Yes, the NSA and the greater intelligence community clearly needs oversight, but will anyone trust someone with that much power any more than we currently trust the NSA?
You don't need meta-powers over the NSA to oversee the NSA, you only need the power needed to oversee the NSA. You don't even need enforcement power as long as your oversight can be reported - and accepted - by whatever agency actually regulates the NSA.
That's how checks and balances work. The President cannot control Congress (who cannot even control themselves, but that's another story). The President cannot control the Judiciary. Likewise, neither of those branches can control the President. But their powers were alloted in such a way that each branch can be held accountable by the other two branches.
"I came to the conclusion that using it is a gross violation of all standards of professional code generation. "
Amen brother. Kids today cant be bothered with good code, and their spaghetti crap ends up as a "standard" in some places. look through a lot of the TI MSP embedded libraries and frameworks. We dont use ANY of it as it is all a bloated mess for a small embedded platform.
Hell it's a bloated mess for any platform.
I'm not a kid, but I didn't get paid to write good code. All they wanted was to get it done fast and get it done cheap. When I tried to write good code - or better yet, good design, I got dinged for taking too long.
... so the article speaks of a dedicated line when it speaks of "analog"? I don't think so(without reading the article). it just speaks of analog protection systems, like an analog temp fuse on fire suppression water lines.
(analog dedicated control line would be only as useful as both ends of the wire are secure.. making it about as useful as a digital line only transmitting a simple protocol handled with good code at both ends)
real analog control and protection systems aren't programmable and so less vulnerable to someone hacking the max RPM limit on some centrifuges etc, since the attacker would need to physically alter the control mechanisms/analog electronics to alter the rpm. obviously such systems are more demanding to operate too..
they are more expensive to do and more prone for faults though...
Consider the dreaded EMP attack. By producing a sufficiently powerful EM impulse sufficiently close, even digital circuits can be pushed into analog domains where they can become deranged or destroyed.
That's an extreme, but it shows that attacks need not be solely on the wire or through the wire. A more finely-tuned attack might be able to simply strobe some other line in a cable bundle to a degree that its effects leak past whatever shielding might be present and induce a false impression of a control or data analog value.
To pull off such a stunt obviously requires a good knowledge of your target systems, but so does the equivalent type of operation done in digital code and that happens routinely.
Running a farm does not create wealth. You assume that by someone generating an income, they are creating wealth. The problem with this assumption is income is complex: it comes exclusively from other people losing exactly as much money, and so is zero-sum. It's all the other assets and all the other effects that you must examine.
Generating income is not a zero sum game. If I buy a car and fix it up. I have created wealth. If I buy a box of lumber and create a table. I have created more wealth for me and for the person I sell the table for who otherwise would have to spend their own time/energy/expertise/etc... making the table. Likewise running a farm very much does create wealth. If I grow tomatoes in a garden in my backyard, I am creating something that didn't exist before, reducing the scarcity of tomatoes, and generating wealth for me and the people I sell those tomatoes to.
Only if your labor (and in the case of the farm, water, fertilizer, etc.) is of zero value. Otherwise, you're not creating anything, wealth-wise. You're just converting a valuable commodity (your time and effort) into value-added to the raw materials. The illusion of creation comes from not including all the inputs in your equations.
But considering the way we value the ability to push money around more than we value physical labor in today's world, I suppose that forgetting to do that is just a natural mistake.
You and the OP are still seeing the wrong side of this....
Why is there an estate tax of 45% upon anyone's death!!! That income has been taxed already. Bequeathment is not a fucking INCOME issue.
It may have been taxed as income for the principal - although anyone that rich probably managed to find a way not to pay it to begin with - but when the estate is passed to heirs, it becomes their income, and just like any other system where cash flows from point to point, it becomes fair game for the taxman again.
I will get a lot of grief for saying this, but I wouldn't cry if the whole Death Tax thing were 100% less what it takes to support minor heirs until they're grown up enough to be able to make their own fortunes. That's because the best legacy that a successful person can leave his/her heirs isn't a large chunk of money, it's the skills and mentoring that will make them successful on their own without simply breeding up a generation of useless drones living off other people's hard work. And after all, isn't that what we revile welfare recipients for?
We don't (so far) allow you to be handed political power simply because of who your parents are a la monarchy in the USA. But we do support handing wealth to people simply because of who your parents are.
What house? Pay as you go mobile has internet too, you don't need any (registered) house address for it.
You've got something better. To actually send/receive data, the unit has to be in contact with a tower. Unlesss the perp is so far out in nowhere that you can't get enough towers to trilaterate, you can pinpoint the exact position of the unit for any unit detected sending encrypted traffic (which TFA indicates should be monitored by the phone company). Then you call Obama and he sends in the drones.
scientifically untrue. if the world economy grows each year by 3% (let's say 3.000.000.000 dollars) we can have people who can get richer each year by let's say 10% where that 10% can be let's say 1.000.000 dollars. We can have 3.000 such people in order to reach to the point where your assumption would have to be true.
Doesn't matter. Most recent income stats have shown the upper crust to be getting quite a bit more than 10% richer. While the vast majority of people got considerably less than 10% richer. Less-than-inflation richer in some cases. That's a formula for revolution.
You might think that southwest Florida would have plenty of water - it's right next to the ocean.
But you can't grow crops on seawater and they are under more or less permanent water restrictions.
It is, however, one of the places where they grow things like early-season tomatoes commercially, and for some years now drip irrigation has been used to maximize the effectiveness of available water.
I think that turning the USA into a nation of fear, undermining basic constitutional rights can reasonably be considered giving aid and comfort to our enemies. For it erodes the reasons why so much of the world looked to us, instead of them.
I think that destroying the reputation of the USA as a bastion of freedom and morality, where torture was not condoned and imprisonment could only be done within the constraints of the law gave aid and comfort - and outright joy - to our enemies.
So even within the USA legal definition of the word "treason" there are grounds. There are many secrets that governments need to keep, lest it enable our enemies to work against us, but recent revelations have been about secrets which, when revealed made our allies wary of us. And weakening our alliances certainly works to the advantage of our enemies.
True. As another poster has observed, the NSA rapes you as part of your basic taxpayer services at no additional cost.
Plus, the NSA doesn't employ telemarketers to call you up 5 times a day 7 days a week year after year, exploiting the loopholes in the "Do Not Call" registry. To say nothing of the junk mail.
The term "hacker" gets applied in the general public usage to:
1. Social Engineers, regardless of tech skills 2. ignorant script kiddies 3. malicious invaders ("crackers") 4. people who bang on systems with blunt objects ("hack jobs" in the pre-computer sense) 5. people who actually know what they are doing and do it for constructive purposes
It's mostly our own fault that we haven't managed to make the distinctions clearer. The first 3 on the list are basically criminals unless they're working for authorized purposes. The fourth may or may not be, but even when they are on the side of "good", sloppy is a menace in and of itself. The fifth is not only all too rare, but in my experience is sometimes actively discouraged, because it takes too long to do a truly competent job.
Criminals do get glorified, when they're "Robin Hood", Thoreau, or the Founding Fathers. Sometimes their crimes are attempts to remediate even worse crimes.
You could use a password manager like KeePass, LastPass, PasswordSafe, etc. Is there some reason you don't?
And even if there is, reconsider it. You can keep a password safe database(s) on a thumb drive handcuffed to your wrist if you want to be really paranoid. The databases are encrypted, but if they're physically tethered to you, you'll have to take them with you instead of possibly leaving them unguarded on your desk.
The idea of making different apps all have different passwords (as opposed to single signon or a password safe/PIN vault under a master password) may sound secure, but nobody's memory is that good, and the resulting post-its, unencrypted spreadshhets, Windows Notepad files or whatever means that in reality, you may be less secure, rather than more secure.
I took a class on the Soviets once, and a little anecdote about the Eastern Bloc was quite illuminating.
The Soviet Union actually had three votes in the UN. Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus all had seats, and all were constituent Soviet Republics. Sometimes the Russians would change their vote at the last minute, and not everybody would get the memo in time. In the first few years of the UN the Bulgarians voted against Russia less often then Ukraine. Kruschev loosened things up a bit, which was one reason the Communist Party fired him.
The Russians wanted obedient little puppets, which meant they wanted no street demonstrations, which in turn meant that all Eastern Bloc leaders needed something very much like the Stasi or they'd be replaced.
Street demonstrations were just fine as long as they were approved demonstrations - for example, anti-US rallies. It's where the term "rent-a-crowd" gained parlance.
I think by that logic, you could also argue that the Magna Carta was bad.
It's quite possible that the more enlightened practices employed on the later colonial separations were influenced by both the example of what could happen when their separation was forbidden and by the model documents that the American revolution brought into being.
Some financial people and investment bankers apparently retire at thirty five or something like that. Hasn't there been an anonymous insider's article recently linked from here? When you sell your soul, it often pays off.
Not uncommon for sports professionals. I think the minimum player salary in the NFL is around $150K, and you're likely to be a physical wreck by 35. So you retire, maybe buy an auto dealership.
One of the items I have to certify when using open-source in a corporate environment is that there is no foreign content.
Well, let's see. There's the Linux kernel. I hear that was developed by some guy in Finland. Then there's Samba, which comes from Australia, I believe.
Anyone care to add to the list? This is just for starters.
if it was a phoned in order the labor would be around 1/2 second to select the checkbox to install Firefox. Everything else would most likely be automated.
Um hum.
All You Have To Do Is...
Actually, you have to download or otherwise make accessible the installer first. Then you have to deal with the occasional bits of lint that pop up unexpectedly for one reason or another - anything up to and including the surprise discovery that their factory-installed disk drive has major bad spots on it (speaking from personal experience). Then the user will probably whine that the desktop icons are in the wrong place, etc. and insist on having things set up "properly".
One thing I've learned working with computers is that there is no task no trivial nor no program so simple that it cannot eat up at least an hour of your life.
Oops, just reread. Yeah, they can charge for the service of installing Firefox - they're not selling the browser, they're selling the effort to install it.
How dull do you have to be to pay someone to do this for you?
Consider your average user. Then remember half of them are duller than that.
Slashdot Mirror
Who watches the watchmen?
Yes, the NSA and the greater intelligence community clearly needs oversight, but will anyone trust someone with that much power any more than we currently trust the NSA?
You don't need meta-powers over the NSA to oversee the NSA, you only need the power needed to oversee the NSA. You don't even need enforcement power as long as your oversight can be reported - and accepted - by whatever agency actually regulates the NSA.
That's how checks and balances work. The President cannot control Congress (who cannot even control themselves, but that's another story). The President cannot control the Judiciary. Likewise, neither of those branches can control the President. But their powers were alloted in such a way that each branch can be held accountable by the other two branches.
Laws apply to everybody regardless of who's roaming the planet.
Otherwise the psychos end up running things.
"I came to the conclusion that using it is a gross violation of all standards of professional code generation. "
Amen brother. Kids today cant be bothered with good code, and their spaghetti crap ends up as a "standard" in some places. look through a lot of the TI MSP embedded libraries and frameworks. We dont use ANY of it as it is all a bloated mess for a small embedded platform.
Hell it's a bloated mess for any platform.
I'm not a kid, but I didn't get paid to write good code. All they wanted was to get it done fast and get it done cheap. When I tried to write good code - or better yet, good design, I got dinged for taking too long.
. ..
so the article speaks of a dedicated line when it speaks of "analog"? I don't think so(without reading the article). it just speaks of analog protection systems, like an analog temp fuse on fire suppression water lines.
(analog dedicated control line would be only as useful as both ends of the wire are secure.. making it about as useful as a digital line only transmitting a simple protocol handled with good code at both ends)
real analog control and protection systems aren't programmable and so less vulnerable to someone hacking the max RPM limit on some centrifuges etc, since the attacker would need to physically alter the control mechanisms/analog electronics to alter the rpm. obviously such systems are more demanding to operate too..
they are more expensive to do and more prone for faults though...
Consider the dreaded EMP attack. By producing a sufficiently powerful EM impulse sufficiently close, even digital circuits can be pushed into analog domains where they can become deranged or destroyed.
That's an extreme, but it shows that attacks need not be solely on the wire or through the wire. A more finely-tuned attack might be able to simply strobe some other line in a cable bundle to a degree that its effects leak past whatever shielding might be present and induce a false impression of a control or data analog value.
To pull off such a stunt obviously requires a good knowledge of your target systems, but so does the equivalent type of operation done in digital code and that happens routinely.
And to make it even more simple: Everyone, including smart people, makes mistakes.
Or gets into a Homer Simpson mood and doesn't take the usual amount of care.
Running a farm does not create wealth.
You assume that by someone generating an income, they are creating wealth. The problem with this assumption is income is complex: it comes exclusively from other people losing exactly as much money, and so is zero-sum. It's all the other assets and all the other effects that you must examine.
Generating income is not a zero sum game. If I buy a car and fix it up. I have created wealth.
If I buy a box of lumber and create a table. I have created more wealth for me and for the person I sell the table for who
otherwise would have to spend their own time/energy/expertise/etc... making the table.
Likewise running a farm very much does create wealth. If I grow tomatoes in a garden in my backyard, I am
creating something that didn't exist before, reducing the scarcity of tomatoes, and generating wealth for me and the people
I sell those tomatoes to.
Only if your labor (and in the case of the farm, water, fertilizer, etc.) is of zero value. Otherwise, you're not creating anything, wealth-wise. You're just converting a valuable commodity (your time and effort) into value-added to the raw materials. The illusion of creation comes from not including all the inputs in your equations.
But considering the way we value the ability to push money around more than we value physical labor in today's world, I suppose that forgetting to do that is just a natural mistake.
You and the OP are still seeing the wrong side of this....
Why is there an estate tax of 45% upon anyone's death!!! That income has been taxed already. Bequeathment is not a fucking INCOME issue.
It may have been taxed as income for the principal - although anyone that rich probably managed to find a way not to pay it to begin with - but when the estate is passed to heirs, it becomes their income, and just like any other system where cash flows from point to point, it becomes fair game for the taxman again.
I will get a lot of grief for saying this, but I wouldn't cry if the whole Death Tax thing were 100% less what it takes to support minor heirs until they're grown up enough to be able to make their own fortunes. That's because the best legacy that a successful person can leave his/her heirs isn't a large chunk of money, it's the skills and mentoring that will make them successful on their own without simply breeding up a generation of useless drones living off other people's hard work. And after all, isn't that what we revile welfare recipients for?
We don't (so far) allow you to be handed political power simply because of who your parents are a la monarchy in the USA. But we do support handing wealth to people simply because of who your parents are.
What house? Pay as you go mobile has internet too, you don't need any (registered) house address for it.
You've got something better. To actually send/receive data, the unit has to be in contact with a tower. Unlesss the perp is so far out in nowhere that you can't get enough towers to trilaterate, you can pinpoint the exact position of the unit for any unit detected sending encrypted traffic (which TFA indicates should be monitored by the phone company). Then you call Obama and he sends in the drones.
scientifically untrue. if the world economy grows each year by 3% (let's say 3.000.000.000 dollars) we can have people who can get richer each year by let's say 10% where that 10% can be let's say 1.000.000 dollars. We can have 3.000 such people in order to reach to the point where your assumption would have to be true.
Doesn't matter. Most recent income stats have shown the upper crust to be getting quite a bit more than 10% richer. While the vast majority of people got considerably less than 10% richer. Less-than-inflation richer in some cases. That's a formula for revolution.
You might think that southwest Florida would have plenty of water - it's right next to the ocean.
But you can't grow crops on seawater and they are under more or less permanent water restrictions.
It is, however, one of the places where they grow things like early-season tomatoes commercially, and for some years now drip irrigation has been used to maximize the effectiveness of available water.
I think that turning the USA into a nation of fear, undermining basic constitutional rights can reasonably be considered giving aid and comfort to our enemies. For it erodes the reasons why so much of the world looked to us, instead of them.
I think that destroying the reputation of the USA as a bastion of freedom and morality, where torture was not condoned and imprisonment could only be done within the constraints of the law gave aid and comfort - and outright joy - to our enemies.
So even within the USA legal definition of the word "treason" there are grounds. There are many secrets that governments need to keep, lest it enable our enemies to work against us, but recent revelations have been about secrets which, when revealed made our allies wary of us. And weakening our alliances certainly works to the advantage of our enemies.
Sorry but AT&T is far more evil than the NSA.
True. As another poster has observed, the NSA rapes you as part of your basic taxpayer services at no additional cost.
Plus, the NSA doesn't employ telemarketers to call you up 5 times a day 7 days a week year after year, exploiting the loopholes in the "Do Not Call" registry. To say nothing of the junk mail.
NSA ?
GCHQ ?
Or their equivalent from South Korea ?
AT&T
AT&T would be redundant for NSA.
The term "hacker" gets applied in the general public usage to:
1. Social Engineers, regardless of tech skills
2. ignorant script kiddies
3. malicious invaders ("crackers")
4. people who bang on systems with blunt objects ("hack jobs" in the pre-computer sense)
5. people who actually know what they are doing and do it for constructive purposes
It's mostly our own fault that we haven't managed to make the distinctions clearer. The first 3 on the list are basically criminals unless they're working for authorized purposes. The fourth may or may not be, but even when they are on the side of "good", sloppy is a menace in and of itself. The fifth is not only all too rare, but in my experience is sometimes actively discouraged, because it takes too long to do a truly competent job.
Criminals do get glorified, when they're "Robin Hood", Thoreau, or the Founding Fathers. Sometimes their crimes are attempts to remediate even worse crimes.
You could use a password manager like KeePass, LastPass, PasswordSafe, etc. Is there some reason you don't?
And even if there is, reconsider it. You can keep a password safe database(s) on a thumb drive handcuffed to your wrist if you want to be really paranoid. The databases are encrypted, but if they're physically tethered to you, you'll have to take them with you instead of possibly leaving them unguarded on your desk.
The idea of making different apps all have different passwords (as opposed to single signon or a password safe/PIN vault under a master password) may sound secure, but nobody's memory is that good, and the resulting post-its, unencrypted spreadshhets, Windows Notepad files or whatever means that in reality, you may be less secure, rather than more secure.
Databases are not evil.
It's what you do with them that makes them evil.
It's why you don't put wolves in positions as watchdogs over herds of sheep.
I took a class on the Soviets once, and a little anecdote about the Eastern Bloc was quite illuminating.
The Soviet Union actually had three votes in the UN. Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus all had seats, and all were constituent Soviet Republics. Sometimes the Russians would change their vote at the last minute, and not everybody would get the memo in time. In the first few years of the UN the Bulgarians voted against Russia less often then Ukraine. Kruschev loosened things up a bit, which was one reason the Communist Party fired him.
The Russians wanted obedient little puppets, which meant they wanted no street demonstrations, which in turn meant that all Eastern Bloc leaders needed something very much like the Stasi or they'd be replaced.
Street demonstrations were just fine as long as they were approved demonstrations - for example, anti-US rallies. It's where the term "rent-a-crowd" gained parlance.
If metadata is so unimportant, why have I been seeing ads for metadata specialists on the job boards lately?
I think by that logic, you could also argue that the Magna Carta was bad.
It's quite possible that the more enlightened practices employed on the later colonial separations were influenced by both the example of what could happen when their separation was forbidden and by the model documents that the American revolution brought into being.
Who the hell retires at the young age of 50?!?!
Some financial people and investment bankers apparently retire at thirty five or something like that. Hasn't there been an anonymous insider's article recently linked from here? When you sell your soul, it often pays off.
Not uncommon for sports professionals. I think the minimum player salary in the NFL is around $150K, and you're likely to be a physical wreck by 35. So you retire, maybe buy an auto dealership.
One of the items I have to certify when using open-source in a corporate environment is that there is no foreign content.
Well, let's see. There's the Linux kernel. I hear that was developed by some guy in Finland. Then there's Samba, which comes from Australia, I believe.
Anyone care to add to the list? This is just for starters.
What lawyers? Have you seen their accreditation? It's just a piece of paper after all...
Dewey, Cheatem and Howe.
if it was a phoned in order the labor would be around 1/2 second to select the checkbox to install Firefox. Everything else would most likely be automated.
Um hum.
All You Have To Do Is...
Actually, you have to download or otherwise make accessible the installer first. Then you have to deal with the occasional bits of lint that pop up unexpectedly for one reason or another - anything up to and including the surprise discovery that their factory-installed disk drive has major bad spots on it (speaking from personal experience). Then the user will probably whine that the desktop icons are in the wrong place, etc. and insist on having things set up "properly".
One thing I've learned working with computers is that there is no task no trivial nor no program so simple that it cannot eat up at least an hour of your life.
Oops, just reread. Yeah, they can charge for the service of installing Firefox - they're not selling the browser, they're selling the effort to install it.
How dull do you have to be to pay someone to do this for you?
Consider your average user. Then remember half of them are duller than that.
Honestly, it is not so much the government snooping that scares me as the private snooping does.
The government can't afford to spy on us, but the corporations make money doing it. So they can afford to do it more.
Being able to afford something never stopped governments.