When I go on vacation, I like to go places where there is often no phone or internet service. If there is anything that my department cannot handle while I'm out, that's a problem. It's a problem I fix as soon as possible. It's been quite a few years since anything that "needed" my attention turned out to be something besides "we didn't bother reading the documentation." I expect a backlog of issues they couldn't handle as efficiently as I could, but nothing they couldn't do if they just read and learned more.
My predecessor once bragged that my employer would never be able to keep him from being able to log back in. He left on "good" terms, so I didn't have to immediately ensure that wasn't the case. That was nice since it did take me more than a month to ensure his access was truly disabled without interrupting any services. My replacement shouldn't need more than a day.
If I'm ever hurt, I expect my job to be waiting for me when I get back. I don't expect it to visit me in the hospital or at my home when I'm recuperating.
If I win the lottery* one day, I expect to call HR and let them know that I'll come in for an exit interview after a few months in a tropical resort. I expect them to miss me and need to pay three times my salary for my replacements. I expect to get invited to office Christmas parties.
*I don't expect to win the lottery. I don't buy lottery tickets, but according to the way I understand math, my odds of winning are exactly the same for planning purposes.
Once in a while I get a call from somebody who wants to sell IT in a box type outsourcing. I don't dismiss the idea out of hand because there's a lot of scut work I wish I didn't have to spend time on, but so far, I can't rationalize the cost. I know they can't replace us, but sometimes I think it would be nice to separate our true work from the work that just fills the low priority moments. There's a very slim chance that somebody with a poor sense of what we actually do will get one of those calls and think they can save money by replacing us. In our offices, I expect that idea to be dismissed immediately, but maybe personnel will change or somebody will make a stupid decision and I'll get to hand over the passwords to my replacement. My next employer will have a dozen references vouching for me and in three months I'll get offered my old job with a salary high enough to make me, at least briefly, consider taking them up on it.
If you're on/., then you're not the target demographic for a chromebook. If you are saddled with one, you'll need five minutes of reading and then you'll put Ubuntu on it or otherwise make it do things no normal human cares about doing. If you want a computer, you care about what you can make it do, not what software comes with it. You're not normal and chromebooks are for normal people.
Chromebooks are what I'd recommend for nearly all of my family and friends. There are two questions that determine if a chromebook is right for you:
1. How cheap does it need to be? 2. How hard should it be to screw up?
If you're doing work (getting paid) that needs another OS, you're willing to spend extra on something and take the time to prevent and repair messed up systems.
If you need something cheap, it's hard to get more function than a chromebook gives at the entry price point they offer.
If you need something really hard to mess up, it's hard, nigh impossible, to get a system much easier to support. Note that I didn't mention the price. Not even the iPhone is as resistant to getting screwed up and Apple has done it well enough to get a monopoly in the grandma market.
Cheap and easy. That's what matters to 99.9% of the market. The wonder is that Windows and Macs aren't losing even more market share.
You and I are the exceptions. We're the 1 out of 1,000 who bothers to read tech news. We're the out of a 1,000 who care about things like operating systems. Ask people you meet on the street to describe any difference between operating system kernels or ask them to name four different operating systems and I'd be surprised if you find someone who can do both in 2000 tries.
I don't trust Google to always do what I think is morally right, but they give me tools to see and expunge everything they track about me.
That's a far better deal than I get from most companies I interact with.
Sure, of course they may be lying, but why would they lie when 99.999% of their customers won't even bother learning that there is such an option, let alone exercise it?! Lying would open them to legal risk, telling them the truth insulates them and costs them practically nothing.
I've seen how the humans drive where I live. I think the odds of dying at the hands of the humans is far higher than the odds of dying at the... well not hands, but whatever the equivalent is for autonomous vehicles.
Is it worth the deaths? That's a trolley problem and humankind hasn't really been able to answer it. But if you ask most people, they'd tell you they prefer a one in a billion chance of dying over a one in a million chance.
Humans are tremendously versatile, and capable of doing many things better than any machine to date. Making unfailing good decisions while driving is not among those things. The question here isn't whether or not machines will kill less people than humans, but rather what approach will get us to fewer deaths quickest. Uber, Google and Musk are taking the approach of getting the tech deployed and working as quickly as possible.
I don't trust the motives, but I do recognize the conflict. If our society can deploy the tech starting today that will save a thousand lives in the next year, isn't it worth scaring a bunch of people and pissing off a bunch of politicians? I'd say yes, but that's a big if. I'm still on the fence as to whether it might not save more lives to have more controlled and regulated testing that slows such deployment.
Fortunately, there is a way to get sufficient test data to make a rational decision as to whether the tech will save lives. Michigan has made it tremendously easier to test self driving cars than California. I wish Uber would concentrate all their resources into making Michigan the test case. If they can get to ten percent autonomous cars in Michigan, then we should see a corresponding decline in traffic related deaths. Do that for a year and point out how many Californians died needlessly next year to every news outlet that will listen and we'll have our revolution.
Cancer. Death. Disease. Things we already have and could potentially cure with this.
People could die. People will die, with or without this. Maybe, just maybe, this could mean fewer people dying unnecessary deaths.
Is this a moon shot? No. This has the possibility of saving millions of lives. Millions of people who have the potential to make the world better, for all of humanity, for the species. Most importantly, this has the potential to make the world better for the people who don't die and for the people they don't leave behind. Soon, and it cannot happen soon enough!
Peter had a tendency to use bad language. He let his temper flare when it did no good. When confronted with a test of his faith, he buckled. I can see myself in his failures. Thomas saw people fed when it was impossible, saw people healed and knew Jesus. Yet when told that Jesus was alive, refused to accept the possibility of another miracle. He went so far as to say he would never believe unless he could touch the pierced flesh of Jesus himself. If there's anyone I see myself in, it's not Jesus, it's Thomas.
Of course Christians want to be like Jesus, but we don't act like him. We act like the people he loved and forgave. Over and over, we act like them and we have faith he forgives us too. The story the Bible tells is about people who fail as often as not.
I call myself a Christian, not because I act like Christ, but because I believe I should act like Christ. And because I believe Jesus forgives me for failing.
I've believed a lot of things that I no longer believe. As many times as I've gotten things wrong, I'm sure I still have a lot of things wrong now. I have done things, and I continue to do things, I regret. I think Yeshu will have to forgive me for getting his name wrong too, but considering my track record, I think that's the least of my transgressions.
If Christians were more like Jesus, if they went around challenging the status quo and overly-rigid thinking and pushing people to think critically, then I would really like that religion.
Me too. Meanwhile, I (try to) stick with something I was taught a long time ago. I do the best I can, where I am, with what I have.
I'm not an emacs user, but it's not because I have anything against emacs, it's because vi is already on everything.
I started out using vi because it was installed. Most of the production systems I've been charged with handling don't have emacs, but they do have vi. If I'm lucky they have vim. I can usually push and manage to get something installed, but typically I don't want to do that. Typically I just want to work on whatever needs changed or fixed.
What I look for in a text editor: Is it installed? Can I do what I need to do with it?
We care a lot. If something doesn't follow the laws of physics as we know them, that means that either we don't understand the something or there is something we don't understand about the laws of physics.
If we don't understand what is happening to something and we figure it out, that's useful engineering knowledge.
That's actually the less awesome potential. If we don't understand something about the laws of physics and we can figure that out instead... well that changes the world. It makes possible what we think impossible.
If an alien landed a spaceship in the middle of Times Square, it wouldn't necessarily change our understanding of physics. This could.
Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space. - Douglas Adams
But that's not the same as saying that intelligent life can't spread across a big space. There are some limits imposed by the speed of light and the speed of the expansion of the universe. That said, machines, intelligent machines with personalities of humans, couldn't spread ourselves around.
Imagine waking up after a journey of a couple million miles and being the one who guides new life to intelligence. Maybe you do a little job here or there to make sure life develops. Maybe you perform a "miracle" or two for primitive lifeforms to keep them headed in the right direction. Maybe eventually you create a biological life-form to direct them to things that will eventually build a society capable of surviving long enough to propagate themselves into space. Sure, you'll get blamed for a lot of stuff that you don't do to keep them happy, but if your goal is expansion of intelligent life in the universe, you take the good, you take the bad you take them both and there you have the facts of life. In the universe and whatnot. Maybe humans aren't even the first.
I think you missed the point there. Nobody is suggesting that FB would stop being "free." They're suggesting that you could pay to have the advertising removed.
I wouldn't have put it that way, but you have a valid point. This is a kid who didn't do anything actually dangerous and was taken from a school in handcuffs. It was made worse because it's apparent it wouldn't haven't have happened if his skin had been light enough.
There seem to be a lot of comments talking about the will or intent of the kid, but honestly it shouldn't matter. We put our children in a government mandated situation where we have to trust the institution with rights otherwise reserved to parent. We expect, and have every right to expect, the institution to handle discipline with consistency and good judgement. It's absolutely justified that we should react with outrage when they fail to do it in such a spectacular fashion. Don't forget this kid was pressured by authorities to sign something admitting to something he didn't do without parental or legal defense.
I don't care what the kid did, kids do stupid stuff sometimes. I don't care what his parents did because having stupid parents shouldn't be an excuse to abuse kids. What I do care about is how the authorities put in charge of our children behave and in this case it was objectively terrible.
That's going to happen. Kids are going to do stupid stuff. Parents are going to do stupid stuff. Authorities are going to react badly. You can't and shouldn't expect to be able to prevent every kid from ever doing something stupid. You can only do so much to prevent parents from being stupid. What we can and must do is prevent authorities from doing stupid stuff, particularly those who are given the authority of force.
Never. Hopefully. Depending on your definition of "spied on."
It is a terrible idea for the government to be able to determine who is a legitimate journalist and who isn't. Imagine Fox News or CNN (which ever you hate more) being the sole news authority and it's obvious why. Letting the government determine who is a journalist leads to a situation where the public is only given government approved news.
If the government doesn't determine who is a journalist, then anyone can be a journalist. Hopefully we as a society encourage the best and discourage the worst, but that means that any citizen has the right to act as a journalist. We can legitimately expect journalists to follow certain ethical guidelines that we establish in law, no sneaky upskirt photography, no snooping on lawyer-client meetings, no taping people inside their homes or bathrooms without their knowledge unless they leave the blinds open. But everything done in public should be something a journalist (any citizen) has the right to record and report on.
US law pretty much reflects that philosophy. The test to ask is if a dirty politician does something bad in the environment and your favorite reporter witnesses it, should the reporter be able to record and report on it. If the answer is yes, then citizens are afforded the same right, even citizens acting as public officials at the time.
Consider this context: Your favorite reporter knows your least favorite dirty politician is up to something bad, so the reporter puts a microphone in a public place where the reporter suspects the dirty politician will talk about it. Should it be illegal for the reporter to do that? Should it be illegal to use the evidence the reporter gathered? If it shouldn't be illegal for the reporter, it shouldn't be illegal for lawyers, cops, or district attorneys either.
Anything you do in public is and should be potentially something that can be reported on or used as evidence. The law is supposed to protect the individual from abuse. The word "privacy" can mean lots of things, but protecting people from having what they do in public become public is not what the law is designed to do.
I support the NSA and I also support Snowden. Snowden did a brave and terrifying thing that needed to happen, that needed to be done, knowing the consequences he faced. The NSA is a good organization with many good people doing what they need to do with love for their countrymen in their hearts and honor in their actions. Some people in the NSA made bad, perhaps even evil decisions. Sometimes bad people get put in positions they shouldn't be, and sometimes people with power, even good people, make decisions that are bad.
Supporting the NSA doesn't mean I support all the decisions or people that are a part of it. I believe the NSA did some bad things, but that doesn't mean I think the organization is bad or comprised of bad people.
What Snowden did may have been illegal, but it was a choice to do what he believed was right. For what it's worth I believe it was right too. I think it is a terrible thing to have to choose between following the law and doing what is right when the two are mutually exclusive.
The US justice system was designed intentionally to have people determine not only whether the law was followed, but also whether the law should apply. Snowden should be able to face a court of his peers and plead his case and that jury should be able to make a judgement not based on the law, but on whether what he did was wrong or right. It disturbs and saddens me to realize I don't trust that he could receive such a fair trial.
In the US, this is an issue tied closely to freedom of the press. When you restrict the rights of the press, you potentially enable abuse which is why it was important enough to be included in the bill of rights.
In modern usage, the freedom of the press includes the rights to take photographs and use them in ways that make other people unhappy.
There are reasonable restrictions placed on that freedom as with all the other freedoms spelled out in the bill of rights. You don't have a right to take photographs on private property when the owner says you can't. You don't have the right to take photographs of people in settings where they have a reasonable expectation of privacy, such as restrooms. While you do have the right to take a picture from the public sidewalk of what you see through the open window of someone's home, you don't have that right if they have blinds intended to prevent it.
This means you can take pictures of your mayor smoking crack so long as he's not doing it in his house with the blinds drawn. You can take pictures of protesters and parades without needing to get waivers from everyone photographed. The reason you can watch News Years celebrations in Central Park is because the freedom to photograph and even video those people, even live, without getting waivers is protected by the bill of rights.
You have the right to do this too, whether you're a journalist or not, because journalism doesn't rely on a government agency to approve who gets to be a journalist or not. This is also critical to preventing abuse.
The upshot of all this is that you have the right to take photographs and video without consent and use those photos and videos however you like with only a few reasonable restrictions.
In Illinois they decided the state has the right to restrict the freedom to use pictures and videos in certain ways. It's not unusual for states to restrict freedoms within their borders in order to maintain the balance of freedoms between different people, and it isn't necessarily a problem. In most cases the states are careful to craft any laws, particularly those that restrict freedoms guaranteed by the bill of rights, very carefully so that the law won't be invalidated by the federal courts.
I think this law is bound to eventually be invalidated by federal courts. Some public figure will be photographed doing something shady and the photograph will be correlated to the figure by biometric algorithms. When that happens, the public figure will try to shut down the story using this law and journalists will prevail in the courts because of the protections of the bill of rights.
Eventually we will have to accept that being photographed in public and having computers organize, sort and assist us with those pictures is something that cannot be prevented without compromising the basic rights that support our legislative system.
Whether we will decide that the protections of a free press or our privacy is more important in the long run is something that worries me. Americans are all too often more interested in their comfort than their freedom and that trend worries me.
I'm not sure I actually disagree with your prediction. That said, this seems unlikely to me.
The ISP tracking every click I make or how much time I spend on content sounds like they have control of my computer. That seems unlikely to me. People use VPNs for work where they literally aren't allowed to share information with a third party. People use VPNs and proxies to avoid being tracked. People buy computers with the express intent of putting a different OS on the computer than what it might come with, or precisely because they can put whatever they want on it. People jailbreak iphones and put Cyanogenmod on phones sold with Android. All of the history of people interacting with the devices they purchase and companies being required to protect secret information makes me skeptical of a scenario where ISPs have enough power to track the uses of people using their service. Not to mention that ISPs fight the content providers in order to offer service to customers who want data access without oversight.
The war with pirates is futile.
I think the war with pirates cannot be won by anyone but the pirates.
The alternative is that ISPs will offer devices, without competition, that take more effort to crack than the average consumer is willing to concede when a cracked device offers the same media with a similar cost in effort. I'm not sure if that idea even scares me, because if I could have access to everything I might desire at the same price as anything I could do with hardware under my own control, the effort versus the gain of having actual control of my own device doesn't sound like it would be worth it.
In the article I read, he did apparently attempt to cooperate and tried several guesses at passwords and apparently failed.
He was found to have legal pornography on other devices which lends credence to the argument his lawyer makes. His lawyer makes the case that the evidence they are attempting to obtain is based on the accusations of a sister who is angry that the suspect stopped supporting her.
I question the reliability of the witness, but that's not enough to convince me that a judge shouldn't attempt to get all possible facts in this or any other case. That's a matter of judgement, and the role of a judge. In this case, the judge has apparently decided that an angry relative was telling the truth and a man failing to succeed in decrypting data was lying about forgetting a password.
(Honestly, I think the judge's suspicions are right and the man is deliberately failing to produce the password.)
Initially, the court determined it didn't have the authority to compel the suspect to take further action, but the prosecution moved to a different court and there found a judge that would side with them.
Have you ever had an angry relative? I have. Have you ever forgotten a password? I have. Do you make a habit of protecting personal information, like tax returns, with a password? I do. I don't like the idea that any of us could be in this situation with no recourse, and no ability to comply, actually innocent and held in prison without a trial.
Since I personally believe this man is guilty, I hope evidence is found that proves to a jury he is guilty. However, since I also believe in the rights of the accused and agree with (most of) the constitution of the US and believe in the rule of law, I also hope this judge is slapped down by a higher authority for failing to uphold the laws protecting the rights of the accused. There are too many "if" statements for me in this case. "If" the sister is telling the truth, and "if" the suspect is lying about not knowing the password and "if" the encrypted data could be decrypted and "if" when decrypted, it would give needed evidence, and "if" holding this man in prison without a trial or even charges will change his decision to lie and "if" this man, who has never been accused of a crime (according to his attorney,) is found guilty then justice would be served.
But at what cost? Can I send a person to jail with no trial, no charges even, by running dd bs=1024 count=1048576 </dev/urandom > myfile and putting it on their computer then making a false allegation? How about if I write a virus infecting thousands that creates random noise files on people's computers then emails accusations to police? Discussion question: How would you react if the police confiscated your devices and demanded a password you don't have to a file you didn't know was on your computer?
(There is a tiny dark voice in my mind that thinks that building a virus to create false evidence on people's hard drives and emailing false confessions, preferring to email from.gov addresses, would go a long way towards preventing tyranny. I try to drown that voice with alcohol.)
The idealist in me wants to believe that government and law enforcement would use the powers only for good. The realist and historian in me recognizes how unlikely that is, especially given time for bad people to gain power and for bad enough things to happen to let the abuse happen.
The US would never do that! But then I remember the Trail of Tears, slavery, Tuskegee syphilis experiment, Project MKUltra, the internment of Japanese Americans, the Bay of Pigs, and most recently the Ferguson police. I realize that's likely in the wrong order but that's the order it came to mind. Certainly some of those are worse than others, but they all show how even a country I love can engage in the most terrible abuses of power.
Recently I had an alert (not sure it was this account) that someone had replied to a post. When I clicked the link, it took me to a blank page. I checked my post history and could see where someone had replied, but the post ID was different than what was presented in the alert. Essentially, the post ID apparently changed at some point. I shrugged, thought "humph, database error" and deleted the alert.
If OP thinks the comments are deleted, it might be due to them changing IDs rather than actually being deleted. If you weren't aware of this, then there might be an issue worth looking into.
Slashdot Mirror
for planning purposes
caveat: noun - a warning or proviso of specific stipulations, conditions, or limitations.
When I go on vacation, I like to go places where there is often no phone or internet service. If there is anything that my department cannot handle while I'm out, that's a problem. It's a problem I fix as soon as possible. It's been quite a few years since anything that "needed" my attention turned out to be something besides "we didn't bother reading the documentation." I expect a backlog of issues they couldn't handle as efficiently as I could, but nothing they couldn't do if they just read and learned more.
My predecessor once bragged that my employer would never be able to keep him from being able to log back in. He left on "good" terms, so I didn't have to immediately ensure that wasn't the case. That was nice since it did take me more than a month to ensure his access was truly disabled without interrupting any services. My replacement shouldn't need more than a day.
If I'm ever hurt, I expect my job to be waiting for me when I get back. I don't expect it to visit me in the hospital or at my home when I'm recuperating.
If I win the lottery* one day, I expect to call HR and let them know that I'll come in for an exit interview after a few months in a tropical resort. I expect them to miss me and need to pay three times my salary for my replacements. I expect to get invited to office Christmas parties.
*I don't expect to win the lottery. I don't buy lottery tickets, but according to the way I understand math, my odds of winning are exactly the same for planning purposes.
Once in a while I get a call from somebody who wants to sell IT in a box type outsourcing. I don't dismiss the idea out of hand because there's a lot of scut work I wish I didn't have to spend time on, but so far, I can't rationalize the cost. I know they can't replace us, but sometimes I think it would be nice to separate our true work from the work that just fills the low priority moments. There's a very slim chance that somebody with a poor sense of what we actually do will get one of those calls and think they can save money by replacing us. In our offices, I expect that idea to be dismissed immediately, but maybe personnel will change or somebody will make a stupid decision and I'll get to hand over the passwords to my replacement. My next employer will have a dozen references vouching for me and in three months I'll get offered my old job with a salary high enough to make me, at least briefly, consider taking them up on it.
Hyperbole is the most heinous abomination against God that mankind has ever committed.
and which god might that be?
All of them.
He's just kidding. Of course he meant both.
Because it's easier to screw up a Ubuntu install.
If you're on /., then you're not the target demographic for a chromebook. If you are saddled with one, you'll need five minutes of reading and then you'll put Ubuntu on it or otherwise make it do things no normal human cares about doing. If you want a computer, you care about what you can make it do, not what software comes with it. You're not normal and chromebooks are for normal people.
Chromebooks are what I'd recommend for nearly all of my family and friends. There are two questions that determine if a chromebook is right for you:
1. How cheap does it need to be?
2. How hard should it be to screw up?
If you're doing work (getting paid) that needs another OS, you're willing to spend extra on something and take the time to prevent and repair messed up systems.
If you need something cheap, it's hard to get more function than a chromebook gives at the entry price point they offer.
If you need something really hard to mess up, it's hard, nigh impossible, to get a system much easier to support. Note that I didn't mention the price. Not even the iPhone is as resistant to getting screwed up and Apple has done it well enough to get a monopoly in the grandma market.
Cheap and easy. That's what matters to 99.9% of the market. The wonder is that Windows and Macs aren't losing even more market share.
You and I are the exceptions. We're the 1 out of 1,000 who bothers to read tech news. We're the out of a 1,000 who care about things like operating systems. Ask people you meet on the street to describe any difference between operating system kernels or ask them to name four different operating systems and I'd be surprised if you find someone who can do both in 2000 tries.
I don't trust Google to always do what I think is morally right, but they give me tools to see and expunge everything they track about me.
That's a far better deal than I get from most companies I interact with.
Sure, of course they may be lying, but why would they lie when 99.999% of their customers won't even bother learning that there is such an option, let alone exercise it?! Lying would open them to legal risk, telling them the truth insulates them and costs them practically nothing.
I've seen how the humans drive where I live. I think the odds of dying at the hands of the humans is far higher than the odds of dying at the... well not hands, but whatever the equivalent is for autonomous vehicles.
Is it worth the deaths? That's a trolley problem and humankind hasn't really been able to answer it. But if you ask most people, they'd tell you they prefer a one in a billion chance of dying over a one in a million chance.
Humans are tremendously versatile, and capable of doing many things better than any machine to date. Making unfailing good decisions while driving is not among those things. The question here isn't whether or not machines will kill less people than humans, but rather what approach will get us to fewer deaths quickest. Uber, Google and Musk are taking the approach of getting the tech deployed and working as quickly as possible.
I don't trust the motives, but I do recognize the conflict. If our society can deploy the tech starting today that will save a thousand lives in the next year, isn't it worth scaring a bunch of people and pissing off a bunch of politicians? I'd say yes, but that's a big if. I'm still on the fence as to whether it might not save more lives to have more controlled and regulated testing that slows such deployment.
Fortunately, there is a way to get sufficient test data to make a rational decision as to whether the tech will save lives. Michigan has made it tremendously easier to test self driving cars than California. I wish Uber would concentrate all their resources into making Michigan the test case. If they can get to ten percent autonomous cars in Michigan, then we should see a corresponding decline in traffic related deaths. Do that for a year and point out how many Californians died needlessly next year to every news outlet that will listen and we'll have our revolution.
Is it illegal to refuse to speak to anyone but your lawyer? I suspect it isn't but don't really know.
What could go wrong?
Cancer. Death. Disease. Things we already have and could potentially cure with this.
People could die. People will die, with or without this. Maybe, just maybe, this could mean fewer people dying unnecessary deaths.
Is this a moon shot? No. This has the possibility of saving millions of lives. Millions of people who have the potential to make the world better, for all of humanity, for the species. Most importantly, this has the potential to make the world better for the people who don't die and for the people they don't leave behind. Soon, and it cannot happen soon enough!
I'll bite.
Peter had a tendency to use bad language. He let his temper flare when it did no good. When confronted with a test of his faith, he buckled. I can see myself in his failures. Thomas saw people fed when it was impossible, saw people healed and knew Jesus. Yet when told that Jesus was alive, refused to accept the possibility of another miracle. He went so far as to say he would never believe unless he could touch the pierced flesh of Jesus himself. If there's anyone I see myself in, it's not Jesus, it's Thomas.
Of course Christians want to be like Jesus, but we don't act like him. We act like the people he loved and forgave. Over and over, we act like them and we have faith he forgives us too. The story the Bible tells is about people who fail as often as not.
I call myself a Christian, not because I act like Christ, but because I believe I should act like Christ. And because I believe Jesus forgives me for failing.
I've believed a lot of things that I no longer believe. As many times as I've gotten things wrong, I'm sure I still have a lot of things wrong now. I have done things, and I continue to do things, I regret. I think Yeshu will have to forgive me for getting his name wrong too, but considering my track record, I think that's the least of my transgressions.
If Christians were more like Jesus, if they went around challenging the status quo and overly-rigid thinking and pushing people to think critically, then I would really like that religion.
Me too. Meanwhile, I (try to) stick with something I was taught a long time ago. I do the best I can, where I am, with what I have.
I'm not an emacs user, but it's not because I have anything against emacs, it's because vi is already on everything.
I started out using vi because it was installed. Most of the production systems I've been charged with handling don't have emacs, but they do have vi. If I'm lucky they have vim. I can usually push and manage to get something installed, but typically I don't want to do that. Typically I just want to work on whatever needs changed or fixed.
What I look for in a text editor: Is it installed? Can I do what I need to do with it?
That's about it.
Yes.
We care a lot. If something doesn't follow the laws of physics as we know them, that means that either we don't understand the something or there is something we don't understand about the laws of physics.
If we don't understand what is happening to something and we figure it out, that's useful engineering knowledge.
That's actually the less awesome potential. If we don't understand something about the laws of physics and we can figure that out instead... well that changes the world. It makes possible what we think impossible.
If an alien landed a spaceship in the middle of Times Square, it wouldn't necessarily change our understanding of physics. This could.
God bless you for suggesting moving. (Can't resist the irony!)
I wish more people were willing to recognize that you have control of your own destiny at least to the extent of the laws you choose to live under.
Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space. - Douglas Adams
But that's not the same as saying that intelligent life can't spread across a big space. There are some limits imposed by the speed of light and the speed of the expansion of the universe. That said, machines, intelligent machines with personalities of humans, couldn't spread ourselves around.
Imagine waking up after a journey of a couple million miles and being the one who guides new life to intelligence. Maybe you do a little job here or there to make sure life develops. Maybe you perform a "miracle" or two for primitive lifeforms to keep them headed in the right direction. Maybe eventually you create a biological life-form to direct them to things that will eventually build a society capable of surviving long enough to propagate themselves into space. Sure, you'll get blamed for a lot of stuff that you don't do to keep them happy, but if your goal is expansion of intelligent life in the universe, you take the good, you take the bad you take them both and there you have the facts of life. In the universe and whatnot. Maybe humans aren't even the first.
That's the problem.
I think you missed the point there. Nobody is suggesting that FB would stop being "free." They're suggesting that you could pay to have the advertising removed.
You know, like Slashdot.
I wouldn't have put it that way, but you have a valid point. This is a kid who didn't do anything actually dangerous and was taken from a school in handcuffs. It was made worse because it's apparent it wouldn't haven't have happened if his skin had been light enough.
There seem to be a lot of comments talking about the will or intent of the kid, but honestly it shouldn't matter. We put our children in a government mandated situation where we have to trust the institution with rights otherwise reserved to parent. We expect, and have every right to expect, the institution to handle discipline with consistency and good judgement. It's absolutely justified that we should react with outrage when they fail to do it in such a spectacular fashion. Don't forget this kid was pressured by authorities to sign something admitting to something he didn't do without parental or legal defense.
I don't care what the kid did, kids do stupid stuff sometimes. I don't care what his parents did because having stupid parents shouldn't be an excuse to abuse kids. What I do care about is how the authorities put in charge of our children behave and in this case it was objectively terrible.
That's going to happen. Kids are going to do stupid stuff. Parents are going to do stupid stuff. Authorities are going to react badly. You can't and shouldn't expect to be able to prevent every kid from ever doing something stupid. You can only do so much to prevent parents from being stupid. What we can and must do is prevent authorities from doing stupid stuff, particularly those who are given the authority of force.
Never. Hopefully. Depending on your definition of "spied on."
It is a terrible idea for the government to be able to determine who is a legitimate journalist and who isn't. Imagine Fox News or CNN (which ever you hate more) being the sole news authority and it's obvious why. Letting the government determine who is a journalist leads to a situation where the public is only given government approved news.
If the government doesn't determine who is a journalist, then anyone can be a journalist. Hopefully we as a society encourage the best and discourage the worst, but that means that any citizen has the right to act as a journalist. We can legitimately expect journalists to follow certain ethical guidelines that we establish in law, no sneaky upskirt photography, no snooping on lawyer-client meetings, no taping people inside their homes or bathrooms without their knowledge unless they leave the blinds open. But everything done in public should be something a journalist (any citizen) has the right to record and report on.
US law pretty much reflects that philosophy. The test to ask is if a dirty politician does something bad in the environment and your favorite reporter witnesses it, should the reporter be able to record and report on it. If the answer is yes, then citizens are afforded the same right, even citizens acting as public officials at the time.
Consider this context: Your favorite reporter knows your least favorite dirty politician is up to something bad, so the reporter puts a microphone in a public place where the reporter suspects the dirty politician will talk about it. Should it be illegal for the reporter to do that? Should it be illegal to use the evidence the reporter gathered? If it shouldn't be illegal for the reporter, it shouldn't be illegal for lawyers, cops, or district attorneys either.
Anything you do in public is and should be potentially something that can be reported on or used as evidence. The law is supposed to protect the individual from abuse. The word "privacy" can mean lots of things, but protecting people from having what they do in public become public is not what the law is designed to do.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I support the NSA and I also support Snowden. Snowden did a brave and terrifying thing that needed to happen, that needed to be done, knowing the consequences he faced. The NSA is a good organization with many good people doing what they need to do with love for their countrymen in their hearts and honor in their actions. Some people in the NSA made bad, perhaps even evil decisions. Sometimes bad people get put in positions they shouldn't be, and sometimes people with power, even good people, make decisions that are bad.
Supporting the NSA doesn't mean I support all the decisions or people that are a part of it. I believe the NSA did some bad things, but that doesn't mean I think the organization is bad or comprised of bad people.
What Snowden did may have been illegal, but it was a choice to do what he believed was right. For what it's worth I believe it was right too. I think it is a terrible thing to have to choose between following the law and doing what is right when the two are mutually exclusive.
The US justice system was designed intentionally to have people determine not only whether the law was followed, but also whether the law should apply. Snowden should be able to face a court of his peers and plead his case and that jury should be able to make a judgement not based on the law, but on whether what he did was wrong or right. It disturbs and saddens me to realize I don't trust that he could receive such a fair trial.
In the US, this is an issue tied closely to freedom of the press. When you restrict the rights of the press, you potentially enable abuse which is why it was important enough to be included in the bill of rights.
In modern usage, the freedom of the press includes the rights to take photographs and use them in ways that make other people unhappy.
There are reasonable restrictions placed on that freedom as with all the other freedoms spelled out in the bill of rights. You don't have a right to take photographs on private property when the owner says you can't. You don't have the right to take photographs of people in settings where they have a reasonable expectation of privacy, such as restrooms. While you do have the right to take a picture from the public sidewalk of what you see through the open window of someone's home, you don't have that right if they have blinds intended to prevent it.
This means you can take pictures of your mayor smoking crack so long as he's not doing it in his house with the blinds drawn. You can take pictures of protesters and parades without needing to get waivers from everyone photographed. The reason you can watch News Years celebrations in Central Park is because the freedom to photograph and even video those people, even live, without getting waivers is protected by the bill of rights.
You have the right to do this too, whether you're a journalist or not, because journalism doesn't rely on a government agency to approve who gets to be a journalist or not. This is also critical to preventing abuse.
The upshot of all this is that you have the right to take photographs and video without consent and use those photos and videos however you like with only a few reasonable restrictions.
In Illinois they decided the state has the right to restrict the freedom to use pictures and videos in certain ways. It's not unusual for states to restrict freedoms within their borders in order to maintain the balance of freedoms between different people, and it isn't necessarily a problem. In most cases the states are careful to craft any laws, particularly those that restrict freedoms guaranteed by the bill of rights, very carefully so that the law won't be invalidated by the federal courts.
I think this law is bound to eventually be invalidated by federal courts. Some public figure will be photographed doing something shady and the photograph will be correlated to the figure by biometric algorithms. When that happens, the public figure will try to shut down the story using this law and journalists will prevail in the courts because of the protections of the bill of rights.
Eventually we will have to accept that being photographed in public and having computers organize, sort and assist us with those pictures is something that cannot be prevented without compromising the basic rights that support our legislative system.
Whether we will decide that the protections of a free press or our privacy is more important in the long run is something that worries me. Americans are all too often more interested in their comfort than their freedom and that trend worries me.
I'm not sure I actually disagree with your prediction. That said, this seems unlikely to me.
The ISP tracking every click I make or how much time I spend on content sounds like they have control of my computer. That seems unlikely to me. People use VPNs for work where they literally aren't allowed to share information with a third party. People use VPNs and proxies to avoid being tracked. People buy computers with the express intent of putting a different OS on the computer than what it might come with, or precisely because they can put whatever they want on it. People jailbreak iphones and put Cyanogenmod on phones sold with Android. All of the history of people interacting with the devices they purchase and companies being required to protect secret information makes me skeptical of a scenario where ISPs have enough power to track the uses of people using their service. Not to mention that ISPs fight the content providers in order to offer service to customers who want data access without oversight.
The war with pirates is futile.
I think the war with pirates cannot be won by anyone but the pirates.
The alternative is that ISPs will offer devices, without competition, that take more effort to crack than the average consumer is willing to concede when a cracked device offers the same media with a similar cost in effort. I'm not sure if that idea even scares me, because if I could have access to everything I might desire at the same price as anything I could do with hardware under my own control, the effort versus the gain of having actual control of my own device doesn't sound like it would be worth it.
In the article I read, he did apparently attempt to cooperate and tried several guesses at passwords and apparently failed.
He was found to have legal pornography on other devices which lends credence to the argument his lawyer makes. His lawyer makes the case that the evidence they are attempting to obtain is based on the accusations of a sister who is angry that the suspect stopped supporting her.
I question the reliability of the witness, but that's not enough to convince me that a judge shouldn't attempt to get all possible facts in this or any other case. That's a matter of judgement, and the role of a judge. In this case, the judge has apparently decided that an angry relative was telling the truth and a man failing to succeed in decrypting data was lying about forgetting a password.
(Honestly, I think the judge's suspicions are right and the man is deliberately failing to produce the password.)
Initially, the court determined it didn't have the authority to compel the suspect to take further action, but the prosecution moved to a different court and there found a judge that would side with them.
Have you ever had an angry relative? I have. Have you ever forgotten a password? I have. Do you make a habit of protecting personal information, like tax returns, with a password? I do. I don't like the idea that any of us could be in this situation with no recourse, and no ability to comply, actually innocent and held in prison without a trial.
This is not a new argument.
Since I personally believe this man is guilty, I hope evidence is found that proves to a jury he is guilty. However, since I also believe in the rights of the accused and agree with (most of) the constitution of the US and believe in the rule of law, I also hope this judge is slapped down by a higher authority for failing to uphold the laws protecting the rights of the accused. There are too many "if" statements for me in this case. "If" the sister is telling the truth, and "if" the suspect is lying about not knowing the password and "if" the encrypted data could be decrypted and "if" when decrypted, it would give needed evidence, and "if" holding this man in prison without a trial or even charges will change his decision to lie and "if" this man, who has never been accused of a crime (according to his attorney,) is found guilty then justice would be served.
But at what cost? Can I send a person to jail with no trial, no charges even, by running /dev/urandom > myfile
dd bs=1024 count=1048576 <
and putting it on their computer then making a false allegation? How about if I write a virus infecting thousands that creates random noise files on people's computers then emails accusations to police? Discussion question: How would you react if the police confiscated your devices and demanded a password you don't have to a file you didn't know was on your computer?
(There is a tiny dark voice in my mind that thinks that building a virus to create false evidence on people's hard drives and emailing false confessions, preferring to email from .gov addresses, would go a long way towards preventing tyranny. I try to drown that voice with alcohol.)
The idealist in me wants to believe that government and law enforcement would use the powers only for good. The realist and historian in me recognizes how unlikely that is, especially given time for bad people to gain power and for bad enough things to happen to let the abuse happen.
The US would never do that! But then I remember the Trail of Tears, slavery, Tuskegee syphilis experiment, Project MKUltra, the internment of Japanese Americans, the Bay of Pigs, and most recently the Ferguson police. I realize that's likely in the wrong order but that's the order it came to mind. Certainly some of those are worse than others, but they all show how even a country I love can engage in the most terrible abuses of power.
Can't say it's a good book because I only read the sample so far, but check The Cicada Prophecy by J.R. McLeay. It looked interesting at least.
Recently I had an alert (not sure it was this account) that someone had replied to a post. When I clicked the link, it took me to a blank page. I checked my post history and could see where someone had replied, but the post ID was different than what was presented in the alert. Essentially, the post ID apparently changed at some point. I shrugged, thought "humph, database error" and deleted the alert.
If OP thinks the comments are deleted, it might be due to them changing IDs rather than actually being deleted. If you weren't aware of this, then there might be an issue worth looking into.