception if they were "Real Faith Bible Printing" or "Real Faith Clerical Vestments." Then it's just plain old marketing because you expect the name of the business to have something to do with the product. But when the product is circuit boards or auto repair... not so much.
No. No digital representation of a date can represent values before 1900, nor is it even mathematically possible.
Really? Are you sure about that? Not mathmatically possible? I guess negative numbers don't exist in your realm.
<david_attenborough_voice>A spectacular example of a Whoosh in the wild! Let's be careful not to disturb it</david_attenborough_voice>
The original comment was tongue-in-cheek. But most computer date representation systems are prospective from modern zero date.
For example, Unix time was originally coded as elapsed whole seconds since midnight January 01, 1970 and represented time as an UNSIGNED 32-bit integer. Such systems still exist and will roll over on 2038. More modern timekeeping systems use 64-bit integers to represent time and date. I'm not sure whether they interpret them as unsigned or signed. If they interpret them as signed, there is certainly an opportunity to represent dates before 1970 and I can think of no reason not to do so since a 63-bit second count will not have a rollover problem in the next 292 billion years. I'm personally comfortable with putting the problem off that long if it also gets me a nice representation of the day on which I was born, which is before the Unix epoch.
NTP uses the same epoch date as Unix but uses the top 32 bits as seconds and the lower 32 bits as fractional seconds. It thus cannot uniquely represent dates before 1970 or after 2038.
Windows uses some different time representation systems but they suffer from similar deficiencies.
And with all that, supposing you do use a system that can represent negative numbers, you don't have to go that far back before you run into other problems. The first is what to do about leap-seconds. I'd say that once you go back before the adoption of atomic time standards, you should count days as being 86400 seconds long by definition of the ante-atomic second. That gets you back to the next problem date, which is adoption time zones synchronized to Greenwich Time or local adoption of the Gregorian Calendar. Depending on where you are, either may have happened before the other. Greenwich synchronization adds an error of up to several hours depending on location. Gregorian calendar adoption caused a slip of several days to the calendar; the later the adoption, the more days of slip. And that gets you back, at best, to 1582 A.D. Computer representation of the date is thus a very messy business back to 1582, subject to the vagaries and religion of the country under consideration. (Protestant and Orthodox countries tended to hold out against the tide of popery and non-Christian countries weren't interested in any kind of Roman dates.)
And that gets us on the Julian Calendar, which is usable back to it its introduction in 45 BC. But it was only used in the Roman Empire and its historical descendants including Christendom. That's as far as the West goes. You can then switch locally to the Jewish calendar, which represents dates back to 3670 or so BCE. But it has lot of slop in it. It's a lunisolar calendar so precise date synchronization with any modern system depends on precise knowledge of historic (and prehistoric) lunar phase with respect to the Earth's prehistoric rate of rotation. Also, the cycles were determined by observation in ancient times and we don't know whether they were always observed on the right day with respect to the lunar phase because some months would have started on a cloudy day, preventing official observation. And though that calendar can represent dates back 5773 years from today, it may not have been in use that long.
In the East, e.g. China, they had their own calendar system and the first opportunity to align it to a Western system was fairly recent. The Chinese system is lunisolar, similar to the Hebrew system, so it has the same kind of imprecision. What's worse, people recorded regnal years of the Emperors (or worse, some local potentate) and you have to know when each monarch took the throne to figure when things happened. And that only gets you back to 862 or so. Before that, people generally didn't write down what year things happened at all.
USA needs to remove "land of the free" from their national anthem as they are plunging down the international listings of freedom.
Why? Citizens in the US have more freedom than anywhere else on the planet.
Don't forget, people are not citizens any more, corporations are citizens but people aren't. People are items with a value, there to be used.
This was presaged by corporate adoption of the term human resources to refer to what had previously been termed personnel. You are a resource, to be exploited like any other kind of resource.
Unlocking doesn't just apply to smart phones. It applies to most cell phones. They are "locked" (digitally preconfigured in a not-easy-to-modify-way) to use only one service. It locks you in to using only that service with that phone. If you are dissatisfied with your service, you can't take that phone to another service provider without first unlocking it.
It's an anti-competitive practice that should be banned. You should be able to take any phone to any service provider that uses a compatible system and have them configure it to use their service.
Of course, if you use a cheap phone, this kind of lock-in doesn't really provide much of a barrier to switching carriers, and may carriers give you a cheap phone when you sign up to use their service.
I guess the first three apply if there's at least a thousand miles of ocean between you and them and it's not the 21st century. East Germany was crushed and occupied as long as the Soviets wanted to hold it.
Also, the first three revolutions were fought by people who stood up in large numbers in public and demanded recognition of their rights. SOPA wasn't stopped by internet vandals. It was stopped because millions of people stood up and publicly said "We don't want this!".
A few guys hiding out under a cloak of anonymity are not going to overturn any power structure by breaking a few laws or making some information public. They just make themselves targets of investigation and give the big guys somebody to point at and say, "See there what irresponsible vandals these guys are? THAT'S why we need to punish them." They also by donning the "Anonymous" mantle, they associate themselves with the thieves and other vandals who also use that name to diffuse responsibility for their mostly ignoble actions.
Publicize his case, hire a really good lawyer and demand a speedy trial?
"mass deployment of sensors and real-time information can help local government"
Sounds as much like Big Brother as Smart City.
Plasmas can easily be replaced by LED LCD TVs that use a lot less energy.
Less but still a lot.
yeah, did that. It's still not clear what the blackmailers want, exactly and therefore not clear whether it is "right." Is is "right" to comply with blackmailers in principle? I would say not, and I would say that such stunts have zero likelihood of getting sentencing guidelines made less strict for computer crime. If anything, it will make the people on the commission even more determined to deal with "these people" in a draconian manner.
Seriously, isn't it written somewhere, "Never try to threaten the guy who's holding the big guns?" It's tactically a bad move.
But they don't realy raise prices to cover the credit card fee. People buy way more stuff if they have a credit card. This is just a new way for you to be screwed.
But if you are offered 1/3 of what a factory worker gets, what are you going to do? And how do you justify spending years earning a degree that qualifies you to work at the bottom of the pay scale?
How about doing it because it's the right thing to do?
Doing WHAT?
If they were law they wouldn't call them guidelines. There is no secret in what the guidelines are though.