Anecdotal but true: My wife went to UW-Madison and got her Masters in CS, and of her classmates only 30% reported having an IT undergrad degree. My favorite was the girl with the Forestry degree, who learned in the first 4 years she liked being inside more than she liked being out in the woods...
Content is content... get it where ever you want, the Nook is just a device for displaying it. Here's my anecdata: I get most of my videos off the web, converting them to the appropriate format with Handbrake directly onto an SD card which I then stick into the Nook. I get ebooks from a number of sites, reformat them (if necessary) via Calibre, and copy them over the same way. The device never has to connect to B&N or any particular network.
If this drive succeeds, don't the maintainers have to lock down the site, preventing any changes? That's how all the other "World Heritage Sites"(tm) are treated, as pretties to be seen and admired. (OTOH, the thought of a final end to the WikiEditWars makes me all warm & happy inside.)
The complaint is that people are DRAWING MUHAMMAD at all - they say it's idolatry to depict him. Showing him with a panda rather than involved in gay porn is still idolatry.
On the off chance your sig wasn't just meant to be funny:
JUCHE is pronounced "joo-chay" with a slight emphasis on the first syllable, and is most-often translated as "self-reliance". It is used almost exclusively by the DPRK (Democratic People's Republic of Korea AKA North Korea) in reference to the nation - I cannot recall reading an instance where it was used by an individual to refer to himself or his actions on his own behalf.
It goes well beyond the concept of 'dependability' and has a big "In Your Face!" component - it's more along the lines of "screw you guys, we'll do this ourselves, we don't need any of you".
No, the FISA requires they get a warrant within 72 hours if they want to keep the intercepted data - it does nothing to prevent gathering it in advance of getting a warrant.
There ARE Directives which govern the activities & practices of SIGINT organizations (see James Bamford's books Body Of Secrets or The Puzzle Palace for details about USSIDs) but those also limit what you can keep and not what you can gather.
Part of it all I think is the problem CNN has. They don't have enough
news to fill 24 hours and I think the web as a whole might not actually have enough
content to fill it all.
It's funny, but I can spend all day reading different news sites, covering different
countries or disciplines (science/finance/funny_pictures_of_cats today) and yet CNN
can't seem to produce more than about 43 minutes of bad summaries of (mostly 1st-)
world events. There's NEWS aplenty, but they don't seem to care about sharing the
majority of it.
I have now been out longer than I was in (the Marines) but I can tell you that using COTS (Common Off The Shelf, or regular consumer-grade) gear is an idea whose time has come many times already. And yes, REI makes some nice stuff that may be better at one facet of the requirements but that nice stuff fails completely at satisfying other requirements.
For example, I have purchased several warm coats over the years, but none came with pockets big enough to carry a grenade much less an MRE, while every coat I was ever issued could do so. I wore the same "Field Jacket" for 10+ years and through numerous deployments, which included crawling under vehicles, carrying & installing & recovering (!) barbed wire a zillion times, etc, and the worst damage it suffered was a torn pocket. I wore my new REI jacket skiing and by the time I got home a seam had split and feathers were poking out through the very fabric.
As to recharging the Touch, as somebody who humped hundreds of pounds of spare batteries over the years, I say YAY! Today's military forces HAVE computers and power outlets, so finding a place to recharge isn't going to be the problem it might have been for Col. Hogan or Rambo.
NK starts developing nuclear technology in the early 90s. Out of fear the US promises to provide electricity and normalized trade in exchange NK would disassemble their nuclear plants and join the NNPT. Korea agrees! They take apart their factories. The US changes to the republican party. They do not provide electricity, they do not normalize trade, they spit in NKs face.
Bzzzt! Nice paragraph history, till the last sentence... you conflate the USA and the ROK (Republic of Korea, AKA South Korea) and their roles in that fiasco. The USA brokered an agreement to provide food aid (which we did) while the ROK was to provide commercial light-water reactors for electrical power generation (which the ROK failed to do) in return for which the DPRK (Democratic People's Republic of Korea, AKA North Korea) would disassemble its breeder reactor and cease all work on developing nuclear weapons (which they pretty much failed to do.)
I blame the South Koreans for failing to make any attempt to meet their obligations in this deal, and the North Koreans for closing the original plant while simultaneously opening a NEW one and for moving its program further underground (literally) rather than stopping it... but I am proud to say the USA kept its part of the bargain and provided the food (the more fool us, but at least we tried.)
It's nice of you to claim that the DPRK government & Kim Jung Il (same thing) are just misunderstood and marginalized souls, but in fact they are far more like the Unabomber than they are like Castro. Crazed conspiracy theorists wanting to go their own way are a dime a dozen, while nutjobs who are willing to blow up their neighbors so they can be 'left alone' are a whole 'nother matter.
I strongly suggest you go read a book, a few magazines, at the very least the frak'n Wikipedia article and THEN go read the DPRK's slant on things... I think you might change your mind about who's zoomin who here. FWIW, I speak and read Korean, I have lived in the ROK, I was in Seoul in the early 90's, and I truly believe Dear Comrade KJI is batshit crazy - but don't take my word for it, please. Go check it out for yourself.
As for your first paragraph, since in 1990 there was evidence that the DPRK already had several pounds of plutonium with which to make at the least a dirty bomb or two, you are wrong there too. They might not be able to make them with swiss-watch craftsmanship like we (used to) do, but don't think they couldn't make SOMETHING unpleasent. Now that they can demonstrably throw one as far as Japan, we might actually want to worry about it just a skosh.
No kidding, AC. The cornerstone of the system and the bare minimum one should expect - but it doesn't require one to assume that everybody on the prosecution side of the case be bastards, idiots, and liars... I asked if that "benefit of the doubt" might not extend to those folks too. But you are right, I should rephrase that to make the point more clear:
Hey, Jane, you seem to accept completely the notion that the accused is a lily-white innocent because his case matches your preconceptions of good legal practice whilst simultaneously imputing stupidity/ignorance/etc to those on the other side of the case - were you just all out of "benefit-of-the-doubt" when you replied above? Could those folks be capable observers without an axe to grind, or is that just too impossible to believe?
I know I'm probably in the minority here when I say that I have worked with a number of law enforcement folks who were individually and collectively moderate and intelligent people, rather than the jack-booted thugs so often described. In my admittedly anecdotal experience, the @$$-holes are the exception, not the rule, just like in every other social setting including this one.
Because I don't, really, understand the point you think you are making. Starting with your points (1) and (2) I do not dispute them nor do I see the above poster doing so. Strawman much? As to point (3) I find it superfluous - this is about what's legal, not what people want or don't want. I also fail to see what incident you are referring to in the following sentence - could you be a little more specific?
Moving on, I see you are pretty fast off the mark to assume these officers are both "badly-trained" and "dumb" - do you have any proof that this is true? Are you letting your dislike for authority figures, as demonstrated in points (4) and (5), get the better of you? You seem willing to give the accused the benefit of the doubt, why not leave a little for the working men here?
Lastly, your point (6) is again not here nor previously disputed, so why make it?
I'll even tack on a quibble to a different post of yours - could you explain to me how a picture that may or may not contain a depiction of child-porn is "electronic communication"? If this were a physical document, would it be less protected somehow? Why?
Here's what I think - the judge should allow the officers to testify, and the accused's lawyer should argue about their qualifications, just like in every other case of law. If the accused refuses to provide access to the disputed item, the judge should (and please do correct me if this is where I went astray) be able to lock him up for contempt, NOT child porn. The child porn case can be adjudicated with or without the actual picture, and his refusal to allow its viewing IS germane to the jury, even though it is completely legal. Reasonable doubt works both ways, doesn't it?
I eagerly await your response. It's funny - your jaundiced view of the law enforcement community is matched rather completely by my none-too-thrilled view of our justice system.
I was thinking this explanation sounded a bit mystical & spooky, till I realized it actually explains something I had experienced a while ago when I lived in Hawaii. I did a lot of snorkeling, often to the same beach area, and many times (dozens) while diving at that site I would be meandering along and suddenly stop to look around. If I did so I would invariably find a ~football-sized hawaiian pufferfish tucked down into the coral, not swimming but giving me the eye. Once they were spotted, they would pop out and swim away. They were big enough that if they had been swimming I would have seen them, so it seems the eye-contact WAS the alerting factor.
It wasn't the same fish each time, it wasn't the same place each time, it wasn't even the same time(of day) each time - I would be swimming & sightseeing, stop for no apparent reason, start observing closely, and there would be a large-eyed fish watching me.
Thanks for making me reconsider my initial position - what's that old expression? It's not the things we don't know that get us in trouble, it's the things we know that aren't so.
According to/.'s favorite source, " a hue and cry (Latin, hutesium et clamor, "a horn and shouting") was a process by which bystanders were summoned to assist in the apprehension of a criminal who had been witnessed in the act of committing a crime."
If the Democrats really mean what they said, they should man-up and vote to cut the funding. Yes, that will probably get vetoed by Pres. Bush, but they can't start to overturn a veto until they get one! Sure, committed believers don't need to see any effort by the Dems to buy that kind of rhetoric, but you don't start a "National Conversation" by just talking to yourself.
And yes, I would also agree the best chance of actually passing a bill would be to tie funds to troop withdrawals... too bad the Dems are (apparently) unable to vote their (professed) consciences. They're also way behind on the other important legislative items of the day - do you suppose it's due to the need to run for reelection/higher office? (Yeah, I am abso-goddamm-lutely looking at you, Barack & Hillary, & John too, how about you get your butts back to Washington and do the job you were hired for!)
And finally, yes, I really do think that all politicians are liars. I've done tech support for city & state governments, and spent time with a number of federal-level pols as well, and every single one of them uses the 'calculus of greatest effect' to make their decisions. You may make a perfect pitch for your special need (say, more funds for libraries) and they may tell you (and actually believe it) that they will make it happen, but 5 minutes later they will be saying the same things to the next constituent/lobbyist/newshack/whoever. The politician's stock-in-trade is their ability to make people believe they care about your problems. It doesn't mean that they are bad people, but it does mean you should never believe they will follow-thru until you actually see it happen.
As the saying goes, an honest politician is one who stays bought. True enough for government work, no?
I will happily continue to pay the still-cheaper-than-hardcopy amount ($15 for 4-6 titles from Webscriptions.net, more or less elsewhere) that my ebooks cost, even if it IS an order of magnitude over the actual production price. Why? Because good editors and publishers save me hours of searching through the endless piles of crap books out there. Hell, if iTunes made me manually search through all their titles to find listenable music, I'd stop buying from them too...
Again, as has been said here before, it's not enough to fix a single aspect of the publishing problem, your solution has to be hugely better to have any hope of replacing the current paradigm. You want a revolution in publishing, you gotta change^H^H^H^H^Himprove everything.
Before Drop Bears but after Hodags... Drop Bears only fall down on you, while the wily Hodag will come swinging down at any angle it wants to. They can even get you on the bounce!
Maybe Orson hasn't seen his name in the paper enough recently, or maybe it's the poster - what an fine apples-to-Sarin comparison the write-up makes. I really wish the site wasn't/.ed right now, I'd love to know who to take exception with.
IIRC Rowling took the over-zealous fan to court because he took it upon himself to write up a compedium on her work based on his understanding of it. Not a new thing in the bunch, just an encyclopedic work of characters and places he had no part in creating... AND did so without asking, AND assumed that this would be just fine with her. That guy didn't "borrow" the plot, as described so creatively, he "borrowed" the characters, places, events, and story, chopped it neatly into bits, and attempted to pass off the re-packaging of her time-and-effort as a new work created by him.
I can only hope that when the slashdotting of the Card article passes, and I finally get to read it, he won't come across as a big tool, which he does now based on the above.
You reminded me of one of my favorite quotes: "Yeah, this is work - if it was fun it'd be called blowjob."
My dad worked hard all his life and was able to retire early... and died 3 years later of pancreatic cancer. I for one am glad he got some time to do what he wanted (he was a month away from going out on the Senior Tour when diagnosed), and the lesson I take from the experience is "don't wait till someday to enjoy life, cause someday may never come."
Find work you don't hate, put in the hours you need to and no more and find your fun and fulfillment outside the workplace - you'll have a much better time, and your family will appreciate the focus being "with them" and not "at work".
WTF, Batman?! If we've done this one already, and you know that well enough to put it in the initial summary, then what's the frackin point? Since when did "piling-on" become "News That Matters?"
Slashdot Mirror
I was a starship trooper till I took a matter beam to the knee ...
Anecdotal but true: My wife went to UW-Madison and got her Masters in CS, and of her classmates only 30% reported having an IT undergrad degree. My favorite was the girl with the Forestry degree, who learned in the first 4 years she liked being inside more than she liked being out in the woods ...
Content is content ... get it where ever you want, the Nook is just a device for displaying it. Here's my anecdata: I get most of my videos off the web, converting them to the appropriate format with Handbrake directly onto an SD card which I then stick into the Nook. I get ebooks from a number of sites, reformat them (if necessary) via Calibre, and copy them over the same way. The device never has to connect to B&N or any particular network.
If this drive succeeds, don't the maintainers have to lock down the site, preventing any changes? That's how all the other "World Heritage Sites"(tm) are treated, as pretties to be seen and admired. (OTOH, the thought of a final end to the WikiEditWars makes me all warm & happy inside.)
The complaint is that people are DRAWING MUHAMMAD at all - they say it's idolatry to depict him. Showing him with a panda rather than involved in gay porn is still idolatry.
Thanks for playing, tho ...
It goes well beyond the concept of 'dependability' and has a big "In Your Face!" component - it's more along the lines of "screw you guys, we'll do this ourselves, we don't need any of you".
Just my [$0.02US | 23 won], of course ...
No, the FISA requires they get a warrant within 72 hours if they want to keep the intercepted data - it does nothing to prevent gathering it in advance of getting a warrant.
There ARE Directives which govern the activities & practices of SIGINT organizations (see James Bamford's books Body Of Secrets or The Puzzle Palace for details about USSIDs) but those also limit what you can keep and not what you can gather.
It's funny, but I can spend all day reading different news sites, covering different countries or disciplines (science/finance/funny_pictures_of_cats today) and yet CNN can't seem to produce more than about 43 minutes of bad summaries of (mostly 1st-) world events. There's NEWS aplenty, but they don't seem to care about sharing the majority of it.
I have now been out longer than I was in (the Marines) but I can tell you that using COTS (Common Off The Shelf, or regular consumer-grade) gear is an idea whose time has come many times already. And yes, REI makes some nice stuff that may be better at one facet of the requirements but that nice stuff fails completely at satisfying other requirements.
For example, I have purchased several warm coats over the years, but none came with pockets big enough to carry a grenade much less an MRE, while every coat I was ever issued could do so. I wore the same "Field Jacket" for 10+ years and through numerous deployments, which included crawling under vehicles, carrying & installing & recovering (!) barbed wire a zillion times, etc, and the worst damage it suffered was a torn pocket. I wore my new REI jacket skiing and by the time I got home a seam had split and feathers were poking out through the very fabric.
As to recharging the Touch, as somebody who humped hundreds of pounds of spare batteries over the years, I say YAY! Today's military forces HAVE computers and power outlets, so finding a place to recharge isn't going to be the problem it might have been for Col. Hogan or Rambo.
Bzzzt! Nice paragraph history, till the last sentence ... you conflate the USA and the ROK (Republic of Korea, AKA South Korea) and their roles in that fiasco. The USA brokered an agreement to provide food aid (which we did) while the ROK was to provide commercial light-water reactors for electrical power generation (which the ROK failed to do) in return for which the DPRK (Democratic People's Republic of Korea, AKA North Korea) would disassemble its breeder reactor and cease all work on developing nuclear weapons (which they pretty much failed to do.)
I blame the South Koreans for failing to make any attempt to meet their obligations in this deal, and the North Koreans for closing the original plant while simultaneously opening a NEW one and for moving its program further underground (literally) rather than stopping it ... but I am proud to say the USA kept its part of the bargain and provided the food (the more fool us, but at least we tried.)
It's nice of you to claim that the DPRK government & Kim Jung Il (same thing) are just misunderstood and marginalized souls, but in fact they are far more like the Unabomber than they are like Castro. Crazed conspiracy theorists wanting to go their own way are a dime a dozen, while nutjobs who are willing to blow up their neighbors so they can be 'left alone' are a whole 'nother matter.
I strongly suggest you go read a book, a few magazines, at the very least the frak'n Wikipedia article and THEN go read the DPRK's slant on things ... I think you might change your mind about who's zoomin who here. FWIW, I speak and read Korean, I have lived in the ROK, I was in Seoul in the early 90's, and I truly believe Dear Comrade KJI is batshit crazy - but don't take my word for it, please. Go check it out for yourself.
As for your first paragraph, since in 1990 there was evidence that the DPRK already had several pounds of plutonium with which to make at the least a dirty bomb or two, you are wrong there too. They might not be able to make them with swiss-watch craftsmanship like we (used to) do, but don't think they couldn't make SOMETHING unpleasent. Now that they can demonstrably throw one as far as Japan, we might actually want to worry about it just a skosh.
That's a little sad ... but it explains so much.
How many businesses do you estimate are still using this one particular format on their business-critical communications?
I'm sorry, but humans taste far more like giant porcupine than chicken ... and I think that was a religious apple, not a magic one (lol.)
Hey, Jane, you seem to accept completely the notion that the accused is a lily-white innocent because his case matches your preconceptions of good legal practice whilst simultaneously imputing stupidity/ignorance/etc to those on the other side of the case - were you just all out of "benefit-of-the-doubt" when you replied above? Could those folks be capable observers without an axe to grind, or is that just too impossible to believe?
I know I'm probably in the minority here when I say that I have worked with a number of law enforcement folks who were individually and collectively moderate and intelligent people, rather than the jack-booted thugs so often described. In my admittedly anecdotal experience, the @$$-holes are the exception, not the rule, just like in every other social setting including this one.
Moving on, I see you are pretty fast off the mark to assume these officers are both "badly-trained" and "dumb" - do you have any proof that this is true? Are you letting your dislike for authority figures, as demonstrated in points (4) and (5), get the better of you? You seem willing to give the accused the benefit of the doubt, why not leave a little for the working men here?
Lastly, your point (6) is again not here nor previously disputed, so why make it?
I'll even tack on a quibble to a different post of yours - could you explain to me how a picture that may or may not contain a depiction of child-porn is "electronic communication"? If this were a physical document, would it be less protected somehow? Why?
Here's what I think - the judge should allow the officers to testify, and the accused's lawyer should argue about their qualifications, just like in every other case of law. If the accused refuses to provide access to the disputed item, the judge should (and please do correct me if this is where I went astray) be able to lock him up for contempt, NOT child porn. The child porn case can be adjudicated with or without the actual picture, and his refusal to allow its viewing IS germane to the jury, even though it is completely legal. Reasonable doubt works both ways, doesn't it?
I eagerly await your response. It's funny - your jaundiced view of the law enforcement community is matched rather completely by my none-too-thrilled view of our justice system.
It wasn't the same fish each time, it wasn't the same place each time, it wasn't even the same time(of day) each time - I would be swimming & sightseeing, stop for no apparent reason, start observing closely, and there would be a large-eyed fish watching me.
Thanks for making me reconsider my initial position - what's that old expression? It's not the things we don't know that get us in trouble, it's the things we know that aren't so.
Based on your description, I believe you mean the novel (by Arthur C. Clarke & Stephen Baxter) rather than the story of the same name by Bob Shaw...
And yes, I would also agree the best chance of actually passing a bill would be to tie funds to troop withdrawals ... too bad the Dems are (apparently) unable to vote their (professed) consciences. They're also way behind on the other important legislative items of the day - do you suppose it's due to the need to run for reelection/higher office? (Yeah, I am abso-goddamm-lutely looking at you, Barack & Hillary, & John too, how about you get your butts back to Washington and do the job you were hired for!)
And finally, yes, I really do think that all politicians are liars. I've done tech support for city & state governments, and spent time with a number of federal-level pols as well, and every single one of them uses the 'calculus of greatest effect' to make their decisions. You may make a perfect pitch for your special need (say, more funds for libraries) and they may tell you (and actually believe it) that they will make it happen, but 5 minutes later they will be saying the same things to the next constituent/lobbyist/newshack/whoever. The politician's stock-in-trade is their ability to make people believe they care about your problems. It doesn't mean that they are bad people, but it does mean you should never believe they will follow-thru until you actually see it happen.
As the saying goes, an honest politician is one who stays bought. True enough for government work, no?
Again, as has been said here before, it's not enough to fix a single aspect of the publishing problem, your solution has to be hugely better to have any hope of replacing the current paradigm. You want a revolution in publishing, you gotta change^H^H^H^H^Himprove everything.
Before Drop Bears but after Hodags ... Drop Bears only fall down on you, while the wily Hodag will come swinging down at any angle it wants to. They can even get you on the bounce!
IIRC Rowling took the over-zealous fan to court because he took it upon himself to write up a compedium on her work based on his understanding of it. Not a new thing in the bunch, just an encyclopedic work of characters and places he had no part in creating ... AND did so without asking, AND assumed that this would be just fine with her. That guy didn't "borrow" the plot, as described so creatively, he "borrowed" the characters, places, events, and story, chopped it neatly into bits, and attempted to pass off the re-packaging of her time-and-effort as a new work created by him.
I can only hope that when the slashdotting of the Card article passes, and I finally get to read it, he won't come across as a big tool, which he does now based on the above.
My dad worked hard all his life and was able to retire early ... and died 3 years later of pancreatic cancer. I for one am glad he got some time to do what he wanted (he was a month away from going out on the Senior Tour when diagnosed), and the lesson I take from the experience is "don't wait till someday to enjoy life, cause someday may never come."
Find work you don't hate, put in the hours you need to and no more and find your fun and fulfillment outside the workplace - you'll have a much better time, and your family will appreciate the focus being "with them" and not "at work".
Thanks for making me shoot coffee out my nose and all over my monitor, lich. You deserve mod points or a beating - or both.
WTF, Batman?! If we've done this one already, and you know that well enough to put it in the initial summary, then what's the frackin point? Since when did "piling-on" become "News That Matters?"