But who the hell gets off on crush porn? The first crush vid I saw was made by a friend of mine and the animals being crushed were worms. This was something new on the scene and the girl involved just thought it was a little gross and messy.
That was over a decade ago. Since then, things have "progressed". Now, you don't have to look far to find people making erotic videos featuring women stomping kittens to death. Or slowly stepping on them so that they suffer and struggle for a while before their skull pops.
I never thought it would happen, but my personal limits have been greatly surpassed in recent years.
Who gets off on this crap? Seriously, I'd like to know so that I can avoid those people.
We have about 1100 IT folks (includes telecomm, workstations, server admin, app development, the whole she-bang) supporting a bit more than 110,000 users in an org with gross yearly revenues exceeding $2.6 trillion USD. We're our own department. Despite the fact that we've shrunk over the last few years from 3100 to 1100 employees, I tend to believe we'll remain our own department for the foreseeable future.
I've had extensive "quality improvement process" training. The best lessons I've learned concern "facilitating failure." Unfortunately, until something fails, it doesn't get fixed.
You make a good point. I've seen several situation like you describe, as well as variations thereof.
Anecdote: A friend of mine retired a while back. He was incredibly stressed and overworked. He was extremely competent and hardworking, but the crushing workload eventually wore him out. He'd been asking for help for years.
He was a GS 11. When he retired, management put a new person in the job, tried that for a while, then re-assessed the situation. When all was said and done, that single GS 11 employee was eventually replaced by two GS 12s and three GS 7s.
My point? In government service, like anywhere else, sometimes it doesn't pay to be as good as you can be. You'll just get worked to death by an uncaring management that displays (as in your situation) a lamentable set of attitudes toward their own people. Even so, there are good and lousy employees in every organization and making assumptions about the competence of people based on whether they work in the public or private sector is never smart. You just can't tell.
I have lots of reasons to hate Bush and the problems that hit my agency while he was Prez are, actually, fairly low on that list. He screwed up lots of other things, too. And "hate" is too strong a word, implying a personal animosity that doesn't exist in this case. I just think he was a lousy president.
As for it all starting under Clinton, I'll take your word for it. After Clinton personally (I repeat: *personally*) killed a project I was peripherally involved with, I never had much use for the guy. You know you've pissed off someone up high when an executive in your agency walks into the group, calls everybody into a meeting, tells everybody to cease all work without even returning pending phone calls, and orders that all records be shredded starting the instant the meeting ends.:-)
So if you say Clinton started it, I'll go along with that. You must admit, though, that the process accelerated and the attitude toward government employees truly went into the crapper under Bush, right?
Why not have Google spend two-years building the interface with a plan to turn control of it over to USPTO employees in 2012? It seems like by then the USPTO could have gained the technical skills necessary to administer their database instead of turning to keys over to some different 3rd party contractor.
You don't understand how government IT works these days.
Most government IT shops in the U.S. have not yet recovered from the election of Bush the Younger. When he came into office, the overall attitude of the new guys in charge was that they hated government, hated government workers, and believed that it was a God-given truth that all government workers are incompetent at all things they do. Thus, anything that could be contracted out must be contracted out. Internal IT got downsized, outsourced, demoralized, broken, and spat on in many, many places.
Just as an aside, this idiocy reached such insane heights that high-level executives at one government agency actually floated a plan to do away with internal local IT support and replace it, where feasible, with something called "depot maintenance." Reduced to nuts and bolts, they actually considered contracting with Best Buy for certain instances of in-the-field deskside support! This made perfect sense to the bigwigs. After all, Best Buy is private industry so they must be more competent than anyone who actually works for the agency, right?
That attitude crippled many agencies and most have yet to recover. Even if Google built the system and handed it over with a ribbon around it, it's likely that the executives at USPTO would go looking for a contractor to charge lots of money to run the thing. (Disclaimer: I'm not there; I'm just speaking from broad experience with multiple agencies. I hope somone from USPTO will chime in.)
It's just part of the culture. I know it seems bad, but eventually people will wake up to the fact that if you keep electing people who believe that all government is bad, the result is going to be...well...bad government. Self-fulfilling prophecy and all that, doncha know.
...a step down in amenity and luxury from the "press" lounge and work area.
How is that possible? I've spent a good deal of time in the press lounge and work areas at Consumer Electronic Shows past and they were far from luxurious. But that was well before the era of blogs so maybe things were different.
I'm not sure why the parent of this post is getting so many replies.
Obvious troll is obvious. Obviously.
Well, maybe not. Parent is a wholly deadpan post making it hard to tell if it, perhaps, could have been meant as an ironic comment on the state of our society. Or it could simply be the case the drinkypoo is stupid and really believes that the all-too-common usage of the word as applying to any male who looks for more than a split-second at any teen is actually correct.
But I think the simplest explanation is probably the most likely. Bravo, drinkypoo, on your well-executed troll.
The girl who called her principal a pedo was 14 years old. That puts her in high school.
A pedo principal will not seek employment at a high school. He'll go to an elementary school or younger.
Unless, of course, the girl doesn't understand (just like the mainstream media frequently misunderstands) the definition of the word "pedophile".
What we have here is a teachable moment. The kid deserves an "F" on this vocabulary test. Somebody make her write on the chalkboard 1000 times: "Dictionaries are good. Using words without understanding them is bad."
Motivations for hard work are usually pretty transparent.
As adults, we work hard to get money or status or personal satisfaction or, well, laid.
It's very clear that spelling bee winners work very, very hard. To me, incomprehensibly hard.
But what do these kids get? Do their peers look up to them? Surely no one would work that hard just for a scholarship or some cash. Or am I wrong about that?
I might even have missed a few. Seriously dude how many guns do you need?
Posting anonymously since possibly enraging people with private weapons depots seems unwise.
That's funny. Thanks.
Seriously, though, guns aren't so much a "need" as a "want". I could make a good case that everyone needs at least two (more likely three) guns. Other people make reasonable cases that no one needs any at all.
However, if you appreciate the fun of shooting, the history that weapons embody, the insanely elegant engineering and design, or even the simple beauty of firearms, then you'll always want more.
Let me put it this way - I like music. (I tried to make a living as a concert bassoonist before I figured out I simply didn't have the talent.) Liking music, it's reasonable that I like records. Now, I don't need a lot of records. A thousand or so would, to most people, be a large collection. So I don't need the ~25,000 LPs that cover the walls in my music room.
At a gun show (in any relatively free state), private citizens can purchase from other private citizens without a background check. Neither is in the business of selling firearms, so no paperwork is required. (The dealers at the show must continue to follow all the same laws and procedures that they do back at their shop.)
You can do the same thing at a garage/yard sale. I've gotten some of my best buys at such places. Every time I stop to look at the computer or audio equipment people have put out in their driveway, I never fail to ask "You got any guns?"
You can do the same thing on a person-to-person basis. I've seen someone try to sell a gun to a pawnbroker who refused to give them enough money. The person walked out the door. That didn't stop me from following them out and offering to buy the gun.
You can do the same thing via the want ads in the newspaper. I've bought many guns from people in my town via that method.
You can do the same thing via an online meet-up. I've met people in internet forums who had a gun I was interested in. If they live in the same state as me and we can agree on a price, we both get in our cars and meet at some spot roughly halfway between our two houses. The last gun I bought was in the lobby of a Days Inn (I think; it was one of those cut-rate, business-travel hotels).
In free states, any two people who can legally own guns can trade them for money.
Big freakin' deal!
There is absoutely nothing special about gun shows. There is no "gun show loophole".
The politicians and anti-freedom activists who complain about the fictitious "gun show loophole" are people who simply want to outlaw all private, unregistered sales.
...you can easily find tales of IRS agents abusing their authority to look up info...
Sure, that's true. It's happened in the past so there are records of it that are easy to find.
But it's sure not common. The employee who was led out of my office (yes, I work for them) in handcuffs last week could testify that IRS employees who look up ex-spouses get fired and prosecuted. Every access to the Integrated Data Retrieval System, the front-end to nearly all our master files, is logged and automatically checked against the employees dossier. If you look up a family member or yourself you get fired and prosecuted. If you look up a famous person without cause, same outcome. If you look up someone who just happens to live in your neighborhood (even though you had no idea you did so), an investigation is opened and it's never pleasant.
I firmly believe that of all "large" agencies the IRS is the most trustworthy. The stats on firings for such reasons are available to the public and I'd feel comfortable comparing them to any other agency.
Does _Letters from the Earth_ reveal a man who doubts the existence of God? Or was it written by a man who apparently believes in God but thinks that the way most people worship him is all-too-often wrongheaded?
My money is on the latter.
My biases in this matter are two. First, I'm a Christian (Baptist, descended from a real-life, tent-meeting evangelical/revivalist tradition). Second, _Letters from the Earth_ became an instant favorite of mine the day my mom gifted me a copy on my 14th (iirc) birthday. Several decades have passed and I still drag it out when I get depressed by people who take themselves too seriously. The chuckles it induces never fail to lift my spirits.
I'm going to assume that you posted that link in good faith and not call you to task for the incompleteness of your perfectly-accurate-but-useless-in-the-real-world answer.
To others who visit that link, keep in mind that CP, in the broadest definition allowed by the linked cite, includes "...simulated lascivious exhibition of the... pubic area...".
That means that pictures of fully clothed kids can be prosecuted as CP. After all, if you can see the crotch area, then the pubic area is on display. If the person in possession can be reasonably proved to get some jollies from looking at the picture, that makes the pubic area exhibition into something lascivious. (Google the Knox decision, if you want more info.)
Thus, we have people convicted of CP crimes for taking pictures of their daughter in a bikini. (Google "Webe Web" if you want more info.)
Bottom line - all pictures of kids are CP if they're in the wrong hands, leaving it up to prosecutors to decide just what they want to attack when it comes to CP.
That means that my original question stands: What sort of real-world, working definition did the FTC use for "child pornography" when they took this action?
Feel free to do the research. I think what you'll find is that people who want to kill themselves...kill themselves. The presence or absence of a gun does nothing to change that.
There are places with high suicide rates and low gun ownership rates. The reverse is also true.
Ultimately, what you'll discover is that once a person makes up their mind to suicide, they do it. They almost always succeed. They'll use a gun if they have one but if they don't, they'll use other means and be about as successful.
People who haven't really made up their minds and attempt suicide as a cry for help won't use a gun even if it's sitting on the nightstand next to them.
I won't say guns make no difference. There will be the occasional incompetent who would have screwed up their own suicide otherwise but succeeded because they had a gun. Those numbers are small enough to be lost in the statistical noise.
Guns simply don't make a difference in how many people wind up dead from suicide.
But don't take my word for it. Do the research and see what you come up with. A little warning, though - It's a big subject into which many people have jumped, people whose passions are often inflamed to the point that their reason is compromised. Much of what you'll read is, in the vernacular, "somebody who has something to sell."
I've seen Asus page before. It's intriguing, but it's not portable. There's no display. If there were a way to use that touch screen as a display, it would still be awkwardly sized and the keyboard looks to be anything but the writer's joy that the M100 was.
As an alternative to the M100, there are low-end computers aimed at the educational and writer's market such as the Dana. However, I've had a chance to hold a Dana and some competing models. None of them have the "Damn, this is so perfect!" feel to their keyboard as the M100. That thing was special.
Of course, all this talk of tactile interfaces is really subjective. I learned to type during the switchover from manuals to electrics in my high school typing class. So the "mechanicalness" of the M100 just feels perfect to me in a way that few other devices (a particular model of Panasonic electric typewriter comes to mind) possibly can. No matter how much I long for that sort of device, I doubt I'll ever have one. I should probably get a Dana and see if I can adapt.
What bugs me is that I know such a thing as an updated M100 is possible. There's a market for the Happy Hacking keyboard, right? So how hard would it be to graft an 8-line monochrome LCD display on top of that? If somebody does it, I'll buy it.
...it doesn't work if your IT department is servicing 3,000 users. However, if it's 300 users with a single point of contact, you'll know pretty quickly how well you are performing...
My IT department services about 100,000 users.
I still think that just asking my customers how well I helped them with their problems is the best way to gauge my performance. I argued along those lines to management for a while but to no avail.
Now, we're in the process of removing nearly all "deskside" support and forcing employees to deal with a centralized help desk and over-the-network tools. That transition is going to be *very* painful and the level of service we deliver will be much worse. We already do as much as is reasonable over the phone and over the network. Sometimes it's much quicker for everyone to just go get on the elevator and sit with the user to solve a problem. The new way, though, will be "It doesn't matter if you spend 5 hours fixing something over the phone when you could have fixed it in 10 minutes by just walking over to the user. You're glued to your seat and you aren't allowed to get up!"
Like I said, this is about to become painful.
But, hey, the beancounters will be able to prove that we're more "efficient".
Funny, I always thought that achieving "effective" had to be accomplished before measures of "efficient" were worth a damn. Guess I was wrong.
Interesting. Before we had mandatory ticketing software, deskside IT support folks in my organization had assigned user populations. I had 350 (or so) officers to keep happy. That was my job. Screw tickets, screw counting anything. If the officers that depended on me were happy, I was happy. And so was my boss.
Then we started measuring things and the quality of my worklife took a big hit. I'll never forget a crusty old sysadmin who spoke out during a training session to an HQ analyst. Quote: "I can fix 20 problems a day. Or I can fix 10 and document them. Which do you want?" To him, me, and the other SAs in the class, the answer was obvious. Fix 20 and get 20 officers back to work, of course.
The analyst replied "As far as management is concerned, if you didn't document it, you didn't do it. Fix 10 and do the documentation."
Mind you, this wasn't for any experimental system where SA feedback was necessary to understand how to keep things running. This was for a long-established legacy system for which every possible problem and fix had long ago been documented in excruciatingly fine detail.
That particular SA retired a few months later. I can't say as I blame him.
Where I work, the weekly check-it-all AV run is scheduled for Sunday nights. That takes care of all the desktops in the office. Laptops run, then, as soon as they get put on the network Monday. Generally, people don't mind, especially since our AV software runs in the background and doesn't slow anybody down enough that it's worth complaining about. Their machines are a bit sluggish on Monday morning but, then again, so are most of the workers.
The folks who find that the AV scan slows them unacceptably turn in a help desk ticket and we have a look. That's a really good indicator that their machine is in need of a bit of a tune-up or has other problems.
Many years ago, I had an in-depth discussion about gathering statistics on heart disease with a woman on the board of the American Heart Association. This was a big deal. Serious ethical issues were in play and there was a great deal of infighting going on.
I asked her how you make a definitive decision that someone has heart disease. I was trying to figure out what to measure. Her answer surprised me. She said "You wait till they die. Then you cut out their heart and have a look." She then went on to patiently explain to me that the only thing that could be measured and evaluated were "markers" of heart disease. Those markers, as revealed by various disgnostic tests, could be mighty reliable. But you never know if someone is going to die of heart disease until they...you know...actually *die*.
Thus informed, I came to realize that what we measure is almost never what we really want to know. Measuring the right stuff is simply too hard to do. No matter where you look, this is almost universally true. In my job, for example, we fix computer problems. Thus, we measure how many incidents get closed and how much time it took. If you quickly close an incident, then surely you've provided good service, right? Most slashdotters should realize that's not true. In fact, my job is actually to get other, more important workers back to work asap. The only way to measure that would be to interview my customers and their bosses. We'd have to pry for an hour into their effectiveness to find out if I properly completed a job that took me five minutes. That's too much trouble, so we look for markers. Closed incidents. Timeliness of closures.
Measures are inadequate so often that I pretty much don't trust anything that contains them. After years of training in Quality Improvement Processes, I came to realize that the amount of time needed to understand a process and perfectly spec out what needs to be measured is 452% of the expected life cycle of the project, plus or minus a 17.5% margin of error. (Aside - How much do you trust those statistics?)
Almost no one can devote the time required to do the job (no matter what "the job" is) right. We just hope people do their best and trust to good intentions.
As a computer guy who wants things to be either "yes" or "no", unambiguously, I found this state of affairs very difficult to accept. But it's just part of being human.
Generally, we don't get any sort of diplomatic treatment when we travel abroad. Yes, tax attaches are housed at embassies. (The Paris assignment is much coveted.) But we're not diplomats in any legal sense. No diplomatic pouches for us.
As for the actual mechanics of the process, it's a part of the culture. The IRS doesn't put sensitive data on any computer that's not owned by the IRS. (At least, as far as field workers are concerned this is true.) We also don't (again, a deeply-ingrained cultural thing) issue multiple computers to one person for extended periods nor do we leave spares in any place outside certain centralized equipment depots. We don't let our hardware be held by third parties except when absolutely necessary. The notion of picking up a computer in-country from the embassy and using it for day-to-day business falls completely outside our security culture.
Remember, after Richard Nixon misused the agency, the IRS got severely slapped in many ways. We're more secure than most agencies. We pay far more attention to customer privacy. We're subject to far more oversight than most. Our people get led away in handcuffs for leaking information that wouldn't even get you fired in private industry. Given that background, our security folks insist that we keep control in-house to the extent possible, even when doing so is pretty darn inconvenient.
Slashdot Mirror
The spitting is weird and I don't care.
The choking can be fun.
But who the hell gets off on crush porn? The first crush vid I saw was made by a friend of mine and the animals being crushed were worms. This was something new on the scene and the girl involved just thought it was a little gross and messy.
That was over a decade ago. Since then, things have "progressed". Now, you don't have to look far to find people making erotic videos featuring women stomping kittens to death. Or slowly stepping on them so that they suffer and struggle for a while before their skull pops.
I never thought it would happen, but my personal limits have been greatly surpassed in recent years.
Who gets off on this crap? Seriously, I'd like to know so that I can avoid those people.
Bingo.
We have about 1100 IT folks (includes telecomm, workstations, server admin, app development, the whole she-bang) supporting a bit more than 110,000 users in an org with gross yearly revenues exceeding $2.6 trillion USD. We're our own department. Despite the fact that we've shrunk over the last few years from 3100 to 1100 employees, I tend to believe we'll remain our own department for the foreseeable future.
Excellent points.
I've had extensive "quality improvement process" training. The best lessons I've learned concern "facilitating failure." Unfortunately, until something fails, it doesn't get fixed.
I have to occasionally remind myself of that.
You make a good point. I've seen several situation like you describe, as well as variations thereof.
Anecdote: A friend of mine retired a while back. He was incredibly stressed and overworked. He was extremely competent and hardworking, but the crushing workload eventually wore him out. He'd been asking for help for years.
He was a GS 11. When he retired, management put a new person in the job, tried that for a while, then re-assessed the situation. When all was said and done, that single GS 11 employee was eventually replaced by two GS 12s and three GS 7s.
My point? In government service, like anywhere else, sometimes it doesn't pay to be as good as you can be. You'll just get worked to death by an uncaring management that displays (as in your situation) a lamentable set of attitudes toward their own people. Even so, there are good and lousy employees in every organization and making assumptions about the competence of people based on whether they work in the public or private sector is never smart. You just can't tell.
I have lots of reasons to hate Bush and the problems that hit my agency while he was Prez are, actually, fairly low on that list. He screwed up lots of other things, too. And "hate" is too strong a word, implying a personal animosity that doesn't exist in this case. I just think he was a lousy president.
As for it all starting under Clinton, I'll take your word for it. After Clinton personally (I repeat: *personally*) killed a project I was peripherally involved with, I never had much use for the guy. You know you've pissed off someone up high when an executive in your agency walks into the group, calls everybody into a meeting, tells everybody to cease all work without even returning pending phone calls, and orders that all records be shredded starting the instant the meeting ends. :-)
So if you say Clinton started it, I'll go along with that. You must admit, though, that the process accelerated and the attitude toward government employees truly went into the crapper under Bush, right?
You don't understand how government IT works these days.
Most government IT shops in the U.S. have not yet recovered from the election of Bush the Younger. When he came into office, the overall attitude of the new guys in charge was that they hated government, hated government workers, and believed that it was a God-given truth that all government workers are incompetent at all things they do. Thus, anything that could be contracted out must be contracted out. Internal IT got downsized, outsourced, demoralized, broken, and spat on in many, many places.
Just as an aside, this idiocy reached such insane heights that high-level executives at one government agency actually floated a plan to do away with internal local IT support and replace it, where feasible, with something called "depot maintenance." Reduced to nuts and bolts, they actually considered contracting with Best Buy for certain instances of in-the-field deskside support! This made perfect sense to the bigwigs. After all, Best Buy is private industry so they must be more competent than anyone who actually works for the agency, right?
That attitude crippled many agencies and most have yet to recover. Even if Google built the system and handed it over with a ribbon around it, it's likely that the executives at USPTO would go looking for a contractor to charge lots of money to run the thing. (Disclaimer: I'm not there; I'm just speaking from broad experience with multiple agencies. I hope somone from USPTO will chime in.)
It's just part of the culture. I know it seems bad, but eventually people will wake up to the fact that if you keep electing people who believe that all government is bad, the result is going to be...well...bad government. Self-fulfilling prophecy and all that, doncha know.
If it's fixed, we won't be able to get rich quick turning tarballs into, basically, gold!
How is that possible? I've spent a good deal of time in the press lounge and work areas at Consumer Electronic Shows past and they were far from luxurious. But that was well before the era of blogs so maybe things were different.
I'm not sure why the parent of this post is getting so many replies.
Obvious troll is obvious. Obviously.
Well, maybe not. Parent is a wholly deadpan post making it hard to tell if it, perhaps, could have been meant as an ironic comment on the state of our society. Or it could simply be the case the drinkypoo is stupid and really believes that the all-too-common usage of the word as applying to any male who looks for more than a split-second at any teen is actually correct.
But I think the simplest explanation is probably the most likely. Bravo, drinkypoo, on your well-executed troll.
The girl who called her principal a pedo was 14 years old. That puts her in high school.
A pedo principal will not seek employment at a high school. He'll go to an elementary school or younger.
Unless, of course, the girl doesn't understand (just like the mainstream media frequently misunderstands) the definition of the word "pedophile".
What we have here is a teachable moment. The kid deserves an "F" on this vocabulary test. Somebody make her write on the chalkboard 1000 times: "Dictionaries are good. Using words without understanding them is bad."
Motivations for hard work are usually pretty transparent.
As adults, we work hard to get money or status or personal satisfaction or, well, laid.
It's very clear that spelling bee winners work very, very hard. To me, incomprehensibly hard.
But what do these kids get? Do their peers look up to them? Surely no one would work that hard just for a scholarship or some cash. Or am I wrong about that?
Just wondering.
That's funny. Thanks.
Seriously, though, guns aren't so much a "need" as a "want". I could make a good case that everyone needs at least two (more likely three) guns. Other people make reasonable cases that no one needs any at all.
However, if you appreciate the fun of shooting, the history that weapons embody, the insanely elegant engineering and design, or even the simple beauty of firearms, then you'll always want more.
Let me put it this way - I like music. (I tried to make a living as a concert bassoonist before I figured out I simply didn't have the talent.) Liking music, it's reasonable that I like records. Now, I don't need a lot of records. A thousand or so would, to most people, be a large collection. So I don't need the ~25,000 LPs that cover the walls in my music room.
But I like 'em.
What's wrong with that?
but this sort of ignorance needs to be corrected.
There is no such thing as a "gun show loophole".
At a gun show (in any relatively free state), private citizens can purchase from other private citizens without a background check. Neither is in the business of selling firearms, so no paperwork is required. (The dealers at the show must continue to follow all the same laws and procedures that they do back at their shop.)
You can do the same thing at a garage/yard sale. I've gotten some of my best buys at such places. Every time I stop to look at the computer or audio equipment people have put out in their driveway, I never fail to ask "You got any guns?"
You can do the same thing on a person-to-person basis. I've seen someone try to sell a gun to a pawnbroker who refused to give them enough money. The person walked out the door. That didn't stop me from following them out and offering to buy the gun.
You can do the same thing via the want ads in the newspaper. I've bought many guns from people in my town via that method.
You can do the same thing via an online meet-up. I've met people in internet forums who had a gun I was interested in. If they live in the same state as me and we can agree on a price, we both get in our cars and meet at some spot roughly halfway between our two houses. The last gun I bought was in the lobby of a Days Inn (I think; it was one of those cut-rate, business-travel hotels).
In free states, any two people who can legally own guns can trade them for money.
Big freakin' deal!
There is absoutely nothing special about gun shows. There is no "gun show loophole".
The politicians and anti-freedom activists who complain about the fictitious "gun show loophole" are people who simply want to outlaw all private, unregistered sales.
Sure, that's true. It's happened in the past so there are records of it that are easy to find.
But it's sure not common. The employee who was led out of my office (yes, I work for them ) in handcuffs last week could testify that IRS employees who look up ex-spouses get fired and prosecuted. Every access to the Integrated Data Retrieval System, the front-end to nearly all our master files, is logged and automatically checked against the employees dossier. If you look up a family member or yourself you get fired and prosecuted. If you look up a famous person without cause, same outcome. If you look up someone who just happens to live in your neighborhood (even though you had no idea you did so), an investigation is opened and it's never pleasant.
I firmly believe that of all "large" agencies the IRS is the most trustworthy. The stats on firings for such reasons are available to the public and I'd feel comfortable comparing them to any other agency.
Does _Letters from the Earth_ reveal a man who doubts the existence of God? Or was it written by a man who apparently believes in God but thinks that the way most people worship him is all-too-often wrongheaded?
My money is on the latter.
My biases in this matter are two. First, I'm a Christian (Baptist, descended from a real-life, tent-meeting evangelical/revivalist tradition). Second, _Letters from the Earth_ became an instant favorite of mine the day my mom gifted me a copy on my 14th (iirc) birthday. Several decades have passed and I still drag it out when I get depressed by people who take themselves too seriously. The chuckles it induces never fail to lift my spirits.
I'm going to assume that you posted that link in good faith and not call you to task for the incompleteness of your perfectly-accurate-but-useless-in-the-real-world answer.
To others who visit that link, keep in mind that CP, in the broadest definition allowed by the linked cite, includes "...simulated lascivious exhibition of the ... pubic area...".
That means that pictures of fully clothed kids can be prosecuted as CP. After all, if you can see the crotch area, then the pubic area is on display. If the person in possession can be reasonably proved to get some jollies from looking at the picture, that makes the pubic area exhibition into something lascivious. (Google the Knox decision, if you want more info.)
Thus, we have people convicted of CP crimes for taking pictures of their daughter in a bikini. (Google "Webe Web" if you want more info.)
Bottom line - all pictures of kids are CP if they're in the wrong hands, leaving it up to prosecutors to decide just what they want to attack when it comes to CP.
That means that my original question stands: What sort of real-world, working definition did the FTC use for "child pornography" when they took this action?
Feel free to do the research. I think what you'll find is that people who want to kill themselves...kill themselves. The presence or absence of a gun does nothing to change that.
There are places with high suicide rates and low gun ownership rates. The reverse is also true.
Ultimately, what you'll discover is that once a person makes up their mind to suicide, they do it. They almost always succeed. They'll use a gun if they have one but if they don't, they'll use other means and be about as successful.
People who haven't really made up their minds and attempt suicide as a cry for help won't use a gun even if it's sitting on the nightstand next to them.
I won't say guns make no difference. There will be the occasional incompetent who would have screwed up their own suicide otherwise but succeeded because they had a gun. Those numbers are small enough to be lost in the statistical noise.
Guns simply don't make a difference in how many people wind up dead from suicide.
But don't take my word for it. Do the research and see what you come up with. A little warning, though - It's a big subject into which many people have jumped, people whose passions are often inflamed to the point that their reason is compromised. Much of what you'll read is, in the vernacular, "somebody who has something to sell."
I've seen Asus page before. It's intriguing, but it's not portable. There's no display. If there were a way to use that touch screen as a display, it would still be awkwardly sized and the keyboard looks to be anything but the writer's joy that the M100 was.
As an alternative to the M100, there are low-end computers aimed at the educational and writer's market such as the Dana. However, I've had a chance to hold a Dana and some competing models. None of them have the "Damn, this is so perfect!" feel to their keyboard as the M100. That thing was special.
Of course, all this talk of tactile interfaces is really subjective. I learned to type during the switchover from manuals to electrics in my high school typing class. So the "mechanicalness" of the M100 just feels perfect to me in a way that few other devices (a particular model of Panasonic electric typewriter comes to mind) possibly can. No matter how much I long for that sort of device, I doubt I'll ever have one. I should probably get a Dana and see if I can adapt.
What bugs me is that I know such a thing as an updated M100 is possible. There's a market for the Happy Hacking keyboard, right? So how hard would it be to graft an 8-line monochrome LCD display on top of that? If somebody does it, I'll buy it.
My IT department services about 100,000 users.
I still think that just asking my customers how well I helped them with their problems is the best way to gauge my performance. I argued along those lines to management for a while but to no avail.
Now, we're in the process of removing nearly all "deskside" support and forcing employees to deal with a centralized help desk and over-the-network tools. That transition is going to be *very* painful and the level of service we deliver will be much worse. We already do as much as is reasonable over the phone and over the network. Sometimes it's much quicker for everyone to just go get on the elevator and sit with the user to solve a problem. The new way, though, will be "It doesn't matter if you spend 5 hours fixing something over the phone when you could have fixed it in 10 minutes by just walking over to the user. You're glued to your seat and you aren't allowed to get up!"
Like I said, this is about to become painful.
But, hey, the beancounters will be able to prove that we're more "efficient".
Funny, I always thought that achieving "effective" had to be accomplished before measures of "efficient" were worth a damn. Guess I was wrong.
Interesting. Before we had mandatory ticketing software, deskside IT support folks in my organization had assigned user populations. I had 350 (or so) officers to keep happy. That was my job. Screw tickets, screw counting anything. If the officers that depended on me were happy, I was happy. And so was my boss.
Then we started measuring things and the quality of my worklife took a big hit. I'll never forget a crusty old sysadmin who spoke out during a training session to an HQ analyst. Quote: "I can fix 20 problems a day. Or I can fix 10 and document them. Which do you want?" To him, me, and the other SAs in the class, the answer was obvious. Fix 20 and get 20 officers back to work, of course.
The analyst replied "As far as management is concerned, if you didn't document it, you didn't do it. Fix 10 and do the documentation."
Mind you, this wasn't for any experimental system where SA feedback was necessary to understand how to keep things running. This was for a long-established legacy system for which every possible problem and fix had long ago been documented in excruciatingly fine detail.
That particular SA retired a few months later. I can't say as I blame him.
Where I work, the weekly check-it-all AV run is scheduled for Sunday nights. That takes care of all the desktops in the office. Laptops run, then, as soon as they get put on the network Monday. Generally, people don't mind, especially since our AV software runs in the background and doesn't slow anybody down enough that it's worth complaining about. Their machines are a bit sluggish on Monday morning but, then again, so are most of the workers.
The folks who find that the AV scan slows them unacceptably turn in a help desk ticket and we have a look. That's a really good indicator that their machine is in need of a bit of a tune-up or has other problems.
Many years ago, I had an in-depth discussion about gathering statistics on heart disease with a woman on the board of the American Heart Association. This was a big deal. Serious ethical issues were in play and there was a great deal of infighting going on.
I asked her how you make a definitive decision that someone has heart disease. I was trying to figure out what to measure. Her answer surprised me. She said "You wait till they die. Then you cut out their heart and have a look." She then went on to patiently explain to me that the only thing that could be measured and evaluated were "markers" of heart disease. Those markers, as revealed by various disgnostic tests, could be mighty reliable. But you never know if someone is going to die of heart disease until they...you know...actually *die*.
Thus informed, I came to realize that what we measure is almost never what we really want to know. Measuring the right stuff is simply too hard to do. No matter where you look, this is almost universally true. In my job, for example, we fix computer problems. Thus, we measure how many incidents get closed and how much time it took. If you quickly close an incident, then surely you've provided good service, right? Most slashdotters should realize that's not true. In fact, my job is actually to get other, more important workers back to work asap. The only way to measure that would be to interview my customers and their bosses. We'd have to pry for an hour into their effectiveness to find out if I properly completed a job that took me five minutes. That's too much trouble, so we look for markers. Closed incidents. Timeliness of closures.
Measures are inadequate so often that I pretty much don't trust anything that contains them. After years of training in Quality Improvement Processes, I came to realize that the amount of time needed to understand a process and perfectly spec out what needs to be measured is 452% of the expected life cycle of the project, plus or minus a 17.5% margin of error. (Aside - How much do you trust those statistics?)
Almost no one can devote the time required to do the job (no matter what "the job" is) right. We just hope people do their best and trust to good intentions.
As a computer guy who wants things to be either "yes" or "no", unambiguously, I found this state of affairs very difficult to accept. But it's just part of being human.
See this post.
Some of that I can answer, some I can't.
Generally, we don't get any sort of diplomatic treatment when we travel abroad. Yes, tax attaches are housed at embassies. (The Paris assignment is much coveted.) But we're not diplomats in any legal sense. No diplomatic pouches for us.
As for the actual mechanics of the process, it's a part of the culture. The IRS doesn't put sensitive data on any computer that's not owned by the IRS. (At least, as far as field workers are concerned this is true.) We also don't (again, a deeply-ingrained cultural thing) issue multiple computers to one person for extended periods nor do we leave spares in any place outside certain centralized equipment depots. We don't let our hardware be held by third parties except when absolutely necessary. The notion of picking up a computer in-country from the embassy and using it for day-to-day business falls completely outside our security culture.
Remember, after Richard Nixon misused the agency, the IRS got severely slapped in many ways. We're more secure than most agencies. We pay far more attention to customer privacy. We're subject to far more oversight than most. Our people get led away in handcuffs for leaking information that wouldn't even get you fired in private industry. Given that background, our security folks insist that we keep control in-house to the extent possible, even when doing so is pretty darn inconvenient.