I reckon they'll start lobbying to make free web porn illegal. Probably by requiring a credit card be involved to "protect the children." Anything that causes ISPs or the *AA to make less money than they'd prefer is criminal, after all.
MS did not own QDOS when they sold it to IBM. Oh, and Bill Gate's mother was on the board of IBM. And what a crap OS DOS was; it held the industry back 10 years. Thankfully MS no longer has that sort of power; you could tell they were slipping when they failed to smother the Internet and force everybody onto MSN. Now, the only real drag they can impose on progress is via patent shakedowns.
“We’re currently working to develop a policy that balances the effective use of this powerful law enforcement tool with the privacy concerns we’re keenly aware of,” Harris said.
That can only mean that they won't record license plates belonging to Republican politicians near gay bath houses.
I was going to say negative numbers are accepted. I also meant to say "iris database". Most current images probably do not have the resolution for that; but give it a year or two.
What's funny is that the scans are not mandatory at the airports I've seen; they only cover half the lines. Just note which line ends in a rape-scan and go to the other ones. They tried to make them mandatory leading up to last Thanksgiving, but so many people were going to opt out that they backed off to avert a PR nightmare. So they still get most of the money, but a real terrorist would just skip the machines.
Without 100% coverage, the machines are useless. But with 100% coverage, people opting out will slow the system to a crawl and they'll have to give up. So they are sticking with an approach which is 100% useless (except to train the slave class to live in fear).
Their entire purpose in life is to lie and cheat in order to make money. Anybody who expect voluntary ethical behaviour from a marketer doesn't know marketers. And don't talk to me about the mythical wise, long-term thinking marketers.
The interesting thing about this is it sets a value on not using Windows. To many, many millions of people, it's worth $5 + markup to not have to use WP7. So the market has determined that WP7's value is -$5.00. I'm sure it's worth more than ten times that negative amount, but MS can't rush the shakedown too much or they'll either kill their hosts or ramp up the immune systems of their hosts (i.e., companies which aren't just parasites, because they actually produce value).
Why wouldn't we give one of the least ethical companies in the world access to everything we do at home? They already inspect and record everything we do online.
There's been a lot of debate lately about the failed War on Drugs. Some say that legalizing drugs would take most of the income from murderous cartels, while others believe that the cartels would simple move into new markets. I have a win-win solution.
Two of the core competencies of the cartels are: anonymously collecting money, and assassinating people.
Let's legalize dope and pay the cartels to whack patent trolls. We free up a lot of prison space, increase tax revenues, cut spending, unfetter the economy, encourage actual innovation and product development, and scare some of the scu^W lawyers into hiding. Huge win all around. We'll have this deficit thing licked in about 3 years.
This is according to a friend of mine who used to tend bar at a Reno casino. I don't know how much has changed since then; maybe a local can tell us more.
Slot machines in Nevada are regulated and required to pay out a certain percentage over time. This means that the longer one type of slot at a casino doesn't pay out, the higher the odds are that they will soon. Once a casino got to the point where a payoff was probable, a bus would pull up full of compulsive gamblers, all wearing the same windbreakers. They'd sit at every machine in the casino and play until someone hit the jackpot. These people were not allowed to keep their winnings (or not much of them), but their habit was paid for.
Since they never tipped, the bartenders hated them. Whenever they saw the bus pull up, they'd place drinks at the slots to reserve the spots.
Anyway, wherever there is money you will find corruption. Rule of law (applied equably), transparency, and cultural values are all that mitigate this. The only reason this doesn't happen in American for-profit prisons is that the money isn't good enough, yet. But the dollar continue to drop. Your kids might gold-farm for the Chinese.
I can't believe I'm praising Iowa politics, but here goes: Iowa uses a simple grid and a computer to determine the maps. It's not perfect (the legislature can vote up/down on changes), but it's more fair than any other state.
Also, we should get rid of the two-party system and use preference voting...
Yep. The monitor industry apparently just quit about 4 years ago. No significant improvements since then; prices are up and resolutions are lower. Part of that is due to the focus on mobile, and part of it is due to the media industry (the LAST people you want defining tech specs) taking over. 1080p ought to be good enough for anybody-- nobody will notice, especially with the horribly lossy compression your "HD" signal from Comcrap will use. So going from 1920x1080 to 19200x1200 will run you about $200. Ridiculous.
As for those of us who want to do actual work... well, there are fewer of us all the time anyway. The media/ISP industry and the usual leader in new technologies, Apple, is making every effort to turn people into consumers, not builders.
Right now I have scripts to list the current ruleset, figure out the deltas between the new ruleset and old, add or remove rules as appropriate, and save that config to disk for reboots. It works well enough, better than restarting iptables, but it should be more efficient with these changes. I wondered why there wasn't a method (that I found; correct me if I'm wrong) for running batch changes without invoking the iptables command for each change.
Thunderbolt looks like a very useful technology. Unfortunately it will add several dollars to the cost of the PC, so probably only Macs will support it, so it'll be hard to find good, cheap monitors etc., and ultimately it will fail. Unless the PC manufacturers decide to grow a pair and do something useful for a change. The PC industry seems committed to the worst possible technologies that people will buy.
Nope, he flipped a 180 on FISA before he was elected. Nobody who might inconvenience the wiretap community will make it anywhere near the levers of power. Which is why a handful of us opposed these power grabs from day one, and were told we were being silly, that there were sunset clauses, there would be oversight, it was just a slight expansion....
Slashdot Mirror
I reckon they'll start lobbying to make free web porn illegal. Probably by requiring a credit card be involved to "protect the children." Anything that causes ISPs or the *AA to make less money than they'd prefer is criminal, after all.
MS did not own QDOS when they sold it to IBM. Oh, and Bill Gate's mother was on the board of IBM. And what a crap OS DOS was; it held the industry back 10 years. Thankfully MS no longer has that sort of power; you could tell they were slipping when they failed to smother the Internet and force everybody onto MSN. Now, the only real drag they can impose on progress is via patent shakedowns.
“We’re currently working to develop a policy that balances the effective use of this powerful law enforcement tool with the privacy concerns we’re keenly aware of,” Harris said.
That can only mean that they won't record license plates belonging to Republican politicians near gay bath houses.
I was going to say negative numbers are accepted. I also meant to say "iris database". Most current images probably do not have the resolution for that; but give it a year or two.
How long until they scrape Facebook photos to build their database? After all, anything that's detectable in public is fair game.
I'm not a Dan, but hey, they called it.
Astronauts don't read Arabic. He should have written it in... Cyrillic? Mandarin?
And Comcast is called Xfinity. Change your name to Xsomething and people will forget whatever you did before, apparently.
What's funny is that the scans are not mandatory at the airports I've seen; they only cover half the lines. Just note which line ends in a rape-scan and go to the other ones. They tried to make them mandatory leading up to last Thanksgiving, but so many people were going to opt out that they backed off to avert a PR nightmare. So they still get most of the money, but a real terrorist would just skip the machines. Without 100% coverage, the machines are useless. But with 100% coverage, people opting out will slow the system to a crawl and they'll have to give up. So they are sticking with an approach which is 100% useless (except to train the slave class to live in fear).
We will add you to a list of dissidents and you will receive super-enhanced screening.
Their entire purpose in life is to lie and cheat in order to make money. Anybody who expect voluntary ethical behaviour from a marketer doesn't know marketers. And don't talk to me about the mythical wise, long-term thinking marketers.
So if I see a guy punch himself in the nuts and screaming, and I decide that this is not for me, I owe him money?
The interesting thing about this is it sets a value on not using Windows. To many, many millions of people, it's worth $5 + markup to not have to use WP7. So the market has determined that WP7's value is -$5.00. I'm sure it's worth more than ten times that negative amount, but MS can't rush the shakedown too much or they'll either kill their hosts or ramp up the immune systems of their hosts (i.e., companies which aren't just parasites, because they actually produce value).
Why wouldn't we give one of the least ethical companies in the world access to everything we do at home? They already inspect and record everything we do online.
There's been a lot of debate lately about the failed War on Drugs. Some say that legalizing drugs would take most of the income from murderous cartels, while others believe that the cartels would simple move into new markets. I have a win-win solution. Two of the core competencies of the cartels are: anonymously collecting money, and assassinating people. Let's legalize dope and pay the cartels to whack patent trolls. We free up a lot of prison space, increase tax revenues, cut spending, unfetter the economy, encourage actual innovation and product development, and scare some of the scu^W lawyers into hiding. Huge win all around. We'll have this deficit thing licked in about 3 years.
They were hoping electrons were shaped like Pac-man. This would where the antimatter went.
Since they never tipped, the bartenders hated them. Whenever they saw the bus pull up, they'd place drinks at the slots to reserve the spots.
Anyway, wherever there is money you will find corruption. Rule of law (applied equably), transparency, and cultural values are all that mitigate this. The only reason this doesn't happen in American for-profit prisons is that the money isn't good enough, yet. But the dollar continue to drop. Your kids might gold-farm for the Chinese.
...is that God did that freehand.
I can't believe I'm praising Iowa politics, but here goes: Iowa uses a simple grid and a computer to determine the maps. It's not perfect (the legislature can vote up/down on changes), but it's more fair than any other state. Also, we should get rid of the two-party system and use preference voting...
While I can see your annoyance at the recent spade of bitcoin articles, this is interesting outside of bitcoin.
Here's a guy who calls a spate a spade.
Yep. The monitor industry apparently just quit about 4 years ago. No significant improvements since then; prices are up and resolutions are lower. Part of that is due to the focus on mobile, and part of it is due to the media industry (the LAST people you want defining tech specs) taking over. 1080p ought to be good enough for anybody-- nobody will notice, especially with the horribly lossy compression your "HD" signal from Comcrap will use. So going from 1920x1080 to 19200x1200 will run you about $200. Ridiculous. As for those of us who want to do actual work... well, there are fewer of us all the time anyway. The media/ISP industry and the usual leader in new technologies, Apple, is making every effort to turn people into consumers, not builders.
Right now I have scripts to list the current ruleset, figure out the deltas between the new ruleset and old, add or remove rules as appropriate, and save that config to disk for reboots. It works well enough, better than restarting iptables, but it should be more efficient with these changes. I wondered why there wasn't a method (that I found; correct me if I'm wrong) for running batch changes without invoking the iptables command for each change.
Like Fon?
Thunderbolt looks like a very useful technology. Unfortunately it will add several dollars to the cost of the PC, so probably only Macs will support it, so it'll be hard to find good, cheap monitors etc., and ultimately it will fail. Unless the PC manufacturers decide to grow a pair and do something useful for a change. The PC industry seems committed to the worst possible technologies that people will buy.
Nope, he flipped a 180 on FISA before he was elected. Nobody who might inconvenience the wiretap community will make it anywhere near the levers of power. Which is why a handful of us opposed these power grabs from day one, and were told we were being silly, that there were sunset clauses, there would be oversight, it was just a slight expansion....