Encryption will block them knowing the dirty joke you just told your friends, but it won't stop them from knowing WHO your friends are!
So, you sent and email to Mr. A.
Who sends email to Mr. B.
Who sends email to Mrs. C.
Yeah, you see where this is going. Just about anyone can be connected to anyone else with enough hops.
And the government would be "justified" in collecting the information on each of the people in those hops because those people are "connected" to someone under investigation.
It's potentially even worse than that. Say you get an e-mail about mortgage rates so low that it will make your penis size double while you earn a college degree from Canada (including videos of the dorm life you are missing).
So do 50 million other people, one of whom is a terrorist suspect. Hmmm, must be a coded activation message sent out to all the sleeper cells (note the funny way they spell "farmasuiticals"). So you are all suspects now.
Welcome to the slippery slope to hell. Watch your step, it's paved with "good intentions" and we wouldn't want anyone to slip up, now would we?
Except that this is obviously a terrorist message because nobody would use the word "mother" in this context. They'd use 'mom', or maybe 'our mother'. Anyone using mother in that way is either a terrorist or a psychopath and should be brought in for questioning.:)
You've never been to Britain, have you?
What exactly are you implying here? Either way, I suspect that somebody ought to be offended.
In my experience, scientists who work with such issues are quite clear on this point (and, so far as I can tell, have been for eighty some years).
But for other sorts of scientists (e.g. biologists), engineers, and the rest of us, who only need to calculate things to five or ten decimal places or so, assuming that the time points in the same direction throughout the area of interest (and generally that space is flat and such) is reasonable--so reasonable, in fact, that we'd be nuts not to work with that as an assumption.
If I'm tracking the migration of some sort of beetle or planning a system of trusses to support a load or deciding if I should walk or drive to the store for milk, I would have to be mad to start out treating spacetime as a fine-grained network of plank-scale events with information flow between them determining the local geometry of space time (and thus the direction of time). Likewise with the effects of nearby astronomical bodies--if they were big enough and close enough to seriously distort spacetime I'd have a lot bigger problems to worry about. On average, to the level I'd ever need to deal with in these sorts of cases, it is now and the future is coming up later and the past is what already happened.
I'm seeing problems similar to what he described on Fedora Core 3 (and others). 0.9x was (IMHO) much more stable.
And yes, it may be an extension issue, but my attempts to prove or disprove that theory haven't been encouraging. Unless the problem is adblock, TalkBack, the DOM inspector, or the Mozilla Spelling libraries, I don't think it's an extension problem. For that matter, why should an extension be able to crash the browser in the first place?
Why, pray tell, did you happen to choose these particular examples? I'd almost suspect that you have a political axe to grind...especially since in your list of cases of "recent vintage" you left off several more compelling, more current, and more significant cases.
...and so on and so forth. I suppose that picking a few from the other side would spoil the image you're trying to convey?
--MarkusQ
P.S. And before you start drawing unfounded conclusions about my politics, I happen to be a fiscally conservative registered Republican, who happens to hold my side to a higher standard than the "opposition". Where I was brought up, cheating to win meant you had lost, no matter what the scoreboard said.
You may be correct. However, in the future please refrain from signing my name to your posts. I'm assuming you just block copied my post & edited it, forgetting to remove the "--MarkusQ", and not that you were trying to put words in my mouth.
I find it amusing how the new school "conservatives" (I'm an old school conservative) are so gung-ho about strict interpretation of the constitution, and not "deriving" governmental authority on abstruse theories (commerce clause, anyone?) but they are willing to turn a blind eye to plain language when it suits them:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defense.
Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.
A vaguely remember when conservatives were in favor of limiting government, especially the federal government, and most especially the executive branch. Seems like, what, maybe five years ago they just dropped that long standing pillar of conservative ideology, along with fiscal restraint and sound judgment. Now the "conservatives" are all about a nanny state on steroids that spends like a drunken sailor and treats the constitution like a "quaint" piece of litter from the past, to be ignored when it doesn't suit them.
I almost wonder if perhaps they never really were conservative in the first place, and just used us in a cynical grab for power.
Look who's talking about spewing talking points. You keep responding to things I didn't say with the standard Republican talking points.
The tribes were giving money to Democrats before Abramoff got involved. He told them to give to Republicans and they stopped giving to Democrats. Abramoff (and K street) are about as Republican as they come. The "the remarkably bipartisan nature of the beneficiaries of Mr. Abramoff's largesses" is flat out a lie, and I suspect you know it.
In any case, the issue isn't who they gave money to, it's who brokered the sale of votes.
I have no intention of going off onto whatever "legalist" side ally you're talking about.
Are you crazy? The intelligence services of the world were almost united in their disbelief of the WMD claims. The inspectors had found no signs of them, they had serious doubts about the credibility of the "sources" that were claiming there were WMD, and (as a consequence) it took a concerted sell-job on the part of the US to convince them (remember Mr. Powell and the photos?).
Congress most decidedly did not have access to the same intelligence; in fact, doubters were told "ah, but if you only knew what we knew" and then were given a cooked and biased "summary" (prepared by the Cheney) that demonstrably misrepresented the case for WMD. This is not news.
As for my politics, I happen to be a fiscally conservative Republican. I have never voted for a Democratic presidential candidate, and I can't recall ever voting for one for congress. But that doesn't mean I have to drink the kool-aid, and believe absolute nonsense out of party loyalty.
I think it would be fair to summarize your post as saying that anyone who doesn't believe that:
political corruption in Washington is a one-party issue
Bush `lied us into war' (not, note that the war was a bad idea or badly handled -- both of these are ideas which I disagree with but which can certainly be argued for rationally. To the true devotee of the paranoid style, the war (or 9/11, or the election) must not just be bad, but must be the product of a vast conspiracy)
has a `pro-Republican bias'. This is a very good example of exactly the type of DU extremism and fringe paranoia I described in my original post.
Point by point:
You may think it would be fair, but it would not be (see following).
I never said that "political corruption in Washington is a one-party issue" and do not believe it. But this particular scandal is a one party issue. What makes it all the more galling is I enthusiastically voted for my share of the present (Republican) crop expressly because of the abuses of their (Democratic) predecessors.
Bush did, as a matter of public record, lie us into a war.
He and his staff made detailed, unequivocal statements about:
The connection between Iraq and the 9/11 attacks
The existence of WMD, including the yellow cake, the aluminum tubes, the satellite photos, etc.
His intention to pursue diplomatic solutions before using force
None of these statements were true
They knew at the time they weren't true, or reasonably should have known this if they were doing their jobs
They told our allies that they were set on a war and were "fixing the facts around the policy"
The net result of these lies was, as intended, a war with Iraq
I never said anything about a "vast conspiracy" and do not believe one exists. I think (to give a few hopefully less emotionally loaded analogies) that state lotteries take in more money than they pay out, that insurance companies do the same, that the "scientologists" dupe gullible people into enriching them as well, but in none of these cases do I suspect a "vast conspiracy"--simple greed and the undeniable fact that some people are smarter than others accounts for all the cases quite nicely. As it will in Washington.
Asking that newspapers report the facts, and not regurgitate partisan spin, is not "extremism"
Noting when this does not happen is hardly "fringe paranoia"
Abramoff's client's donations are the primary issue
So let me get this straight. If some guy gives money to the red cross and the boy scouts, and it later turns out that the red cross was bribing penguins, (by your logic) the boy scouts are somehow guilty of bribing penguins too, because they got money from the same donor?
The problem is not that Indian tribes donated money to politicians or to lobbyists. The problem is that some of the lobbyists paid elected officials to vote they way they wanted, and the politicians went along with it.
The rest is just FUD and smoke from the crooks and their cohorts.
accusing the Washington Post (of all papers!) of having a pro-Republican bias
The key statement that seems to have started all this, that Democrats received money from Abramoff, or his firm, clearly is biased, in that:
It is factually incorrect
It paints one side in a bad light in exactly the fashion the other wants
Little or no coverage has been given to this outright "perception management" attempt on the part of the white house
Also, look up some of the statistics on their coverage of the topic of impeachment. They spent a lot more ink on lying about a blow job than they have about lying to start a war. That would seem to substantiate the claim of pro-Republican bias, or at least make it less absurd than you make it sound.
Would you expect someone to write a decent book about how to speak French without learning French? Would you expect a sportswriter to cover a sport but never watch a game, never talk to a player or a fan, but instead just get "cooperation" from the team's managers and staff? No matter how much "cooperation" the development team gives the documenters, no matter how much "technical background" they have, they need to use the product, even to the point of trying to break it, talk to real users, and, in short, get their hands dirty if they're really going to write about it well.
There's a fundamental rule here: you can't write what you don't know, and the quickest, easiest way to learn something is immersion.
There are some cute tricks in O'reilly's "Linux Server Hacks" which, taken together, can leave you with a pretty sweet setup. #52,#53,#66-#71 are all worth checking out.
You do realize that this is isn't aimed at rival Presidential candidates, but at people in direct contact with terrorist organizations that have attacked the United States, right?
If the program is so secret, how exactly do you know this?
I think that's the sticking point for many people: "Trust us, we're from the government" hasn't set well with most Americans since the days of king George. If you trust them, that's fine for you. But what about the many people (of both parties) who explicitly don't trust that the government (or more to the point, politicians) will just do the right thing with no need for oversight?
If Google was up to it, I'd search/. for a story or posting that was free of errors in grammar, spelling, and punctuation.
Hmm.
Too bad I'm not in the market for a technical writer at the moment.
But seriously, I suppose I would look for "technical writer," or "technical writing service" unless (as in fact, is likely) I had more specific requirements, e.g. "software documentation authors" or "product testing and documentation services."
Which brings up a good point: I personally don't like to hire dedicated "documenters" because, no matter how good they are at writing, the results tend to be vacuous unless you can get them really engaged with the product. Instead, I tent to look for writers who will also do tech support or testing, so that they get a real feel for the product rather than just regurgitating a grammatical paraphrase of what the engineer told them over the cube wall.
I tried the documentation / sales force combination once, but wound up not using any of the results until the following April, when we used a few sample paragraphs and our lawyer's attempt at a rewrite in an April fools memo.
An interesting point (which the article missed) is that people like Christopher Hitchens, ex-critics who have yet who have yet been defending Bush and the "regime change/WMD quest/freedom spreading/think of the children/over there, not here" war are joining the suit.
How many line ending conventions do you suppose there were back in the day? Ever hear of the ASCII characters FS, GS, and RS?
I don't think File/Group/Record Separators where really considered line ending conventions.
You wouldn't think so, would you? Somebody (and I don't recall who) used to pass along email with RS between lines, GS between the header and the body (and, if I recall correctly, US to delimit stuff in the header) and FS between messages.
And not everyone used eight bit ASCII. Or even ASCII. Though somebody (Burroughs?) had something they called ASCII, but wasn't quite.
It seems to me, as a person who did not experience this 'revolution,' that the offspring of the ARPANET technology was hackish and sometimes chaotic. What do you think on this matter?"
I think you should count yourself lucky you missed it. Just a few of the many joys:
Bang paths. Rather than the mail telling you where it was supposed to go, it gave you a guess of how to get it there. Easy in theory; it's just a concatenation of machines, and you play hot potato with it. In practice...yetch.
How many line ending conventions do you suppose there were back in the day? Ever hear of the ASCII characters FS, GS, and RS?
UUCP. It bore the same relationship to transport protocols that a bilge pump has to sound ship design. Basically, if you couldn't handle it on one machine, you pumped it over to another one (with shell commands to be executed on more or less blind faith by both parties), and sort of hoped that things would work out.
Great. Well, now I know what I'm going to be having nightmares about tonight.
if it were printed out as a single line of text, it would stretch around the world more than 250 times. Printing it out on pages of A4 would produce a stack of paper two-and-a-half times as high as Mount Everest
Did anybody else think "Wow, I've got a great idea for a mural for the space elevator!"
I don't get it. What's going to be left in the US?
If I had to guess, a bunch of fundamentalist christians who are willing to give up all their civil rights for the assurance that no married gay people ever get an abortion. Oh yeah, and to fight terrorists.
You may well be correct. I know they've formed well over 80% of the animal biomass (and total biomass for that matter) located inside my house at various times, so I may be more inclined to err on the side of Insects! than otherwise.
The key point really being that no fish, very very few plants, almost no birds, few reptiles, and only a small fraction of the mammals will routinely think it's a good idea to explore your dwelling on the off chance that something they might want is inside. For social insects in some parts of the world, on the other hand, it's kind of a hobby.
Social insects comprise up to 80% of the animal biomass in many parts of the world. This is not a problem, per se, but something you want to be aware of. If you are especially squeamish about bugs! you might want to stay closer to one of the poles.
The consequences for not meeting the law's provisions are severe: those holding licenses from States that fail to meet the requirements by 2008 will not be permitted to fly on airplanes or enter federal buildings.
Does anyone else remember when "Your papers, please, comrade" was always said in a foreign accent, and as a joke?
Slashdot Mirror
So do 50 million other people, one of whom is a terrorist suspect. Hmmm, must be a coded activation message sent out to all the sleeper cells (note the funny way they spell "farmasuiticals"). So you are all suspects now.
Welcome to the slippery slope to hell. Watch your step, it's paved with "good intentions" and we wouldn't want anyone to slip up, now would we?
--MarkusQ
You've never been to Britain, have you?
What exactly are you implying here? Either way, I suspect that somebody ought to be offended.
--MarkusQ
In my experience, scientists who work with such issues are quite clear on this point (and, so far as I can tell, have been for eighty some years).
But for other sorts of scientists (e.g. biologists), engineers, and the rest of us, who only need to calculate things to five or ten decimal places or so, assuming that the time points in the same direction throughout the area of interest (and generally that space is flat and such) is reasonable--so reasonable, in fact, that we'd be nuts not to work with that as an assumption.
If I'm tracking the migration of some sort of beetle or planning a system of trusses to support a load or deciding if I should walk or drive to the store for milk, I would have to be mad to start out treating spacetime as a fine-grained network of plank-scale events with information flow between them determining the local geometry of space time (and thus the direction of time). Likewise with the effects of nearby astronomical bodies--if they were big enough and close enough to seriously distort spacetime I'd have a lot bigger problems to worry about. On average, to the level I'd ever need to deal with in these sorts of cases, it is now and the future is coming up later and the past is what already happened.
--MarkusQ
I'm seeing problems similar to what he described on Fedora Core 3 (and others). 0.9x was (IMHO) much more stable.
And yes, it may be an extension issue, but my attempts to prove or disprove that theory haven't been encouraging. Unless the problem is adblock, TalkBack, the DOM inspector, or the Mozilla Spelling libraries, I don't think it's an extension problem. For that matter, why should an extension be able to crash the browser in the first place?
--MarkusQ
P.S. Firefox is still my primary browser.
Why, pray tell, did you happen to choose these particular examples? I'd almost suspect that you have a political axe to grind...especially since in your list of cases of "recent vintage" you left off several more compelling, more current, and more significant cases.
--MarkusQ
P.S. And before you start drawing unfounded conclusions about my politics, I happen to be a fiscally conservative registered Republican, who happens to hold my side to a higher standard than the "opposition". Where I was brought up, cheating to win meant you had lost, no matter what the scoreboard said.
The guy that started the topic is the same !#@&% guy that offered to relicense the linux kernel for some $50,000 not some time ago.
Jeff V. Merkey rides again!
Good catch. I never would have noticed that but it does put thing in perspective!
--MarkusQ
You may be correct. However, in the future please refrain from signing my name to your posts. I'm assuming you just block copied my post & edited it, forgetting to remove the "--MarkusQ", and not that you were trying to put words in my mouth.
--MarkusQ
At last, we can fill in the missing step!
The Professor's Secret Plan To Wealth
--MarkusQ
I find it amusing how the new school "conservatives" (I'm an old school conservative) are so gung-ho about strict interpretation of the constitution, and not "deriving" governmental authority on abstruse theories (commerce clause, anyone?) but they are willing to turn a blind eye to plain language when it suits them: A vaguely remember when conservatives were in favor of limiting government, especially the federal government, and most especially the executive branch. Seems like, what, maybe five years ago they just dropped that long standing pillar of conservative ideology, along with fiscal restraint and sound judgment. Now the "conservatives" are all about a nanny state on steroids that spends like a drunken sailor and treats the constitution like a "quaint" piece of litter from the past, to be ignored when it doesn't suit them.
I almost wonder if perhaps they never really were conservative in the first place, and just used us in a cynical grab for power.
--MarkusQ
Look who's talking about spewing talking points. You keep responding to things I didn't say with the standard Republican talking points.
--MarkusQ
I think it would be fair to summarize your post as saying that anyone who doesn't believe that:
has a `pro-Republican bias'. This is a very good example of exactly the type of DU extremism and fringe paranoia I described in my original post.
Point by point:
--MarkusQ
Abramoff's client's donations are the primary issue
So let me get this straight. If some guy gives money to the red cross and the boy scouts, and it later turns out that the red cross was bribing penguins, (by your logic) the boy scouts are somehow guilty of bribing penguins too, because they got money from the same donor?
The problem is not that Indian tribes donated money to politicians or to lobbyists. The problem is that some of the lobbyists paid elected officials to vote they way they wanted, and the politicians went along with it.
The rest is just FUD and smoke from the crooks and their cohorts.
-- MarkusQ
accusing the Washington Post (of all papers!) of having a pro-Republican bias
The key statement that seems to have started all this, that Democrats received money from Abramoff, or his firm, clearly is biased, in that:
Also, look up some of the statistics on their coverage of the topic of impeachment. They spent a lot more ink on lying about a blow job than they have about lying to start a war. That would seem to substantiate the claim of pro-Republican bias, or at least make it less absurd than you make it sound.
--MarkusQ
I beg to differ.
Would you expect someone to write a decent book about how to speak French without learning French? Would you expect a sportswriter to cover a sport but never watch a game, never talk to a player or a fan, but instead just get "cooperation" from the team's managers and staff? No matter how much "cooperation" the development team gives the documenters, no matter how much "technical background" they have, they need to use the product, even to the point of trying to break it, talk to real users, and, in short, get their hands dirty if they're really going to write about it well.
There's a fundamental rule here: you can't write what you don't know, and the quickest, easiest way to learn something is immersion.
--MarkusQ
There are some cute tricks in O'reilly's "Linux Server Hacks" which, taken together, can leave you with a pretty sweet setup. #52,#53,#66-#71 are all worth checking out.
--MarkusQ
You do realize that this is isn't aimed at rival Presidential candidates, but at people in direct contact with terrorist organizations that have attacked the United States, right?
If the program is so secret, how exactly do you know this?
I think that's the sticking point for many people: "Trust us, we're from the government" hasn't set well with most Americans since the days of king George. If you trust them, that's fine for you. But what about the many people (of both parties) who explicitly don't trust that the government (or more to the point, politicians) will just do the right thing with no need for oversight?
--MarkusQ
If Google was up to it, I'd search
Hmm.
Too bad I'm not in the market for a technical writer at the moment.
But seriously, I suppose I would look for "technical writer," or "technical writing service" unless (as in fact, is likely) I had more specific requirements, e.g. "software documentation authors" or "product testing and documentation services."
Which brings up a good point: I personally don't like to hire dedicated "documenters" because, no matter how good they are at writing, the results tend to be vacuous unless you can get them really engaged with the product. Instead, I tent to look for writers who will also do tech support or testing, so that they get a real feel for the product rather than just regurgitating a grammatical paraphrase of what the engineer told them over the cube wall.
I tried the documentation / sales force combination once, but wound up not using any of the results until the following April, when we used a few sample paragraphs and our lawyer's attempt at a rewrite in an April fools memo.
--MarkusQ
An interesting point (which the article missed) is that people like Christopher Hitchens, ex-critics who have yet who have yet been defending Bush and the "regime change/WMD quest/freedom spreading/think of the children/over there, not here" war are joining the suit.
--MarkusQ
I don't think File/Group/Record Separators where really considered line ending conventions.
You wouldn't think so, would you? Somebody (and I don't recall who) used to pass along email with RS between lines, GS between the header and the body (and, if I recall correctly, US to delimit stuff in the header) and FS between messages.
And not everyone used eight bit ASCII. Or even ASCII. Though somebody (Burroughs?) had something they called ASCII, but wasn't quite.
--MarkusQ
It seems to me, as a person who did not experience this 'revolution,' that the offspring of the ARPANET technology was hackish and sometimes chaotic. What do you think on this matter?"
I think you should count yourself lucky you missed it. Just a few of the many joys:
Great. Well, now I know what I'm going to be having nightmares about tonight.
--MarkusQ
if it were printed out as a single line of text, it would stretch around the world more than 250 times. Printing it out on pages of A4 would produce a stack of paper two-and-a-half times as high as Mount Everest
Did anybody else think "Wow, I've got a great idea for a mural for the space elevator!"
Anybody?
Uh, well, it's late...
--MarkusQ
I don't get it. What's going to be left in the US?
If I had to guess, a bunch of fundamentalist christians who are willing to give up all their civil rights for the assurance that no married gay people ever get an abortion. Oh yeah, and to fight terrorists.
--MarkusQ
You may well be correct. I know they've formed well over 80% of the animal biomass (and total biomass for that matter) located inside my house at various times, so I may be more inclined to err on the side of Insects! than otherwise.
The key point really being that no fish, very very few plants, almost no birds, few reptiles, and only a small fraction of the mammals will routinely think it's a good idea to explore your dwelling on the off chance that something they might want is inside. For social insects in some parts of the world, on the other hand, it's kind of a hobby.
--MarkusQ
Social insects comprise up to 80% of the animal biomass in many parts of the world. This is not a problem, per se, but something you want to be aware of. If you are especially squeamish about bugs! you might want to stay closer to one of the poles.
--MarkusQ
The consequences for not meeting the law's provisions are severe: those holding licenses from States that fail to meet the requirements by 2008 will not be permitted to fly on airplanes or enter federal buildings.
Does anyone else remember when "Your papers, please, comrade" was always said in a foreign accent, and as a joke?
--MarkusQ