No, there is nothing you are missing I don't get the upheaval over Gnome 3 either. Some people just can't stand anything changing and there is a certain small subset that group that likes to kill time by searching for crap to get angry over and make a lot of noise about it. The rest of the Gnome 2 traditionalists have simply realised that there is a growing collection of (how many is it now?) Gnome 2 forks out there and they are only a yum/apt-get away. Mate for example is now at version 1.6 and there is a Linux Mint LiveDVD that comes preinstalled with it.
I'm not someone who froths at the mouth and gnaws my desk every time something changes. Even the perpetual shuffle on Windows only annoys me (OK, so what is the Nitwit Neighborhood called in this release?).
But Gnome3 took away critical desktop assets that I used every day and all day. THAT is what the upheaval is about. It didn't change them, it removed them and left nothing comparable in its place. And that is what had me screaming in rage.
I switched to Cinnamon, which replaces some, though not all of what I lost, and I don't mind the fact that it looks like Gnome3 at all.
Although it may be true that most people do not work to "do good" they do tend to avoid work they consider manifest wickedness.
I'd believe that if not for all the people working for tobacco companies.
Not everyone considers smoking tobacco to be 'manifest wickedness,' you know.
Smokers, for example.
Actually, I don't know many smokers that actually DO think smoking tobacco is a Good Thing after a few years of it.
Knowing what we know about tobacco in this day and age, anyone who can work in the industry and feel like they are doing something they can be proud of is probably a certifiable psychopath.
Then this discussion might be the impetus for you to switch on and have a listen! There's still an awful lot of interesting-tending-to-weird stuff on HF these days. If you have an SSB-compatible receiver, you can listen in on amateur radio folks working the world. The US version of the bands we use are listed here in several formats - they're mostly representative of ham usage worldwide.
I've got my own impetus. It's Hurricane season! WX4NHC 14.325Mhz.
Yes, in theory, open source lets you check. However a bug in a complex accountancy system is likely to be very difficult and if you didn't find the bug then it could actually strengthen the evidence against you.
I like open source; it is not, however, a panacea to all the worlds ills. The bigger question here is how a prosecution started by faulty accounting software ended in a conviction. Unless the defence did a very poor job, the prosecution overstated their case or the jury mis-applied 'reasonable doubt' surely this shouldn't have happened.
Complexity isn't always required to screw things up. You could do that using nothing but Windows Calculator.
I agree that open source is no panacea, but nevertheless I myself use GnuCash for my accounts, and it's pretty straightforward for most things.
The main thing, however, is that I don't blindly accept the computer's figures, I cross-check them.
The software provider carries certain obligations (moral, if not legal ones), but so do the users.
Elections are a great way of changing the desktop wallpaper colour of your "democracy"
Then you're doing it wrong. First, overhaul your local government. There are fewer people outvoting you and they are one of the biggest pools of candidates for the next level up. Then repeat at the next level. And so forth.
And above all else, join a party, if your state doesn't permit open elections, but don't vote for a party or an ideology. One reason why we get such screwball candidates for the top positions is that the extremists are choosing the candidates. No one else bothers.
"Freedom isn't Free" is typically plastered with an image of a raptor and implications that guns are required. The truth is, the REAL price of Freedom these days is much harder. It involves becoming well-informed not just about the causes, but the people who pretend to espouse them, and involves going out and voting in all those piddling little elections that "don't count". It's hard work. And, unlike an armed conflict, it never ends.
Sorry, I do not see the machine gun nests set up around the American border with the intent to KEEP PEOPLE IN Until that happens, I have little cause to believe your NSA=Stasi story
And post-WWI Germany didn't have them either. At first.
And don't give me any crap about Godwin. Godwin isn't an excuse to dismiss repeating history.
Besides, the Stasi weren't the people with the machine-guns nests. Those were for people whose intent was obvious.
Quotes/sound bites are by their very nature distortions. However, they also distill the essence of a more nuanced but longer expression, or they aren't quotes, they're mis-quotes.
there is little value in opposing the threat of a closed society by imitating its arbitrary restrictions. Even today, there is little value in insuring the survival of our nation if our traditions do not survive with it
Or, if you prefer something pithier and more immediate:
We have met the enemy and he is us - Pogo
Which actually was used in reference to pollution in the particular book I have, although it applies well to many things, and I think actually was used more than once even in the original comic for different purposes.
Any democracy that possesses an army is a paradox, because an army is in many ways the antithesis of democracy. In a democracy, all are supposed to have equal power and be equally informed. In an army, power delegates from an individual, and information is often "need to know" only.
If there's a way for a true democracy to exist on this planet without an army, however, that way is beyond my ken. Or even - before the nitpickers kick in - a Democratic Republic. Still, the USA is founded on democratic principles and it bodes ill when an army-style approach is allowed to subvert it. Or even gain excessive control over it. And that, in essence, is what Kennedy was warning against.
Yes, there are a certain number of people here (and elsewhere) who are absolutely opposed to any and all secrecy. There are absolutists in all things, but in real life, absolute anything rarely works. Just because there are absolutists, however, doesn't mean that the core issue can be discounted. Even if you don't buy into fertilizing the Tree of Liberty with blood, it's definitely time to freshen the mulch.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."
We really need our Patriots, especially now. Tyrants? Not so much. That being said, we've already spilled the blood of too many Patriots--let's start with the tyrants this time around. Perhaps then, we could bring our Patriots home.
I'm inclined to feel that a true patriot isn't someone who runs around screaming "We're #1" and brandishing popguns, it's someone who actually goes out with the understanding that their blood is nourishment for their nation's liberty.
We all know the rule of law has broken down completely. I admire their approach, but we need to be realistic. Its the end of the road for our current way of life.
We're all just waiting for this to really kick in and its not going to be pretty when it does.
Now, we don't know that the rule of law has truly broken down. We're just not allowed to see what the laws are.
Today we're all into asymmetric warfare. Terrorists cannot muster large armies, so they sneak-attack civilians. Governments amass detailed and indiscriminate information on citizens, but object if anyone else is allowed any information.
Billy Joel, Dire Straits and mid eighties Peter Gabriel (as opposed to his more edgy late seventies solo work) were very much adult oriented pop of their day, which makes them oldies today, 25-30 years later. I would start to feel old if the oldies station started to play INXS and Eurythmics though.
Er.... I hate to be the bearer of bad tidings, but...
With all this surveillance, it's a wonder there are any large crime rings at all. Yet the rings still seem to thrive.
Actually, that's one of the most compelling reasons why not only is what's going on an offense to the spirit of the US Constitution, it's a major waste of taxpayer resources.
As Isaac Asimov once noted (Foundation Trilogy), the use of statistical methods to predict individual behavior is a flawed concept. And, in fact, one of the most effective ways of deterring terrorism has proven to be the involvement of ordinary civilians on the scene, as witness such events as the Shoe and Underwear bomber incidents.
Part of the reason for that success isn't just that statistics is an approximate solution to a problem demanding specific answers, it's that most of the programs in effect aren't nearly as secret as their proponents dream that they are and the Bad Guys factor them into their plans - not waiting for whistleblowers to confirm. They cannot, however, factor in all possible ways that the general public may discover and disarm them.
Also, of course, if you can successfully claim the role of professional criminal (as opposed to the supernatural title of "Enemy Combatant"), investigations have to come under the oversight of the public laws and procedures. In such cases, you can operate for years as the various agencies attempt to gain specific proofs.
I've been programming for a long time, and I still tend to scan over the code, looking at defs. Or if I'm in a proper IDE, looking at the class outline first. Then I go to the entry point, if there is one, or the init if there isn't, and read through that line by line.
Actually, the FIRST thing I try to do when I get a non-trivial program/system dumped on me is attempt to find and review the technical documentation.
THEN I start looking for/at code, based on the documentation.
In cases where the sole documentation consists of oral folklore, I spend a brief interval meditating on the best way to hunt down and kill those responsible.
Polls showed that more than 1/2 of American's weren't bothered by the spying..
51% also voted for Obama a second time..
Coincidence?
Meaningless, unless you show correlation between the two sets.
More than meaningless, when you consider that Obama simply expanded on his predecessor's groundwork. Unless you're willing to consider that exactly the same people voted for Obama as voted for Bush in this era of polarized politics.
A thorn can be either a voiced or voiceless dental fricative, even if modern Icelandic orthography only uses it for the former.
Thorn was the original initial spelling for the English word now spelled "the". The "ye Olde Time Shoppe" signs are a reflection of the period when English typesetters were using "y" to represent thorn because they were using Continental fonts from countries like Germany, where the "th" is completely foreign.
The app itself would (or, should) know the exact details of the next flight.
Though I think it would be better just to have a barcode assigned to each customer which is then attached to their luggage - then they don't have to fiddle around with the tag every time they go on a flight. Recording flight data into the tag itself seems to be a completely redundant stage.
I think that if you'd put a QR code on the passenger ticket and replicate it on each luggage tag that would be good. You could hold a lot more info than a straight bar code, and it would be something that tied passenger and luggage and their routes together more closely.
The problem with an electronic tag is that there's more danger of it being wiped accidentally. Or deliberately reprogrammed for malicious purposes. A paper code is harder to tamper with.
WWVH doesn't operate on 20 MHz. WWV and WWVH also broadcast on 2.5 MHz, though.
Although the exact set of frequencies used has changed over the years.
TFA completely ignored that CHU Canada also broadcasts time signals. It's not a US monopoly, even if the NIST clocks are probably the world's most accurate. CHU broadcasts on 7.333 MHz, and I think on 14.666.
WWVB is unique, however, in that it is tailored for reception and decoding by automated time-tracking equipment. The WWV and CHU stations provide voice data.
TFA is also spouting nonsense about WWVB being something only good for toys. I have several bits of weather station gear that use it for time tracking. Which not only allows them to display a time-of-day clock, but also makes for better logging of weather events.
The erosion of morality on Congress Hill did not start with Obama, it started way back during Jefferson's administration
Fixed that for you.
As with so many other things, it's all due to increasing leverage. Four conscienceless jerks with box-cutters could kill more people than a small army would have been able to back 200 years earlier. Four conscienceless jerks with metadata and a supercomputer could ruin more lives than a small army of misinformed spies 200 years ago.
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Ocean-front property? In Arizona?
From the front porch you can see the sea?
It was once. Why not again?
Nope I'm holding out for the land I own at 100' above sea level in Florida to become ocean front.
You own land on Space Mountain???
No, there is nothing you are missing I don't get the upheaval over Gnome 3 either. Some people just can't stand anything changing and there is a certain small subset that group that likes to kill time by searching for crap to get angry over and make a lot of noise about it. The rest of the Gnome 2 traditionalists have simply realised that there is a growing collection of (how many is it now?) Gnome 2 forks out there and they are only a yum/apt-get away. Mate for example is now at version 1.6 and there is a Linux Mint LiveDVD that comes preinstalled with it.
I'm not someone who froths at the mouth and gnaws my desk every time something changes. Even the perpetual shuffle on Windows only annoys me (OK, so what is the Nitwit Neighborhood called in this release?).
But Gnome3 took away critical desktop assets that I used every day and all day. THAT is what the upheaval is about. It didn't change them, it removed them and left nothing comparable in its place. And that is what had me screaming in rage.
I switched to Cinnamon, which replaces some, though not all of what I lost, and I don't mind the fact that it looks like Gnome3 at all.
Although it may be true that most people do not work to "do good" they do tend to avoid work they consider manifest wickedness.
I'd believe that if not for all the people working for tobacco companies.
Not everyone considers smoking tobacco to be 'manifest wickedness,' you know.
Smokers, for example.
Actually, I don't know many smokers that actually DO think smoking tobacco is a Good Thing after a few years of it.
Knowing what we know about tobacco in this day and age, anyone who can work in the industry and feel like they are doing something they can be proud of is probably a certifiable psychopath.
Then this discussion might be the impetus for you to switch on and have a listen! There's still an awful lot of interesting-tending-to-weird stuff on HF these days. If you have an SSB-compatible receiver, you can listen in on amateur radio folks working the world. The US version of the bands we use are listed here in several formats - they're mostly representative of ham usage worldwide.
I've got my own impetus. It's Hurricane season! WX4NHC 14.325Mhz.
Yes, in theory, open source lets you check. However a bug in a complex accountancy system is likely to be very difficult and if you didn't find the bug then it could actually strengthen the evidence against you.
I like open source; it is not, however, a panacea to all the worlds ills. The bigger question here is how a prosecution started by faulty accounting software ended in a conviction. Unless the defence did a very poor job, the prosecution overstated their case or the jury mis-applied 'reasonable doubt' surely this shouldn't have happened.
Complexity isn't always required to screw things up. You could do that using nothing but Windows Calculator.
I agree that open source is no panacea, but nevertheless I myself use GnuCash for my accounts, and it's pretty straightforward for most things.
The main thing, however, is that I don't blindly accept the computer's figures, I cross-check them.
The software provider carries certain obligations (moral, if not legal ones), but so do the users.
Elections are a great way of changing the desktop wallpaper colour of your "democracy"
Then you're doing it wrong. First, overhaul your local government. There are fewer people outvoting you and they are one of the biggest pools of candidates for the next level up. Then repeat at the next level. And so forth.
And above all else, join a party, if your state doesn't permit open elections, but don't vote for a party or an ideology. One reason why we get such screwball candidates for the top positions is that the extremists are choosing the candidates. No one else bothers.
"Freedom isn't Free" is typically plastered with an image of a raptor and implications that guns are required. The truth is, the REAL price of Freedom these days is much harder. It involves becoming well-informed not just about the causes, but the people who pretend to espouse them, and involves going out and voting in all those piddling little elections that "don't count". It's hard work. And, unlike an armed conflict, it never ends.
Although it may be true that most people do not work to "do good" they do tend to avoid work they consider manifest wickedness.
I'd believe that if not for all the people working for tobacco companies.
Sorry, I do not see the machine gun nests set up around the American border with the intent to KEEP PEOPLE IN
Until that happens, I have little cause to believe your NSA=Stasi story
And post-WWI Germany didn't have them either. At first.
And don't give me any crap about Godwin. Godwin isn't an excuse to dismiss repeating history.
Besides, the Stasi weren't the people with the machine-guns nests. Those were for people whose intent was obvious.
Quotes/sound bites are by their very nature distortions. However, they also distill the essence of a more nuanced but longer expression, or they aren't quotes, they're mis-quotes.
there is little value in opposing the threat of a closed society by imitating its arbitrary restrictions. Even today, there is little value in insuring the survival of our nation if our traditions do not survive with it
Or, if you prefer something pithier and more immediate:
We have met the enemy and he is us - Pogo
Which actually was used in reference to pollution in the particular book I have, although it applies well to many things, and I think actually was used more than once even in the original comic for different purposes.
Any democracy that possesses an army is a paradox, because an army is in many ways the antithesis of democracy. In a democracy, all are supposed to have equal power and be equally informed. In an army, power delegates from an individual, and information is often "need to know" only.
If there's a way for a true democracy to exist on this planet without an army, however, that way is beyond my ken. Or even - before the nitpickers kick in - a Democratic Republic. Still, the USA is founded on democratic principles and it bodes ill when an army-style approach is allowed to subvert it. Or even gain excessive control over it. And that, in essence, is what Kennedy was warning against.
Yes, there are a certain number of people here (and elsewhere) who are absolutely opposed to any and all secrecy. There are absolutists in all things, but in real life, absolute anything rarely works. Just because there are absolutists, however, doesn't mean that the core issue can be discounted. Even if you don't buy into fertilizing the Tree of Liberty with blood, it's definitely time to freshen the mulch.
Any replacement system will just evolve into a similar system as the one we have now.
Or we might, you know, develop an advanced and completely disinterested AI system and let it manage us the way that we deserve.
I hear SkyNet is totally uninterested in petty human squabblings.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."
We really need our Patriots, especially now. Tyrants? Not so much. That being said, we've already spilled the blood of too many Patriots--let's start with the tyrants this time around. Perhaps then, we could bring our Patriots home.
I'm inclined to feel that a true patriot isn't someone who runs around screaming "We're #1" and brandishing popguns, it's someone who actually goes out with the understanding that their blood is nourishment for their nation's liberty.
Magna Carta was for the benefit of the barons, not the general population. Perhaps you're thinking of a document from 1688.
English law started at the top and worked its way down.
Unfortunately, it looks like American law started with rights for all and is now working its way back up.
We all know the rule of law has broken down completely. I admire their approach, but we need to be realistic. Its the end of the road for our current way of life.
We're all just waiting for this to really kick in and its not going to be pretty when it does.
Now, we don't know that the rule of law has truly broken down. We're just not allowed to see what the laws are.
Today we're all into asymmetric warfare. Terrorists cannot muster large armies, so they sneak-attack civilians. Governments amass detailed and indiscriminate information on citizens, but object if anyone else is allowed any information.
I'm fairly certain that CHU has moved from 7333 kHz to 7850 kHz. It also transmits on 3330 kHz and 14670 kHz.
WWV and WWVH also have digital-compatible subcarrier signal formats, BTW.
As you might have guessed, I don't switch on the shortwave that often these days.
I think Japan also broadcasts time signals. Not sure what other countries do, though.
Billy Joel, Dire Straits and mid eighties Peter Gabriel (as opposed to his more edgy late seventies solo work) were very much adult oriented pop of their day, which makes them oldies today, 25-30 years later. I would start to feel old if the oldies station started to play INXS and Eurythmics though.
Er.... I hate to be the bearer of bad tidings, but...
With all this surveillance, it's a wonder there are any large crime rings at all. Yet the rings still seem to thrive.
Actually, that's one of the most compelling reasons why not only is what's going on an offense to the spirit of the US Constitution, it's a major waste of taxpayer resources.
As Isaac Asimov once noted (Foundation Trilogy), the use of statistical methods to predict individual behavior is a flawed concept. And, in fact, one of the most effective ways of deterring terrorism has proven to be the involvement of ordinary civilians on the scene, as witness such events as the Shoe and Underwear bomber incidents.
Part of the reason for that success isn't just that statistics is an approximate solution to a problem demanding specific answers, it's that most of the programs in effect aren't nearly as secret as their proponents dream that they are and the Bad Guys factor them into their plans - not waiting for whistleblowers to confirm. They cannot, however, factor in all possible ways that the general public may discover and disarm them.
Also, of course, if you can successfully claim the role of professional criminal (as opposed to the supernatural title of "Enemy Combatant"), investigations have to come under the oversight of the public laws and procedures. In such cases, you can operate for years as the various agencies attempt to gain specific proofs.
I've been programming for a long time, and I still tend to scan over the code, looking at defs. Or if I'm in a proper IDE, looking at the class outline first. Then I go to the entry point, if there is one, or the init if there isn't, and read through that line by line.
Actually, the FIRST thing I try to do when I get a non-trivial program/system dumped on me is attempt to find and review the technical documentation.
THEN I start looking for/at code, based on the documentation.
In cases where the sole documentation consists of oral folklore, I spend a brief interval meditating on the best way to hunt down and kill those responsible.
Polls showed that more than 1/2 of American's weren't bothered by the spying..
51% also voted for Obama a second time..
Coincidence?
Meaningless, unless you show correlation between the two sets.
More than meaningless, when you consider that Obama simply expanded on his predecessor's groundwork. Unless you're willing to consider that exactly the same people voted for Obama as voted for Bush in this era of polarized politics.
I've never been that keen on Dvorak, either. A truly fast English keyboard's home row ought to look something like:
"andoftheinm"
A thorn can be either a voiced or voiceless dental fricative, even if modern Icelandic orthography only uses it for the former.
Thorn was the original initial spelling for the English word now spelled "the". The "ye Olde Time Shoppe" signs are a reflection of the period when English typesetters were using "y" to represent thorn because they were using Continental fonts from countries like Germany, where the "th" is completely foreign.
Bring back e thorn!
The app itself would (or, should) know the exact details of the next flight.
Though I think it would be better just to have a barcode assigned to each customer which is then attached to their luggage - then they don't have to fiddle around with the tag every time they go on a flight. Recording flight data into the tag itself seems to be a completely redundant stage.
I think that if you'd put a QR code on the passenger ticket and replicate it on each luggage tag that would be good. You could hold a lot more info than a straight bar code, and it would be something that tied passenger and luggage and their routes together more closely.
The problem with an electronic tag is that there's more danger of it being wiped accidentally. Or deliberately reprogrammed for malicious purposes. A paper code is harder to tamper with.
WWVH doesn't operate on 20 MHz. WWV and WWVH also broadcast on 2.5 MHz, though.
Although the exact set of frequencies used has changed over the years.
TFA completely ignored that CHU Canada also broadcasts time signals. It's not a US monopoly, even if the NIST clocks are probably the world's most accurate. CHU broadcasts on 7.333 MHz, and I think on 14.666.
WWVB is unique, however, in that it is tailored for reception and decoding by automated time-tracking equipment. The WWV and CHU stations provide voice data.
TFA is also spouting nonsense about WWVB being something only good for toys. I have several bits of weather station gear that use it for time tracking. Which not only allows them to display a time-of-day clock, but also makes for better logging of weather events.
The erosion of morality on Congress Hill did not start with Obama, it started way back during Jefferson's administration
Fixed that for you.
As with so many other things, it's all due to increasing leverage. Four conscienceless jerks with box-cutters could kill more people than a small army would have been able to back 200 years earlier. Four conscienceless jerks with metadata and a supercomputer could ruin more lives than a small army of misinformed spies 200 years ago.
All it shows is someone else knows how to program better. Not how to use it better as you seem to think.
All it really shows is that someone devoted a lot of time towards developing a UI, as opposed to what I devote my time to.
Since "program better" to me includes producing a usable product, I'd definitely argue that they know how to "program better".