Every penny the feds spend on maintaining secrecy is a penny wasted. There is not one thing that the feds do that they should be doing that they couldn't do in an above board way.
Improving their IT infrastructure will never hit all the spots they want it to, and will only prove to be a further mask for their incompetence, similiar to the "training" excuse. "Well, we couldn't make the software work, so all that stuff we've been working on was a waste of time." How many ten year plans do they have to mess up before they look for fresh solutions and stop looking for a bigger hammer. They can't use the hammers they have properly, what makes anybody think this is going to get better? God help us all if these guys actually get their act together, their idea of efficiency is a horror show of secrets and silence punctuating circumventions of the law in the name of "good."
Imagine you're a fed. Imagine you're stationed in Boston. You spend 99.9% of your time looking into student idiocies which amount to zip. Once in a blue moon, several things come together to make you think, one of these kids is getting serious about a revolution. Wouldn't you pay him a visit? It wasn't a SWAT team that showed up. Pull that in SLC and I bet the SAC would show up and give you a body cavity search. I personally believe that all of this security is useless, that the nuts that do these horrible things are spread so thin that it will only ever be random chance that they'll catch one that has a brain at all. So why do we spend billions of dollars when it's all just a crap shoot anyway? Well, guess who gets the money!
What alarms me even more than this blatant corruption is the number of bad cops that end up being produced by this unattainable "perfect security." Recent example- Everyone on the plane has been cleared, the luggage has been screened. Some guy starts screaming he has a bomb while a female companion starts screaming he's bipolar and off his meds. What kind of cop thinks, "All the systems have failed and I have to put a bullet in this guy to save everyone?" Not a good one. The training is set up the way it is so that bad policemen can make bad calls and it's ok because that's the way they were trained. The Air Marshalls can say the guys were following training, but that training sucks if they start shooting passengers because they didn't get their meds today. Seriously, when all of this stuff is going on I don't want Dirty Harry or John McClane protecting me, I want freaking Andy Taylor.
Free trade is called anarchy, no matter what conservative wonks like to say. Trade throughout history has been regulated, ceasing regulation of industry only serves to create a chaos in which the mightiest prey on the weak. Historically even this sort of prey/victim relationship has some controls which we see reflected in class and caste systems.
If you want things to improve worldwide, you set standards for your trading partners. If we all want the US standard of living, the US must only trade with nations where they enjoy a similar standard of living, otherwise it's just a race to the bottom. The current political environment makes this impossible, no one on any part of the political spectrum is pounding this drum in the US. But, if we don't want to see the American economy dissolve into banana republicanism, we must expect and enforce higher standards of living for the workers of our trading partners. That is the only time US workers will look like a better deal.
Europe is doing a good job of this for us to a certain extent by regulating work environment conditions (particularly toxins) in products sold in the EU.
How dare these religious fanatics disparage my ancestors! It's like saying that slaves from Africa contributed nothing to american culture. My ancestors were amphibious, it's in the science! It's like saying babies come from storks, and pig ignorant. How anyone can get a PhD and stand opposed to science boggles my mind.
There are 3 management styles. 1) Parenting 2) Team Captain 3) Locutus-style (which you've tried.)
The easiest is probably parenting, since there are cognitive hooks that we all have that you can take advantage of. There are upsides and downsides to each. If you don't have the age and experience necessary to create the meme-dynamic in your group that you are the dad/mom, or if your crew is a bunch of head cases with parent issues that make this style of management impractical, the best over-all style is team captain. All the florid books about being truthful, honest, having integrity and confidence enough in oneself to manage people are true but also 99% fecal matter because you can break every rule in all those books and still be a great manager. Good Team Captains have charisma. Hopefully you rolled high enough at the beginning of your game that you are now a good match for management. At the master level of management you realize that each of these styles have applications in one way or another with the broad variety of persons you may work with. Some people need Locutus, some people need Ward Cleaver, and some people need Mike Eruzione.
Re:If they have skills, they'll find jobs in NoVA
on
Massive Layoffs At AOL
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· Score: 1
Really a security clearance is key.
VHS going going gone, and now a /. article
on
The VHS is Dead
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· Score: 2, Interesting
When my wife and I moved to Wash. DC Our moving company stole our VCR. Insured at $350 bought 12 years ago, the company paid to replace it at retail. We still had the receipt (yes we're that crazy.) We bought what we call the uber-VCR 5 years ago. Look at http://www.sonystyle.com/is-bin/INTERSHOP.enfinity/eCS/Store/en/-/USD/SY_BrowseCatalog-Start?Categor yName=hav_VHSVCR&Dept=havsony now and all they offer is combo DVD players and none over $170. Clearly money is no longer being made by VHS recorders, and the last gasp already occurred. Now if you want a record player you might as well make your own since the cost is just crazy now after an insane dip as producers changed over to CD players.
I also worked for Hollywood Video, and unless their store is by a trailer park, they're not renting VHS tapes anymore.
I have a family and while I would love to protest the treatment of our civil liberties by this administration, in this environment where police feel they have carte blanche to arrest or detain someone for several days without judicial review, I can't take a chance that I might be locked up. It's wrong. Everything about it is wrong, and the attitudes trumpeted by the right reflect quite chillingly those of the Nazis, down to their exagerrated proclamations of victory and silencing of dissent through intimidation.
Soon we will all be augmented by our extra brain bags! Organic computers in a purse that we either wear or have implanted in our abdomens. I can't wait for the beta test.
This is a symptom of a meme virus. There's a CERN article on this, someone else will have to look up the link. First do a back up. Carefully de- and then re-encephelate.
Slashdot Mirror
Statistically, you're likely to finish grad school when SC 3 comes out.
i rements_for_completion_3
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graduate_school#Requ
Every penny the feds spend on maintaining secrecy is a penny wasted. There is not one thing that the feds do that they should be doing that they couldn't do in an above board way.
Improving their IT infrastructure will never hit all the spots they want it to, and will only prove to be a further mask for their incompetence, similiar to the "training" excuse. "Well, we couldn't make the software work, so all that stuff we've been working on was a waste of time." How many ten year plans do they have to mess up before they look for fresh solutions and stop looking for a bigger hammer.
They can't use the hammers they have properly, what makes anybody think this is going to get better?
God help us all if these guys actually get their act together, their idea of efficiency is a horror show of secrets and silence punctuating circumventions of the law in the name of "good."
Imagine you're a fed.
Imagine you're stationed in Boston.
You spend 99.9% of your time looking into student idiocies which amount to zip. Once in a blue moon, several things come together to make you think, one of these kids is getting serious about a revolution. Wouldn't you pay him a visit? It wasn't a SWAT team that showed up.
Pull that in SLC and I bet the SAC would show up and give you a body cavity search.
I personally believe that all of this security is useless, that the nuts that do these horrible things are spread so thin that it will only ever be random chance that they'll catch one that has a brain at all. So why do we spend billions of dollars when it's all just a crap shoot anyway?
Well, guess who gets the money!
What alarms me even more than this blatant corruption is the number of bad cops that end up being produced by this unattainable "perfect security." Recent example- Everyone on the plane has been cleared, the luggage has been screened. Some guy starts screaming he has a bomb while a female companion starts screaming he's bipolar and off his meds. What kind of cop thinks, "All the systems have failed and I have to put a bullet in this guy to save everyone?" Not a good one. The training is set up the way it is so that bad policemen can make bad calls and it's ok because that's the way they were trained.
The Air Marshalls can say the guys were following training, but that training sucks if they start shooting passengers because they didn't get their meds today.
Seriously, when all of this stuff is going on I don't want Dirty Harry or John McClane protecting me, I want freaking Andy Taylor.
Free trade is called anarchy, no matter what conservative wonks like to say. Trade throughout history has been regulated, ceasing regulation of industry only serves to create a chaos in which the mightiest prey on the weak. Historically even this sort of prey/victim relationship has some controls which we see reflected in class and caste systems.
If you want things to improve worldwide, you set standards for your trading partners. If we all want the US standard of living, the US must only trade with nations where they enjoy a similar standard of living, otherwise it's just a race to the bottom. The current political environment makes this impossible, no one on any part of the political spectrum is pounding this drum in the US. But, if we don't want to see the American economy dissolve into banana republicanism, we must expect and enforce higher standards of living for the workers of our trading partners. That is the only time US workers will look like a better deal.
Europe is doing a good job of this for us to a certain extent by regulating work environment conditions (particularly toxins) in products sold in the EU.
How dare these religious fanatics disparage my ancestors! It's like saying that slaves from Africa contributed nothing to american culture. My ancestors were amphibious, it's in the science! It's like saying babies come from storks, and pig ignorant. How anyone can get a PhD and stand opposed to science boggles my mind.
There are 3 management styles.
1) Parenting
2) Team Captain
3) Locutus-style (which you've tried.)
The easiest is probably parenting, since there are cognitive hooks that we all have that you can take advantage of. There are upsides and downsides to each. If you don't have the age and experience necessary to create the meme-dynamic in your group that you are the dad/mom, or if your crew is a bunch of head cases with parent issues that make this style of management impractical, the best over-all style is team captain.
All the florid books about being truthful, honest, having integrity and confidence enough in oneself to manage people are true but also 99% fecal matter because you can break every rule in all those books and still be a great manager.
Good Team Captains have charisma. Hopefully you rolled high enough at the beginning of your game that you are now a good match for management.
At the master level of management you realize that each of these styles have applications in one way or another with the broad variety of persons you may work with. Some people need Locutus, some people need Ward Cleaver, and some people need Mike Eruzione.
Really a security clearance is key.
When my wife and I moved to Wash. DC Our moving company stole our VCR. Insured at $350 bought 12 years ago, the company paid to replace it at retail. We still had the receipt (yes we're that crazy.) We bought what we call the uber-VCR 5 years ago. Look at http://www.sonystyle.com/is-bin/INTERSHOP.enfinity /eCS/Store/en/-/USD/SY_BrowseCatalog-Start?Categor yName=hav_VHSVCR&Dept=havsony now and all they offer is combo DVD players and none over $170. Clearly money is no longer being made by VHS recorders, and the last gasp already occurred. Now if you want a record player you might as well make your own since the cost is just crazy now after an insane dip as producers changed over to CD players.
I also worked for Hollywood Video, and unless their store is by a trailer park, they're not renting VHS tapes anymore.
Only robots will have shotguns.
Ashcroft has used the Patriot Act to detain 5000 people, used secret detentions so that many of these people are just missing to their families. (link requires subscription)
I have a family and while I would love to protest the treatment of our civil liberties by this administration, in this environment where police feel they have carte blanche to arrest or detain someone for several days without judicial review, I can't take a chance that I might be locked up. It's wrong. Everything about it is wrong, and the attitudes trumpeted by the right reflect quite chillingly those of the Nazis, down to their exagerrated proclamations of victory and silencing of dissent through intimidation.
Soon we will all be augmented by our extra brain bags! Organic computers in a purse that we either wear or have implanted in our abdomens. I can't wait for the beta test.
This is a symptom of a meme virus. There's a CERN article on this, someone else will have to look up the link. First do a back up. Carefully de- and then re-encephelate.
Only the person with the most money will be able to hold the domain in any legal kerfuffle. Look at what happened to etoys.com.
Couldn't we do something like this with dirigibles and x-ray lasers? I thought everyone was moving away from wires?
No I'm not advertising SkyCaptain and the World of Tomorrow.
He said "s/he/it" hehe.
Move to Montana.
Build a shed.
Write letters to every cabal that has wronged you.
Simmer.
You'll know what to do next, snowflake.