Beyond the legal benefits of hiring contractors, there are also budget considerations. An agency might have only a small amount of their budget allocated to staffing, but they can spread the larger share allocated to contracting, and thereby get the contractor's work force. Often it's cheaper to hire a contractor than to get a federal employee.
It all goes back to Congress being unable to set a budget. When budgets get tight, essential positions get contracted out to people who may not deserve them. You get what you pay for, even -- especially -- in government.
"Any person who has a security clearance knows that he or she has an obligation to protect classified information and abide by the law,"
Isn't widespread domestic spying without a specific purpose and a warrant against the law?
No, no it's not. That's the *point*. The law has been twisted and re-interpreted so that the activities that Congress intended to stop are now allowable. PRISM only collects metadata and launders intelligence through foreign services. That slips through a loophole, so that no laws are being broken.
That's why Snowden (indeed, any leaker anywhere) is not protected by the Whistleblowers' act, that's why he will go to jail and that's why NSA surveillance will continue: Because the law is insufficient to stop those who operate without transparency. No matter what law you create, agencies who operate without scrutiny will find a way around the law. There is no oversight to tell them when they've gone too far.
A system of laws require enforcement, which requires oversight and accountability. Take any of those legs away and the whole system collapses into a totalitarian mess. We are way too late to prevent this. The most important question of the 21st century may be, 'How will mankind prosper under Big Brother?'
GCHQ may have had access to the data acquired, but based on the NSA's own documents, the GCHQ was not privy to the source or method of collecting that data.
They don't need to know where the data comes from in order to share it with the NSA. This is how the NSA spies on American citizens, by laundering the data through foreign agencies. The foreign agencies don't have to know or care where the data comes from. In return they're probably sharing data with the NSA in the same way, to spy on citizens in their own country.
Steam doesn't have a microphone or camera that's always on. Even if I have them connected to my system, I can turn them off or disconnect them and Steam won't care.
The fact that Xbox One won't work without the Kinect system is suspicious. There's no reason for that kind of design unless surveillance is one of the top priorities of the device.
My dad was a big dreamer, and he saw lots of potential in early arcade games. We had a Pong game in our house in 1979, because my dad thought he could rent it out. Eventually he offered to buy me a game system to get me off the Pong game, and I asked for an Atari 400, mostly because I thought it was better than the 2600, so I could lord it over my friends. My friends weren't impressed because of the smaller game catalog, but I nearly melted that chiclet keyboard as I taught myself to program in BASIC with it. By age 13 I had designed my own version of Breakout (better than Pong, because I could play it by myself) and was working on adventure games.
Buy a kid a computer with any programming language, and they will learn it.
I honestly don't know. I don't know if a taggant added to printer plastic would affect its use or durability. But since 3D printer plastic is sold in lots that can be used in multiple printers, all a taggant would do is tell the cops from which online store the plastic was purchased. That's a lot less specific than rifling marks, which can track down a certain make/model of gun, or the specific weapon used.
It takes some knowledge of metalworking and gunsmithing to make your own traditional gun. For a 3D printer all it takes is an internet connection. The authorities aren't worried about one or two crazy gunsmiths; they're worried about 1,000 disgruntled Joe Schmoes who just bought a 3D printer at Staples.
There are only a few different types of plastic available for 3D printers. Knowing that a bullet was fired out of a gun made with ABS won't help if/all/ the 3D printed guns use ABS plastic.
The reason a 3D printed gun is a big deal is because it cannot be tracked. Normal weapons made for consumers and the military have unique tracking characteristics such as the number of rifle ridges in the barrel, the position of the firing pin, etc. These signatures can be used by law enforcement to track down the type of weapon used in a crime -- if not the exact brand and model, then at least the approximate style and manufacture of the gun. The forensic marks on a bullet can be compared to rounds fired out of an individual weapon to prove whether that weapon was used to commit a crime in question.
Now we're entering a world where anybody can create a gun in secret with no identifying marks and then melt it down after use. Law enforcement authorities are justifiably freaking out over this. But nobody said that the police had a right to have easy jobs...
I use lynx because my workplace blocks most websites that I like to peruse through the day. (They don't block Slashdot, though, which is why I'm here so often.) I need SSH for my job so they reluctantly opened a hole for it, and I then SSH out to my linux shell, start up lynx and browse the news.
I can't even list all the problems at work that I've magically fixed with perl.
Yes, I'm stubborn, yes, I'm regressive. But the old tools give me more power than the newfangled stuff, because the new stuff is often simplified to the point of uselessness or locked down by bureaucracy. There is magic in things that are old and wild.
The problem might not be wear and tear, it might be ice forming somewhere in the wheel system. Normal ice can be evaporated away by heating up the instrument, but when I say 'ice', I mean deposits of some material -- vaporized rubber, outgassing paint, or even neutron spalling. All of those could add friction to the system, can't be easily removed, and may have nothing to do with the bearings.
They might be, but it wouldn't matter. The friction is probably due to ice forming on the reaction wheel or its axle. Ice will eventually clog up even a mag-lev system. Space is just a difficult place to keep mechanisms working.
In TFA: [Tesla] has plans to build its first showroom in the state next year.
In North Carolina they've got nothing, just a web presence. No overhead. Whether that means they're competing unfairly or not is for the capitalists and their lawyers to work out.
Also selling directly without using local vendors, you will need to expand your sales force to cover all the areas, and have to deal with a B2C model vs a B2B model. So your increase your own staff, which then will make your product much closer to the initial cost of selling to an other business at a discount and they mark it up by 10-20%
They're selling their cars over the internet. There is no sales force, there are no vendors. The entire nationwide sales operation could be run by one guy with a php script. (But hopefully they have a bit more than that.) Welcome to the future.
Yes, it's a silly fandom for a kid's show. But it's an amazing community unlike any I've seen on the internet -- and I've seen a lot. The creativity and generosity of this fandom is off the charts, and that's the kind of crowd with whom I'm proud to associate.
It sounds to me as if all the classes and gameplay have been dumbed down to appeal to casual players, but the challenge has been ratcheted up for raid content. That's great for people who enjoy group dynamics, but that's a small percentage of players. Most players want to play the game, not play gamer personalities against each other trying to make them work as a team. If the game insults the players' intelligence, no amount of interpersonal complexity will salvage their experience.
Let me make an analogy -- it's like a ping-pong match played against a wall with a 24-man team. For the leader that might be an exciting test of his skill in managing a group, but for the players it's just hitting a ball against a wall.
Those too are opposites. How can you be too far in both directions at the same time?
They are not opposites.
Grind means being forced to do repetitive tasks over and over. Catering to casuals means allowing tasks to be completed easily and in a short time. Put them together -- as games tend to do, these days -- and you get dumb content that you must repeat.
Grindy, not casual friendly: 'Get 100 macguffins. You can find one at the bottom of each high level dungeon.' Not grindy, casual friendly: 'Solve this puzzle to receive a one-time buff.' Grindy and casual friendly: 'Kill 10 spiders and bring their legs back to me.'
To appeal to the lowest common denominator, MMOs have become focused on quests like 'kill 10 spiders'. That's about all the new content has, anymore.
I never played WoW, but I'm a refugee from City of Heroes who tried and failed to get into Guild Wars 2. I can't find any community in-game. If I ask questions on broadcast chat I get snide answers. They tell me to join a guild, but I don't see any guilds advertising for members (and no way to check them out before joining. What happened to guild web pages?) My highest character is level 27 but the first dungeon is level 35, and there's nobody left in the newbie grounds. It's a terrible experience for a new player.
I wonder where MMOs are going from here. The WoW generation is stale. The next generation of auction-house-enhanced free-to-play MMOs have completely failed from my perspective as a non-PvP player. (Some, like EVE, attract PvPers. I don't understand the allure.) I wish I knew what the next generation -- like Wildstar and Elder Scrolls Online -- are planning to break out of the same old mold.
There's nothing particularly ground-breaking in either, despite Slashdot's glorification of Ender's Game as some sort of nerd canon. It's pretty much EVERY sci-fi/fantasy story ever told:
Yeah, but some of that is the John Carter problem. It was groundbreaking and fresh when it came out, but in the interim it has been copied so many times that now the original story feels trite and formulaic.
The John Carter books *invented* the space opera, the alien princess, the lightsaber, and arguably the superhero. Just because those concepts have been rehashed ad infinitum shouldn't diminish the earlier work. Ender's Game invented some literary concepts also -- young heroes fighting for their lives, the misfit hero, the special academy, a desperate future. It established the subgenre, and was groundbreaking when it appeared.
Because in a nation with the size and diversity of the US, advocates of Socialism seem willfully blind to the fact that there are people who would disagree with the implementation.
On a tangential thought, why can't we have both? This is the future. We should have a customizable, user-friendly government and economic structure.
Maybe Citizen A prefers free enterprise, so he opts for a capitalist citizenship. He works for a living, pays a low level of taxes and receives little help from the government. Citizen B prefers a socialist citizenship, so he receives a stipend and single-payer health care, and a large portion of his earnings are sucked away in taxes. Citizen C lives in a shed down by the river and prefers the anarchist option; he pays no taxes and expects nothing from the government, and is indeed excluded from any laws that affect only himself. He can't hurt other people, but he can drink and do drugs all he likes.
There is no reason, in today's information-rich society, why every citizen can't choose among several different legal and economic options, all of which combine to form the government system of their country. All it would take is a database and a form for citizens to choose their option.
These systems -- capitalism, socialism, communism, anarchism -- they are not each others' enemy. They are different options that are all superior in some way, and people should get their choice in the way they want to live.
Perhaps you are the one who doesn't get it. Why should a fully capable PC and a tablet be two different experiences?
Because a fully functional PC is for content creation while a tablet is for content consumption. And many people don't understand the difference.
Very well said.
I think the disconnect is that computer manufacturers like to lump their customers as either content creators or consumers, when in reality almost every computer user is both. Kids who play videogames eventually learn to code them, or to create their own animations. Grandparents who barely know how to turn the computer on will someday want to post pictures of their family. Mothers who mostly swap gossip and recipes will someday want to create posters for their bake sale. It's too easy to switch between consumption and creation to consider those activities as always separate.
I have yet to meet a computer user who does not create content of some sort, and I do not know anyone who uses a tablet exclusively. All the tablet owners I know also own a PC -- a laptop, at least. Users will not be satisfied with one or the other. And since there is no satisfying way to provide both tablet and PC experiences in one device, I wish manufacturers would stop trying.
Slashdot Mirror
Beyond the legal benefits of hiring contractors, there are also budget considerations. An agency might have only a small amount of their budget allocated to staffing, but they can spread the larger share allocated to contracting, and thereby get the contractor's work force. Often it's cheaper to hire a contractor than to get a federal employee.
It all goes back to Congress being unable to set a budget. When budgets get tight, essential positions get contracted out to people who may not deserve them. You get what you pay for, even -- especially -- in government.
Isn't widespread domestic spying without a specific purpose and a warrant against the law?
No, no it's not. That's the *point*. The law has been twisted and re-interpreted so that the activities that Congress intended to stop are now allowable. PRISM only collects metadata and launders intelligence through foreign services. That slips through a loophole, so that no laws are being broken.
That's why Snowden (indeed, any leaker anywhere) is not protected by the Whistleblowers' act, that's why he will go to jail and that's why NSA surveillance will continue: Because the law is insufficient to stop those who operate without transparency. No matter what law you create, agencies who operate without scrutiny will find a way around the law. There is no oversight to tell them when they've gone too far.
A system of laws require enforcement, which requires oversight and accountability. Take any of those legs away and the whole system collapses into a totalitarian mess. We are way too late to prevent this. The most important question of the 21st century may be, 'How will mankind prosper under Big Brother?'
GCHQ may have had access to the data acquired, but based on the NSA's own documents, the GCHQ was not privy to the source or method of collecting that data.
They don't need to know where the data comes from in order to share it with the NSA. This is how the NSA spies on American citizens, by laundering the data through foreign agencies. The foreign agencies don't have to know or care where the data comes from. In return they're probably sharing data with the NSA in the same way, to spy on citizens in their own country.
Of course the NSA doesn't spy on American citizens. That's against the law.
What they do is allow friendly foreign agents -- like the UK -- to spy on American citizens, and then they share the data together. It's totally different and completely legal.
Steam doesn't have a microphone or camera that's always on. Even if I have them connected to my system, I can turn them off or disconnect them and Steam won't care.
The fact that Xbox One won't work without the Kinect system is suspicious. There's no reason for that kind of design unless surveillance is one of the top priorities of the device.
My dad was a big dreamer, and he saw lots of potential in early arcade games. We had a Pong game in our house in 1979, because my dad thought he could rent it out. Eventually he offered to buy me a game system to get me off the Pong game, and I asked for an Atari 400, mostly because I thought it was better than the 2600, so I could lord it over my friends. My friends weren't impressed because of the smaller game catalog, but I nearly melted that chiclet keyboard as I taught myself to program in BASIC with it. By age 13 I had designed my own version of Breakout (better than Pong, because I could play it by myself) and was working on adventure games.
Buy a kid a computer with any programming language, and they will learn it.
I honestly don't know. I don't know if a taggant added to printer plastic would affect its use or durability. But since 3D printer plastic is sold in lots that can be used in multiple printers, all a taggant would do is tell the cops from which online store the plastic was purchased. That's a lot less specific than rifling marks, which can track down a certain make/model of gun, or the specific weapon used.
It takes some knowledge of metalworking and gunsmithing to make your own traditional gun. For a 3D printer all it takes is an internet connection. The authorities aren't worried about one or two crazy gunsmiths; they're worried about 1,000 disgruntled Joe Schmoes who just bought a 3D printer at Staples.
There are only a few different types of plastic available for 3D printers. Knowing that a bullet was fired out of a gun made with ABS won't help if /all/ the 3D printed guns use ABS plastic.
The reason a 3D printed gun is a big deal is because it cannot be tracked. Normal weapons made for consumers and the military have unique tracking characteristics such as the number of rifle ridges in the barrel, the position of the firing pin, etc. These signatures can be used by law enforcement to track down the type of weapon used in a crime -- if not the exact brand and model, then at least the approximate style and manufacture of the gun. The forensic marks on a bullet can be compared to rounds fired out of an individual weapon to prove whether that weapon was used to commit a crime in question.
Now we're entering a world where anybody can create a gun in secret with no identifying marks and then melt it down after use. Law enforcement authorities are justifiably freaking out over this. But nobody said that the police had a right to have easy jobs...
For a SFW (and non-Tumblr) example, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nVjxIKgaGc .
Nopony breaks a Pinkie promise. Or else.
I use lynx because my workplace blocks most websites that I like to peruse through the day. (They don't block Slashdot, though, which is why I'm here so often.) I need SSH for my job so they reluctantly opened a hole for it, and I then SSH out to my linux shell, start up lynx and browse the news.
I can't even list all the problems at work that I've magically fixed with perl.
Yes, I'm stubborn, yes, I'm regressive. But the old tools give me more power than the newfangled stuff, because the new stuff is often simplified to the point of uselessness or locked down by bureaucracy. There is magic in things that are old and wild.
The problem might not be wear and tear, it might be ice forming somewhere in the wheel system. Normal ice can be evaporated away by heating up the instrument, but when I say 'ice', I mean deposits of some material -- vaporized rubber, outgassing paint, or even neutron spalling. All of those could add friction to the system, can't be easily removed, and may have nothing to do with the bearings.
They might be, but it wouldn't matter. The friction is probably due to ice forming on the reaction wheel or its axle. Ice will eventually clog up even a mag-lev system. Space is just a difficult place to keep mechanisms working.
In TFA: [Tesla] has plans to build its first showroom in the state next year.
In North Carolina they've got nothing, just a web presence. No overhead. Whether that means they're competing unfairly or not is for the capitalists and their lawyers to work out.
Also selling directly without using local vendors, you will need to expand your sales force to cover all the areas, and have to deal with a B2C model vs a B2B model. So your increase your own staff, which then will make your product much closer to the initial cost of selling to an other business at a discount and they mark it up by 10-20%
They're selling their cars over the internet. There is no sales force, there are no vendors. The entire nationwide sales operation could be run by one guy with a php script. (But hopefully they have a bit more than that.) Welcome to the future.
(\ Brohoof back at ya.
Yes, it's a silly fandom for a kid's show. But it's an amazing community unlike any I've seen on the internet -- and I've seen a lot. The creativity and generosity of this fandom is off the charts, and that's the kind of crowd with whom I'm proud to associate.
Yes, I'm that Remus Shepherd. Keep it quiet, though -- I'm more likely to be driven out with pitchforks than welcomed.
But is it personal challenge, or group challenge?
It sounds to me as if all the classes and gameplay have been dumbed down to appeal to casual players, but the challenge has been ratcheted up for raid content. That's great for people who enjoy group dynamics, but that's a small percentage of players. Most players want to play the game, not play gamer personalities against each other trying to make them work as a team. If the game insults the players' intelligence, no amount of interpersonal complexity will salvage their experience.
Let me make an analogy -- it's like a ping-pong match played against a wall with a 24-man team. For the leader that might be an exciting test of his skill in managing a group, but for the players it's just hitting a ball against a wall.
Those too are opposites. How can you be too far in both directions at the same time?
They are not opposites.
Grind means being forced to do repetitive tasks over and over. Catering to casuals means allowing tasks to be completed easily and in a short time. Put them together -- as games tend to do, these days -- and you get dumb content that you must repeat.
Grindy, not casual friendly: 'Get 100 macguffins. You can find one at the bottom of each high level dungeon.'
Not grindy, casual friendly: 'Solve this puzzle to receive a one-time buff.'
Grindy and casual friendly: 'Kill 10 spiders and bring their legs back to me.'
To appeal to the lowest common denominator, MMOs have become focused on quests like 'kill 10 spiders'. That's about all the new content has, anymore.
I never played WoW, but I'm a refugee from City of Heroes who tried and failed to get into Guild Wars 2. I can't find any community in-game. If I ask questions on broadcast chat I get snide answers. They tell me to join a guild, but I don't see any guilds advertising for members (and no way to check them out before joining. What happened to guild web pages?) My highest character is level 27 but the first dungeon is level 35, and there's nobody left in the newbie grounds. It's a terrible experience for a new player.
I wonder where MMOs are going from here. The WoW generation is stale. The next generation of auction-house-enhanced free-to-play MMOs have completely failed from my perspective as a non-PvP player. (Some, like EVE, attract PvPers. I don't understand the allure.) I wish I knew what the next generation -- like Wildstar and Elder Scrolls Online -- are planning to break out of the same old mold.
That begs the question: Can God dupe so much gold that even He couldn't lift it?
There's nothing particularly ground-breaking in either, despite Slashdot's glorification of Ender's Game as some sort of nerd canon. It's pretty much EVERY sci-fi/fantasy story ever told:
Yeah, but some of that is the John Carter problem. It was groundbreaking and fresh when it came out, but in the interim it has been copied so many times that now the original story feels trite and formulaic.
The John Carter books *invented* the space opera, the alien princess, the lightsaber, and arguably the superhero. Just because those concepts have been rehashed ad infinitum shouldn't diminish the earlier work. Ender's Game invented some literary concepts also -- young heroes fighting for their lives, the misfit hero, the special academy, a desperate future. It established the subgenre, and was groundbreaking when it appeared.
Because in a nation with the size and diversity of the US, advocates of Socialism seem willfully blind to the fact that there are people who would disagree with the implementation.
On a tangential thought, why can't we have both? This is the future. We should have a customizable, user-friendly government and economic structure.
Maybe Citizen A prefers free enterprise, so he opts for a capitalist citizenship. He works for a living, pays a low level of taxes and receives little help from the government. Citizen B prefers a socialist citizenship, so he receives a stipend and single-payer health care, and a large portion of his earnings are sucked away in taxes. Citizen C lives in a shed down by the river and prefers the anarchist option; he pays no taxes and expects nothing from the government, and is indeed excluded from any laws that affect only himself. He can't hurt other people, but he can drink and do drugs all he likes.
There is no reason, in today's information-rich society, why every citizen can't choose among several different legal and economic options, all of which combine to form the government system of their country. All it would take is a database and a form for citizens to choose their option.
These systems -- capitalism, socialism, communism, anarchism -- they are not each others' enemy. They are different options that are all superior in some way, and people should get their choice in the way they want to live.
Perhaps you are the one who doesn't get it. Why should a fully capable PC and a tablet be two different experiences?
Because a fully functional PC is for content creation while a tablet is for content consumption. And many people don't understand the difference.
Very well said.
I think the disconnect is that computer manufacturers like to lump their customers as either content creators or consumers, when in reality almost every computer user is both. Kids who play videogames eventually learn to code them, or to create their own animations. Grandparents who barely know how to turn the computer on will someday want to post pictures of their family. Mothers who mostly swap gossip and recipes will someday want to create posters for their bake sale. It's too easy to switch between consumption and creation to consider those activities as always separate.
I have yet to meet a computer user who does not create content of some sort, and I do not know anyone who uses a tablet exclusively. All the tablet owners I know also own a PC -- a laptop, at least. Users will not be satisfied with one or the other. And since there is no satisfying way to provide both tablet and PC experiences in one device, I wish manufacturers would stop trying.