Yeah well if a sysadmin tells me not to make police officers hate me, I'll take the advice.
If a sysadmin tells me not to make sysadmins hate me, I'll take it as self-serving BS if it's not an overt threat. The lesson from the Edward Snowden case is "don't piss off your sysadmin" says a sysadmin. Sysadmins need to get over themselves. They're commodity-grade workers at the end of the day.
A more interesting article would be "Why users hate sysadmins". Then the sysadmins around here might learn something.
Threat, friendly advice, you be the judge. "Commodity-grade" workers or not, you rely on them to be able to do your job. Do you piss off waiters before they bring your food? You shouldn't.
Watch when the workaholic engineer expects us to be there around the clock for everything from new machines to coffee runs as he compulsively works his 72-hour shifts.
Oh my God, this. Go home people! The work will be there when you come back!
NOW... if they arm the flippin' things (even with non-lethal ordinance) or they say it's cool for them to check out the inside of buildings' windows then it's alllllll over.
what happens when they can develop swarming nanobot flying insects with cameras and microphones on them that dont need to charge and are attracted to noise. always swarming above peoples heads and fully autonomous.
It's real simple regardless of the technology. If they have a warrant issued by a real judge for that one specific purpose (which means probable cause for a specific crime), even long-term surveillance that violates privacy is OK. You may not like this, but that's the way it has been for many decades.
On the other hand, no warrant, no privacy-violating surveillance. They can still watch/listen to you when you are in public, but they can't legally listen to your phone calls, listen to conversations inside your house that are not loud enough to be heard without augmentation, etc. What this means is that they can't fly a drone over your house in the middle of your 40 acres of land to watch or listen to you unless they have a warrant. I'd even argue that a drone looking into your fenced backyard that can't otherwise be seen from public property would require a warrant.
In light of recent news about the NSA spying on everyone, these limitations do not fill me with confidence. Put another way, I don't trust the federal government to follow the law anymore.
No, I made the far better choice of getting a job that pays more than minimum wage when I was 15 and still in highschool. I saved my money to pay for college and got a degree, then I married a woman who shared a similar mindset. We still live with a roommate which some people have too much pride for apparently but it has cut our mortgage in half.
Maybe the reason people can't get name-brand Cheerios (I don't anyway, waste of money) is that they make really poor life choices?
Maybe not. It's amazing to me that there are still people who blame the poor for their poverty by saying they made bad choices. To be fair, I'm sure some of them did. But to be blind to the massive advantage wealth gives a person, and conversely the disadvantage of poverty, takes a special kind of obtuseness.
You think there are a lot of Americans struggling to get Cheerios?
Yes, this is news? See here. The poverty rate has been going up for a bit now. And poverty is defined as $23,000 for a family of four. So yeah, there are a lot of Americans struggling to afford Cheerios.
I find the problem is, they keep increasing the speeds (and sometimes the cost) but what I want is half the speed I currently have at half my current monthly bill. The cable company would still be getting the same $4.66/1mbit that I'm paying now. They don't offer such packages for some unknown stupid reason.
I'm in the same boat. I don't download a lot, so 10 Mb works fine for me. It's plenty for streaming Netflix, which is my most bandwidth intensive activity. But my provider recently upped the lowest tier to 25 Mb. So now I'm forced to pay more for service I don't really want, and which rarely runs at the advertised speed anyway.
You always have your rights... it's just a question of if and how you exercise them.
The difference here is the guy who went to talk to the police on his own (ie voluntarily) vs being arrested (ie unwillingly).
The court ruled that in the prior, you have to make an affirmative statement as to you exercising your 5a rights.
Yes, that is unfortunately what the court ruled. From TFA: "Although 'no ritualistic formula is necessary in order to invoke the privilege'... a witness does not do so by simply standing mute," Alito added.
That still seems like bullshit to me. The right is to remain silent. Saying, "I invoke my 5th amendment right against self-incrimination" is not remaining silent. It is manifestly speaking.
Ya know the way he did such a huge 180 on...well pretty much every thing he believed in? makes me wonder if that old Bill Hicks joke didn't have some truth: "Ya know why they always change once they get in the white house? The CIA sits them down and says 'you should watch this film and maybe rethink your position' and then plays him a film they shot of Kennedy getting offed in Texas, complete with the actual shooters. Once they see how easily they can be replaced? they read from the cue card just like the last guy".
I think this is more or less correct. Jesse Ventura said that after he was elected governor of Minnesota he had a meeting with the CIA and other unidentified agents (unidentified as in, they refused to identify themselves) where they asked about his campaign and his agenda as governor. Bill Clinton was interested in UFO's when he first became president. But he refused to release any information he got because he said he didn't want to end up like Jack Kennedy. At the higher levels of government I think people know that if they color too far outside the lines and start getting attention, some aspect of the System will act to maintain the status quo.
Honestly after all the shit we have found out, from Gulf Of Tonkin being a false flag to Fast & Furious? It frankly wouldn't surprise me, not one bit. Hell the only truth we get anymore is from whistleblowers, our MSM makes Soviet era Pravda look anti-establishment, and both parties seem to be in a race to see which can use more plays in the dictatorship playbook than the other. Anybody who hasn't seen the lecture I just linked to really ought to watch, Naomi Wolf lays out how many of the same plays used by Franco, Stalin, the crazy Austrian, are being used right here and the scary part? The video is from 2007, its much worse than that now. Even scarier? She is on the watchlist now for this lecture and one she did on what rights you have under the constitution, how is that for fricking scary?
The treatment of people like Naomi Wolf puts the lie to the claim that all of this surveillance and security is about stopping terrorism. It's not hard to find examples of these powers being used to stifle dissent and against people with undesirable political views or who try to inform the masses about the crimes of the powerful. Sure they can be used against terrorists, but their deeper purpose is maintaining the status quo against whomever might want to change it.
Although this thread is not about Syria it is all part of the one cause. What exactly does the USA have to do with Syria? It's on the other side of the world and populated by warring muslims, isn't it the perogative of its neighbours to take part. The USA must just love war, right?
As with almost everything on the world stage, it's about power and control. The US wants to have a say in the outcome of the conflict in Syria. Why, I cannot say. Though it probably has to do with natural resources or geo-strategy.
I agree. An old saying, one I believe originated in World War 2 while fighting the Nazis: "The end results do not justify the means used". If the US government breaks the very laws they are responsible to uphold, then it is wrong, regardless of the results. A government that ignores its own laws when they are inconvenient is NOT a democracy and should not expect its citizens to uphold the law any more than they do.
I would add to this that the means determine the end. How you do something, and the means you employ, determine where you end up.
You only have to spy if you are trying to maintain an empire. Otherwise, just prefer trade over war. It's no secret that it's impossible to maintain a democracy or individual freedoms under a state of perpetual war. It's also no secret that war is self-reinforcing (both because of the lasting hate it creates, but also because it feeds an increasingly fatter military-industrial complex, that then has the resources to control the government and politicians). It's also clear that the terrorist threat is minor: more people die per year on average of slipping in the bath tube. In the land of the brave, people would respond to terrorism by going on with their lives without changing anything and showing no fear.
American hegemony is not being maintained in name of the interests of its citizens, but of its elite. American citizens are being reduced to slavery while living under the illusion that they are getting the better deal. I know Americans don't want to hear this, but there are a number of countries all over the world where people enjoy more personal freedom than the USA. The USA has the highest percentage of its population in prison of _all_ countries in the world, including totalitarian regiems like China. Americans have 10x more expensive healthcare than the rest of the western world, 1/3 of the holidays and there isn't proper separation of religion and state (e.g. you are not allowed to show tits on TV in the 21st century !!!???!) You are not allowed to board a plane without going through a humiliating ritual where strangers get to see you naked, sift through your personal effects and ask personal and intrusive questions. And so on and so on...
I'm quoting the parent because this bears repeating. Well said.
The correct answer is to know that the NSA is filled with professionals that fully understand rights and freedoms, and know exactly what Posse Comitatus is, which is pretty much their Prime Directive/First Rule of Fight Club.
And then we have
Remember, no one has freedom. That is because power disparity exists in society.
You still need to kiss ass to those with higher power than you.
I'm seeing a potential conflict here. Especially since this is all done in secret.
I may be the only person who actually liked DNF. I thought it was fun to play, and the Duke-isms cracked me up. "Who wants white meat, huh? Who wants some!" It wasn't game of the year or anything, but I got it for $5 from Game Stop and got every cent out of playing it.
If you go against prevailing opinion here, even if you're not trolling your post gets modded -1 and will be hidden totally and completely. Hey, isn't this censorship? Nobody understands what irony means here.
Though I agree that people shouldn't be modded down just for expressing unpopular opinions, it is not censorship. I browse at -1, so I see every post.
Fact: efficiency is no priority for governments, only growing power is priority and you don't grow power to reducing costs, you grow power by growing the apparatus around you.
But why doesn't that apply to business as well? From what I have seen, business (especially big businesses) wants to maximize profit any way they can. If they can do it without providing the best product, they will. If they can do it through anti-competitive practices, they will. If they can do it by offloading externalities onto others, they will.
Inefficiency is also not only the province of government. I have seen ridiculous inefficiency in many companies I have worked for. I see it every day in my current job and I do not work for the government. I know in theory that businesses should seek to maximize efficiency to maximize profit. But that requires that decision makers recognize and properly diagnose inefficiency, and then deal with it in an effective manner. And that is by no means a foregone conclusion.
We as a nation are affirming our commitment to the implementation of a police state, in the name of preventing something that was already about as statistically impossible as getting hit by lightning while claiming your Powerball jackpot.
Well, yes. Big business, Madison Avenue, the Media and government spokespeople have been scaring the crap out of people for the past 12 years if not longer. People feel like they have no control over terrorism. You're in the wrong place at the wrong time and you're dead. 9/11 was so shocking, it burned that fear into the psyche of everyone who was alive back then. People are scared and they only know what they are told by the people who simultaneously define the threat and the solution.
What amazes me is that more people don't realize it's being done on purpose. It simply does not fit into their worldview that their government and corporate institutions would deliberately take advantage of the fear of terrorism for their own gain. Who would do such a manipulative thing?
Slashdot Mirror
Seems by now someone would have come up with a viable way to make the plates unreadable by machine, but still perfectly human readable??!?
Would the high intensity infrared LEDs around the plate not do the trick?
I've seen them blind cameras before, and be un-noticed by the human eye.
Yes, a plastic film, or a clear plastic cover will often foil the plate readers. Of course, both are illegal in my state.
Yeah, well, ok...
Yeah well if a sysadmin tells me not to make police officers hate me, I'll take the advice.
If a sysadmin tells me not to make sysadmins hate me, I'll take it as self-serving BS if it's not an overt threat. The lesson from the Edward Snowden case is "don't piss off your sysadmin" says a sysadmin. Sysadmins need to get over themselves. They're commodity-grade workers at the end of the day.
A more interesting article would be "Why users hate sysadmins". Then the sysadmins around here might learn something.
Threat, friendly advice, you be the judge. "Commodity-grade" workers or not, you rely on them to be able to do your job. Do you piss off waiters before they bring your food? You shouldn't.
The only thing the article accomplishes is a rant.
Yeah, but it was cathartic!
Watch when the workaholic engineer expects us to be there around the clock for everything from new machines to coffee runs as he compulsively works his 72-hour shifts.
Oh my God, this. Go home people! The work will be there when you come back!
NOW... if they arm the flippin' things (even with non-lethal ordinance) or they say it's cool for them to check out the inside of buildings' windows then it's alllllll over.
Yeah, for you and the rest of us...
what happens when they can develop swarming nanobot flying insects with cameras and microphones on them that dont need to charge and are attracted to noise. always swarming above peoples heads and fully autonomous.
It's real simple regardless of the technology. If they have a warrant issued by a real judge for that one specific purpose (which means probable cause for a specific crime), even long-term surveillance that violates privacy is OK. You may not like this, but that's the way it has been for many decades.
On the other hand, no warrant, no privacy-violating surveillance. They can still watch/listen to you when you are in public, but they can't legally listen to your phone calls, listen to conversations inside your house that are not loud enough to be heard without augmentation, etc. What this means is that they can't fly a drone over your house in the middle of your 40 acres of land to watch or listen to you unless they have a warrant. I'd even argue that a drone looking into your fenced backyard that can't otherwise be seen from public property would require a warrant.
In light of recent news about the NSA spying on everyone, these limitations do not fill me with confidence. Put another way, I don't trust the federal government to follow the law anymore.
Should we cite Anonymous Cowards instead?
No, I made the far better choice of getting a job that pays more than minimum wage when I was 15 and still in highschool. I saved my money to pay for college and got a degree, then I married a woman who shared a similar mindset. We still live with a roommate which some people have too much pride for apparently but it has cut our mortgage in half.
Maybe the reason people can't get name-brand Cheerios (I don't anyway, waste of money) is that they make really poor life choices?
Maybe not. It's amazing to me that there are still people who blame the poor for their poverty by saying they made bad choices. To be fair, I'm sure some of them did. But to be blind to the massive advantage wealth gives a person, and conversely the disadvantage of poverty, takes a special kind of obtuseness.
You think there are a lot of Americans struggling to get Cheerios?
Yes, this is news? See here. The poverty rate has been going up for a bit now. And poverty is defined as $23,000 for a family of four. So yeah, there are a lot of Americans struggling to afford Cheerios.
I find the problem is, they keep increasing the speeds (and sometimes the cost) but what I want is half the speed I currently have at half my current monthly bill. The cable company would still be getting the same $4.66/1mbit that I'm paying now. They don't offer such packages for some unknown stupid reason.
I'm in the same boat. I don't download a lot, so 10 Mb works fine for me. It's plenty for streaming Netflix, which is my most bandwidth intensive activity. But my provider recently upped the lowest tier to 25 Mb. So now I'm forced to pay more for service I don't really want, and which rarely runs at the advertised speed anyway.
You always have your rights... it's just a question of if and how you exercise them.
The difference here is the guy who went to talk to the police on his own (ie voluntarily) vs being arrested (ie unwillingly).
The court ruled that in the prior, you have to make an affirmative statement as to you exercising your 5a rights.
Yes, that is unfortunately what the court ruled. From TFA: "Although 'no ritualistic formula is necessary in order to invoke the privilege' ... a witness does not do so by simply standing mute," Alito added.
That still seems like bullshit to me. The right is to remain silent. Saying, "I invoke my 5th amendment right against self-incrimination" is not remaining silent. It is manifestly speaking.
Ya know the way he did such a huge 180 on...well pretty much every thing he believed in? makes me wonder if that old Bill Hicks joke didn't have some truth: "Ya know why they always change once they get in the white house? The CIA sits them down and says 'you should watch this film and maybe rethink your position' and then plays him a film they shot of Kennedy getting offed in Texas, complete with the actual shooters. Once they see how easily they can be replaced? they read from the cue card just like the last guy".
I think this is more or less correct. Jesse Ventura said that after he was elected governor of Minnesota he had a meeting with the CIA and other unidentified agents (unidentified as in, they refused to identify themselves) where they asked about his campaign and his agenda as governor. Bill Clinton was interested in UFO's when he first became president. But he refused to release any information he got because he said he didn't want to end up like Jack Kennedy. At the higher levels of government I think people know that if they color too far outside the lines and start getting attention, some aspect of the System will act to maintain the status quo.
Honestly after all the shit we have found out, from Gulf Of Tonkin being a false flag to Fast & Furious? It frankly wouldn't surprise me, not one bit. Hell the only truth we get anymore is from whistleblowers, our MSM makes Soviet era Pravda look anti-establishment, and both parties seem to be in a race to see which can use more plays in the dictatorship playbook than the other. Anybody who hasn't seen the lecture I just linked to really ought to watch, Naomi Wolf lays out how many of the same plays used by Franco, Stalin, the crazy Austrian, are being used right here and the scary part? The video is from 2007, its much worse than that now. Even scarier? She is on the watchlist now for this lecture and one she did on what rights you have under the constitution, how is that for fricking scary?
The treatment of people like Naomi Wolf puts the lie to the claim that all of this surveillance and security is about stopping terrorism. It's not hard to find examples of these powers being used to stifle dissent and against people with undesirable political views or who try to inform the masses about the crimes of the powerful. Sure they can be used against terrorists, but their deeper purpose is maintaining the status quo against whomever might want to change it.
Although this thread is not about Syria it is all part of the one cause. What exactly does the USA have to do with Syria? It's on the other side of the world and populated by warring muslims, isn't it the perogative of its neighbours to take part. The USA must just love war, right?
As with almost everything on the world stage, it's about power and control. The US wants to have a say in the outcome of the conflict in Syria. Why, I cannot say. Though it probably has to do with natural resources or geo-strategy.
I agree. An old saying, one I believe originated in World War 2 while fighting the Nazis: "The end results do not justify the means used". If the US government breaks the very laws they are responsible to uphold, then it is wrong, regardless of the results. A government that ignores its own laws when they are inconvenient is NOT a democracy and should not expect its citizens to uphold the law any more than they do.
I would add to this that the means determine the end. How you do something, and the means you employ, determine where you end up.
You only have to spy if you are trying to maintain an empire. Otherwise, just prefer trade over war. It's no secret that it's impossible to maintain a democracy or individual freedoms under a state of perpetual war. It's also no secret that war is self-reinforcing (both because of the lasting hate it creates, but also because it feeds an increasingly fatter military-industrial complex, that then has the resources to control the government and politicians). It's also clear that the terrorist threat is minor: more people die per year on average of slipping in the bath tube. In the land of the brave, people would respond to terrorism by going on with their lives without changing anything and showing no fear.
American hegemony is not being maintained in name of the interests of its citizens, but of its elite. American citizens are being reduced to slavery while living under the illusion that they are getting the better deal. I know Americans don't want to hear this, but there are a number of countries all over the world where people enjoy more personal freedom than the USA. The USA has the highest percentage of its population in prison of _all_ countries in the world, including totalitarian regiems like China. Americans have 10x more expensive healthcare than the rest of the western world, 1/3 of the holidays and there isn't proper separation of religion and state (e.g. you are not allowed to show tits on TV in the 21st century !!!???!) You are not allowed to board a plane without going through a humiliating ritual where strangers get to see you naked, sift through your personal effects and ask personal and intrusive questions. And so on and so on...
I'm quoting the parent because this bears repeating. Well said.
First we have
The correct answer is to know that the NSA is filled with professionals that fully understand rights and freedoms, and know exactly what Posse Comitatus is, which is pretty much their Prime Directive/First Rule of Fight Club.
And then we have
Remember, no one has freedom. That is because power disparity exists in society.
You still need to kiss ass to those with higher power than you.
I'm seeing a potential conflict here. Especially since this is all done in secret.
The Federal Government has been taken over by and is being run by world class criminals at every level.
FTFY
I may be the only person who actually liked DNF. I thought it was fun to play, and the Duke-isms cracked me up. "Who wants white meat, huh? Who wants some!" It wasn't game of the year or anything, but I got it for $5 from Game Stop and got every cent out of playing it.
Did this get modded Insightful because there isn't an Asinine mod?
Why should fundamental reform require violence?
If you go against prevailing opinion here, even if you're not trolling your post gets modded -1 and will be hidden totally and completely. Hey, isn't this censorship? Nobody understands what irony means here.
Though I agree that people shouldn't be modded down just for expressing unpopular opinions, it is not censorship. I browse at -1, so I see every post.
Fact: efficiency is no priority for governments, only growing power is priority and you don't grow power to reducing costs, you grow power by growing the apparatus around you.
But why doesn't that apply to business as well? From what I have seen, business (especially big businesses) wants to maximize profit any way they can. If they can do it without providing the best product, they will. If they can do it through anti-competitive practices, they will. If they can do it by offloading externalities onto others, they will.
Inefficiency is also not only the province of government. I have seen ridiculous inefficiency in many companies I have worked for. I see it every day in my current job and I do not work for the government. I know in theory that businesses should seek to maximize efficiency to maximize profit. But that requires that decision makers recognize and properly diagnose inefficiency, and then deal with it in an effective manner. And that is by no means a foregone conclusion.
The phone company records this already. My cell phone bill includes a list of every phone number and the cities we were in.
If the phone company is recording and saving this, why wouldn't the Government have access to it if they needed it?
Needed it for what?
We as a nation are affirming our commitment to the implementation of a police state, in the name of preventing something that was already about as statistically impossible as getting hit by lightning while claiming your Powerball jackpot.
Well, yes. Big business, Madison Avenue, the Media and government spokespeople have been scaring the crap out of people for the past 12 years if not longer. People feel like they have no control over terrorism. You're in the wrong place at the wrong time and you're dead. 9/11 was so shocking, it burned that fear into the psyche of everyone who was alive back then. People are scared and they only know what they are told by the people who simultaneously define the threat and the solution.
What amazes me is that more people don't realize it's being done on purpose. It simply does not fit into their worldview that their government and corporate institutions would deliberately take advantage of the fear of terrorism for their own gain. Who would do such a manipulative thing?