Yeah, I don't see that inspiring terror in any reasonable cat.
Y'know, the same critters that consider the vacuum cleaner their nemesis; that try to eviscerate the computer when a CD pops out unexpectedly (to them); that will barely allow a live human to pet them and only when in the right mood?
Not acceptable for any business environment, how'd you feel if I was processing your SSN off that xp sp1 box?
Since you'll just paste them, along with a variety of other personally identifying information, into an unencrypted spreadsheet which you then email to your various regional offices, I don't really care what OS you run on your desktop PC. Attackers will take advantage of the easiest way to get what they want - And I don't care if you still run Windows ME for all it matters, because "YOU are the weakest link" (or rather, humans in general, not you in particular).
To answer the original question, though, I still run XP (SP3, at least) on some of my machines for the same reason I run any OS - It works well and runs everything I want it to. Tell me what Win7 does for me* that XP can't, and we can have a more meaningful discussion; but as phrased, the FP amounts to a trolling question. He may as well have asked what keeps us all from using Beos.
And that 11% drop? We call that "Christmas" here in the US, and you just can't buy a new machine with XP anymore.
* And for the record, I DO have two machines running Win7, for precisely the one thing it does that XP doesn't (at least, not well) - 64 bit support. Not all that impressed, otherwise, and outright annoyed by most of the "improvements" to Windows Explorer.
What new and exciting product have they come out with in the last couple of decades?
You might have heard of a collection of toy apps called "WebSphere"? Really nothing, but the transaction processing industry with their crazy ol' uptime and throughput demands seems fond of it.;)
IBM has indeed moved out of the PC market for the most part, but they remain as strong as ever in the ways of Big Iron.
they should be deprived of any benefit of having the software may have brought them.
By that reasoning, legit buyers should then receive compensation for how much harm the software causes them.
Have you ever actually had the great misfortune to use 20/20? I have known kitchen designers who could literally work faster at a drafting table, but the "corporate standard" required them to use 20/20 (in the interest of making them all low-skilled interchangeable cogs, naturally). But of course, if you have any problems with their amazingly flaky access control dongles, their tech support will gladly treat you like a criminal - In French - Until you provide 27 forms of ID and a DNA sample.
So put that in your measuring stick and smoke it.;)
Simple - We make the standard expected behavior for any legitimate QR code reading app, that it show the contents of the barcode (and preferably certify it as kosher via Google or some AV vendor) BEFORE automatically sending you off to goatse.
Your app doesn't do that? MALWARE. The address doesn't verify as safe? Enter at your own risk.
The court is corrupt on the face of this decision. Impeach the judges responsible.
And this from the ninth circuit, the one that usually actually stands up for the people over government or big business, the one that the even more corrupt USSC most often overturns.
What can I say? Hey Feds, just fuck all y'all. I won't even give you the time to stop and piss on your graves after the revolution you seem so intent on forcing us into.
Copyright covers the actual content of the test, not the concept of a short battery of simple test of various cognitive skills.
So... Rewrite the damned test. Use different math problems, different spatial problems, different linguistic problems, which gets around the copyright issue entirely but still fundamentally measures the same underlying capacity.
17+34 doesn't magically measure basic math ability "better" than 15+29 just because Folstein, Folstein, and McHugh blessed it.
That was FUD. Oracle is moving Java from the Java6 sdk to the openjdk, and this Ubuntu upgrade move you from sun java to open jdk.
Yes and no... Given the more-or-less equivalence of the two JDKs, it means a minor nuisance for most people as they search the forums to figure out why Random App X inexplicably broke, and how to point their favorite toys at Open instead of Sun. Should they ever have needed to do so?
Upgrade Manager even tells you what it is doing.
To most people, an official "update" amounts to a calm reassurance that some geek-deities somewhere far away, perhaps Silicon Valley, perhaps Finland, perhaps Mars for all they know, have cast a spell that will make everything work out alright. Even among lower-tier tech-savvy people, very few would know whether or not they wanted to let the updater make the indicated change. Hell, even as a seasoned developer, I wouldn't necessarily know (prior to the change) what, if anything, would break as a result.
I don't disagree with you in spirit, but the issue still boils down to having changes made semi-unwittingly to your system, for political rather than technical reasons. Not because it will give you the best long-term outcome, but because an agreement has expired between parties you don't even recognize as even remotely relevant to the state of "your" PC.
And that I take as the heart of the FP's argument - We can't trust proprietary software because we can't know when a distribution agreement may retroactively expire, or a court may waves their wand-o'-justice to make P2P magically illegal overnight, or some government wants to censor any mention of Pastafarianism. None of those, except by my decision to play ball, should have any effect whatsoever on my PC that worked just fine the day before.
Unfortunately, not even that - The recent debacle with Canonical/Ubuntu needing to pull the Oracle/Sun JVM pretty much demonstrates that we can't even trust FOSS, without completely disabling any form of updates whatsoever.
That said, at least with open source, you have a chance of identifying and disabling the myriad ways a system tries to update itself. Good luck getting anything proprietary to stop phoning home, short of never connecting it to the internet (in which case it may just petulantly refuse to work, a la the annoying DRM in many games).
It's _FULLY_ possible for them you shut _ALL_ of you up, kill _ALL_ of you, if they wanted.
You realize, of course, that anyone even halfway sane would conduct such attacks from a public WiFi hotspot, right? Track all you want, but somehow I doubt Starbucks has secretly masterminded a global online movement against government and corporate secrecy.
Want to prove me wrong? Want to prove how "powerful" you really are? Come after me then.
Why would anyone bother? You count as just another nobody. Anonymous doesn't go after nobodies, it goes after the worst "legal" scum it can find. Governments, banks, now PACs - You wonder why people cheer Anon on? Because they do the "right" thing while the rest of us sit on our asses complaining about the gradual erosion of our privacy and rights.
Back to a geoeconomic scale, Silicon Valley will keep ripping along for a while, but I have no doubt I'll see it implode. And by implode, I mean like Detroit did.
Absolutely! I in no way meant to imply that the country's current tech centers will remain strong forever. Everything changes, and some day another set of technologies will make Silicon Valley look as quaint as US Steel.
Can you really tell me that someone's not going to inexpensively undercut the crap tech empires
Of course they will... But doing so just creates a new crap tech empire; and eventually, it starts to balance out - We've even already started to see that - Companies have begun "onshoring" not out of an interest in the local economy, but simply because we've accidentally raised the standard of living in places like Bangalore too high. Indian IT shops now expect pay in the same ballpark as what a company would have to pay in some of the more rural areas of the US, yet they still have all the downsides of outsourcing
tech workers' employable life is from 18 to 48... 3/7ths of a good lifespan. Don't believe me? Look at your office demographics: the national population has a rather substantial peak from 55 to 70. See 'em well represented at your firm? And I don't just mean in 1-of-6 quantities at management level. Where are they?
You've made a mistake in assuming I work in Silicon Valley. The world of IT extends beyond its strongholds, and while those strongholds do indeed value youth a bit too highly, the rest of the world values skills and efficiency.
Or put another way, every single company in the modern world requires people dedicated to the tasks of maintaining their IT infrastructure, of getting their data to/from the outside world, of getting their various systems to talk to each other, of extracting useful strategic information from that vast flood of data they may not even realize they have. Even if they don't do it in-house, someone still needs to do it. And thanks to the steady march of "progress", they not only need clever young bunnies familiar with all the newest buzzwords, but they also need seasoned veterans in their prime, and even, occasionally, people who know long-out-of-vogue languages and systems.
As for your 1-in-6 question, "Where are they?" I have two good answers to that.
First of all, I don't intend to need to work until I drop. I don't ever plan to formally retire because I love what I do and get bored easily, but even in this crappy economy, I look solidly on course to have the ability to retire comfortably in my early 50s. So even though 18-48 may only mean 3/7ths of a lifetime, for skilled professional workers, those same years add up to more like 75% of a working life.
And second, I can honestly answer "In the next cubicle". I work with people about half over-40, and a good quarter over 55. As I said, outside the tech utopias (and marketing), the business world values experience over youth. My boss (older than myself, as an aside) cares that I get the job done efficiently, not that I look good doing it.
as in take a display and stick it onto a motherboard... are they doing well too? because, after all, by your logic, people who 'make things' do well?
Yes, actually, though not by American standards.
Despite what we consider appalling working conditions, despite what we consider pitiful wages, despite what we consider meaningless piecework - People beg for jobs at those factories because it still counts as the best deal around!
Now, you might well argue that they would do better sticking to subsistence farming... And I wouldn't even disagree. But if you want more than mere subsistence, you need to play at least one of the money-making games.
Yes, I'm sure everyone who worked at Solyndra agrees with you
Solyndra chose to build Lamborghinis when the market wanted Kias - They used an expensive and low-yield manufacturing process to produce a marginally superior product, but then had to compete with Chinese product at under half the cost per Watt.
They went under for good reasons. The only mystery in that situation comes from asking why the hell the US government decided to front an obviously flawed business model half a billion dollars.
These people don't understand that their cushy lives and jobs depend on a strong US economy.
Which explains why they've managed to do well for the past three years how, exactly? The economy has generally sucked since 2001, and really sucked since 2009. If Silicon Valley depends on a strong US economy, they should have tanked along with the rest of the currently very weak US economy.
Not really, no. This ain't Wikipedia, and they don't allow "original research" anyway.
Ya wanna clue?
You have eyes and access to a kid or three? Hell, you don't even need kids - You can produce the same effect in your own body. Suck down a pound of sugar and then see how well you do at a quiet, still activity like reading a good book.
Kids party hard and then invariably collapse into Need-A-Nap syndrome. Sugar's got nil to do with it.
And yet, if you don't feed them a boatload of sugar, their mood remains relatively stable and they don't crash hard. Huh. Weird.
Look, sorry I don't want to play along with your little hating-sugar-got-too-popular-so-I'll-do-the-opposite campaign, but as I already said, you can't just explain away reality.
Silicon Valley has done well through the recession for three obvious reasons:
1) They actually produce something that the rest of the world wants. We seem to have forgotten, as a culture, that someone has to actually make things; a service economy only works if you have someone to serve... Which leads into:
2) The bankers, the realtors, the assorted "middle men" of Silicon Valley provide actual services to those bringing in the money. They haven't (yet) replaced the doers as Silicon Valley's raison d'etre. The world needs bankers - The bankers just need to remember that real people need them to provide real money so they can buy real things, rather than bundling together unicorn farts and leprechaun gold and hoping to get-rich-quick selling it as an "investment" to morons who only see dollar signs.
3) No slackers allowed - The usual parasites in any community get about as much sympathy from geeks as they would from Hitler. 'Nuff said.
Sorry, but all the studies and assertions in the world don't explain away a real, easily-reproduced phenomenon. Give kids a pile of sugary snacks, and half an hour later they turn into hyperactive demons; then a few hours later, they crash and turn into miserable, whiny little brats.
When you set out to disprove something trivially-true, you may learn a variety of interesting subtleties, but you can't actually talk something into nonexistence.
Acknowledging that you can't understand someone through a thick accent doesn't make you a racist. I'd say the same thing about the staff at call centers in the Southeastern US - Can't understand a damned word they say. Nothing "racist" about it, purely a practical matter.
That said, this FP does have an interesting hint of racism inherent in it - We have a bunch of Americans cheering the end of a "barbaric" practice, just after having filled their bellies with the charred but otherwise neatly-dissected corpses of a variety of animals. Sublime.
Seriously? We don't want uncontrolled portable devices on our networks because we don't control them. We can't force-install AV software (if it even exists for your favorite no-name phone/player/tablet/whatever), we can't even do basic cleanup of them without your cooperation.
And that only describes them as a potential vector for attack. We also can't control who else has access to them, can't wipe remotely without your permission, can't keep you from leaving it, complete with the latest super-secret corporate strategy on it, in the bar at a random trade show.
Dislike of portables has nothing to do with controlling you, and everything to do with controlling and protecting what the company pays us to - Their IT infrastructure and digital IP.
I thought the whole point of weapons was 100% lethality.
The ethics of killing aside, the "best" weapon for strategic (as opposed to personal self-defense) purposes doesn't kill, but rather, maximizes the resource drain required to deal with the damage. Ideally, a "perfect" weapon would leave your enemy's troops all alive, all severely crippled, and all not quite damaged enough to consider letting them die a mercy, yet requiring some fabulously expensive perpetual treatment.
Some of the greatest victories in human history came down to such trivial nuisances as dysentery or the flu.
We use it like that here in the US, but thanks to our Puritanical roots, we frequently see it used only "unofficially" in that capacity.
We have tons of rules regarding where methadone clinics can go, how many people they can serve, under what conditions people can use it, how long, etc. So you end up seeing a lot of methadone prescribed for "chronic pain", despite the fact that it really kinda sucks for the whole "pain management" thing that opiates normally excel at.
Really, it does one and only thing well - It keeps people from going into withdrawal.
So basically, when you see a cluster of poor minorities with loq education OD'ing on this stuff, it doesn't mean their doctors have failed, it means a not-quite-ex-addict tried to get high on it and learned the hard way that it doesn't work very well for that, either.
he had a lot of mental tricks to do it too. he convinced HIMSELF that he wasn't lying, and then he was able to tell the interviewer he wasn't lying without breaking a sweat.
Oh, good - So true sociopaths should have no trouble at all getting cherry positions at the CIA.
I feel better that a known-flawed screening method only lets through the worst of the bad, rather than merely missing the borderline candidates.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I don't see that inspiring terror in any reasonable cat.
Y'know, the same critters that consider the vacuum cleaner their nemesis; that try to eviscerate the computer when a CD pops out unexpectedly (to them); that will barely allow a live human to pet them and only when in the right mood?
Not acceptable for any business environment, how'd you feel if I was processing your SSN off that xp sp1 box?
Since you'll just paste them, along with a variety of other personally identifying information, into an unencrypted spreadsheet which you then email to your various regional offices, I don't really care what OS you run on your desktop PC. Attackers will take advantage of the easiest way to get what they want - And I don't care if you still run Windows ME for all it matters, because "YOU are the weakest link" (or rather, humans in general, not you in particular).
To answer the original question, though, I still run XP (SP3, at least) on some of my machines for the same reason I run any OS - It works well and runs everything I want it to. Tell me what Win7 does for me* that XP can't, and we can have a more meaningful discussion; but as phrased, the FP amounts to a trolling question. He may as well have asked what keeps us all from using Beos.
And that 11% drop? We call that "Christmas" here in the US, and you just can't buy a new machine with XP anymore.
* And for the record, I DO have two machines running Win7, for precisely the one thing it does that XP doesn't (at least, not well) - 64 bit support. Not all that impressed, otherwise, and outright annoyed by most of the "improvements" to Windows Explorer.
What new and exciting product have they come out with in the last couple of decades?
;)
You might have heard of a collection of toy apps called "WebSphere"? Really nothing, but the transaction processing industry with their crazy ol' uptime and throughput demands seems fond of it.
IBM has indeed moved out of the PC market for the most part, but they remain as strong as ever in the ways of Big Iron.
they should be deprived of any benefit of having the software may have brought them.
;)
By that reasoning, legit buyers should then receive compensation for how much harm the software causes them.
Have you ever actually had the great misfortune to use 20/20? I have known kitchen designers who could literally work faster at a drafting table, but the "corporate standard" required them to use 20/20 (in the interest of making them all low-skilled interchangeable cogs, naturally). But of course, if you have any problems with their amazingly flaky access control dongles, their tech support will gladly treat you like a criminal - In French - Until you provide 27 forms of ID and a DNA sample.
So put that in your measuring stick and smoke it.
Simple - We make the standard expected behavior for any legitimate QR code reading app, that it show the contents of the barcode (and preferably certify it as kosher via Google or some AV vendor) BEFORE automatically sending you off to goatse.
Your app doesn't do that? MALWARE. The address doesn't verify as safe? Enter at your own risk.
The court is corrupt on the face of this decision. Impeach the judges responsible.
And this from the ninth circuit, the one that usually actually stands up for the people over government or big business, the one that the even more corrupt USSC most often overturns.
What can I say? Hey Feds, just fuck all y'all. I won't even give you the time to stop and piss on your graves after the revolution you seem so intent on forcing us into.
Unfortunately, there's no easy way to leave them a comment about one's opinion of their behavior on their website. I looked.
You could try cs@parinc.com, their customer service email address.
You could also try rsmith@parinc.com, their CEO.
That said, pond scum doesn't usually care what you think about it.
Copyright covers the actual content of the test, not the concept of a short battery of simple test of various cognitive skills.
So... Rewrite the damned test. Use different math problems, different spatial problems, different linguistic problems, which gets around the copyright issue entirely but still fundamentally measures the same underlying capacity.
17+34 doesn't magically measure basic math ability "better" than 15+29 just because Folstein, Folstein, and McHugh blessed it.
That was FUD. Oracle is moving Java from the Java6 sdk to the openjdk, and this Ubuntu upgrade move you from sun java to open jdk.
Yes and no... Given the more-or-less equivalence of the two JDKs, it means a minor nuisance for most people as they search the forums to figure out why Random App X inexplicably broke, and how to point their favorite toys at Open instead of Sun. Should they ever have needed to do so?
Upgrade Manager even tells you what it is doing.
To most people, an official "update" amounts to a calm reassurance that some geek-deities somewhere far away, perhaps Silicon Valley, perhaps Finland, perhaps Mars for all they know, have cast a spell that will make everything work out alright. Even among lower-tier tech-savvy people, very few would know whether or not they wanted to let the updater make the indicated change. Hell, even as a seasoned developer, I wouldn't necessarily know (prior to the change) what, if anything, would break as a result.
I don't disagree with you in spirit, but the issue still boils down to having changes made semi-unwittingly to your system, for political rather than technical reasons. Not because it will give you the best long-term outcome, but because an agreement has expired between parties you don't even recognize as even remotely relevant to the state of "your" PC.
And that I take as the heart of the FP's argument - We can't trust proprietary software because we can't know when a distribution agreement may retroactively expire, or a court may waves their wand-o'-justice to make P2P magically illegal overnight, or some government wants to censor any mention of Pastafarianism. None of those, except by my decision to play ball, should have any effect whatsoever on my PC that worked just fine the day before.
Unfortunately, not even that - The recent debacle with Canonical/Ubuntu needing to pull the Oracle/Sun JVM pretty much demonstrates that we can't even trust FOSS, without completely disabling any form of updates whatsoever.
That said, at least with open source, you have a chance of identifying and disabling the myriad ways a system tries to update itself. Good luck getting anything proprietary to stop phoning home, short of never connecting it to the internet (in which case it may just petulantly refuse to work, a la the annoying DRM in many games).
*facepalm*
Judging by by your post you have no idea whatsoever who or what Stratfor is.
If you want to rob a bank, usually the easiest approach doesn't involve a cutting torch and many hours of hard work.
It's _FULLY_ possible for them you shut _ALL_ of you up, kill _ALL_ of you, if they wanted.
You realize, of course, that anyone even halfway sane would conduct such attacks from a public WiFi hotspot, right? Track all you want, but somehow I doubt Starbucks has secretly masterminded a global online movement against government and corporate secrecy.
Want to prove me wrong? Want to prove how "powerful" you really are? Come after me then.
Why would anyone bother? You count as just another nobody. Anonymous doesn't go after nobodies, it goes after the worst "legal" scum it can find. Governments, banks, now PACs - You wonder why people cheer Anon on? Because they do the "right" thing while the rest of us sit on our asses complaining about the gradual erosion of our privacy and rights.
Back to a geoeconomic scale, Silicon Valley will keep ripping along for a while, but I have no doubt I'll see it implode. And by implode, I mean like Detroit did.
Absolutely! I in no way meant to imply that the country's current tech centers will remain strong forever. Everything changes, and some day another set of technologies will make Silicon Valley look as quaint as US Steel.
Can you really tell me that someone's not going to inexpensively undercut the crap tech empires
Of course they will... But doing so just creates a new crap tech empire; and eventually, it starts to balance out - We've even already started to see that - Companies have begun "onshoring" not out of an interest in the local economy, but simply because we've accidentally raised the standard of living in places like Bangalore too high. Indian IT shops now expect pay in the same ballpark as what a company would have to pay in some of the more rural areas of the US, yet they still have all the downsides of outsourcing
tech workers' employable life is from 18 to 48... 3/7ths of a good lifespan. Don't believe me? Look at your office demographics: the national population has a rather substantial peak from 55 to 70. See 'em well represented at your firm? And I don't just mean in 1-of-6 quantities at management level. Where are they?
You've made a mistake in assuming I work in Silicon Valley. The world of IT extends beyond its strongholds, and while those strongholds do indeed value youth a bit too highly, the rest of the world values skills and efficiency.
Or put another way, every single company in the modern world requires people dedicated to the tasks of maintaining their IT infrastructure, of getting their data to/from the outside world, of getting their various systems to talk to each other, of extracting useful strategic information from that vast flood of data they may not even realize they have. Even if they don't do it in-house, someone still needs to do it. And thanks to the steady march of "progress", they not only need clever young bunnies familiar with all the newest buzzwords, but they also need seasoned veterans in their prime, and even, occasionally, people who know long-out-of-vogue languages and systems.
As for your 1-in-6 question, "Where are they?" I have two good answers to that.
First of all, I don't intend to need to work until I drop. I don't ever plan to formally retire because I love what I do and get bored easily, but even in this crappy economy, I look solidly on course to have the ability to retire comfortably in my early 50s. So even though 18-48 may only mean 3/7ths of a lifetime, for skilled professional workers, those same years add up to more like 75% of a working life.
And second, I can honestly answer "In the next cubicle". I work with people about half over-40, and a good quarter over 55. As I said, outside the tech utopias (and marketing), the business world values experience over youth. My boss (older than myself, as an aside) cares that I get the job done efficiently, not that I look good doing it.
as in take a display and stick it onto a motherboard... are they doing well too? because, after all, by your logic, people who 'make things' do well?
Yes, actually, though not by American standards.
Despite what we consider appalling working conditions, despite what we consider pitiful wages, despite what we consider meaningless piecework - People beg for jobs at those factories because it still counts as the best deal around!
Now, you might well argue that they would do better sticking to subsistence farming... And I wouldn't even disagree. But if you want more than mere subsistence, you need to play at least one of the money-making games.
Yes, I'm sure everyone who worked at Solyndra agrees with you
Solyndra chose to build Lamborghinis when the market wanted Kias - They used an expensive and low-yield manufacturing process to produce a marginally superior product, but then had to compete with Chinese product at under half the cost per Watt.
They went under for good reasons. The only mystery in that situation comes from asking why the hell the US government decided to front an obviously flawed business model half a billion dollars.
These people don't understand that their cushy lives and jobs depend on a strong US economy.
Which explains why they've managed to do well for the past three years how, exactly? The economy has generally sucked since 2001, and really sucked since 2009. If Silicon Valley depends on a strong US economy, they should have tanked along with the rest of the currently very weak US economy.
[citation needed]
Not really, no. This ain't Wikipedia, and they don't allow "original research" anyway.
Ya wanna clue?
You have eyes and access to a kid or three? Hell, you don't even need kids - You can produce the same effect in your own body. Suck down a pound of sugar and then see how well you do at a quiet, still activity like reading a good book.
Kids party hard and then invariably collapse into Need-A-Nap syndrome. Sugar's got nil to do with it.
And yet, if you don't feed them a boatload of sugar, their mood remains relatively stable and they don't crash hard. Huh. Weird.
Look, sorry I don't want to play along with your little hating-sugar-got-too-popular-so-I'll-do-the-opposite campaign, but as I already said, you can't just explain away reality.
Silicon Valley has done well through the recession for three obvious reasons:
1) They actually produce something that the rest of the world wants. We seem to have forgotten, as a culture, that someone has to actually make things; a service economy only works if you have someone to serve... Which leads into:
2) The bankers, the realtors, the assorted "middle men" of Silicon Valley provide actual services to those bringing in the money. They haven't (yet) replaced the doers as Silicon Valley's raison d'etre. The world needs bankers - The bankers just need to remember that real people need them to provide real money so they can buy real things, rather than bundling together unicorn farts and leprechaun gold and hoping to get-rich-quick selling it as an "investment" to morons who only see dollar signs.
3) No slackers allowed - The usual parasites in any community get about as much sympathy from geeks as they would from Hitler. 'Nuff said.
Sugar-hyperactivity is a MYTH.
Sorry, but all the studies and assertions in the world don't explain away a real, easily-reproduced phenomenon. Give kids a pile of sugary snacks, and half an hour later they turn into hyperactive demons; then a few hours later, they crash and turn into miserable, whiny little brats.
When you set out to disprove something trivially-true, you may learn a variety of interesting subtleties, but you can't actually talk something into nonexistence.
Serves you right then for being a racist
Acknowledging that you can't understand someone through a thick accent doesn't make you a racist. I'd say the same thing about the staff at call centers in the Southeastern US - Can't understand a damned word they say. Nothing "racist" about it, purely a practical matter.
That said, this FP does have an interesting hint of racism inherent in it - We have a bunch of Americans cheering the end of a "barbaric" practice, just after having filled their bellies with the charred but otherwise neatly-dissected corpses of a variety of animals. Sublime.
Seriously? We don't want uncontrolled portable devices on our networks because we don't control them. We can't force-install AV software (if it even exists for your favorite no-name phone/player/tablet/whatever), we can't even do basic cleanup of them without your cooperation.
And that only describes them as a potential vector for attack. We also can't control who else has access to them, can't wipe remotely without your permission, can't keep you from leaving it, complete with the latest super-secret corporate strategy on it, in the bar at a random trade show.
Dislike of portables has nothing to do with controlling you, and everything to do with controlling and protecting what the company pays us to - Their IT infrastructure and digital IP.
I thought the whole point of weapons was 100% lethality.
The ethics of killing aside, the "best" weapon for strategic (as opposed to personal self-defense) purposes doesn't kill, but rather, maximizes the resource drain required to deal with the damage. Ideally, a "perfect" weapon would leave your enemy's troops all alive, all severely crippled, and all not quite damaged enough to consider letting them die a mercy, yet requiring some fabulously expensive perpetual treatment.
Some of the greatest victories in human history came down to such trivial nuisances as dysentery or the flu.
We use it like that here in the US, but thanks to our Puritanical roots, we frequently see it used only "unofficially" in that capacity.
We have tons of rules regarding where methadone clinics can go, how many people they can serve, under what conditions people can use it, how long, etc. So you end up seeing a lot of methadone prescribed for "chronic pain", despite the fact that it really kinda sucks for the whole "pain management" thing that opiates normally excel at.
Really, it does one and only thing well - It keeps people from going into withdrawal.
So basically, when you see a cluster of poor minorities with loq education OD'ing on this stuff, it doesn't mean their doctors have failed, it means a not-quite-ex-addict tried to get high on it and learned the hard way that it doesn't work very well for that, either.
he had a lot of mental tricks to do it too. he convinced HIMSELF that he wasn't lying, and then he was able to tell the interviewer he wasn't lying without breaking a sweat.
Oh, good - So true sociopaths should have no trouble at all getting cherry positions at the CIA.
I feel better that a known-flawed screening method only lets through the worst of the bad, rather than merely missing the borderline candidates.