To actually be arrested and prosecuted for a crime over such a refusal is new... Should we begin divesting from Canada's corporations?
Did you know that in America they can, and do, the exact same fucking thing?
You want to fix this? Take it up with the governments and corporations who make up the New World Order. The rest of society apparently doesn't get a vote on the topic.
Your rank and file Canadian has no more ability to do anything about this than your average American or Israeli.
But if your government is one of the ones doing this crap... then shout about that first. And if you're cheering when your government does it to people from other countries.. then STFU and stop pretending to be superior.
Sadly, I fear governments, security, and borders are increasingly becoming more and more draconian and acting like police states. Which means most governments are being ran by assholes and shortsighted morons.
Well, and the thing to remember is you have no idea what actually happens when you press a button.
Have you been connected to a pay for call service? Have they confirmed your phone number is valid? There are examples of people pressing "1" only to find a line item on their phone bill the next month.
Honestly, the best solution I've found is to buy phones which can be programmed to block certain calls (like callers with Unknown/Private numbers). After that, I simply don't answer calls from area codes I don't recognize or from 800 numbers.
It has reached the point where 99% of all incoming calls are purely spam and scams, which means the default position is to assume when the phone rings it's just crap.. if it's important, well, that's what answering machines are for.
There are technical means that could be employed, but the lobbyists for the assholes who make their money from call centers have made sure that caller Id spoofing is legal to support their business model -- but this has the effect of meaning it is impossible to know who the hell is actually calling you.
Just remember, it's the exemptions for business who claim their free speech rights are being violated if they aren't allowed to call you are the ones who paid your politicians for exemptions.
And then stop answering the phone unless you recognize the caller.
Bigger areas for button presses, charms, bigger hit boxes and all that stuff, and you know what? Good for them, I hope they keep going in that direction.
See, when confronted with that GUI on a non-touch screen 23" monitor, in which clicking on the big giant idiot button causes something to open up on the bottom right corner of the screen so that I have to move my mouse back across the screen in order to click what should have been where I clicked... just fucking no.
The Metro UI paradigm is largely useless on a standard monitor, mouse, and keyboard layout. Which what my desktop is used with.
but your view of "tablet = bad" is ignoring the realities of where the market is heading
While inarguably people are buying tablets, not all computers are tablets, nor do all tasks benefit from tablet interfaces... and an old fashioned desktop machine does not benefit from Metro.
Certainly the flashing dynamic desktop paradigm is as annoying as ads to me, and I do not WANT any of that animated eye candy. And I know from experience it's both security and privacy holes waiting to happen. They have twice now had to abandon live desktop content because it was insecure. Why should I trust this stuff?
Don't get me wrong, once I no longer had to look at any of the Romper Room crap for 99% of my tasks, I'm happy with the OS. So far it's stable and quick... but essentially it now looks like Windows 2003 or Windows 7 or even Vista once you turn the crud off.
Guess what, your spreadsheets still work, so does Visual studio, but I can now use the system using a touch interface too, is that so bad?
You know, once again, these are not things I do on tablets. A tablet isn't where I go to do work.
I'm lucky enough to not schlep around some monster laptop daily to to my job. A tablet for me is down-time.. it's travel, it's consuming web content, and not doing productive work.
So, here I don't want a desktop interface. I want a hammock interface. I want a plane interface. Or a hotel interface. I want the big squishy buttons.
If Microsoft would stop trying to give me a tablet interface on my desktop, and a desktop interface on my tablet... maybe they'd understand what people actually use tablets for, and what they use desktops for... and actually make the appropriate interface for the job.
Seriously? My bloody spreadsheets will work? Are you aware you're epitomizing the "I"m a PC and I'm a Mac" cliche? Because when the original iPad came out, and Google has had successful tablets... most of which are used for damned near anything but spreadsheets... nobody was using it for spreadsheets. Not even a little.
The people who are going almost entirely tablet are using video conferencing, watching movies, reading eBooks, reading their email, and doing a little banking. Because normal people doing normal things on a computer pretty much do those things.
And you and Microsoft want to be sure my spreadsheets will work on my tablet? That's pathetic.
I'm looking forward to being able to use my tablet more like a PC.
I had been hoping to use my big-boy desktop workstation like a big-boy desktop workstation... instead I got some moronic marketing vision in which that isn't a conceivable thing, and that I clearly need an app for that, and have a touch screen. The Metro interface is more of a hindrance in that context. It's useless and cumbersome.
Maybe they will succeed at an environment which seamlessly does both. But so far from what I've seen they're doing a shitty job of them individually, so lucking into one combined thing which works is just not gonna happen.
Well there's an answer to that, buy a modern computer
I did buy a frickin' "modern" computer, I just didn't buy a portable or a tablet.
I bought a desktop workstation, with 8CPU cores, 16GB of RAM, and which has 6TB of disk space.
And then I had to spend hours removing a fucking romper room interface designed for a cell phone.
If I buy a tablet, I expect a tablet interface. If I buy a desktop workstation, I expect to have that, and not have to strip out the idiotic and brightly colored garbage because some moron at Microsoft has decided the whole fucking world is doing everything on tablets.
The problem is people at Microsoft are stupid enough to think that the tablet interface has any utility whatsoever in a desktop machine, and forget that MANY of us still use desktop workstations to do work... not connect to Facebook, not to share stuff on Twitter, and pretty much not a damned thing Windows 8.1 is geared towards out of the box.
Out of the box, Windows 8.1 is ahorrific mess of crap, designed for the drooling masses, and designed to be pretty and flashy, but which utterly fails to understand that essentially this is no different from the "Live Desktop" crap we were turning off a decade ago.
It's all eye candy and non substance for a desktop machine. So far, when you turn the crap off, it's a great OS. But Microsoft has no idea of what the desktop experience needs to be.
It too me a day or so to remove the crap from Windows 8.1 to make it look like an actual desktop.
So windows 10 will, what, be just as broken as the desktop was in Windows 8.1? Or it will try to suck less and be less like a tablet experience?
At this point, I'm forced to conclude (from a week or so of running my new Windows 8.1 machine) that most of the decisions Microsoft has been making indicate they no longer know how to write a UI for a desktop, and they're entirely focused on writing only stuff for tablets.
They keep betting they're going to be successful on the phone Real Soon Now... and they're so busy playing catch up they might need to worry someone is going to come out with the next new thing before they can put out a copy of what everyone else has had for years.
So the same experience on a Windows 10 phone as a desktop? That's based on giving you a crappy experience on the desktop.
Every time I see a comment like this I wonder if the person has some kind of reading comprehension problem
Funny, when I see comments like this I conclude the poster is an asshole.
There was no deficiency in the Bitcoin protocol
Speaking of reading comprehension, did I fucking suggest it was a failure in the protocol?
The problem with Bitcoin, as I see it, is it seems to bring out the stupid in people. As in people handing over virtual money, to a shady player, who is neither a bank nor operates as a bank, and isn't insured as a bank, and then are surprised to get ripped off.
It's like the people who have drank the kool-aid about bitcoin become irrational idiots who think the unicorn shit which has been smeared all over bitcoin makes it immune to this.
I don't give a crap what you do with your money. But when I see people hand wringing about losing the money they essentially gave to a shady stranger in a dark alley... I'm forced to conclude it served these people right for being idiots. Yes, the crypto worked beautifully
I don't give a crap about how wonderful the crypto is, or isn't, in bitcoin. But it seems like people using it suffer from either blind optimism, or inherent stupidity.
Which seems to be the case in all speculative markets, and very especially bitcoin, which seems to give widespread encouragement to become an idiot... either in what you do, or in how much of a drooling idiot you become on the topic.
Every time I see stories like this, I think... gee, so you entrusted millions of dollars with an entity which isn't a bank, isn't regulated as a bank, and who more or less mostly just promised they wouldn't steal your money... and somehow people are surprised by this.
On what basis, exactly, does handing strangers your money make sense when you have no legal basis to get it back?
It's hard not to see this as a self inflicted problem, and people handed sacks full of money to some guy in an alley with no receipt thinking they were investing.
Sorry, but I'm afraid this was people believing that Bitcoin was somehow magic, and that nobody would ever be a crook.
The machine doesn't just go ping. It provides information about frequency, phase, polarization, and time of flight between two points.
LOL... Temba, with his arms open!
OK, this is really big science... and I just need a few more small words...
We have two small widgets a known distance apart, these widgets are essentially fixed in place, but will wobble when acted upon by... well, obviously gravity waves.
Since there's nothing big enough to make two things that far apart wobble at the same time (short of something very kinetic, which we'd measure through several other means)..... we infer that we have measured the passage of the only phenomenon which could make out widgets wobble? Shit.
So basically a long baseline widget wobbler which weighs waves of gravity. (Assuming of course the theory is right, the engineering is right, and these events happen often enough to measure.)
That's some wacky science right there. Still not sure I got it even close.
but since all our theory and all our observation says it should be detecting them and only them, it's fairly safe to assume it's actually doing so
So, build me a fucking god detector. And when it goes off, I'm going to call bullshit like I'm calling here.
Look, I'm no physicist... but surely someone can explain how a machine that goes "ping" is proof positive that it has detected the thing it claims to be detecting, no?
It's clearly something glaringly obvious that I'm too dense to understand... but the mere fact that a machine goes "ping" doesn't mean it worked, or that it proved anything. It means people invested in saying "see, it went ping, therefore it worked" will be happy... but the rest of us aren't sure how.
So, a big giant expensive machine goes ping... and the only plausible explanation, because we have great theories and everybody did their part... is gravitational waves?
I'm aware I'm not qualified to refute that fancy physics, but it seems like there's a step in there that could use some dumbing down for the rest of us.
Because, let's face it, with a simple light switch, I can build you a bullshit detector. It's demonstrating that it actually worked, instead of just being a light switch, which is the tricky part.;-)
So can anybody better versed in the physics fill this in a little: "an ultrasensitive instrument that may soon detect ripples in space and time set off when neutron stars or black holes merge".
If the machine goes ping, we infer the machine is working perfectly, and somewhere a neutron star or black hole has merged? But you have no independent confirmation other than the machine going ping?
So, set the damned thing to go ping, and claim you've found gravitational waves... profit!!!
Seriously, I'm confused. Surely there has to be some other way to confirm the machine works than having it tell you it worked.
Civil disobedience has ALWAYS carried the potential for punishment and if you break the law to make your point that the law is unjust you should stand ready to be arrested, imprisoned and tried in court for what you choose to do.
You assume he'd get a trial which was anything other than a secret kangaroo court, operating under secret laws, and that he'd get a fair trial.
When your government has decided it doesn't give a fuck about your laws and your Constitutional rights... you don't stick around to "face the music".
The only way we'd have ever learned half as much is by him leaving.
And, curiously, the people who were breaking the fucking law in the first place have had pretty much zero repercussions.
Do you see Cheney up on charges? Or Bush? Or Obama? Or the head of the CIA?
Of course not, because those clowns are operating under a different set of laws than you and I do.
Face it, America is handling this like a banana Republic.. if the only thing the AG is promising is no death penalty, maybe the AG doesn't give a crap about the law, or the truth, just protecting the government when it shits all over the Constitution?
Face it, America is now being ran by people who don't believe the law applies to them. Which means you should be very angry with the people in power, and not enabling them to keep acting like this.
Why in Sam Hill would a user give a shit about hidden stuff?
Because it has been demonstrated for a long time that it can be dangerous to hide stuff.
So if I set something to be "malware.jpg.exe", Microsoft will present that as "malware.exe".
The act of hiding this stuff to try to make it "user friendly" leads the users to make stupid decisions.
Just like autorun, which says "I'm going to run any executable on any media which is connected to this machine".
You don't know bullshit from wild honey about how to do their job.
I don't give a flying fuck about how they do their job. But I don't want to spend hours undoing moronic marketing decisions so that I can do my job on my computer.
There's set in my ways, and then there's confronted with a modern piece of shit that some marketing wanker thinks is helpful.
And, I'm sorry to say it, but almost all of the crap I had to figure out how to remove was garbage, intended to give a tablet like interface, using a UI which is mostly about eye candy.
It serves no purpose, and provides no value to me.
It's crap. But it's pretty.
My problem with Microsoft is they seem to have forgotten that many of us still actually use computers to do our fucking work.
Metro was a steaming pile of crap which wasn't useful for that.
The OS itself seems good. The user interface has been designed by morons.
I just went through setting up a new Windows 8.1 machine.
And the sheer quantity of places where Microsoft has more or less gone out of their way to hide basic stuff about your computer, and make it as difficult to find as possible -- well, that is kind of mind boggling (and very frustrating).
And when they do make it available to you, they couch it in a "well, everything hereafter is your fault".
Essentially, in my opinion, Microsoft has tried to dumb down the system so far that when you try to do anything it is almost useless, and if you need to see more information it just throws up its hands and says "fuck it, not my problem".
So, maybe instead of trying to write a crappy, useless system for the users who will be scared to know they're looking at a text file or an exe... Microsoft should try to write something which isn't crap, isn't still predicated on using that crap autorun to ensure every possible source of malware is ran without being prompted, and from the get go tells users "this is a computer, we're not hiding this from you".
It boggles my mind even at work on a Windows server, when my account is an admin and I'm doing admin tasks how Microsoft goes out of their way to hide the actual functionality. And when they don't their "helpful" error messages are garbage... like "something bad happened, contact your administrator". Tell you what, I'm the fucking administrator, why don't you tell me an actual error message instead of assuming I'm a child?
It seems like the more Microsoft tries to dumb things down for their users, the worse they actually make their software. Because it actively tries to be sure you can't see what you know, and simply can't (or won't) tell you what happened when it should.
Microsoft is way too focused on pointless eye candy (like the Metro interface on my desktop I had to remove), and dumbing down the user experience... and seems to utterly fail to make it possible for someone who actually has some idea of what they're doing to find what they need.
The more "helpful" they try to be, the less helpful and usable they actually are.
Well, if anybody else in government did this, they'd get fired, lose their pension, and possibly face criminal charges.
When the people at the highest levels of power decide that the law doesn't apply to them, nothing at all happens.
So, on behalf of the rest of the world... when the political leaders ignore the law and face no consequences, the rest of us want to send a big collective "fuck you".
This has nothing to do with her politics. If Bush or Cheney had done this, we'd want them prosecuted as well.
Laws which are selectively applied are crap. Assholes in power who believe the law doesn't apply to them need to be punished.
These laws exist so there is a public record of activities, not some place where you can sidestep that and conduct business elsewhere away from oversight.
Slashdot Mirror
Did you know that in America they can, and do, the exact same fucking thing?
You want to fix this? Take it up with the governments and corporations who make up the New World Order. The rest of society apparently doesn't get a vote on the topic.
Your rank and file Canadian has no more ability to do anything about this than your average American or Israeli.
But if your government is one of the ones doing this crap ... then shout about that first. And if you're cheering when your government does it to people from other countries .. then STFU and stop pretending to be superior.
Sadly, I fear governments, security, and borders are increasingly becoming more and more draconian and acting like police states. Which means most governments are being ran by assholes and shortsighted morons.
You know, you are 100% correct, and that literally didn't occur to me.
I was thinking purely voluntary nipple upgrades, and was baffled.
Don't forget, it's easy to forget stuff like this .. most of us take nipples for granted, and don't focus on their existence very much.
Cheers
Well, and the thing to remember is you have no idea what actually happens when you press a button.
Have you been connected to a pay for call service? Have they confirmed your phone number is valid? There are examples of people pressing "1" only to find a line item on their phone bill the next month.
Honestly, the best solution I've found is to buy phones which can be programmed to block certain calls (like callers with Unknown/Private numbers). After that, I simply don't answer calls from area codes I don't recognize or from 800 numbers.
It has reached the point where 99% of all incoming calls are purely spam and scams, which means the default position is to assume when the phone rings it's just crap .. if it's important, well, that's what answering machines are for.
There are technical means that could be employed, but the lobbyists for the assholes who make their money from call centers have made sure that caller Id spoofing is legal to support their business model -- but this has the effect of meaning it is impossible to know who the hell is actually calling you.
Just remember, it's the exemptions for business who claim their free speech rights are being violated if they aren't allowed to call you are the ones who paid your politicians for exemptions.
And then stop answering the phone unless you recognize the caller.
I'm sorry, but did you miss the decade in which both Fox and CNN were doing the same in America?
Hmmm ... apparently I am unversed in the realm of custom nipples, as I've never conceived of it before. Is this a thing I've been missing?
So, I guess we can have an informal Slashdot poll ... if you were going to have custom nipples it would look like:
1) Smiley faces
2) Tux
3) The Windows Logo
4) Monkeys
5) USB ports
6) Cowboy Neal
7) Cupcakes
8) Hearts
9) AC/DC's logo
10) Yoda
I for one welcome our new, custom-nipple overlords.
See, when confronted with that GUI on a non-touch screen 23" monitor, in which clicking on the big giant idiot button causes something to open up on the bottom right corner of the screen so that I have to move my mouse back across the screen in order to click what should have been where I clicked ... just fucking no.
The Metro UI paradigm is largely useless on a standard monitor, mouse, and keyboard layout. Which what my desktop is used with.
While inarguably people are buying tablets, not all computers are tablets, nor do all tasks benefit from tablet interfaces ... and an old fashioned desktop machine does not benefit from Metro.
Certainly the flashing dynamic desktop paradigm is as annoying as ads to me, and I do not WANT any of that animated eye candy. And I know from experience it's both security and privacy holes waiting to happen. They have twice now had to abandon live desktop content because it was insecure. Why should I trust this stuff?
Don't get me wrong, once I no longer had to look at any of the Romper Room crap for 99% of my tasks, I'm happy with the OS. So far it's stable and quick ... but essentially it now looks like Windows 2003 or Windows 7 or even Vista once you turn the crud off.
You know, once again, these are not things I do on tablets. A tablet isn't where I go to do work.
I'm lucky enough to not schlep around some monster laptop daily to to my job. A tablet for me is down-time .. it's travel, it's consuming web content, and not doing productive work.
So, here I don't want a desktop interface. I want a hammock interface. I want a plane interface. Or a hotel interface. I want the big squishy buttons.
If Microsoft would stop trying to give me a tablet interface on my desktop, and a desktop interface on my tablet ... maybe they'd understand what people actually use tablets for, and what they use desktops for ... and actually make the appropriate interface for the job.
Seriously? My bloody spreadsheets will work? Are you aware you're epitomizing the "I"m a PC and I'm a Mac" cliche? Because when the original iPad came out, and Google has had successful tablets ... most of which are used for damned near anything but spreadsheets ... nobody was using it for spreadsheets. Not even a little.
The people who are going almost entirely tablet are using video conferencing, watching movies, reading eBooks, reading their email, and doing a little banking. Because normal people doing normal things on a computer pretty much do those things.
And you and Microsoft want to be sure my spreadsheets will work on my tablet? That's pathetic.
I had been hoping to use my big-boy desktop workstation like a big-boy desktop workstation ... instead I got some moronic marketing vision in which that isn't a conceivable thing, and that I clearly need an app for that, and have a touch screen. The Metro interface is more of a hindrance in that context. It's useless and cumbersome.
Maybe they will succeed at an environment which seamlessly does both. But so far from what I've seen they're doing a shitty job of them individually, so lucking into one combined thing which works is just not gonna happen.
Bah, if what happened when I upgraded my iPod Touch is any indication ... he'd still be troubleshooting the damned thing.
Can't say anything about their mapping stuff, but their software upgrade experience is getting annoying of late.
Well, really, just you and that one other guy ... everyone else? Not so much. ;-)
Man, I have got to start reading the news letter more often.
Here I've been going around with un-Spocked bills like a n00b.
Yarg! Now get 'yer booty to my cabin, and put on that frilly thing I be likin' so much.
Oh, evening captain. Mr. Jones, carry on as you were.
I did buy a frickin' "modern" computer, I just didn't buy a portable or a tablet.
I bought a desktop workstation, with 8CPU cores, 16GB of RAM, and which has 6TB of disk space.
And then I had to spend hours removing a fucking romper room interface designed for a cell phone.
If I buy a tablet, I expect a tablet interface. If I buy a desktop workstation, I expect to have that, and not have to strip out the idiotic and brightly colored garbage because some moron at Microsoft has decided the whole fucking world is doing everything on tablets.
The problem is people at Microsoft are stupid enough to think that the tablet interface has any utility whatsoever in a desktop machine, and forget that MANY of us still use desktop workstations to do work ... not connect to Facebook, not to share stuff on Twitter, and pretty much not a damned thing Windows 8.1 is geared towards out of the box.
Out of the box, Windows 8.1 is ahorrific mess of crap, designed for the drooling masses, and designed to be pretty and flashy, but which utterly fails to understand that essentially this is no different from the "Live Desktop" crap we were turning off a decade ago.
It's all eye candy and non substance for a desktop machine. So far, when you turn the crap off, it's a great OS. But Microsoft has no idea of what the desktop experience needs to be.
It too me a day or so to remove the crap from Windows 8.1 to make it look like an actual desktop.
So windows 10 will, what, be just as broken as the desktop was in Windows 8.1? Or it will try to suck less and be less like a tablet experience?
At this point, I'm forced to conclude (from a week or so of running my new Windows 8.1 machine) that most of the decisions Microsoft has been making indicate they no longer know how to write a UI for a desktop, and they're entirely focused on writing only stuff for tablets.
They keep betting they're going to be successful on the phone Real Soon Now ... and they're so busy playing catch up they might need to worry someone is going to come out with the next new thing before they can put out a copy of what everyone else has had for years.
So the same experience on a Windows 10 phone as a desktop? That's based on giving you a crappy experience on the desktop.
Funny, when I see comments like this I conclude the poster is an asshole.
Speaking of reading comprehension, did I fucking suggest it was a failure in the protocol?
The problem with Bitcoin, as I see it, is it seems to bring out the stupid in people. As in people handing over virtual money, to a shady player, who is neither a bank nor operates as a bank, and isn't insured as a bank, and then are surprised to get ripped off.
It's like the people who have drank the kool-aid about bitcoin become irrational idiots who think the unicorn shit which has been smeared all over bitcoin makes it immune to this.
I don't give a crap what you do with your money. But when I see people hand wringing about losing the money they essentially gave to a shady stranger in a dark alley ... I'm forced to conclude it served these people right for being idiots. Yes, the crypto worked beautifully
I don't give a crap about how wonderful the crypto is, or isn't, in bitcoin. But it seems like people using it suffer from either blind optimism, or inherent stupidity.
Which seems to be the case in all speculative markets, and very especially bitcoin, which seems to give widespread encouragement to become an idiot ... either in what you do, or in how much of a drooling idiot you become on the topic.
Sounds like it was an overwhelming success, then.
Every time I see stories like this, I think ... gee, so you entrusted millions of dollars with an entity which isn't a bank, isn't regulated as a bank, and who more or less mostly just promised they wouldn't steal your money ... and somehow people are surprised by this.
On what basis, exactly, does handing strangers your money make sense when you have no legal basis to get it back?
It's hard not to see this as a self inflicted problem, and people handed sacks full of money to some guy in an alley with no receipt thinking they were investing.
Sorry, but I'm afraid this was people believing that Bitcoin was somehow magic, and that nobody would ever be a crook.
Damned bastard Khajit and Argonians, can't trust any of them ... wait, what?
A spokesman for Curiosity said it would be taking some well deserved downtime, basking in the sunshine, and streaming "Rovers Gone Wild" videos.
The spokesman also added Curiosity is long overdue for a vacation in the Martian Riviera.
NASA officials were unavailable for comment on how Curiosity seems to have gotten a bottle of Wild Turkey, a keg, and a beer bong.
LOL ... Temba, with his arms open!
OK, this is really big science ... and I just need a few more small words ...
We have two small widgets a known distance apart, these widgets are essentially fixed in place, but will wobble when acted upon by ... well, obviously gravity waves.
Since there's nothing big enough to make two things that far apart wobble at the same time (short of something very kinetic, which we'd measure through several other means) ... .. we infer that we have measured the passage of the only phenomenon which could make out widgets wobble? Shit.
So basically a long baseline widget wobbler which weighs waves of gravity. (Assuming of course the theory is right, the engineering is right, and these events happen often enough to measure.)
That's some wacky science right there. Still not sure I got it even close.
So, build me a fucking god detector. And when it goes off, I'm going to call bullshit like I'm calling here.
Look, I'm no physicist ... but surely someone can explain how a machine that goes "ping" is proof positive that it has detected the thing it claims to be detecting, no?
It's clearly something glaringly obvious that I'm too dense to understand ... but the mere fact that a machine goes "ping" doesn't mean it worked, or that it proved anything. It means people invested in saying "see, it went ping, therefore it worked" will be happy ... but the rest of us aren't sure how.
So, a big giant expensive machine goes ping ... and the only plausible explanation, because we have great theories and everybody did their part ... is gravitational waves?
I'm aware I'm not qualified to refute that fancy physics, but it seems like there's a step in there that could use some dumbing down for the rest of us.
Because, let's face it, with a simple light switch, I can build you a bullshit detector. It's demonstrating that it actually worked, instead of just being a light switch, which is the tricky part. ;-)
So can anybody better versed in the physics fill this in a little: "an ultrasensitive instrument that may soon detect ripples in space and time set off when neutron stars or black holes merge".
If the machine goes ping, we infer the machine is working perfectly, and somewhere a neutron star or black hole has merged? But you have no independent confirmation other than the machine going ping?
So, set the damned thing to go ping, and claim you've found gravitational waves ... profit!!!
Seriously, I'm confused. Surely there has to be some other way to confirm the machine works than having it tell you it worked.
Or, you know ... Factoring-attack on RSA-Export Keys.
Seriously, there's a lot of different ways to do an acronym (or a backronym as this likely is).
My suggestion? Get over it.
You assume he'd get a trial which was anything other than a secret kangaroo court, operating under secret laws, and that he'd get a fair trial.
When your government has decided it doesn't give a fuck about your laws and your Constitutional rights ... you don't stick around to "face the music".
The only way we'd have ever learned half as much is by him leaving.
And, curiously, the people who were breaking the fucking law in the first place have had pretty much zero repercussions.
Do you see Cheney up on charges? Or Bush? Or Obama? Or the head of the CIA?
Of course not, because those clowns are operating under a different set of laws than you and I do.
Face it, America is handling this like a banana Republic .. if the only thing the AG is promising is no death penalty, maybe the AG doesn't give a crap about the law, or the truth, just protecting the government when it shits all over the Constitution?
Face it, America is now being ran by people who don't believe the law applies to them. Which means you should be very angry with the people in power, and not enabling them to keep acting like this.
Because it has been demonstrated for a long time that it can be dangerous to hide stuff.
So if I set something to be "malware.jpg.exe", Microsoft will present that as "malware.exe".
The act of hiding this stuff to try to make it "user friendly" leads the users to make stupid decisions.
Just like autorun, which says "I'm going to run any executable on any media which is connected to this machine".
I don't give a flying fuck about how they do their job. But I don't want to spend hours undoing moronic marketing decisions so that I can do my job on my computer.
There's set in my ways, and then there's confronted with a modern piece of shit that some marketing wanker thinks is helpful.
And, I'm sorry to say it, but almost all of the crap I had to figure out how to remove was garbage, intended to give a tablet like interface, using a UI which is mostly about eye candy.
It serves no purpose, and provides no value to me.
It's crap. But it's pretty.
My problem with Microsoft is they seem to have forgotten that many of us still actually use computers to do our fucking work.
Metro was a steaming pile of crap which wasn't useful for that.
The OS itself seems good. The user interface has been designed by morons.
I just went through setting up a new Windows 8.1 machine.
And the sheer quantity of places where Microsoft has more or less gone out of their way to hide basic stuff about your computer, and make it as difficult to find as possible -- well, that is kind of mind boggling (and very frustrating).
And when they do make it available to you, they couch it in a "well, everything hereafter is your fault".
Essentially, in my opinion, Microsoft has tried to dumb down the system so far that when you try to do anything it is almost useless, and if you need to see more information it just throws up its hands and says "fuck it, not my problem".
So, maybe instead of trying to write a crappy, useless system for the users who will be scared to know they're looking at a text file or an exe ... Microsoft should try to write something which isn't crap, isn't still predicated on using that crap autorun to ensure every possible source of malware is ran without being prompted, and from the get go tells users "this is a computer, we're not hiding this from you".
It boggles my mind even at work on a Windows server, when my account is an admin and I'm doing admin tasks how Microsoft goes out of their way to hide the actual functionality. And when they don't their "helpful" error messages are garbage ... like "something bad happened, contact your administrator". Tell you what, I'm the fucking administrator, why don't you tell me an actual error message instead of assuming I'm a child?
It seems like the more Microsoft tries to dumb things down for their users, the worse they actually make their software. Because it actively tries to be sure you can't see what you know, and simply can't (or won't) tell you what happened when it should.
Microsoft is way too focused on pointless eye candy (like the Metro interface on my desktop I had to remove), and dumbing down the user experience ... and seems to utterly fail to make it possible for someone who actually has some idea of what they're doing to find what they need.
The more "helpful" they try to be, the less helpful and usable they actually are.
Well, if anybody else in government did this, they'd get fired, lose their pension, and possibly face criminal charges.
When the people at the highest levels of power decide that the law doesn't apply to them, nothing at all happens.
So, on behalf of the rest of the world ... when the political leaders ignore the law and face no consequences, the rest of us want to send a big collective "fuck you".
This has nothing to do with her politics. If Bush or Cheney had done this, we'd want them prosecuted as well.
Laws which are selectively applied are crap. Assholes in power who believe the law doesn't apply to them need to be punished.
These laws exist so there is a public record of activities, not some place where you can sidestep that and conduct business elsewhere away from oversight.