Blimps like this were used with some success during WWII.
They are excellent at providing a low observablility obstacle capable of ripping the wings off unsuspecting aircraft.
I for one am excited by this important new program that will enable to government to more successfully spy on itself, and see no possibility for mass carnage when an unsuspecting A380 crashing into downtown Baltimore. And besides, in that edge case it will help Boeing sales - an important national agenda item. Played with proper plausible deniability it might even lead to baggage-less, nude flying. This will greatly reduce aircraft gate times, and increase TSA worker morale.
Win-Win-Win. Yeah, I'm liking this plan more and more!
That's the lie that Dow Chemical used to shut down competition when their Freon patents were expiring. Don't battle the government. Just tell them an implausible but unverifiable story, that conveniently vastly increases their regulatory power. Then sit back and let International Treaties to save the environment fill your bank account.
So, Mozilla is just like the country that spawned it: A hypocrite and a bully that does not have the approval of it's constituents/employees. That seems all too believable.
Like others have said people will buy the cheaper product irrespective of ANYTHING else - aka The First Law of Walmart.
But if the SEC is going to make a stink about it the easy solution is to not be listed on an American Stock Exchange. It's funny really. We sent every job overseas so we could become the "Financial Center". Now we are going to drive finance offshore too. People, especially the US Government fails to realize that there are other countries on this planet, and not all of them like being our sheep.
I seriously doubt Ford is alone, unique, or even special. On-Star has been spying on everyone for > 10 years. Remember that gangster they prosecuted after having On-Star bug his car. Technically they had a warrant and all but that decreases the creepy factor exactly none!
I expect the short term to see a big rise in casual car modding to disable these devices - everything from simple breaking to special modules to feed the thrice damned spy whatever it needs to hear to keep the engine running (like yes I drove 40,000 miles circling the Ford Corporate headquarters).
OF COURSE government is probably already collecting this data but regardless of promises, executive orders, laws, or international treaties that will continue unabated. If you think otherwise you really have learned nothing at all from history. And where one group of "legal" criminals go the "illegal" ones will soon follow. I don't see a commercial model for a product to stalk your girlfriend, but that doesn't mean it won't be done. How about real time tracking for the people who make the bank deposits? I'm not criminally minded enough to come up with a good use case, but the ONLY way to prevent abuse is to NOT collect the data AT ALL!!!!! If you collect it someone, someday, somehow will use it to harm others.
Want to bet the NSA Hoover didn't pull in ALL the evidence that global warming / climate change is an out and out fraud - complete with names, dates, and DOLLAR Amounts? Seriously if they can hack North Korean nuclear weapons data I think they can stumble upon a global conspiracy by thousands of ass hats that all think they are too smart to get caught.
For example, it's difficult now to have the sort of VIC-20, Commodore-64 or Apple II experience that inspired well know programmers like Linus Torvalds and many others to become interested in computing and programming at an early age.
Not true. It is still just as easy to have that experience on a windows, Linux, or even apple PC. What your statement fails to acknowledge is the "glitz component". Linus even today doesn't get involved in the KDE vs gnome vs xfc etc pissing contests. The core of install the GCC compiler and start coding is alive, well and actually more accessible than ever. But kids don't want to create lamba functions, they want wiz bang spinning flaming logos that play music -- well that's not really programming. That is scripting and component assembly.
I freely admit I SUCK at web design. But few web designers can code either. They are different skills used for different jobs. The public just doesn't understand the difference because they both happen inside the black box.
Ultimately I think this effort is a negative. It will generate even more people who know just enough to be dangerous, most of which will go on to get MBAs and lord over future programmers telling them how easy their job is and they were doing this stuff when they were 10; never knowing, or caring, how completely ignorant they really are.
If you give people your data you can't really complain when they use it. I (almost) never use free wi-fi without firing up my VPN.
After putting way more effort into it than I normally do for such things I ended up with iVPN. Very happy with them. (no it's not a commercial and I have no interest blah blah blah, but there are dozens of companies and most of them are total crap. So this is my a public service advice).
My greatest fear is that these politically powerful fools will one day hurt our defense posture so mortally that we will come under nuclear attack. I am not sure that's not what they actually want. They despise all human life. Which is just disgusting.
I honestly don't get it. Couldn't a proper service generate key pairs on the user's device and then just charge (or not if you prefer) for KB transmitted. The recipient has the private key to decrypt it. Or not. If you show up with a search warrant (or a gun) I give you the encrypted data and wish you a happy summer decyrpting it. Problem solved - as much as it will ever be solved in an open network where messages are not transported by human couriers. Yes given time and resources anything can be broken - for certain. But fishing expeditions or general ill will become prohibitively expensive. ALL resources are finite.
"You want to improve things, it's not by going back to old teaching methods, it's by allowing teachers to teach thinking again and not by forcing them to be pawns in the organized "sheltering of young minds" that the administrations seem to be all too happy to go along with."
Everything you say is true, but the problem is much more pervasive than you imply. The next level of the problem is that a huge percentage the teachers themselves have now grown up in this environment. Therefore they cannot be expected to lead any grand turnaround. Just like this story itself, the adults are just older victims of the same disease.
Finally one must not fall into the erroneous belief that the system is broken. The system is actually working exactly as its creators have intended. The solution then becomes to remove its creators from the equation. That is politically impossible within the comfortable little fantasy in which people live. All this means the problem will get much much worse before the laws of physics step in for a massive reset. It is noteworthy that after the fall of the Roman Empire it took quite some time (1000 years) for things to actually improve.
All I can add is that by declaring a blatantly Unconstitutional act legal you cheapen the definition of both the term "legal" and the value of having a Constitution.
Be careful what rights you give away. One day your children will bleed to get them back.
This reminds me of those Head First books that were all the rage a while back. It is an interesting approach. And learning doesn't have to be painful. But there is a thick gray line between stoic and ADD. I think the trick is staying in that area. Also we have to consider that for a lot of programming -- the part that thinks it is more like engineering and less like painting - a certain degree of maturity is a prerequisite. So we shouldn't make programming childish thereby completely alienating the people who will design the important stuff like controlling the electric grid or Martian probes. It would suck to have a 20 hour blackout or lose a 5 billion dollar probe just because someone didn't feel like checking a return code.
Still it takes all kinds. I suspect the guys who wrote the SCADA software would never have come up with Angry Birds. But I don't necessarily want the ROVIO guys controlling the nuclear power plant up the road. So once again, all things in moderation.
It never ceases to amaze and depress me that otherwise seemingly intelligent people are mortified by the big bag nuclear boogie man. There is nothing magical about these weapons. Just like every weapon since the wooden club they have strengths and weaknesses. For some objectives they are ideal, for others completely ineffective.
Every one ever built detonated all at once is not remotely capable of destroying the planet or wiping out all human life. Just NO OK? You're 10 orders of magnitude short of that threshold -- in reality it is probably completely unobtainable with these weapons PERIOD. You can certainly destroy a city. You can disrupt a country and international commerce for years to come. But destroy all life? Crack the planet open? Please, you make yourself sound like a uneducated savage worshiping the man with the fire stick.
What they ARE capable of and why the media and politicians are universally TERRIFIED of them is because they are uniquely capable of upsetting the historic definition of war. That is: "War is old men talking and young men dying".
War is a lot less fun when it is something other than sending politically impotent people's children to die in some God forsaken hell hole on the other side of the world. This is the only explanation I can find for the the Nuclear Hysteria. An ICBM can bring the war to Harry Reid, John Boehner and Rupert Murdoch's back yards. But the war it brings isn't really any different than the war bomb laden B-52s have been bringing to targets for decades. Note that I'm not judging those conflicts, just observing to the dead people it doesn't matter very damn much what killed them.
I'm just pointing out that our allegedly "humane" wars about which we lie to ourselves that only the bad guys are killed are all a politically correct illusion. Nuclear weapons make that illusion fairly impossible to maintain. A society has to do some actual soul searching (assuming they can even find its soul under the recordings of reality TV) and decide emphatically YES This Cause is worth risking our lives for, and it is worth killing so many women and children that we can no longer pretend it didn't happen.
In the end nuclear weapons are probably the most humane military instrument ever devised. Depending on exactly how evolved your sense of "humanity" is of course.
I don't care enough to look up the specific numbers but I must observe that they are taking a single measurement, which is known to have traveled over just about every single point on the globe at one time or another, and assigning its entire variation to their pet agenda.
The two things that spring to mind immediately are the Pacific volcano a couple decades ago and the Japanese earthquake, both of which were reported to have permanently (to the limit of our near nonexistent understanding) changed the Earth's very orbit itself.
So forgive me if I am more than a whole lot skeptical of their childishly simple cause = effect assumption. There are literally hundreds of thousands of inputs we know of their model likely omits and probably millions we don't even know about.
This is yet another "Measure with a micrometer, mark with chalk, cut with ax" story.
There is a really simple solution to this. DO NOT BUY ANYTHING FROM SONY. Complain to magazines and web sites that review their stuff. If they ignore you then boycott that site / mag too.
DONE.
Don't bitch and whine about it. Don't wave your arms and scream it's unconstitutional while you stand in line to fork over $75.00 for the latest repackage of the same game you've already played 50 times. Just Freaking walk away! People really fail to grasp this. Don't bother to pirate their stuff. Sure this can be broken - but why? Treat them like they don't exist. Honest you WILL live without Sony. But Sony will NOT live without customers. Then if this actually matters to enough people Sony will become a responsible corporation and behave in polite society. If not then you will have taken the moral high ground anyway, and probably given your money to a responsible studio that doesn't treat its paying customers as mortal enemies. Had you rather be on the side of good - or play Killzone 15? Free choice. It cuts both ways.
If you want to be honest and fair there is no issue. You might want to feel persecuted. You might want to disenfranchise a particular group. But all of this has a simple solution that is beyond possible contest. NOTE: That doesn't mean that it would stop the arguments. Because fundamentally an enormous swath of the people do not wish to be fair or honest.
The simple solution? A state government issued photo id with your voter registration number on it. Simple. Maybe you accept a state ID, a driver's license, a passport, or a concealed carry permit for that matter. OR maybe you make every person drag their ass down once in their ever so busy life and stand in line for a VOTER ID card. But SOMETHING that proves you are an American citizen that has at one point had some passing interest in governance and society. I unequivocally reject the notion that voting should be a "Zero Investment Activity". If you want a say in how the country, and thereby very much the world, runs it is NOT too much to ask that you show the barest sliver of interest and forethought. Frankly if someone has to tackle you outside a shopping mall and beg you to fill out the form - I do NOT want you influencing the course of civilization.
I will admit to an anti-liberal leaning. I say that because I'm not much happier with those calling themselves conservatives. But I have not seen a single proposal that was aimed, or could even be used for, anything other than curbing voter fraud. I do not understand why everyone is not 100% behind this. The only possible benefactors I can see from this fraud is allowing illegal aliens to vote. And yes I refuse to call them undocumented non-citizen guest residents.
Just organized -crime- ah make that organized labor flexing it's political might. Nothing really to see here. Minnesota has long had a uniquely perverse relationship with higher education. It's not surprising that the do nothing administrators and do little teachers would instruct their minions in government to issue this edict. I'm sure without federal preemption they'd force ISPs to block this invasion of their fiefdom.
Very likely not true. When one company buys another they take on all liabilities (like long term contracts and loans) as well as all assets (like cash and computers). I don't know, or particularly care, if Joyent is a different corporation or if textdrive just changed their name. But conceptually it doesn't actually matter.
In practice of course you ALL the rights you can afford to prosecute in court. And NO others.
Before an Indian rocket goes to Mars it might be helpful if they, you know, built one? Last I heard, and a brief Google search doesn't seem to show any new progress, they were still using Russian engines on their cryogenic upper state. This was because they've been trying for 20 years to build a working engine, apparently without any measurable success at all. Somehow buying a Proton and trucking it to an Indian launch pad isn't quite the same as "an Indian rocket". Here is the link to last time I heard of actual hardware leaving the ground.
Slashdot Mirror
Blimps like this were used with some success during WWII.
They are excellent at providing a low observablility obstacle capable of ripping the wings off unsuspecting aircraft.
I for one am excited by this important new program that will enable to government to more successfully spy on itself, and see no possibility for mass carnage when an unsuspecting A380 crashing into downtown Baltimore. And besides, in that edge case it will help Boeing sales - an important national agenda item. Played with proper plausible deniability it might even lead to baggage-less, nude flying. This will greatly reduce aircraft gate times, and increase TSA worker morale.
Win-Win-Win. Yeah, I'm liking this plan more and more!
That's the lie that Dow Chemical used to shut down competition when their Freon patents were expiring. Don't battle the government. Just tell them an implausible but unverifiable story, that conveniently vastly increases their regulatory power. Then sit back and let International Treaties to save the environment fill your bank account.
Crony Capitalism FTW!!
So, Mozilla is just like the country that spawned it: A hypocrite and a bully that does not have the approval of it's constituents/employees. That seems all too believable.
But if the SEC is going to make a stink about it the easy solution is to not be listed on an American Stock Exchange. It's funny really. We sent every job overseas so we could become the "Financial Center". Now we are going to drive finance offshore too. People, especially the US Government fails to realize that there are other countries on this planet, and not all of them like being our sheep.
I expect the short term to see a big rise in casual car modding to disable these devices - everything from simple breaking to special modules to feed the thrice damned spy whatever it needs to hear to keep the engine running (like yes I drove 40,000 miles circling the Ford Corporate headquarters).
OF COURSE government is probably already collecting this data but regardless of promises, executive orders, laws, or international treaties that will continue unabated. If you think otherwise you really have learned nothing at all from history. And where one group of "legal" criminals go the "illegal" ones will soon follow. I don't see a commercial model for a product to stalk your girlfriend, but that doesn't mean it won't be done. How about real time tracking for the people who make the bank deposits? I'm not criminally minded enough to come up with a good use case, but the ONLY way to prevent abuse is to NOT collect the data AT ALL!!!!! If you collect it someone, someday, somehow will use it to harm others.
Want to bet the NSA Hoover didn't pull in ALL the evidence that global warming / climate change is an out and out fraud - complete with names, dates, and DOLLAR Amounts? Seriously if they can hack North Korean nuclear weapons data I think they can stumble upon a global conspiracy by thousands of ass hats that all think they are too smart to get caught.
For example, it's difficult now to have the sort of VIC-20, Commodore-64 or Apple II experience that inspired well know programmers like Linus Torvalds and many others to become interested in computing and programming at an early age.
Not true. It is still just as easy to have that experience on a windows, Linux, or even apple PC. What your statement fails to acknowledge is the "glitz component". Linus even today doesn't get involved in the KDE vs gnome vs xfc etc pissing contests. The core of install the GCC compiler and start coding is alive, well and actually more accessible than ever. But kids don't want to create lamba functions, they want wiz bang spinning flaming logos that play music -- well that's not really programming. That is scripting and component assembly.
I freely admit I SUCK at web design. But few web designers can code either. They are different skills used for different jobs. The public just doesn't understand the difference because they both happen inside the black box.
Ultimately I think this effort is a negative. It will generate even more people who know just enough to be dangerous, most of which will go on to get MBAs and lord over future programmers telling them how easy their job is and they were doing this stuff when they were 10; never knowing, or caring, how completely ignorant they really are.
After putting way more effort into it than I normally do for such things I ended up with iVPN. Very happy with them. (no it's not a commercial and I have no interest blah blah blah, but there are dozens of companies and most of them are total crap. So this is my a public service advice).
My greatest fear is that these politically powerful fools will one day hurt our defense posture so mortally that we will come under nuclear attack. I am not sure that's not what they actually want. They despise all human life. Which is just disgusting.
I honestly don't get it. Couldn't a proper service generate key pairs on the user's device and then just charge (or not if you prefer) for KB transmitted. The recipient has the private key to decrypt it. Or not. If you show up with a search warrant (or a gun) I give you the encrypted data and wish you a happy summer decyrpting it. Problem solved - as much as it will ever be solved in an open network where messages are not transported by human couriers. Yes given time and resources anything can be broken - for certain. But fishing expeditions or general ill will become prohibitively expensive. ALL resources are finite.
Everything you say is true, but the problem is much more pervasive than you imply. The next level of the problem is that a huge percentage the teachers themselves have now grown up in this environment. Therefore they cannot be expected to lead any grand turnaround. Just like this story itself, the adults are just older victims of the same disease.
Finally one must not fall into the erroneous belief that the system is broken. The system is actually working exactly as its creators have intended. The solution then becomes to remove its creators from the equation. That is politically impossible within the comfortable little fantasy in which people live. All this means the problem will get much much worse before the laws of physics step in for a massive reset. It is noteworthy that after the fall of the Roman Empire it took quite some time (1000 years) for things to actually improve.
Be careful what rights you give away. One day your children will bleed to get them back.
This reminds me of those Head First books that were all the rage a while back. It is an interesting approach. And learning doesn't have to be painful. But there is a thick gray line between stoic and ADD. I think the trick is staying in that area. Also we have to consider that for a lot of programming -- the part that thinks it is more like engineering and less like painting - a certain degree of maturity is a prerequisite. So we shouldn't make programming childish thereby completely alienating the people who will design the important stuff like controlling the electric grid or Martian probes. It would suck to have a 20 hour blackout or lose a 5 billion dollar probe just because someone didn't feel like checking a return code. Still it takes all kinds. I suspect the guys who wrote the SCADA software would never have come up with Angry Birds. But I don't necessarily want the ROVIO guys controlling the nuclear power plant up the road. So once again, all things in moderation.
Every one ever built detonated all at once is not remotely capable of destroying the planet or wiping out all human life. Just NO OK? You're 10 orders of magnitude short of that threshold -- in reality it is probably completely unobtainable with these weapons PERIOD. You can certainly destroy a city. You can disrupt a country and international commerce for years to come. But destroy all life? Crack the planet open? Please, you make yourself sound like a uneducated savage worshiping the man with the fire stick.
What they ARE capable of and why the media and politicians are universally TERRIFIED of them is because they are uniquely capable of upsetting the historic definition of war. That is: "War is old men talking and young men dying".
War is a lot less fun when it is something other than sending politically impotent people's children to die in some God forsaken hell hole on the other side of the world. This is the only explanation I can find for the the Nuclear Hysteria. An ICBM can bring the war to Harry Reid, John Boehner and Rupert Murdoch's back yards. But the war it brings isn't really any different than the war bomb laden B-52s have been bringing to targets for decades. Note that I'm not judging those conflicts, just observing to the dead people it doesn't matter very damn much what killed them.
I'm just pointing out that our allegedly "humane" wars about which we lie to ourselves that only the bad guys are killed are all a politically correct illusion. Nuclear weapons make that illusion fairly impossible to maintain. A society has to do some actual soul searching (assuming they can even find its soul under the recordings of reality TV) and decide emphatically YES This Cause is worth risking our lives for, and it is worth killing so many women and children that we can no longer pretend it didn't happen.
In the end nuclear weapons are probably the most humane military instrument ever devised. Depending on exactly how evolved your sense of "humanity" is of course.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Taste_of_Armageddon
The two things that spring to mind immediately are the Pacific volcano a couple decades ago and the Japanese earthquake, both of which were reported to have permanently (to the limit of our near nonexistent understanding) changed the Earth's very orbit itself.
So forgive me if I am more than a whole lot skeptical of their childishly simple cause = effect assumption. There are literally hundreds of thousands of inputs we know of their model likely omits and probably millions we don't even know about.
This is yet another "Measure with a micrometer, mark with chalk, cut with ax" story.
There is a really simple solution to this. DO NOT BUY ANYTHING FROM SONY. Complain to magazines and web sites that review their stuff. If they ignore you then boycott that site / mag too. DONE. Don't bitch and whine about it. Don't wave your arms and scream it's unconstitutional while you stand in line to fork over $75.00 for the latest repackage of the same game you've already played 50 times. Just Freaking walk away! People really fail to grasp this. Don't bother to pirate their stuff. Sure this can be broken - but why? Treat them like they don't exist. Honest you WILL live without Sony. But Sony will NOT live without customers. Then if this actually matters to enough people Sony will become a responsible corporation and behave in polite society. If not then you will have taken the moral high ground anyway, and probably given your money to a responsible studio that doesn't treat its paying customers as mortal enemies. Had you rather be on the side of good - or play Killzone 15? Free choice. It cuts both ways.
The simple solution? A state government issued photo id with your voter registration number on it. Simple. Maybe you accept a state ID, a driver's license, a passport, or a concealed carry permit for that matter. OR maybe you make every person drag their ass down once in their ever so busy life and stand in line for a VOTER ID card. But SOMETHING that proves you are an American citizen that has at one point had some passing interest in governance and society. I unequivocally reject the notion that voting should be a "Zero Investment Activity". If you want a say in how the country, and thereby very much the world, runs it is NOT too much to ask that you show the barest sliver of interest and forethought. Frankly if someone has to tackle you outside a shopping mall and beg you to fill out the form - I do NOT want you influencing the course of civilization.
I will admit to an anti-liberal leaning. I say that because I'm not much happier with those calling themselves conservatives. But I have not seen a single proposal that was aimed, or could even be used for, anything other than curbing voter fraud. I do not understand why everyone is not 100% behind this. The only possible benefactors I can see from this fraud is allowing illegal aliens to vote. And yes I refuse to call them undocumented non-citizen guest residents.
Just organized -crime- ah make that organized labor flexing it's political might. Nothing really to see here. Minnesota has long had a uniquely perverse relationship with higher education. It's not surprising that the do nothing administrators and do little teachers would instruct their minions in government to issue this edict. I'm sure without federal preemption they'd force ISPs to block this invasion of their fiefdom.
Very likely not true. When one company buys another they take on all liabilities (like long term contracts and loans) as well as all assets (like cash and computers). I don't know, or particularly care, if Joyent is a different corporation or if textdrive just changed their name. But conceptually it doesn't actually matter. In practice of course you ALL the rights you can afford to prosecute in court. And NO others.
Before an Indian rocket goes to Mars it might be helpful if they, you know, built one? Last I heard, and a brief Google search doesn't seem to show any new progress, they were still using Russian engines on their cryogenic upper state. This was because they've been trying for 20 years to build a working engine, apparently without any measurable success at all. Somehow buying a Proton and trucking it to an Indian launch pad isn't quite the same as "an Indian rocket". Here is the link to last time I heard of actual hardware leaving the ground.