Good for you, and no thats no sarcasm, we need better testing regimes in commercial software development companies, and developers, you should ask for some metrics on code before you join a team, testing is crutial if yo're going to ship a good product, code reviews, test harnesses etc should all be in abundance. Sadly what happens in a lot of cases is Marketing says deliver on day X, where day X is some random day that they thought up rather than a "real deadline" ("real deadline" being a competitor about to trample you etc) then you have to massage the code, work 18 hours a day, not do testing just so everything fits in with when Marketing want to launch their ad campaign (usually about a month after their Kenyan safari). I have personally expereinced this, and its not fun at all. If you want a professional level product you need to plan, design implement and TEST. The most recent high profile case I can think of is Oracles CRM offering which sucks, and doesnt have functionality that corporations were sold on. So now I know many people looking for alternatives to Oracle, not just for CRM but DBMS as well, give a dog a bad name and all that.
I always prefered the Amigas "Guru Meditation" error messages, I just wish they had combined it with a Zen Koan generator or quote of the day, it would have made figuring out what went wrong even more fun!
Yes RIPA was passed before the Human Rights Act,and I doubt that RIPA will be used as it is well known that it violates the Human Rights Act therefore bringing a prosecution for an offence under RIPA will lead to it being quashed as the defence will show the incompatibility. RIPA is bad law and it is on the Books, and needs to be removed as a matter of principle, and in practice I see it having no effect.
Maybe you should check out what the US media coverage of the massacres in East Timor was like, do a search on Google for "east timor us arms kissinger newspapers" heres one link that gets thrown up here
Re:The human mind is a good filter [possibly OT]
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The Hypermedia Hazard
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· Score: 2
Well we did have a formidable Navy, that didnt stop the Wolfpacks from destroying alot of convoys of material from the US though ( and the US charged us a lot of money for the material, maybe thats when price gouging by Americans started:), again we beat them by cracking the Enigma and gaining the information advantage. The British Navy did have great successes like cutting off Rommels supplies in Africa, again due to intelligence gathered by cracking the Enigma. As for the fighters, well once Hitler had turned his attention from Britain he didnt really care about invading, though they still tried to bomb us into submission, and in the later part of the war they were more concerned with having fighters over Germany to try and stop Allied forces bombing them into the Stone Age. Again it was part luck, courage, technology and brains that stopped themin the end, the US did have a part to play, but not as significant as most Americans seem to think, in fact the recent series Band of Brothers showed how distorted Americans views of history are. At the end of one episode about Operation Market Garden they give one line at the end to the 8,000 British troups killed vs the 100s of Americans that died, thats because the British paratroops were up front (in Arnhiem) were the real resistance was as opposed to were the Americans landed behind with little resistance. Another example would be the recent film about the capture of the first naval Enigma machine in the film U-571, where the Americans capture the sub, actually it was U110 and it was the British that captured it, I hope the American population starts to learn about history and truth soon.
The biggest problem with America is that only two other countries border us. It's difficult to hop on a train and travel to different countries like you can in Europe so our access to different cultures is limited to our propensity to travel by plane. This is rather expensive, a lot more than a rail pass in Europe anyway, so there are only a select few that can manage this.
Yeah I think some Americans travel to Tijuana or Bogota for some stimulation unless they are invading a country of course, never invade when you're stoned out of your mind, you'll never remember which end of the M16 is right one.
It's just the black helicopter set that takes this idea seriously.
And of course they don't run the country and in other news The Warren Commision is now required reading at US schools and mention of The Grassy Knoll is grounds for immediate suspension...
There's a saying that americans are ignorant - can't point out Egypt on a map
Well Bush Jr didnt know the leaders of Pakistan and India remember? Maybe when I have made my billions I'll buy every American a globe and a CIA World Factbook for Xmas...
Sure in the "Land of the free" the average hick might not have known about the holocast going on in Europe under the Nazis, maybe you should be asking why your government tries to stop you from having the truth? I'm glad that here in the UK when government Ministers start lying we start throwing them in jail (Jeffery Archer was the most recent example), its actually funny to watch our current government try to do "spin" like the Americans and fail miserably, it has a lot to do with having a) a press that actually has some journalists in it rather than people who brown nose to whoever has more money b) a population that is more sceptical and c) has a tradition of actually discussing world topics in public, like down the pub, or at Speakers Corner d) the ability to say the truth, however unpalitable to those around you, basically imagine a nation of Ralph Naders with a sense of humour and great beer.
Re:The human mind is a good filter [possibly OT]
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The Hypermedia Hazard
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· Score: 2
No, there are many languages in the US, Mall-Speak which is a dialect of Valley-Speak ("like totally very"), Corporate-Speak ("In Q4 we will leverage our synergies to..."), McSpeak ("would you like fries with that?"), Techno-Babble ("Onramps to the Information superhighway will be snarled up due to Code Red..."), Pyscho-Babble ("The Jungian interpretation of that Freudian slip is it's ultimate Gestalt variation"), NewAge-Speak ("Crystal healing of your Aura will transend you to the higher plane") etc etc etc
Re:The human mind is a good filter [possibly OT]
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The Hypermedia Hazard
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· Score: 2
Q: What do you call the people who saved the Swedes and everyone else in W. Europe from Hitler?
A: American
I am always surprised when this comes up. By the time the US entered the war against the Nazis Britain had fought them off 2 years before in what is generally called "The Battle of Britain" where the RAF stopped Hitler from gaining air superiority over Britain and so they did not invade. It was a close run thing, and it was a combination of technology/brains (RADAR, Enigma cracking etc) guts (I think the average lifespan of an RAF pilot was just a couple of days in the air) and luck in that the Nazis started bombing the civilian population vs. military targets and they turned their attention towards the Western front. By the time the US entered the war, there were thousands of SOE (Special Operations Executive) commandos in continental Europe sabotaging the Nazi military and organising resistance groups and the Nazis were losing on the Western front againt the Soviets. The US entry into the war did shorten the conflict, and stopped the Soviets from having an almost complete monopoly on all of Europe. This was all because the US before Pearl Harbour had considered WWII as a "European war" and didnt give a damn about the slaughter of Jews / Gays / Romany Gypsies / mentally or physically disabled people, as say compared to Britain that took an immediate stand on the invasion of Poland by immediately declaring war on Germany. The US entered the war out of self interest, Britain had forces in the Pacific area, more advanced technologies like RADAR and code cracking par excellance. If you are going to spout off about things, please in the future be informed.
Q: What do you call the inventor of the Internet and most of the technologies that allow you to post your anti-American drivel?
A: American.
Packet switching was invented in Britain, well ahead of the US, IP which did come out of the US is basically just like the technology developed in the UK. The reason the UK did not persue the technology was due to the government turning down funding for the R&D by the Science Minister of the time Tony Ben MP. Again, please get your history right next time, thanks in advance.
I was not saying HP is bad, I was saying you're about to have an influx of badness with the Compaq merger, you may soon be joined by people who know less about servicing the customer, and standards may or may not drop, I for one will not take the chance that I have to deal with some ex-Compaq employee who thinks customer service / support should be a profit centre rather than a cost centre, accusing customers of causing faults that are due to the companies poor quality products and half arsed QA and then getting the customer to pay for their errors is fraud, considering that Compaq was a company that at the beginning of the PC revolution was instrumental in creating a mass market it's sad to see what became of them. If the infection in Compaq ends up spreading to HP then it might prove fatal, it's unfortunate that HP doesnt have management that is aware of these issues, my advice to HP people is if you start to see the standards drop, look to jump ship, like DEC people did in the wake of takeover by Compaq.
Warranties are not all they are cracked up to be, my Compaq laptops keyboard developed a fault and sent it back to them, they replaced the keyboard as they should have, then that keyboard failed and I sent it back, they said I had spilt coffee in it which was a lie, and said I would have to pay for it to be fixed ($100), so I coughed up the money even though it should have been covered by the warranty, when I got the laptop back the hinge broke immediately and then the keyboard failed again, I no longer buy Compaq, and none of my companies buy Compaq, one bitten, forever shy, and that includes HP which Compaq is now merging with.
Not sure how I can do this? What info I know is still classified.
Well there is a difference between classified and known by others. If it something that has been discussed / investigated and while still classified is known to the outside world, like everyone knew about No Such Agency well before it was acknowledged, and the same goes for Echelon.
Two reasons: one, because it's illegal to remove it and the project would be cancelled, and two because I called after posting and verified that things have not changed with regards to the presidential directive. I trust the individual who gave me the answers so I believe it's still in place.
I'd like to point out that millions of people do illegal things every day,just because something is illegal doesnt mean it doesnt happen. The directive maybe in place, the question is is the code? I know from a project I worked on in the UK that their were many levels of deceit going on, the only one that was eventually exposed was the massive cost overruns in the order of £800M thats about ~$1.2BN US on the project, it was only exposed when an investigaive reporter found out, what they never found out was that weapon system did not work even after the cost overruns, after the whole thing had subsided the project was quietly dropped.
Yes, but you're not going to like the answer. The project is still alive and grows each year and I was party to phone calls and awards where the project was lauded for giving concrete results. They're not keep the project funded with millions every year just to give us contractors revenue. It's a good project. More than thant is classified still...sorry. If you're really interested, send me an email and I'll tell you off-line the unclassified stuff and you can draw your own conclusions.
Sounds interesting, it depends who the targets are, if they were Bin Ladens mob and they got some of them that would be a good outcome, if they were tracking your average Joe for signs he might be commiting thoughtcrimes I would be very concerned, like Oppenhiemer said "We're all Sons of Bitches now". I don't get involved in that sort of stuff now, I was up for being involved in another project, fortunately I didnt take it, that was stuff linked to SDI, 22 of the top techies on the project wound up dead in various mysterious circumstances, what was funny was another guy I worked with later on in my carreer had an offer from them and chose to turn them down, you could say we were both quite lucky. Heres a link
I've heard of these books and I'm skeptical for two reasons. One is I truly don't care (despite me posting about it -- I just want to clear up misconceptions and let people draw their own conclusions), I've been there, done that, and I really didn't like all the classified stuff. Second, is can you trust the books. Many people aren't aware of this, but when you get an NSA clearance (different than DoD), you actually waive your first amendment rights to free speech. You may not publish anything without their consent (and I truely hope I'm not violating that because I do respect the government and it's security needs) and review. So you have one of two cases: the person was formerly on the inside and is now writing a book that his been reviewed by the NSA and published with their consent, or they are an outsider and everything they are publishing could be based on rumor and heresay. Draw your own conclusions...:-)
Read the books, check the FOIA documents for yourself, no one has said they are wrong, in fact US administations have made no comments, just hoping it would all quietly fade away. Always check sources, thats my motto. There is a clear distinction for me between those that can and cannot back up their claims. Both books are reasonable accounts of what is documented as far as I have been able to verify myself, it's like the whole MKUltra/Delta stuff, in 10 years everyone will acknowledge it and it will be just another thing thats in the media (like the MKUltra fluff of Conspiracy Theory), unfortunately governments and their depts work by saying "That was then, a completely different administration,we have changed now and are really cuddly", sadly in my expereince it's business as usual.
Hate to be really pessimistic, but worst case is someone gets all your CC / bank acct / stock trading acct details, crashes the world economy / markets, there is mass unrest, people start killing each other to gain things like food rather than trading as all currencies are now worthless, of course now we are in the age of weapons of mass destruction, so people will use those as well, humanity becomes extinct, the END.
Or email your CEO with a nice prepared bit on how it's going to hurt your corporation including how much money it will take from the bottomline or some approximate guess, all he has to do is forward that to your congressman that would do far moregood,if they add up it will cost the country $XXX BN then that is more effective that you telling them how bad it is to live in a totalitarian state.
First the rest of the/. community has to assume you are not astroturfing on behalf of the NSA here, if you could back up your statements with some outside links to respected spook watchers that would certainly help, some vof us do read Cryptome etc on a regular basis you know. Second how do you know that the code is still in there? They could have taken it out / disabled it since you left. Also I have worked on defence projects in the past in the UK, signed the Official Secrets Act had many deep background checks etc etc, and the one thing I learnt more than anything else is that the most secret thing about most of these Top Secret military projects is the massive limitations on them, how they don't work as advertised and thats something that puts everyone in a risky position. Do you have some evidence to share that shows that what the NSA has is in anyway a useful tool to actually get the bad guys or are they just targeting people whos politics the current administration don't like or worse just chucking eberyone through and see if they can find anything they don't approve of?
From everything I've read from independent sources, the NSA and Echelon are not what we would call the good guys, I recommend reading the books by James Bamford on the NSA, Body of Secrets and The Puzzle Palace. Body of Secrets details operation Northwood in which the Joint Chiefs in the 60's proposed various scenarios in which innocent Americans would be killed by the US government within US borders in order to lay the blame on Castro and rally the American public to back an invasion into Cuba, and it's backed up by FOIA-obtained documents, it's truely scary. It shows the only thing that counts is politics, not doing the Right Thing at all. In light of the fact that the CIA passed on information about the terrorists involved in 11th Sept, some from members of the public to the FBI and the FBI chose to do nothing, I see no reason from more information gathering, rather more analysis and action regarding the information they already have.
Re:Interesting use of statistics here..
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Microsoft's Future
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Stocks are usually grouped as "income" or "growth", income stocks are driven by the % dividend they pay the stockholders every year, growth stocks are pushed by the % increase in the value of the stock. M$ has been a classic growth stock, so investers have bought it for the increase in its market value, as revenue increase declines given the same P/E ratio the price delta will slow, stall or decline. That is why the % growth of revenue is on the graph.
Technology == tools, i.e. pen and paper are technology just as much as laptops, what has been around a long time and become commodotised and has fairly universal usuage we now call "low tech" and that that is not we call "high tech". Technology, tools, are just things that help us do things, teachers are to my mind "Learning CEOs" they set the direction, pace and scope. A good teacher to me is one that inspires the student with a passion to go out and learn for themselves, because in the real world that is what many of us have to do each day, learn something new and apply it in a way that is valuable. Once you've got the basics, like language and some basic math skills you can become your own teacher, thats what really good teachers I have expereinced do. As I remember someone saying, schools teach you to get A on the test, not how to apply that in different strategies to get good outcomes in real life. I am fortunate to know some very dedicated and good teachers who are able to inspire their students who may or may not do well on the tests, but will be able togo out and learn what they need toeven if it wasnt on the curriculum. Computers will hopefully just make it easier for the students to find information faster and therefore lower the barriers to learning something new. So in conclusion, we need both, technology to make learning any new topic easier by providing a means to access information and teachers to guide and inspire, I do hope we have plenty of both.
This is a yes and no issue. Yes M$ might end up with a strangle hold on alot of businesses and individuals, however, what you must understand is that by creating bottlenecks innovation and creativity are held back, therefore those that choose an M$ "solution" will start to fall behind and might even die off in the face of competitors who do not have the same restrictions. I hope M$ keeps doing as it always does, and those who choose to go that route might be up for the Darwin Award in a decade or so. To sum up in the words of one of the characters in Jurassic Park "Life will always find a way".
Not just M$s legal dept, but the RIAA and the government lakeys that they bought and paid for to get the DMCA through, as the Reg does t-shirts I hope they do one that says "I downloaded a crack for M$ DRM from The Reg so I can exercise my fair use rights. What have you done?"
We are survived by hiding from them by running from them. But they are the gatekeepers. They are guarding all the doors. They are holding all the keys, which means that sooner or later, someone is going to have to fight them. - Morpheus, The Matrix
I don't think they would try to create a secret trial court, but I can imagine the government wanting a secret court to permit breaking into and monitoring hacker computers and communications.
Why bother with a trial? Just announce that there was a "gun battle" with those horrible "hackers" and classify all information relating to the incident, you just need some bod to have a press conference and tell the world justice has been done, its called a whitewash and thats what politicians do see Warren Commision, Nixon, Bill/Monica etc for why we should not trust politians or their cronies.
Slashdot Mirror
Remember M$ putting in non-fatal error messages in Windows to kill off DRDOS? If you don't read this
Good for you, and no thats no sarcasm, we need better testing regimes in commercial software development companies, and developers, you should ask for some metrics on code before you join a team, testing is crutial if yo're going to ship a good product, code reviews, test harnesses etc should all be in abundance. Sadly what happens in a lot of cases is Marketing says deliver on day X, where day X is some random day that they thought up rather than a "real deadline" ("real deadline" being a competitor about to trample you etc) then you have to massage the code, work 18 hours a day, not do testing just so everything fits in with when Marketing want to launch their ad campaign (usually about a month after their Kenyan safari). I have personally expereinced this, and its not fun at all. If you want a professional level product you need to plan, design implement and TEST. The most recent high profile case I can think of is Oracles CRM offering which sucks, and doesnt have functionality that corporations were sold on. So now I know many people looking for alternatives to Oracle, not just for CRM but DBMS as well, give a dog a bad name and all that.
I always prefered the Amigas "Guru Meditation" error messages, I just wish they had combined it with a Zen Koan generator or quote of the day, it would have made figuring out what went wrong even more fun!
Yes RIPA was passed before the Human Rights Act,and I doubt that RIPA will be used as it is well known that it violates the Human Rights Act therefore bringing a prosecution for an offence under RIPA will lead to it being quashed as the defence will show the incompatibility. RIPA is bad law and it is on the Books, and needs to be removed as a matter of principle, and in practice I see it having no effect.
Maybe you should check out what the US media coverage of the massacres in East Timor was like, do a search on Google for "east timor us arms kissinger newspapers" heres one link that gets thrown up here
Well we did have a formidable Navy, that didnt stop the Wolfpacks from destroying alot of convoys of material from the US though ( and the US charged us a lot of money for the material, maybe thats when price gouging by Americans started :), again we beat them by cracking the Enigma and gaining the information advantage. The British Navy did have great successes like cutting off Rommels supplies in Africa, again due to intelligence gathered by cracking the Enigma. As for the fighters, well once Hitler had turned his attention from Britain he didnt really care about invading, though they still tried to bomb us into submission, and in the later part of the war they were more concerned with having fighters over Germany to try and stop Allied forces bombing them into the Stone Age. Again it was part luck, courage, technology and brains that stopped themin the end, the US did have a part to play, but not as significant as most Americans seem to think, in fact the recent series Band of Brothers showed how distorted Americans views of history are. At the end of one episode about Operation Market Garden they give one line at the end to the 8,000 British troups killed vs the 100s of Americans that died, thats because the British paratroops were up front (in Arnhiem) were the real resistance was as opposed to were the Americans landed behind with little resistance. Another example would be the recent film about the capture of the first naval Enigma machine in the film U-571, where the Americans capture the sub, actually it was U110 and it was the British that captured it, I hope the American population starts to learn about history and truth soon.
The biggest problem with America is that only two other countries border us. It's difficult to hop on a train and travel to different countries like you can in Europe so our access to different cultures is limited to our propensity to travel by plane. This is rather expensive, a lot more than a rail pass in Europe anyway, so there are only a select few that can manage this.
Yeah I think some Americans travel to Tijuana or Bogota for some stimulation unless they are invading a country of course, never invade when you're stoned out of your mind, you'll never remember which end of the M16 is right one.
It's just the black helicopter set that takes this idea seriously.
And of course they don't run the country and in other news The Warren Commision is now required reading at US schools and mention of The Grassy Knoll is grounds for immediate suspension...
In defense of myself, I would say most people in the U.S. don't have anything to do with Sweden and /or Switzerland.
Sure all the pretty blondes in LA come from a bottle and your *cough* leaders don't have bank accounts offshore...
There's a saying that americans are ignorant - can't point out Egypt on a map
Well Bush Jr didnt know the leaders of Pakistan and India remember? Maybe when I have made my billions I'll buy every American a globe and a CIA World Factbook for Xmas...
Sure in the "Land of the free" the average hick might not have known about the holocast going on in Europe under the Nazis, maybe you should be asking why your government tries to stop you from having the truth? I'm glad that here in the UK when government Ministers start lying we start throwing them in jail (Jeffery Archer was the most recent example), its actually funny to watch our current government try to do "spin" like the Americans and fail miserably, it has a lot to do with having a) a press that actually has some journalists in it rather than people who brown nose to whoever has more money b) a population that is more sceptical and c) has a tradition of actually discussing world topics in public, like down the pub, or at Speakers Corner d) the ability to say the truth, however unpalitable to those around you, basically imagine a nation of Ralph Naders with a sense of humour and great beer.
No, there are many languages in the US, Mall-Speak which is a dialect of Valley-Speak ("like totally very"), Corporate-Speak ("In Q4 we will leverage our synergies to..."), McSpeak ("would you like fries with that?"), Techno-Babble ("Onramps to the Information superhighway will be snarled up due to Code Red..."), Pyscho-Babble ("The Jungian interpretation of that Freudian slip is it's ultimate Gestalt variation"), NewAge-Speak ("Crystal healing of your Aura will transend you to the higher plane") etc etc etc
Q: What do you call the people who saved the Swedes and everyone else in W. Europe from Hitler?
A: American
I am always surprised when this comes up. By the time the US entered the war against the Nazis Britain had fought them off 2 years before in what is generally called "The Battle of Britain" where the RAF stopped Hitler from gaining air superiority over Britain and so they did not invade. It was a close run thing, and it was a combination of technology/brains (RADAR, Enigma cracking etc) guts (I think the average lifespan of an RAF pilot was just a couple of days in the air) and luck in that the Nazis started bombing the civilian population vs. military targets and they turned their attention towards the Western front. By the time the US entered the war, there were thousands of SOE (Special Operations Executive) commandos in continental Europe sabotaging the Nazi military and organising resistance groups and the Nazis were losing on the Western front againt the Soviets. The US entry into the war did shorten the conflict, and stopped the Soviets from having an almost complete monopoly on all of Europe. This was all because the US before Pearl Harbour had considered WWII as a "European war" and didnt give a damn about the slaughter of Jews / Gays / Romany Gypsies / mentally or physically disabled people, as say compared to Britain that took an immediate stand on the invasion of Poland by immediately declaring war on Germany. The US entered the war out of self interest, Britain had forces in the Pacific area, more advanced technologies like RADAR and code cracking par excellance. If you are going to spout off about things, please in the future be informed.
Q: What do you call the inventor of the Internet and most of the technologies that allow you to post your anti-American drivel?
A: American.
Packet switching was invented in Britain, well ahead of the US, IP which did come out of the US is basically just like the technology developed in the UK. The reason the UK did not persue the technology was due to the government turning down funding for the R&D by the Science Minister of the time Tony Ben MP. Again, please get your history right next time, thanks in advance.
I was not saying HP is bad, I was saying you're about to have an influx of badness with the Compaq merger, you may soon be joined by people who know less about servicing the customer, and standards may or may not drop, I for one will not take the chance that I have to deal with some ex-Compaq employee who thinks customer service / support should be a profit centre rather than a cost centre, accusing customers of causing faults that are due to the companies poor quality products and half arsed QA and then getting the customer to pay for their errors is fraud, considering that Compaq was a company that at the beginning of the PC revolution was instrumental in creating a mass market it's sad to see what became of them. If the infection in Compaq ends up spreading to HP then it might prove fatal, it's unfortunate that HP doesnt have management that is aware of these issues, my advice to HP people is if you start to see the standards drop, look to jump ship, like DEC people did in the wake of takeover by Compaq.
Warranties are not all they are cracked up to be, my Compaq laptops keyboard developed a fault and sent it back to them, they replaced the keyboard as they should have, then that keyboard failed and I sent it back, they said I had spilt coffee in it which was a lie, and said I would have to pay for it to be fixed ($100), so I coughed up the money even though it should have been covered by the warranty, when I got the laptop back the hinge broke immediately and then the keyboard failed again, I no longer buy Compaq, and none of my companies buy Compaq, one bitten, forever shy, and that includes HP which Compaq is now merging with.
Thanks for the answers.
:-)
Not sure how I can do this? What info I know is still classified.
Well there is a difference between classified and known by others. If it something that has been discussed / investigated and while still classified is known to the outside world, like everyone knew about No Such Agency well before it was acknowledged, and the same goes for Echelon.
Two reasons: one, because it's illegal to remove it and the project would be cancelled, and two because I called after posting and verified that things have not changed with regards to the presidential directive. I trust the individual who gave me the answers so I believe it's still in place.
I'd like to point out that millions of people do illegal things every day,just because something is illegal doesnt mean it doesnt happen. The directive maybe in place, the question is is the code? I know from a project I worked on in the UK that their were many levels of deceit going on, the only one that was eventually exposed was the massive cost overruns in the order of £800M thats about ~$1.2BN US on the project, it was only exposed when an investigaive reporter found out, what they never found out was that weapon system did not work even after the cost overruns, after the whole thing had subsided the project was quietly dropped.
Yes, but you're not going to like the answer. The project is still alive and grows each year and I was party to phone calls and awards where the project was lauded for giving concrete results. They're not keep the project funded with millions every year just to give us contractors revenue. It's a good project. More than thant is classified still...sorry. If you're really interested, send me an email and I'll tell you off-line the unclassified stuff and you can draw your own conclusions.
Sounds interesting, it depends who the targets are, if they were Bin Ladens mob and they got some of them that would be a good outcome, if they were tracking your average Joe for signs he might be commiting thoughtcrimes I would be very concerned, like Oppenhiemer said "We're all Sons of Bitches now". I don't get involved in that sort of stuff now, I was up for being involved in another project, fortunately I didnt take it, that was stuff linked to SDI, 22 of the top techies on the project wound up dead in various mysterious circumstances, what was funny was another guy I worked with later on in my carreer had an offer from them and chose to turn them down, you could say we were both quite lucky. Heres a link
I've heard of these books and I'm skeptical for two reasons. One is I truly don't care (despite me posting about it -- I just want to clear up misconceptions and let people draw their own conclusions), I've been there, done that, and I really didn't like all the classified stuff. Second, is can you trust the books. Many people aren't aware of this, but when you get an NSA clearance (different than DoD), you actually waive your first amendment rights to free speech. You may not publish anything without their consent (and I truely hope I'm not violating that because I do respect the government and it's security needs) and review. So you have one of two cases: the person was formerly on the inside and is now writing a book that his been reviewed by the NSA and published with their consent, or they are an outsider and everything they are publishing could be based on rumor and heresay. Draw your own conclusions...
Read the books, check the FOIA documents for yourself, no one has said they are wrong, in fact US administations have made no comments, just hoping it would all quietly fade away. Always check sources, thats my motto. There is a clear distinction for me between those that can and cannot back up their claims. Both books are reasonable accounts of what is documented as far as I have been able to verify myself, it's like the whole MKUltra/Delta stuff, in 10 years everyone will acknowledge it and it will be just another thing thats in the media (like the MKUltra fluff of Conspiracy Theory), unfortunately governments and their depts work by saying "That was then, a completely different administration,we have changed now and are really cuddly", sadly in my expereince it's business as usual.
Hate to be really pessimistic, but worst case is someone gets all your CC / bank acct / stock trading acct details, crashes the world economy / markets, there is mass unrest, people start killing each other to gain things like food rather than trading as all currencies are now worthless, of course now we are in the age of weapons of mass destruction, so people will use those as well, humanity becomes extinct, the END.
Or email your CEO with a nice prepared bit on how it's going to hurt your corporation including how much money it will take from the bottomline or some approximate guess, all he has to do is forward that to your congressman that would do far moregood,if they add up it will cost the country $XXX BN then that is more effective that you telling them how bad it is to live in a totalitarian state.
First the rest of the /. community has to assume you are not astroturfing on behalf of the NSA here, if you could back up your statements with some outside links to respected spook watchers that would certainly help, some vof us do read Cryptome etc on a regular basis you know. Second how do you know that the code is still in there? They could have taken it out / disabled it since you left. Also I have worked on defence projects in the past in the UK, signed the Official Secrets Act had many deep background checks etc etc, and the one thing I learnt more than anything else is that the most secret thing about most of these Top Secret military projects is the massive limitations on them, how they don't work as advertised and thats something that puts everyone in a risky position. Do you have some evidence to share that shows that what the NSA has is in anyway a useful tool to actually get the bad guys or are they just targeting people whos politics the current administration don't like or worse just chucking eberyone through and see if they can find anything they don't approve of?
Here is some coverage from The Register EU releases Echelon spying report
From everything I've read from independent sources, the NSA and Echelon are not what we would call the good guys, I recommend reading the books by James Bamford on the NSA, Body of Secrets and The Puzzle Palace. Body of Secrets details operation Northwood in which the Joint Chiefs in the 60's proposed various scenarios in which innocent Americans would be killed by the US government within US borders in order to lay the blame on Castro and rally the American public to back an invasion into Cuba, and it's backed up by FOIA-obtained documents, it's truely scary. It shows the only thing that counts is politics, not doing the Right Thing at all. In light of the fact that the CIA passed on information about the terrorists involved in 11th Sept, some from members of the public to the FBI and the FBI chose to do nothing, I see no reason from more information gathering, rather more analysis and action regarding the information they already have.
Stocks are usually grouped as "income" or "growth", income stocks are driven by the % dividend they pay the stockholders every year, growth stocks are pushed by the % increase in the value of the stock. M$ has been a classic growth stock, so investers have bought it for the increase in its market value, as revenue increase declines given the same P/E ratio the price delta will slow, stall or decline. That is why the % growth of revenue is on the graph.
Technology == tools, i.e. pen and paper are technology just as much as laptops, what has been around a long time and become commodotised and has fairly universal usuage we now call "low tech" and that that is not we call "high tech". Technology, tools, are just things that help us do things, teachers are to my mind "Learning CEOs" they set the direction, pace and scope. A good teacher to me is one that inspires the student with a passion to go out and learn for themselves, because in the real world that is what many of us have to do each day, learn something new and apply it in a way that is valuable. Once you've got the basics, like language and some basic math skills you can become your own teacher, thats what really good teachers I have expereinced do. As I remember someone saying, schools teach you to get A on the test, not how to apply that in different strategies to get good outcomes in real life. I am fortunate to know some very dedicated and good teachers who are able to inspire their students who may or may not do well on the tests, but will be able togo out and learn what they need toeven if it wasnt on the curriculum. Computers will hopefully just make it easier for the students to find information faster and therefore lower the barriers to learning something new. So in conclusion, we need both, technology to make learning any new topic easier by providing a means to access information and teachers to guide and inspire, I do hope we have plenty of both.
This is a yes and no issue. Yes M$ might end up with a strangle hold on alot of businesses and individuals, however, what you must understand is that by creating bottlenecks innovation and creativity are held back, therefore those that choose an M$ "solution" will start to fall behind and might even die off in the face of competitors who do not have the same restrictions. I hope M$ keeps doing as it always does, and those who choose to go that route might be up for the Darwin Award in a decade or so. To sum up in the words of one of the characters in Jurassic Park "Life will always find a way".
Not just M$s legal dept, but the RIAA and the government lakeys that they bought and paid for to get the DMCA through, as the Reg does t-shirts I hope they do one that says "I downloaded a crack for M$ DRM from The Reg so I can exercise my fair use rights. What have you done?"
We are survived by hiding from them by running from them. But they are the gatekeepers. They are guarding all the doors. They are holding all the keys, which means that sooner or later, someone is going to have to fight them. - Morpheus, The Matrix
I don't think they would try to create a secret trial court, but I can imagine the government wanting a secret court to permit breaking into and monitoring hacker computers and communications.
Why bother with a trial? Just announce that there was a "gun battle" with those horrible "hackers" and classify all information relating to the incident, you just need some bod to have a press conference and tell the world justice has been done, its called a whitewash and thats what politicians do see Warren Commision, Nixon, Bill/Monica etc for why we should not trust politians or their cronies.