If you want to float through the game, going from hilighted area to hilighted area, and just watch all the CGs, you can. And then complain the game is too easy and too linear.
It's the challenge you make of it. That's why it's fun.
That sounds good. I'm a hopelessly inept gamer and if I don't have options to make a game "too easy and too linear," I probably won't enjoy it. It's beginning to sound more and more like I should try to play this game.
Believe it or not, this sort of thing (along with a really bad review in my local newspaper) is actually making this oldtimer consider buying a console. I haven't done that since I picked up a $50 Dreamcast solely for the purpose of playing Tetris.
Ballistics is an interesting field for the hobbyist, but I can't say I agree with your choice of book.
For the advanced hobbyist, Modern Exterior Ballistics by McCoy (ISBN 0764307207) is the choice. However, the math is tougher than most people want to deal with and there are errors in the text. Consider it a "going from intermediate to advanced" book. McCoy, now deceased, is never going to correct the errors in the book and I doubt anyone else would want to bother, so you need to be knowledgeable enough at the start to catch the errors and not be bothered.
Applicable to a broader audience is Understanding Firearms Ballistics by Rinker (ISBN 0964559854). For most knowledgeable shooters, this book is the stepping stone from "the guy at the gun club who knows what he's doing" to being a real expert. The few paragraphs on wind drift as a function of rate of velocity loss (not time of flight, as most people assume) in the transonic range were worth the cost of the book to me. (Just yesterday, I received my subscription copy of a reloading magazine with a column by gun writer Bryan Pearce in which he makes some point by comparing the.38 Special to the.357 Maximum and gives partial credit to the higher velocity of the Maximum for producing less wind drift. That's all wrong; if both cartridges launch the same full-weight bullet at near-max velocity, the Maximum will exhibit *more* wind drift specifically because it is launching the bullet at higher velocity. Even gun pros get this stuff wrong.) The book is far from perfect, though. It needs a good editor and the charts are poorly hand-drawn. Despite that, it can take a good shooter, even one who is weak on the math, and give him a very good working knowledge of exterior ballistics. That's saying something.
Along the same line, Handloading for Competition by Zediker (ISBN 096269259X) is, by far, the best handloading book on the market, assuming you already have a basic manual from one of the major bullet manufacturers. It goes past the basics wonderfully. Benchresters and rimfire users are in another world, but any other competitive shooters will find it incredibly useful. I only have two complaints. First, the binding is cheap. On my copy, the cover delaminated and pages started falling out within a couple of months of constant use. Second, the author frequently butchers the English language in a failed attempt to entertain with a fake "down-home, country" writing style. Seriously, he uses stupid metaphors like discussing a squirrel running headlong into a tree while attempting to make a point about the relative quality of reloading presses. You'll occasionally find yourself re-reading the same paragraph five times trying to figure out just wtf he's trying to say. That's forgiveable, though, since most of the book is both accessible and advanced like no other reference on the subject.
Most U.S. government agencies scrambling to implement the White House directive regarding data encryption (the deadline is already expired) are running toward SecureDoc by WinMagic. I'm elbow-deep in implementation right now.
I've been using hardware encryption for quite a while. There are nice, as-near-as-I-can-tell-unbreakable products to be found here. They make good drives. While the North American distributors aren't super-duper when it comes to dealing with small orders, if you want a hundred or more just contact the home office. The people there have been a professional pleasure to deal with. And if you need convincing as to the viability of their products, poke around for RFPs in the.mil domain and elsewhere. When you see the U.S. Navy putting up requests for multiples of these drives, you get the idea they're pretty darn good pieces of kit.
Given that a relatively small (IMO) drive from these guys costs more than most computers, I doubt slashdotters will be stampeding in their direction. Still, it's nice to know the hardware is out there if you need it.
The medicine is great for the people that need it, I'm sure. But let's go off on a tangent; I see a number of posters already are doing so.
Why are so many slashdrones so terribly hostile toward diabetics? It's not possible to post a story mentioning diabetes without various people posting inaccurate information ("Being lazy and getting fat causes diabetes!") combined with hearty invective ("You're sub-human slobs and you all deserve to die!").
(Just for the record, obesity is associated with diabetes but is not the cause. Diabetes is a failure of various regulatory mechanisms and heredity plays a big part. There's lots of good research that indicates the process of becoming diabetic tends to make you fat rather than the reverse. And treatment is severely problematical, often because common drugs cause massive weight gain, a problem this new drug is supposed to address.)
So why all the bile poured out on diabetes sufferers? I really don't understand it. There are lots of other diseases that make people unattractive or can be partially blamed on lifestyle, but I don't see anyone jumping on the "People get cancer because they're stupid!" or the "All alcoholics should be shot!" bandwagons, even though those ideas make about as much sense as condemning diabetics for being sick.
...that my employer, a place flat-out driven by SSNs in many aspects of our work, wouldn't think of using them for anything internal that isn't mandated by law. We issue to everyone a 5-character ID that's used for signons and all sorts of IDs. We used to use a contraction of the user name, but even that has been 95% phased out for years.
It's not that difficult to quit using SSNs and it's just good policy. I'm surprised that they are still so commonly used in situations where they might be disclosed to anyone but the person to whom it belongs.
Actually, the point of the OP was indeed that the Amish are so much better than regular Christians on this issue and that the strict adherence provides 'inner peace' and 'principled, spirit-based skills'.
Actually, no. When I wrote that, I wasn't judging the Amish as superior. I was simply pointing out that true Christian belief (requiring, as I've expanded on the topic in another post in this thread, lots of hard work) will equip anyone with skills to handle evil when it attacks. I was citing the Amish as having made practical strides in achieving this, so much so that when their attitudes wind up on the evening news people are shocked.
Christians who have made much effort at all to understand their religion are not shocked by this. This is the sort of thing the faith requires. Indeed, I'll go further and say that anyone should be able to do this. You don't have to establish a separate society (though that is the method the Amish chose) nor do you have to dress funny or eschew violent movies.
The Amish are human. I didn't say otherwise. According to Christian doctrine, every single one of them is flawed and sinful and not deserving to be in the presence of God. IOW, they're just like everybody else. However, (and this is what I think is admirable) you make a good point when you say
The real challenge is finding a practical framework in which people can be happy without hurting others, not a theoretical one.
That is precisely what I find admirable about the Amish. They've made the effort to meet that challenge and, by and large, they've succeeded. You do a fine job of pointing out that neither the people nor their society are perfect. As a Christian, I accept that and consider it no real indictment; we and our institutions are all imperfect.
But how many societies would react with anything other than rage after the attack suffered by the Amish at that schoolhouse? Few, if any, I'd say. I know I'd be screaming for blood. The Amish didn't. It seems obvious to me that they're doing something right. I doubt their solution scales, but it's awfully nice to see a working prototype.
And now, after making nice and essentially agreeing with everything you said, I do have one strong negative reaction to your post. Here's the relevant passage:
IMHO the greatest failing in many Christians is they refuse to accept basic human traits and attempt to suppress them, which will not result in better humans, but in sinners.
I'm not sure what to do with that. It seems wrong on so many levels that I fear I'm misunderstanding you severely. It's not a "failing" of Christianity to refuse to accept basic human traits. We accept that the nature of man is what it is. And what it is, is sinful. Christianity isn't in the business of creating better humans (though that's a nice side effect that *should* be universal and is actively encouraged); we're in the business of seeking forgiveness for the flawed, sinful creatures we are.
So are you saying that "basic human traits" should be accepted, not suppressed, and that would somehow lead us to a better society populated by better humans? Since Christianity holds that many "basic human traits" are sinful and that *not* accepting them but striving against them through various means is part and parcel of being a Christian, I think you'll find that one a very hard sell.
So, did I miss your point somewhere? (About this one little thing, remember. For the most part, we're pretty much in sync on most of what's been discussed.)
Your understanding is correct and my original post was oversimplified. I *did* say I wanted to avoid writing a book. The deeper point is that while being a Christian does not require perfect emulation of the life of the Son of God to get into Heaven (the standard that many non-Christians *think* is required, thus granting themselves infinite permission to belittle a perceived hypocrisy of Christianity) it does require a more than your post would indicate. It's not enough to simply accept that we're flawed and sincerely ask for forgiveness and be done with it, knowing that's enough to get into Heaven. (Again, I don't want to write a book about doctrinal ideas of ultimate rewards and their relation to how we live our lives. There are even Christian sects who believe that *everyone* will go to Heaven, no matter what's in their hearts while they're here on Earth.) Christianity does, however, require some effort. In fact, it requires a *lot* of effort. Christians are expected to reach out to others, to help each other, to live lives that will, by example, show the world that belief in God is something special, something that makes you different. (Contrast, for example, the Christian idea of the Golden Rule, "Do unto other as you would have them do unto you", with the way Eastern religions approach the topic. In most Eastern religions, the nearest equivalent would be "Don't do to anyone anything you wouldn't want done to you." Christianity is many things, but passive isn't one of them. And I can't really expand that point further without writing a whole sermon. Sorry.)
The Amish do this. In spades. Many Christians don't. Oh, heck, *most* Christians don't. And if you don't at least *try* to live your life according to your Christian principles, are you really a Christian? That, according to Christian doctrine, can only be determined by God who judges what you are, inside, spiritually, instead of what you do, the face you show the world.
Now, lots of people show a good face to the world and we judge those people the only way we can, in our limited, earthly existence, judge those people - by what they do. But if they do it for all the wrong reasons, if their motivation isn't pure, then (again, according to Christian doctrine) they can't fool God who knows what's in their hearts and will judge them accordingly. Folks like that have limits, though. I doubt you'd see some fake "Everybody watch me while I donate to charity and do other really nice things" only-on-Sunday Christians come out with sincere forgiveness for a man who murdered their innocent daughter.
In the Amish, we have an example of forgiveness under even the most trying circumstances. As another poster in this thread has pointed out, this is not necessarily because the Amish are saints; there are community pressures involved. But, at minimum, we can say the Amish do an awfully good job of setting up the infrastructure, if you will, for an entire community to act in accordance with Christian principles. I think that's admirable. It may also be impossible without separation from the larger society, but that's another issue.
...from the Amish. I realize they are a christian sect, but their EXAMPLE spoke to me louder than the millions of words I've heard come from christians(or the other two "religions of peace"). If all religions did their preaching that way, they'd make the world a better place...
The Amish merely walked the walk instead of just talking the talk. I don't think any religion can point to all or even a simple majority of its adherents and say, truthfully, that "Those people live according to their beliefs." Nearly all religions (and, without trying to write a book on the subject, I have to say that Christianity is the most severe in this regard) require more, for lack of a better word, "goodness" from its followers than any human being can deliver. Even the Amish realize this and allow their younglings to taste the world before making an informed decision to adhere to the practices of the community for life. Their system works well for them and illustrates what Christianity *should* be. I don't mean the physical trappings, the dress, the low-tech, the separation. I mean the state of the spirit and how adherence to spiritual principles provides certain guidance even when the bad old world busts in and murders your family members.
Inner peace like that comes at what, to a non-adherent, seems to be a very high price. Whether it is or isn't and whether it should be paid is a decision for each individual. It's too bad that most people never consciously make that decision and instead choose to pursue what they think of as "life," only to find that when that life throws them a curve they don't have the principled, spirit-based skills needed to handle the situation.
The Amish are different in that regard. In Slashdot parlance, the Amish have mad skillz.:-)
Y'know, being a pudgy white nerd in my mid-40s who actually does think that the Buffyverse was the greatest televised artistic creation in history makes for some weird moments. A while back, I injured a knee and took my physical therapy at a place that does a booming business in injured little girls, mostly teen cheerleaders and soccer players. So here I am, riding the stationary bike, doing my stretches, and constantly surrounded by drama queen, rap-talkin' little whiners. No amount of cute visuals could make up for the throbbing headache I left with every day.
So one day, in conversation with my trainer, I said something. I don't even remember what it was - some quote from Buffy, or was it a Puffy AmiYumi reference? - and three or four girls around me just froze. They stared. They backed up and walked away and whispered. Obviously, some fat old slob that knew that stuff must have hobbies that make the skin crawl. Frankly, I was a little put off by the whole "let's treat this guy like radioactive anthrax" vibe that lasted the rest of the day.
Oh, well. I should find something to take my mind off such things. I'm gonna go check my Tivo and see if there's an episode of Hanna Montana I can watch.
...isn't cool anymore? Just because I'm a 40+ year old white guy who raps an obscene, extended version of "The Ballad of the Beverly Hillbillies" explaining in detail the relationship between Ellie Mae and all those animals and thinks I'm being funny while I do it, we've reached the point where rap isn't cool?
Damn it all to hell.
I worked hard on that song. A couple of drunk crowds at comedy clubs have loved at it. I guess now I'll have to ditch it from the act.
Interestingly, we have two software distribution systems here. One is Tivoli. The higherups have spent millions and it's damn well gonna get used, whether it works or not.
The other is a little program named M2 that runs at startup, checks a list in a specified directory, compares it to a local server, and applies anything available on the server that applies to your type of machine. You don't start work until it finishes. Works like a charm. Solid as a rock. Cost us nothing because it was written by one of our guys. Beats the hell out of Tivoli.
Why don't we use it for everything? Tivoli does a couple of things it doesn't; M2 *only* distributes software. Mainly, though, it's politics. Our most powerful user group refuses to use M2 because when a large update of any sort comes through, the boot process can take a while. Their attitude is that the time of their people is too valuable to wait for a long boot. Without their buy-in, we'll never be able to get any large, all-user patch installed on any sort of reasonably compressed schedule.
Frustrating as hell.
Not quite as frustrating as 5 years ago when we took our last major user group off of pure-Unix laptops and put them on Windows, but close.
Why do we have any left at SP1? I could be flip and say it's because we relied on Tivoli to update them, but I won't go there. Basically, we updated about 100K machines and are hunting down the last few hundred, mostly laptops belonging to people who spend all their time in the field and try to never come into the office where they can be updated. (Among our old-timers, it's a real badge of honor to brag that they haven't been in the office in 6 months.) Internal politics prevents us from simply locking those people off the network; we have to chase them down and say please. For any organization-wide update, there are always a few like that.
I work in a large organization that push-deployed the patch asap. The result is that any XP machine sitting at Service Pack 1 level for the OS can no longer be successfully updated to SP2 without first deleting a file (c:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\VGX\vgx.dll on our image). Then we can install SP2, then re-install the 0-day.
What a pain in the ass. Is everybody seeing the same trouble?
I have the opposite problems, sorta and sometimes. I'm old and my hearing sucks. In a quiet environment, at home, listening to my LPs, I love wide dynamics. That's what real music played in real space tends to have. In most places where I listen to music, though, this isn't the case. In the car or in my slightly noisy office, lower dynamic-range passages get lost in the background noise. I find myself turning my car stereo way up on some quiet things then way back down on loud passages.
A theory: commonly overused compression may be an artifact of poor hearing on the part of the person running the controls, the target audience, or both.
Personally, I wish I had two things. First, I wish I had my hearing back. Second, I wish I had a car radio with user-controllable compression. Yeah, I know it's anti-audiophile, but there are times when I'd just like to hear everything over the ambient noise so I'd *choose* to compress like crazy. If a radio existed with a control to do that (and, of course, the ability to turn it off), I'd pony up some bucks.
I cannot state factually why this happens, but my opinion is that it seems like it takes too long to fire someone. Indeed, the numerous levels of bureaucracy create a complex process for firing someone as well as numerous avenues for employees to fight it.
Excellent, excellent point.
Feds get fired two ways. One is to screw up royally and get escorted off the property.
The other, however, is for performance problems. It most certainly is harder to fire someone from federal service than in the private sector because of those civil service protections. The alternatives, however, are worse.
The "spoils" system, where all the government jobs go exclusively to cronies, causes massive problems. There have been many city governments in the past where if Party A is in power, no one from Party B gets a city job. When Party A goes in, the first thing they do is fire everyone who's a member of Party B and hire all their friends. The disruption in services is severe.
The same thing is possible at all levels of government. Imagine the incredible disruption of vital services that would happen if federal employees could be easily fired. Bush goes into office and right away every registered Democrat is out of a job. It would be chaos.
Theoretically, all firings should only be done if objective criteria are met. Meeting those criteria removes the ability of spiteful or politically motivated managers to unjustly remove people. This is good. This also prevents anyone from being fired quickly. I think that's a reasonable price to pay. This is government, after all. The steady and reliable flow of services is far more important than efficiency.
In my mind, if I supervised an employee that I thought should be fired, I wouldn't want to try to fire him/her only to have him/her continue working for me while I'm trying to fire him/her. It's likely the employee would be upset about this possibility, and it's also likely he/she would be miserable to work with from the day when he/she found out until the day he/she was fired.
That's a big problem. It's a very uncomfortable situation when an employee is placed on a 90-day performance plan (pretty much the standard first step towards a firing). However, it also means that the firing, if it is truly justified, will stick. Under a 90-day plan, the manager is required to explicity say "This is where you're screwing up and you have to fix this or I'll fire you." That means the employee knows exactly and unambiguously what he must do to improve his performance enough to stay employed. It's uncomfortable but it's also objective.
Under this system, it's not possible (or, at minimum, it's so much work to fake up the documentation that no boss is going to go to that much trouble unless they're a real psycho) for a manager to fire someone based on silly personal biases like "You're not a good fit" or "I just think you're not working out around here." I think that's a plus and worth the discomfort and inefficiency.
A side note: During their first year of employment, workers are "probationary" and may be fired with two weeks notice without articulated cause. That tends to weed out the real losers right up front.
You've actually hit very close to the truth. From TFA:
More than 30,000 laptops were used within the department's 15 operating units since 2001, the department said, and a total of 1,137 were stolen or missing.
I help with the computer inventory of a major agency. If at any time you took a snapshot of our inventory database, then sampled it, you'd find a distressingly large number of computers missing. Most of them aren't gone, they're just mislaid. They got taken off the network and put on a shelf in a storeroom under a box and no one could find them the last time the local inventory specialist was walking around with his bar code reader. In most cases when you read about a government operation with lots of lost computers you're actually reading about slop in the inventory database. That's not good, of course, but it's not the evidence of across-the-board incompetence that most people assume when government employees are involved.
I know I'm feeding a troll, but I can't help it. Good troll!
...Federal employees can't really be punished,...if you fuck up, you might get demoted or shuffled around ("I see there's a warehouse in Sioux Falls that needs a manager...") but probably not actually thrown out on your ass by Security...
Bullshit. There's less of people getting "thrown out on your ass by Security" in government service for lots of reasons, the main one being you can't get thrown out just because you pissed off your big boss and he has the right to throw people out. In private industry, if you have the audacity to show up at a meeting and say to everyone that your boss 5 levels up is an idiot and here's why, you'll likely get fired. In the public service arena, if you make the same statements, without being a jerk about it and while backing up your assertions with facts, then you haven't violated your contract and you stay employed. Yes, pissing off people isn't good for your government career, but it doesn't get you summarily fired. We have rules and as long as you obey them, you're safe, unlike the private sector where an asshole corporate officer can not only convince him/herself that he's God but can also wield the power to ruin people's lives without oversight.
OTOH, I've seen employees marched out in handcuffs on more than one occasion when they screwed up. I've seen desks sealed with evidence tape and left in the office where they served as an example and warning for anyone else contemplating misdeeds. I've seen a woman convicted of over 100 counts of failing to uphold confidentiality and get hauled off to jail for it. The lines you have to cross to get fired from Federal service are fairly bright and the consequences severe and swift. The most slack I've ever seen someone get cut was a long-time employee who was eligible to retire when he was caught downloading CP. He was allowed to retire and then arrested a few days later at his home.
The laptop losses don't really surprise me, because I doubt these people get more than some sort of administrative demerit -- if that -- for losing one. I'm sure there's some sort of procedure that they go through, but I'm willing to bet that in the long run they just get a new machine issued and they go on, grinding their way towards retirement.
I can't speak for other agencies, but where I work simply "losing" a laptop does get you fired. Over the last few years, I've seen many laptops lost but in every case there was a reason. We lost a hell of a lot of equipment when the New Orleans office got flooded last year. At the same time, when the flood waters rose a bunch of employees lost their laptops that were properly secured, as per procedure, in the trunks of their cars. We've had home and car break-ins. We've had muggings. But I don't remember any employee simply "losing" a laptop. In those few cases where an employee is deemed to have exercised insufficient care, the cost of the laptop is deducted from their paycheck.
Which isn't to say it doesn't happen. We've had a number of laptops get "lost," inexcuseably, when we loaned laptops to volunteers who prepare tax returns for the needy. But those weren't lost by employees and the volunteers who fail to turn them back in eventually get visited by very intimidating people with badges and guns who work for our Inspector General. I would imagine that something of the same dynamic happened at Census - short-term employees who are just one step above volunteers and are not dedicated to a life of public service may very well fail to take proper care of their equipment. It's inexcuseable and career employees generally don't screw up like that. (Generally. There are always exceptions.)
He just got unlucky when he ran into one of the few journalists who still has the balls to question the regime.
No, this question was posed by a senator during his testimony. The senator was clearly on the side of the Atty Gen. He was trying to give Gonzalez and chance to toot his own horn. The senator looked mildly embarrassed that he had inadverdently asked a couple of hard questions and he quickly moved on.
How about you stop pulling the "terrorism" card and "child porn" card, and tell us why, in no uncertain terms, you need to keep prying into our lives. What evidence do you have that proves, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that such additional monitoring will help stamp out child pornography?
I spent about an hour watching the Atty Gen testifying last night on CSpan. At one point, he held up as a success the data retention requirements under 2257. Those requirements are onerous and ridiculous, designed merely to harass mainstream porn producers.
Here was what struck me as odd. He said there was a connection between adult obscenity prosecutions and CP. He was asked to expand on that. He was asked how often it was the case that adult obscenity prosecutions led to CP prosecutions. The answer? He couldn't come up with anything. He cited unspecified studies as showing a connection, but he could not provide a single example of a prosecution for CP that had come about as a result of an adult obscenity investigation. In fact, he could only come up with one (just ONE) successful prosecution under 2257, that being the Girls Gone Wild case, something that has nothing to do with what any reasonable person would think of as CP.
I was kinda shocked. I knew he was lying about the correlation but I was shocked that he would lie so blatantly and then have no backup story. It was like he never expected to be asked to support any of his statements. It was like he expected to say anything he wanted and never get anything approaching a *real* question. The arrogance, the hubris were unbelievable. As another poster has said, he wasn't even trying to come up with *believable* lies.
Sidebar - This was ostensibly a hearing on the access of CP producers to credit card services. That would have been interesting. However, for the hour I listened (I came in in the middle) that subject was never brought up.
sometimes a tactical retreat is best....For me and my family, we are leaving this little false paradise...
Where are you going and why that place? I've reached the same conclusion and in a couple of years, when certain duties of mine in the U.S. have been discharged, I'll be leaving. I just haven't decided where to go. It seems to me that somebody, somewhere, has probably already put up a web-based guide for people who want to get out, something that questions you about what you like and need and then makes recommendations. Has anyone seen anything like that?
Slashdot Mirror
That sounds good. I'm a hopelessly inept gamer and if I don't have options to make a game "too easy and too linear," I probably won't enjoy it. It's beginning to sound more and more like I should try to play this game.
Kinda sounds like something from my long-gone youth.
Believe it or not, this sort of thing (along with a really bad review in my local newspaper) is actually making this oldtimer consider buying a console. I haven't done that since I picked up a $50 Dreamcast solely for the purpose of playing Tetris.
Ballistics is an interesting field for the hobbyist, but I can't say I agree with your choice of book.
.38 Special to the .357 Maximum and gives partial credit to the higher velocity of the Maximum for producing less wind drift. That's all wrong; if both cartridges launch the same full-weight bullet at near-max velocity, the Maximum will exhibit *more* wind drift specifically because it is launching the bullet at higher velocity. Even gun pros get this stuff wrong.) The book is far from perfect, though. It needs a good editor and the charts are poorly hand-drawn. Despite that, it can take a good shooter, even one who is weak on the math, and give him a very good working knowledge of exterior ballistics. That's saying something.
For the advanced hobbyist, Modern Exterior Ballistics by McCoy (ISBN 0764307207) is the choice. However, the math is tougher than most people want to deal with and there are errors in the text. Consider it a "going from intermediate to advanced" book. McCoy, now deceased, is never going to correct the errors in the book and I doubt anyone else would want to bother, so you need to be knowledgeable enough at the start to catch the errors and not be bothered.
Applicable to a broader audience is Understanding Firearms Ballistics by Rinker (ISBN 0964559854). For most knowledgeable shooters, this book is the stepping stone from "the guy at the gun club who knows what he's doing" to being a real expert. The few paragraphs on wind drift as a function of rate of velocity loss (not time of flight, as most people assume) in the transonic range were worth the cost of the book to me. (Just yesterday, I received my subscription copy of a reloading magazine with a column by gun writer Bryan Pearce in which he makes some point by comparing the
Along the same line, Handloading for Competition by Zediker (ISBN 096269259X) is, by far, the best handloading book on the market, assuming you already have a basic manual from one of the major bullet manufacturers. It goes past the basics wonderfully. Benchresters and rimfire users are in another world, but any other competitive shooters will find it incredibly useful. I only have two complaints. First, the binding is cheap. On my copy, the cover delaminated and pages started falling out within a couple of months of constant use. Second, the author frequently butchers the English language in a failed attempt to entertain with a fake "down-home, country" writing style. Seriously, he uses stupid metaphors like discussing a squirrel running headlong into a tree while attempting to make a point about the relative quality of reloading presses. You'll occasionally find yourself re-reading the same paragraph five times trying to figure out just wtf he's trying to say. That's forgiveable, though, since most of the book is both accessible and advanced like no other reference on the subject.
Most U.S. government agencies scrambling to implement the White House directive regarding data encryption (the deadline is already expired) are running toward SecureDoc by WinMagic. I'm elbow-deep in implementation right now.
I've been using hardware encryption for quite a while. There are nice, as-near-as-I-can-tell-unbreakable products to be found here. They make good drives. While the North American distributors aren't super-duper when it comes to dealing with small orders, if you want a hundred or more just contact the home office. The people there have been a professional pleasure to deal with. And if you need convincing as to the viability of their products, poke around for RFPs in the .mil domain and elsewhere. When you see the U.S. Navy putting up requests for multiples of these drives, you get the idea they're pretty darn good pieces of kit.
Given that a relatively small (IMO) drive from these guys costs more than most computers, I doubt slashdotters will be stampeding in their direction. Still, it's nice to know the hardware is out there if you need it.
The medicine is great for the people that need it, I'm sure. But let's go off on a tangent; I see a number of posters already are doing so.
Why are so many slashdrones so terribly hostile toward diabetics? It's not possible to post a story mentioning diabetes without various people posting inaccurate information ("Being lazy and getting fat causes diabetes!") combined with hearty invective ("You're sub-human slobs and you all deserve to die!").
(Just for the record, obesity is associated with diabetes but is not the cause. Diabetes is a failure of various regulatory mechanisms and heredity plays a big part. There's lots of good research that indicates the process of becoming diabetic tends to make you fat rather than the reverse. And treatment is severely problematical, often because common drugs cause massive weight gain, a problem this new drug is supposed to address.)
So why all the bile poured out on diabetes sufferers? I really don't understand it. There are lots of other diseases that make people unattractive or can be partially blamed on lifestyle, but I don't see anyone jumping on the "People get cancer because they're stupid!" or the "All alcoholics should be shot!" bandwagons, even though those ideas make about as much sense as condemning diabetics for being sick.
What's up? Anyone want to clue me in?
...that my employer, a place flat-out driven by SSNs in many aspects of our work, wouldn't think of using them for anything internal that isn't mandated by law. We issue to everyone a 5-character ID that's used for signons and all sorts of IDs. We used to use a contraction of the user name, but even that has been 95% phased out for years.
It's not that difficult to quit using SSNs and it's just good policy. I'm surprised that they are still so commonly used in situations where they might be disclosed to anyone but the person to whom it belongs.
Actually, no. When I wrote that, I wasn't judging the Amish as superior. I was simply pointing out that true Christian belief (requiring, as I've expanded on the topic in another post in this thread, lots of hard work) will equip anyone with skills to handle evil when it attacks. I was citing the Amish as having made practical strides in achieving this, so much so that when their attitudes wind up on the evening news people are shocked.
Christians who have made much effort at all to understand their religion are not shocked by this. This is the sort of thing the faith requires. Indeed, I'll go further and say that anyone should be able to do this. You don't have to establish a separate society (though that is the method the Amish chose) nor do you have to dress funny or eschew violent movies.
The Amish are human. I didn't say otherwise. According to Christian doctrine, every single one of them is flawed and sinful and not deserving to be in the presence of God. IOW, they're just like everybody else. However, (and this is what I think is admirable) you make a good point when you say
That is precisely what I find admirable about the Amish. They've made the effort to meet that challenge and, by and large, they've succeeded. You do a fine job of pointing out that neither the people nor their society are perfect. As a Christian, I accept that and consider it no real indictment; we and our institutions are all imperfect.
But how many societies would react with anything other than rage after the attack suffered by the Amish at that schoolhouse? Few, if any, I'd say. I know I'd be screaming for blood. The Amish didn't. It seems obvious to me that they're doing something right. I doubt their solution scales, but it's awfully nice to see a working prototype.
And now, after making nice and essentially agreeing with everything you said, I do have one strong negative reaction to your post. Here's the relevant passage:
I'm not sure what to do with that. It seems wrong on so many levels that I fear I'm misunderstanding you severely. It's not a "failing" of Christianity to refuse to accept basic human traits. We accept that the nature of man is what it is. And what it is, is sinful. Christianity isn't in the business of creating better humans (though that's a nice side effect that *should* be universal and is actively encouraged); we're in the business of seeking forgiveness for the flawed, sinful creatures we are.
So are you saying that "basic human traits" should be accepted, not suppressed, and that would somehow lead us to a better society populated by better humans? Since Christianity holds that many "basic human traits" are sinful and that *not* accepting them but striving against them through various means is part and parcel of being a Christian, I think you'll find that one a very hard sell.
So, did I miss your point somewhere? (About this one little thing, remember. For the most part, we're pretty much in sync on most of what's been discussed.)
Your understanding is correct and my original post was oversimplified. I *did* say I wanted to avoid writing a book. The deeper point is that while being a Christian does not require perfect emulation of the life of the Son of God to get into Heaven (the standard that many non-Christians *think* is required, thus granting themselves infinite permission to belittle a perceived hypocrisy of Christianity) it does require a more than your post would indicate. It's not enough to simply accept that we're flawed and sincerely ask for forgiveness and be done with it, knowing that's enough to get into Heaven. (Again, I don't want to write a book about doctrinal ideas of ultimate rewards and their relation to how we live our lives. There are even Christian sects who believe that *everyone* will go to Heaven, no matter what's in their hearts while they're here on Earth.) Christianity does, however, require some effort. In fact, it requires a *lot* of effort. Christians are expected to reach out to others, to help each other, to live lives that will, by example, show the world that belief in God is something special, something that makes you different. (Contrast, for example, the Christian idea of the Golden Rule, "Do unto other as you would have them do unto you", with the way Eastern religions approach the topic. In most Eastern religions, the nearest equivalent would be "Don't do to anyone anything you wouldn't want done to you." Christianity is many things, but passive isn't one of them. And I can't really expand that point further without writing a whole sermon. Sorry.)
The Amish do this. In spades. Many Christians don't. Oh, heck, *most* Christians don't. And if you don't at least *try* to live your life according to your Christian principles, are you really a Christian? That, according to Christian doctrine, can only be determined by God who judges what you are, inside, spiritually, instead of what you do, the face you show the world.
Now, lots of people show a good face to the world and we judge those people the only way we can, in our limited, earthly existence, judge those people - by what they do. But if they do it for all the wrong reasons, if their motivation isn't pure, then (again, according to Christian doctrine) they can't fool God who knows what's in their hearts and will judge them accordingly. Folks like that have limits, though. I doubt you'd see some fake "Everybody watch me while I donate to charity and do other really nice things" only-on-Sunday Christians come out with sincere forgiveness for a man who murdered their innocent daughter.
In the Amish, we have an example of forgiveness under even the most trying circumstances. As another poster in this thread has pointed out, this is not necessarily because the Amish are saints; there are community pressures involved. But, at minimum, we can say the Amish do an awfully good job of setting up the infrastructure, if you will, for an entire community to act in accordance with Christian principles. I think that's admirable. It may also be impossible without separation from the larger society, but that's another issue.
The Amish merely walked the walk instead of just talking the talk. I don't think any religion can point to all or even a simple majority of its adherents and say, truthfully, that "Those people live according to their beliefs." Nearly all religions (and, without trying to write a book on the subject, I have to say that Christianity is the most severe in this regard) require more, for lack of a better word, "goodness" from its followers than any human being can deliver. Even the Amish realize this and allow their younglings to taste the world before making an informed decision to adhere to the practices of the community for life. Their system works well for them and illustrates what Christianity *should* be. I don't mean the physical trappings, the dress, the low-tech, the separation. I mean the state of the spirit and how adherence to spiritual principles provides certain guidance even when the bad old world busts in and murders your family members.
Inner peace like that comes at what, to a non-adherent, seems to be a very high price. Whether it is or isn't and whether it should be paid is a decision for each individual. It's too bad that most people never consciously make that decision and instead choose to pursue what they think of as "life," only to find that when that life throws them a curve they don't have the principled, spirit-based skills needed to handle the situation.
The Amish are different in that regard. In Slashdot parlance, the Amish have mad skillz. :-)
Y'know, being a pudgy white nerd in my mid-40s who actually does think that the Buffyverse was the greatest televised artistic creation in history makes for some weird moments. A while back, I injured a knee and took my physical therapy at a place that does a booming business in injured little girls, mostly teen cheerleaders and soccer players. So here I am, riding the stationary bike, doing my stretches, and constantly surrounded by drama queen, rap-talkin' little whiners. No amount of cute visuals could make up for the throbbing headache I left with every day.
So one day, in conversation with my trainer, I said something. I don't even remember what it was - some quote from Buffy, or was it a Puffy AmiYumi reference? - and three or four girls around me just froze. They stared. They backed up and walked away and whispered. Obviously, some fat old slob that knew that stuff must have hobbies that make the skin crawl. Frankly, I was a little put off by the whole "let's treat this guy like radioactive anthrax" vibe that lasted the rest of the day.
Oh, well. I should find something to take my mind off such things. I'm gonna go check my Tivo and see if there's an episode of Hanna Montana I can watch.
...isn't cool anymore? Just because I'm a 40+ year old white guy who raps an obscene, extended version of "The Ballad of the Beverly Hillbillies" explaining in detail the relationship between Ellie Mae and all those animals and thinks I'm being funny while I do it, we've reached the point where rap isn't cool?
Damn it all to hell.
I worked hard on that song. A couple of drunk crowds at comedy clubs have loved at it. I guess now I'll have to ditch it from the act.
Damn.
Clear thinking amongst the slashdrones stands out like a beacon in the darkness. Thanks.
Anybody have a list a Swedish proxy servers they'd like to share? Free is good, but I'd be willing to pay for a reliable one.
Interestingly, we have two software distribution systems here. One is Tivoli. The higherups have spent millions and it's damn well gonna get used, whether it works or not.
The other is a little program named M2 that runs at startup, checks a list in a specified directory, compares it to a local server, and applies anything available on the server that applies to your type of machine. You don't start work until it finishes. Works like a charm. Solid as a rock. Cost us nothing because it was written by one of our guys. Beats the hell out of Tivoli.
Why don't we use it for everything? Tivoli does a couple of things it doesn't; M2 *only* distributes software. Mainly, though, it's politics. Our most powerful user group refuses to use M2 because when a large update of any sort comes through, the boot process can take a while. Their attitude is that the time of their people is too valuable to wait for a long boot. Without their buy-in, we'll never be able to get any large, all-user patch installed on any sort of reasonably compressed schedule.
Frustrating as hell.
Not quite as frustrating as 5 years ago when we took our last major user group off of pure-Unix laptops and put them on Windows, but close.
You don't have any stock in us.
Why do we have any left at SP1? I could be flip and say it's because we relied on Tivoli to update them, but I won't go there. Basically, we updated about 100K machines and are hunting down the last few hundred, mostly laptops belonging to people who spend all their time in the field and try to never come into the office where they can be updated. (Among our old-timers, it's a real badge of honor to brag that they haven't been in the office in 6 months.) Internal politics prevents us from simply locking those people off the network; we have to chase them down and say please. For any organization-wide update, there are always a few like that.
I work in a large organization that push-deployed the patch asap. The result is that any XP machine sitting at Service Pack 1 level for the OS can no longer be successfully updated to SP2 without first deleting a file (c:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\VGX\vgx.dll on our image). Then we can install SP2, then re-install the 0-day.
What a pain in the ass. Is everybody seeing the same trouble?
I have the opposite problems, sorta and sometimes. I'm old and my hearing sucks. In a quiet environment, at home, listening to my LPs, I love wide dynamics. That's what real music played in real space tends to have. In most places where I listen to music, though, this isn't the case. In the car or in my slightly noisy office, lower dynamic-range passages get lost in the background noise. I find myself turning my car stereo way up on some quiet things then way back down on loud passages.
A theory: commonly overused compression may be an artifact of poor hearing on the part of the person running the controls, the target audience, or both.
Personally, I wish I had two things. First, I wish I had my hearing back. Second, I wish I had a car radio with user-controllable compression. Yeah, I know it's anti-audiophile, but there are times when I'd just like to hear everything over the ambient noise so I'd *choose* to compress like crazy. If a radio existed with a control to do that (and, of course, the ability to turn it off), I'd pony up some bucks.
Excellent, excellent point.
Feds get fired two ways. One is to screw up royally and get escorted off the property.
The other, however, is for performance problems. It most certainly is harder to fire someone from federal service than in the private sector because of those civil service protections. The alternatives, however, are worse.
The "spoils" system, where all the government jobs go exclusively to cronies, causes massive problems. There have been many city governments in the past where if Party A is in power, no one from Party B gets a city job. When Party A goes in, the first thing they do is fire everyone who's a member of Party B and hire all their friends. The disruption in services is severe.
The same thing is possible at all levels of government. Imagine the incredible disruption of vital services that would happen if federal employees could be easily fired. Bush goes into office and right away every registered Democrat is out of a job. It would be chaos.
Theoretically, all firings should only be done if objective criteria are met. Meeting those criteria removes the ability of spiteful or politically motivated managers to unjustly remove people. This is good. This also prevents anyone from being fired quickly. I think that's a reasonable price to pay. This is government, after all. The steady and reliable flow of services is far more important than efficiency.
That's a big problem. It's a very uncomfortable situation when an employee is placed on a 90-day performance plan (pretty much the standard first step towards a firing). However, it also means that the firing, if it is truly justified, will stick. Under a 90-day plan, the manager is required to explicity say "This is where you're screwing up and you have to fix this or I'll fire you." That means the employee knows exactly and unambiguously what he must do to improve his performance enough to stay employed. It's uncomfortable but it's also objective.
Under this system, it's not possible (or, at minimum, it's so much work to fake up the documentation that no boss is going to go to that much trouble unless they're a real psycho) for a manager to fire someone based on silly personal biases like "You're not a good fit" or "I just think you're not working out around here." I think that's a plus and worth the discomfort and inefficiency.
A side note: During their first year of employment, workers are "probationary" and may be fired with two weeks notice without articulated cause. That tends to weed out the real losers right up front.
You've actually hit very close to the truth. From TFA:
I help with the computer inventory of a major agency. If at any time you took a snapshot of our inventory database, then sampled it, you'd find a distressingly large number of computers missing. Most of them aren't gone, they're just mislaid. They got taken off the network and put on a shelf in a storeroom under a box and no one could find them the last time the local inventory specialist was walking around with his bar code reader. In most cases when you read about a government operation with lots of lost computers you're actually reading about slop in the inventory database. That's not good, of course, but it's not the evidence of across-the-board incompetence that most people assume when government employees are involved.
I know I'm feeding a troll, but I can't help it. Good troll!
Bullshit. There's less of people getting "thrown out on your ass by Security" in government service for lots of reasons, the main one being you can't get thrown out just because you pissed off your big boss and he has the right to throw people out. In private industry, if you have the audacity to show up at a meeting and say to everyone that your boss 5 levels up is an idiot and here's why, you'll likely get fired. In the public service arena, if you make the same statements, without being a jerk about it and while backing up your assertions with facts, then you haven't violated your contract and you stay employed. Yes, pissing off people isn't good for your government career, but it doesn't get you summarily fired. We have rules and as long as you obey them, you're safe, unlike the private sector where an asshole corporate officer can not only convince him/herself that he's God but can also wield the power to ruin people's lives without oversight.
OTOH, I've seen employees marched out in handcuffs on more than one occasion when they screwed up. I've seen desks sealed with evidence tape and left in the office where they served as an example and warning for anyone else contemplating misdeeds. I've seen a woman convicted of over 100 counts of failing to uphold confidentiality and get hauled off to jail for it. The lines you have to cross to get fired from Federal service are fairly bright and the consequences severe and swift. The most slack I've ever seen someone get cut was a long-time employee who was eligible to retire when he was caught downloading CP. He was allowed to retire and then arrested a few days later at his home.
I can't speak for other agencies, but where I work simply "losing" a laptop does get you fired. Over the last few years, I've seen many laptops lost but in every case there was a reason. We lost a hell of a lot of equipment when the New Orleans office got flooded last year. At the same time, when the flood waters rose a bunch of employees lost their laptops that were properly secured, as per procedure, in the trunks of their cars. We've had home and car break-ins. We've had muggings. But I don't remember any employee simply "losing" a laptop. In those few cases where an employee is deemed to have exercised insufficient care, the cost of the laptop is deducted from their paycheck.
Which isn't to say it doesn't happen. We've had a number of laptops get "lost," inexcuseably, when we loaned laptops to volunteers who prepare tax returns for the needy. But those weren't lost by employees and the volunteers who fail to turn them back in eventually get visited by very intimidating people with badges and guns who work for our Inspector General. I would imagine that something of the same dynamic happened at Census - short-term employees who are just one step above volunteers and are not dedicated to a life of public service may very well fail to take proper care of their equipment. It's inexcuseable and career employees generally don't screw up like that. (Generally. There are always exceptions.)
No, this question was posed by a senator during his testimony. The senator was clearly on the side of the Atty Gen. He was trying to give Gonzalez and chance to toot his own horn. The senator looked mildly embarrassed that he had inadverdently asked a couple of hard questions and he quickly moved on.
I spent about an hour watching the Atty Gen testifying last night on CSpan. At one point, he held up as a success the data retention requirements under 2257. Those requirements are onerous and ridiculous, designed merely to harass mainstream porn producers.
Here was what struck me as odd. He said there was a connection between adult obscenity prosecutions and CP. He was asked to expand on that. He was asked how often it was the case that adult obscenity prosecutions led to CP prosecutions. The answer? He couldn't come up with anything. He cited unspecified studies as showing a connection, but he could not provide a single example of a prosecution for CP that had come about as a result of an adult obscenity investigation. In fact, he could only come up with one (just ONE) successful prosecution under 2257, that being the Girls Gone Wild case, something that has nothing to do with what any reasonable person would think of as CP.
I was kinda shocked. I knew he was lying about the correlation but I was shocked that he would lie so blatantly and then have no backup story. It was like he never expected to be asked to support any of his statements. It was like he expected to say anything he wanted and never get anything approaching a *real* question. The arrogance, the hubris were unbelievable. As another poster has said, he wasn't even trying to come up with *believable* lies.
Sidebar - This was ostensibly a hearing on the access of CP producers to credit card services. That would have been interesting. However, for the hour I listened (I came in in the middle) that subject was never brought up.
With bargain prices like that, I'll predict a runaway success!!
Where are you going and why that place? I've reached the same conclusion and in a couple of years, when certain duties of mine in the U.S. have been discharged, I'll be leaving. I just haven't decided where to go. It seems to me that somebody, somewhere, has probably already put up a web-based guide for people who want to get out, something that questions you about what you like and need and then makes recommendations. Has anyone seen anything like that?