He has more power than the president in that position. Odd.
Ever since he's taken over state (Jan of this year) our entire foreign policy strategy has looked exactly like this. I wasn't like that before. We helped push Mubarak out when it became obvious that he was going to go, and supporting him any further would just hurt us. We not only militarily forced Quadaffi out, but we managed to arrange things so that everyone else was *begging* us to do it, so we could come in "reluctantly". That one was a master stroke. Now all we do whine loudly that people who don't like us much should do what we want them to do (Syria, Israel & Palestine, Russia, China). You tell me what else changed in the last 8 months to cause this?
Yesterday I was listening to a former Regan admin offcial (James Baker perhaps?) on NPR, and he was saying how happy he was so far with Kerry at State because he felt Obama kept Clinton on too "short of a leash" (his words, not mine). So yes, according to that Republican at least, policy is being much more directed by Kerry lately.
I remember something that happened years ago uncannily like this whole Snowden affair.
Remember a decade back, when there was a guy running for POTUS as a decorated war hero at a time we were involved in two wars? The other side made some rediculous attacks on his war record. So did he react like a war hero? Perhaps attack his assailants in some way? Heck no! He sat around for months taking no action other than whining impotently about the lack of help from his opponent who wasn't even (provably) directly involved.
This is pretty much exactly how we've been handling this whole Snowden affair. Did we just send folks out to arrest him? No. So did we instead just quitely bide our time waiting for him to try to move to some non-shithole country so we can arrest him (in the meantime, leaving him effectively in a large jail)? Nope. We just sit on our ass for months whining impotently that Russia, who we tweak at every opportunity, should go out of their way to help us. Funny how similar these situations are.
Actually, I've noticed a rather serious backsliding in the competence of the USA's foriegn policy in about the last year or so.
I know there are those folks who are die-hard partisans for the other party. To hear them, every decision made, past present or future was/is/will be either utter incompetence or malice of the level that would make Sauron blush.
But for the rest of us, frankly we handled things about as well as could reasonably have been done right up until the Syria uprising started a year ago. Since then, well, I'm mystified. Suddenly we can't make decisions, can't actually perform any useful actions, but are chock full of ideas for things other soverign entities really must be doing right now. I'd say a big "fuck you" to that, and it's my own damn country I'm talking about!
If you are looking for someone to blame, well, one might notice that a year ago is (perhaps not so coincidentally) about the time John Kerry took over the State Department from Ms. Clinton. This is the same John Kerry who somehow managed to lose an election to the worst president in US history, while being a war hero running during two wars. Should it really shock anybody that he can't manage the State Department any better than he managed his election campaign?
Disseminating USA classified material to uncleared people is a crime in the USA. I don't think anybody (even Snowden himself) is arguing that he didn't break that law.
Yeah, and arresting terrorists makes other terrorists mad at us too. So what? Either its the right thing to do, and we do it, or it isn't, and we don't.
The real conversation nobody seems to be having is wether its worth the tremendous black eye we are giving ourselves by ineffecitvely chasing this guy around the world. The guy broke the law, so he should be arrested. But that doesn't mean we have to publicly rail like impotent babies every time this dweeb sneaks into another country that doesn't like us much. For generations people have fled places like Russia and China after saying or doing things there that the government doesn't like (but are perfectly legal here), and we've rightly used each as an oppertunity to lecture them about freedom and human rights. Well guess what? Telling what you know about the NSA's operations is a form of speech that is not illegal in China or Russia. So now they can smugly do the same back to us. So what does our government do? Why, they make a big public stink about it, so that the damage to our reputation when China and Russia throw our own rhetoric back at us is a large as possible. This whole situation has been so perfect for Russia and China that they might start believeing in God again.
HTH did the "Certified articles?" question get enough upvotes to warrant an answer? Anybody with even a cursory knowledge of the history of Wikipedia knows the answer to this. (Hint: Its been tried before. That's how we got Wikipedia in the first place)
Right now US lawmakers couldn't pass gas in a chili house. I think they've managed to pass all of 15 laws this session, and next month they plan on working only 7 days (all that doing nothing has apparently exhausted them). Their polling numbers hit a record low this month. So they can't actually do anything, and everybody hates them.
Snowden should be more worried about what polar bears think of him than the US Congress.
While I agree totally with your point about the utter incompetence of the 113th Congress, this is an odd time to be pointing that out. This is probably the first and only time in their whole session where they made a good attempt at getting something productive and important done. They only came 7 votes shy of the goal, and it was frankly the first significant bipartisan effort I've seen in Congress since the Republicans took it over in 2010. Seriously, don't harsh all over the first tiny ray of sunshine we've seen in three and a half years This kind of thing should be encouraged.
Normal behavior for the Republican Caucus has been to hold pointless symbolic votes to defund "Obamacare", women's health services, or the defunct ACORN (just in case it starts existing again), in between their amazingly long vacations (they will work all of 7 days next month). Then again, its tough to blame them for the vacations when they aren't accomplishing anything on their work days.
But now the Tea Party wing has just discovered that when they work with like-minded Democrats on certian issues, rather than just use them as evil foils for their elections, they might be able to actually accomplish something. Unless you are a fan of random drift, this a promising development in the governing of the nation.
A triffling difference. Its still part of the health-care-industrial complex. Its just that McDonalds is at the front end (making you sick), while pharma is at the back end (treating the symptoms so you can still go eat McDondalds).
Since I'm not currently in a country where mathematics can be owned, it seems weird to me.
The USA is also a country where mathematics cannot be owned. So how do we still have "Software patents"? Well, perhaps because nobody has had the temerity to try pointing out to the Supreme Court that "Software" = algorithm = math. The few times the issue has come up, both the courts and the lawyers involved sidestepped it. It's almost like everyone is afraid of what might happen if an actual ruling on the issue were to be forced. When it comes up in lower courts, its a crapshoot, but about half the time the patents get invalidated just for being software patents.
It isn’t really surprising that Federal Circuit judges who have devoted their working lives to the patent system tend to think most patents, including software patents, are valuable and useful. What is surprising is that, in spite of this likely tendency, the en banc Federal Circuit invalidated the patents here. Half of the en banc judges took the sensible view that running a program on a computer does not transform the computer or render software less abstract
Interestingly, if you read TFA, the author predicts the that the entire movie industry will come to an end somewhere in the vicinity of 2054-2066.
in a 110-minute movie. The rest of the Snyder playbook is there, too: a story-starting catalyst midway through the first act, a shootout at the midpoint that ups the ante, an all-is-lost moment—including a death—between the 75- and 80-minute mark,
and later
It’s enough to make you wonder: Is overreliance on Snyder’s story formula killing movies? If so, then all is lost. The major studios increasingly rely on...
So if the all-is-lost moment is supposed to happen 68-73% of the way through the flick, and the movie industry is at that point now, then a little math tells us that the movie industry should be wrapping up sometime from 2054 to 2066.
I can't wait for the "dark night of the soul" the industry will have at the end of this decade. That's always my favorite part.
Yes. Because when has a country's rulers ever foolishly ensured their own regieme's destruction by helping terrorists attack the USA? Nope, that could never ever happen
The thing you can do with a touchscreen though is pack an entire airliner worth of controls into a single panel, by using multiple screens.
I'd argue however this is the exact opposite of what Apple did with the iPhone. The goal should be using tech to make everything simpler, not using it to increase complexity. My dad's Prius touch-screen is a nightmare to navigate (making it an actual driving hazard). The interface for entering a driving destination, for example, requires you to enter addresses with the parts in reverse order, and split into three screens just to enter a single address. It could not have been make more nightmarish if they'd tried.
The problem I have with the ACLU argument is that nobody argues that this same activity (following a person around in public to see where they go) is a big problem if the cops do it manually. People are getting worried now just because cameras and computers are allowing them to perform the same kinds of surveilence much more efficiently. But the engineer in me insists that either the base activity is OK, or it isn't. If it is OK, then it ought to be OK for the police to do it as efficiently (and cheaply) as possible. Conversely, if tracking a person with cameras and computer assistance isn't OK, then it shouldn't be OK to do it the old-fashioned manual way either.
, need I remind you of the Boston bombing. It was a low tech pressure cooker bomb in backpack that easily got past heighten surveillance at a marathon. How many days did it take to find the people who did it? It was people that found them, not cameras.
The problem with this logic is that we never would have known who we were looking for in the first place without all the cameras. In the event they were able to capture one of the perps planting one of the devices (and its subsequent explosion), and they were also able to place him interacting with another person with a similar backpack. Without the ubiquitous cameras, the FBI would probably still be running down leads at sporting-goods stores today.
Even in the USA metric units are used in Physics and Astronomy.
While this may be gratifying to see if you are accessing this American website from abroad, and are used to having to do mental conversions, you really shouldn't get the idea in your head that folks here in America have finally decided to reorder their thinking to suit your conveinence.
I swear, give you Europeans an inch, and you'll take a mile.:-)
On the other hand, natural disasters that make those who want to cut disaster relief look like hearless fools right before a presidental election are a 1-in-4 year event.
Yeah, as a Brit I'm somewhat confused by this article.... , he's also a mentor and a teacher as well. Occasionally this means hauling out a particularly daft member of the school for everyone else to see and making an example of them
A very long post. If I can summarize, he believes that Linux is doing a good job of fostering the exact kind of nurturing learning envionrment that British Public Schools are famous for.
Yes. When he starting reccomending dino parents quit spanking as a punishment, they were forced to do "timeouts" instead. However, lacking wristwatches, they didn't know to let the kids back up, and they all starved to death.
Slashdot Mirror
He has more power than the president in that position. Odd.
Ever since he's taken over state (Jan of this year) our entire foreign policy strategy has looked exactly like this. I wasn't like that before. We helped push Mubarak out when it became obvious that he was going to go, and supporting him any further would just hurt us. We not only militarily forced Quadaffi out, but we managed to arrange things so that everyone else was *begging* us to do it, so we could come in "reluctantly". That one was a master stroke. Now all we do whine loudly that people who don't like us much should do what we want them to do (Syria, Israel & Palestine, Russia, China). You tell me what else changed in the last 8 months to cause this?
Yesterday I was listening to a former Regan admin offcial (James Baker perhaps?) on NPR, and he was saying how happy he was so far with Kerry at State because he felt Obama kept Clinton on too "short of a leash" (his words, not mine). So yes, according to that Republican at least, policy is being much more directed by Kerry lately.
I remember something that happened years ago uncannily like this whole Snowden affair.
Remember a decade back, when there was a guy running for POTUS as a decorated war hero at a time we were involved in two wars? The other side made some rediculous attacks on his war record. So did he react like a war hero? Perhaps attack his assailants in some way? Heck no! He sat around for months taking no action other than whining impotently about the lack of help from his opponent who wasn't even (provably) directly involved.
This is pretty much exactly how we've been handling this whole Snowden affair. Did we just send folks out to arrest him? No. So did we instead just quitely bide our time waiting for him to try to move to some non-shithole country so we can arrest him (in the meantime, leaving him effectively in a large jail)? Nope. We just sit on our ass for months whining impotently that Russia, who we tweak at every opportunity, should go out of their way to help us. Funny how similar these situations are.
So about that incompetent POTUS candidate...I wonder whatever happened to him.
Actually, I've noticed a rather serious backsliding in the competence of the USA's foriegn policy in about the last year or so.
I know there are those folks who are die-hard partisans for the other party. To hear them, every decision made, past present or future was/is/will be either utter incompetence or malice of the level that would make Sauron blush.
But for the rest of us, frankly we handled things about as well as could reasonably have been done right up until the Syria uprising started a year ago. Since then, well, I'm mystified. Suddenly we can't make decisions, can't actually perform any useful actions, but are chock full of ideas for things other soverign entities really must be doing right now. I'd say a big "fuck you" to that, and it's my own damn country I'm talking about!
If you are looking for someone to blame, well, one might notice that a year ago is (perhaps not so coincidentally) about the time John Kerry took over the State Department from Ms. Clinton. This is the same John Kerry who somehow managed to lose an election to the worst president in US history, while being a war hero running during two wars. Should it really shock anybody that he can't manage the State Department any better than he managed his election campaign?
Disseminating USA classified material to uncleared people is a crime in the USA. I don't think anybody (even Snowden himself) is arguing that he didn't break that law.
Yeah, and arresting terrorists makes other terrorists mad at us too. So what? Either its the right thing to do, and we do it, or it isn't, and we don't.
The real conversation nobody seems to be having is wether its worth the tremendous black eye we are giving ourselves by ineffecitvely chasing this guy around the world. The guy broke the law, so he should be arrested. But that doesn't mean we have to publicly rail like impotent babies every time this dweeb sneaks into another country that doesn't like us much. For generations people have fled places like Russia and China after saying or doing things there that the government doesn't like (but are perfectly legal here), and we've rightly used each as an oppertunity to lecture them about freedom and human rights. Well guess what? Telling what you know about the NSA's operations is a form of speech that is not illegal in China or Russia. So now they can smugly do the same back to us. So what does our government do? Why, they make a big public stink about it, so that the damage to our reputation when China and Russia throw our own rhetoric back at us is a large as possible. This whole situation has been so perfect for Russia and China that they might start believeing in God again.
HTH did the "Certified articles?" question get enough upvotes to warrant an answer? Anybody with even a cursory knowledge of the history of Wikipedia knows the answer to this. (Hint: Its been tried before. That's how we got Wikipedia in the first place)
If only the authors had been Slashdot readers, they could have written this same paper 10 years ago.
Right now US lawmakers couldn't pass gas in a chili house. I think they've managed to pass all of 15 laws this session, and next month they plan on working only 7 days (all that doing nothing has apparently exhausted them). Their polling numbers hit a record low this month. So they can't actually do anything, and everybody hates them.
Snowden should be more worried about what polar bears think of him than the US Congress.
While I agree totally with your point about the utter incompetence of the 113th Congress, this is an odd time to be pointing that out. This is probably the first and only time in their whole session where they made a good attempt at getting something productive and important done. They only came 7 votes shy of the goal, and it was frankly the first significant bipartisan effort I've seen in Congress since the Republicans took it over in 2010. Seriously, don't harsh all over the first tiny ray of sunshine we've seen in three and a half years This kind of thing should be encouraged.
Normal behavior for the Republican Caucus has been to hold pointless symbolic votes to defund "Obamacare", women's health services, or the defunct ACORN (just in case it starts existing again), in between their amazingly long vacations (they will work all of 7 days next month). Then again, its tough to blame them for the vacations when they aren't accomplishing anything on their work days.
But now the Tea Party wing has just discovered that when they work with like-minded Democrats on certian issues, rather than just use them as evil foils for their elections, they might be able to actually accomplish something. Unless you are a fan of random drift, this a promising development in the governing of the nation.
I disagree. You not knowing your representative's name only shows the system is "very broken" if your representative likes it that way.
A triffling difference. Its still part of the health-care-industrial complex. Its just that McDonalds is at the front end (making you sick), while pharma is at the back end (treating the symptoms so you can still go eat McDondalds).
Since I'm not currently in a country where mathematics can be owned, it seems weird to me.
The USA is also a country where mathematics cannot be owned. So how do we still have "Software patents"? Well, perhaps because nobody has had the temerity to try pointing out to the Supreme Court that "Software" = algorithm = math. The few times the issue has come up, both the courts and the lawyers involved sidestepped it. It's almost like everyone is afraid of what might happen if an actual ruling on the issue were to be forced. When it comes up in lower courts, its a crapshoot, but about half the time the patents get invalidated just for being software patents.
It isn’t really surprising that Federal Circuit judges who have devoted their working lives to the patent system tend to think most patents, including software patents, are valuable and useful. What is surprising is that, in spite of this likely tendency, the en banc Federal Circuit invalidated the patents here. Half of the en banc judges took the sensible view that running a program on a computer does not transform the computer or render software less abstract
We have a similar system here in the USA, where ordinary citizens can write whatever law they want and have our Congress vote on it.
Its just that instead of submitting millions of signatures to Congress, you have to submit millions of dollars.
in a 110-minute movie. The rest of the Snyder playbook is there, too: a story-starting catalyst midway through the first act, a shootout at the midpoint that ups the ante, an all-is-lost moment—including a death—between the 75- and 80-minute mark,
and later
It’s enough to make you wonder: Is overreliance on Snyder’s story formula killing movies? If so, then all is lost. The major studios increasingly rely on ...
So if the all-is-lost moment is supposed to happen 68-73% of the way through the flick, and the movie industry is at that point now, then a little math tells us that the movie industry should be wrapping up sometime from 2054 to 2066.
I can't wait for the "dark night of the soul" the industry will have at the end of this decade. That's always my favorite part.
Yes. Because when has a country's rulers ever foolishly ensured their own regieme's destruction by helping terrorists attack the USA? Nope, that could never ever happen
The thing you can do with a touchscreen though is pack an entire airliner worth of controls into a single panel, by using multiple screens.
I'd argue however this is the exact opposite of what Apple did with the iPhone. The goal should be using tech to make everything simpler, not using it to increase complexity. My dad's Prius touch-screen is a nightmare to navigate (making it an actual driving hazard). The interface for entering a driving destination, for example, requires you to enter addresses with the parts in reverse order, and split into three screens just to enter a single address. It could not have been make more nightmarish if they'd tried.
The problem I have with the ACLU argument is that nobody argues that this same activity (following a person around in public to see where they go) is a big problem if the cops do it manually. People are getting worried now just because cameras and computers are allowing them to perform the same kinds of surveilence much more efficiently. But the engineer in me insists that either the base activity is OK, or it isn't. If it is OK, then it ought to be OK for the police to do it as efficiently (and cheaply) as possible. Conversely, if tracking a person with cameras and computer assistance isn't OK, then it shouldn't be OK to do it the old-fashioned manual way either.
, need I remind you of the Boston bombing. It was a low tech pressure cooker bomb in backpack that easily got past heighten surveillance at a marathon. How many days did it take to find the people who did it? It was people that found them, not cameras.
The problem with this logic is that we never would have known who we were looking for in the first place without all the cameras. In the event they were able to capture one of the perps planting one of the devices (and its subsequent explosion), and they were also able to place him interacting with another person with a similar backpack. Without the ubiquitous cameras, the FBI would probably still be running down leads at sporting-goods stores today.
step... spotify pays the LABELS. The LABELS obviously decided the royalties from spotify are enough
Good point. And the benefit that the Labels bring to this entirely online transaction is .... um ... wait a bit, it'll come to me...
Even in the USA metric units are used in Physics and Astronomy.
While this may be gratifying to see if you are accessing this American website from abroad, and are used to having to do mental conversions, you really shouldn't get the idea in your head that folks here in America have finally decided to reorder their thinking to suit your conveinence.
I swear, give you Europeans an inch, and you'll take a mile. :-)
On the other hand, natural disasters that make those who want to cut disaster relief look like hearless fools right before a presidental election are a 1-in-4 year event.
Hi! This is a post from the future.
The good news is that they found the "bio-markers" indicating a propensity towards violence
The bad news is that human being alive has them.
Yeah, as a Brit I'm somewhat confused by this article .... , he's also a mentor and a teacher as well. Occasionally this means hauling out a particularly daft member of the school for everyone else to see and making an example of them
A very long post. If I can summarize, he believes that Linux is doing a good job of fostering the exact kind of nurturing learning envionrment that British Public Schools are famous for.
Any technology that prevents the accidental death of irresponsible gun owners' children is simply interfering with natural selection.
... or that of their neghbor's children?
Yes. When he starting reccomending dino parents quit spanking as a punishment, they were forced to do "timeouts" instead. However, lacking wristwatches, they didn't know to let the kids back up, and they all starved to death.