They tapped FOREIGN AGENTS IN ISRAEL. There is no US law against tapping foreign phone lines.
The article doesn't say very clearly where the wiretapped subjects were, but there's this:
Finally, the CQ story says that Harman's conversation was recorded as part of "a court-approved NSA tap directed at alleged Israel covert action operations in Washington."
From that it sounds like the tapping was entirely domestic, in terms of where the phone lines were located.
I didn't say it did. What I said is that if the only thing you got from reading the Tractatus was that Wittgenstein was not the clearest writer, you weren't paying much attention or trying very hard, or - worse still - you weren't taking it seriously.
Even that fucking crazy goddamn motherfucker Barry Goldwater had some inkling of the fact that he was talking about fucking armageddon; you're just some stupid fucking prick who waves the idea around as though it's completely fucking fungible with conventional war.
You teen years may have been long ago, but you're as fucking immature and dumb as when you turned 13, you stupid goddamn asshole.
A big reason why we don't need nukes anymore is because current conventional weapons are extremely accurate.
Some of us actually lived through the cold war. If you fucking teenagers are going go on about nuclear weapons, could you at least learn that the fuck you're talking about? Asshole.
Alternately a convoluted, confusing and maddening knot of junk, and a transcending work of crystalline insight, clarity and genius, and either way, constantly leaving you with the nagging feeling that if you'd just went through it one more time with love and care, you'd finally, truly get what it's all about.
And rightfully so. If the damn thing needs that much care and feeding, it is defective and should be returned!
Assuming that's not sarcasm, do you really think it's unreasonable to expect a computer user to be sufficiently aware of computer security to know downloading warez and installing it can screw up your computer? What if it asks for your admin password to install stuff, like lots of software packages on lots of operating systems do?
Should average users not have the ability to install software on their computers, or should the manufacturers of the OS design software that's so fantastically advanced it knows that a given app is malware and another isn't? And if you know the secret for doing the latter 100% of the time, please, please, please let everyone else in on it so we can be rid of the spam botnets.
Periodically boot from a CD and do a disk scan. I'm not saying never use AV software. I'm saying, you don't need it running constantly, and that it generally sucks up resources for very little benefit.
Most people's personal computers run with the user logged into an administrative account, or an account that can get administrative privileges with a password prompt, so bypassing or disabling AV software isn't that difficult a task; and that's not even considering the possibility of stuff that spreads using unpatched vulnerabilities.
If you do common sense things - like not running random software from the internet, keeping your machine patched, and turning off unnecessary services - you don't need anti-virus software running constantly.
The problem is, computers are widely owned by people who don't know about how to use them safely and often act as if they can't be bothered to learn.
If a user is tricked into installing malware on a machine, the machine is infected with malware.
It's a shame people think Macs are somehow magically protected against viruses and other nasty computer stuff, merely by virtue of the manufacturer and operating system. It's probably more of a shame that Apple has, in the past at least, marketed Macs as being (more?) immune to viruses than PCs - something which somewhat true, but only for statistical reasons.
It's like STDs - if you're careless and go sticking your junk everywhere without taking precautions, you'll probably catch something cruel, eventually.
The headline on the original article is kind of misleading, but here's some quotes from the article:
"It absolutely is worthwhile to invest in carbon capture and storage because we are not in a vacuum," Mr. Chu told reporters Tuesday following an appearance at an Energy Information Administration conference. "Even if the United States or Europe turns its back on coal, India and China will not," he said. Mr. Chu added that "quite frankly I doubt if the United States will turn its back on coal. We are generating over 50% of our electrical energy from coal."
So, basically he's saying it's a good idea to pursue this technology because we aren't the only coal burning country, and even if we were, other large consumers of energy would still likely use coal. If your goal is reducing carbon in the atmosphere, that'd make sense.
Then:
Mr. Chu said he didn't want to comment on "any specific proposal." He said that the Energy Department was "thinking of investment in" research projects that gasified biomass to separate out the carbon dioxide.
"When you gasify it, you can capture the carbon and sequestrate the carbon -- that actually becomes a net sink of carbon, meaning that as the plant grows, it takes carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere," Mr. Chu said. "I would be very enthusiastic about anything that goes in that direction."
Mr. Chu said a proposal by oil and wind magnate T. Boone Pickens to use natural gas as a transportation fuel was "a possibility," then declared himself "agnostic" about it, before finally emphasizing the virtues of making more fuel-efficient cars and turning to biomass-based transportation fuels. Mr. Chu said that using natural gas as a transportation fuel "will put a strain on natural gas for industrial uses, for heating, and other things," concluding that it was "a complicated issue."
So really it was just general comments about carbon sequestration research, possible alternative fuels, and future directions for energy technology.
It sounds like the guy is just talking about options, and appears to recognize the problems with many of those options, and the WSJ just decided to put a "clean coal" spin on it all. And then you find in the middle of the article:
As for so-called clean-coal technology, Mr. Chu said "it would take probably a minimum of eight years or more to really have confidence that these technologies will work in a cost-effective way." As a result, "energy efficiency, energy conservation are where the greatest gains will be."
Coal-producing states are lobbying the Obama administration to keep coal -- abundant and cheap -- a part of the country's energy mix. Coal backers have looked to clean-coal technology, which aims to store emissions from coal-burning power plants underground. If the U.S. aims to transition away from coal, a question is whether such technology is worth the investment.
Last week, Baard Energy, which is developing a project to create fuel from a coal and biomass mixture, withdrew from the Energy Department's loan-guarantee program after disclosing that the government said it would consider environmental lawsuits when conducting risk evaluation of a project.
So basically, the government doesn't actually appear to be backing clean coal, cause -look - they're going to not ignore environmental lawsuits in risk evaluation. And Chu is also emphasizing the importance of conservation and efficiency over any specific technological changes to energy production. And finally, the middle paragraph just kind of throws a question in there about the value of investing in technology related to clean coal, without linking it back to what Chu was talking about originally.
Bad summary, not a great article. Chu's also said in the past that nuclear energy will have to be part of any future solution to America's energy needs. The man is a scientist - he wants to evaluate all of the options, not just specific ones, and all the quotes in the article attributed to him bear this out. Mostly it just looks like the WSJ trying to create the impression of political skulduggery.
Dude, he caught you out in a unsupported blanket statement; be a man and admit you were wrong. The DOS thing just points out your unwillingness to admit a mistake.
That's the real reason online newspaper sites can't get away with charging monthly subscriptions. They all think that it's because the online community has this "it has to be free" mindset. True, some people think that way. But even if they didn't, nobody's going to pay $10 a month just to read one or two of your articles once in a while.
Yeah, exactly. It's 1) not getting that the way people make use of news sources has shifted significantly already, and 2) not understanding the nature of that shift. There's probably also the undercurrent of fear that you're losing the ability to make money from your work, something which is a pretty normal human response, sadly. It's easy to say that people should find something else to do, but it's much harder to take that attitude when it's your world that's moving out from under your feet.
Out of curiosity, how old are you? Seriously, and the question is not intended as a sleight.
I get where you're coming from, and I used to read a paper daily in high school, but have long since lost that habit in favor of online news. Maybe it's age and when you formed news consumption habits, maybe it's just how you like it irrespective of age and experience. I think you can actually get the NYT on a Kindle, but I've never actually used one, so this is vaguely remembered hearsay.
I think a big part of it was when larger media companies moved in and started buying newspapers, then expected them to turn big profits like TV stations etc. You might be able to make that happen in a really big market like New York, and it's a recipe for the failures we've seen everywhere else. People stop buying the paper when it doesn't carry any local news and the prices go up and it's all full of ads.
That and craig's list, which basically stuck a giant stake in the heart of printed classified ads
I'd be willing to bet that there's a growing chunk of the online population who, like my self, may read content from newspapers, but only do so through online aggregators.
I never check the NYT, Washington Post, NY Post, etc. directly - either the paper or online versions. If I read an article at any of their sites, it's because it's been linked to on a blog or came through in an RSS feed from an aggregator.
They're assuming that people use their websites the way people use their newspapers, and that's probably not the case anymore, and surely won't be in the future.
I personally am in favor of the stimulus bill, but that's not really my point. I was merely saying that Obama's efforts so far have, despite what his detractors sometimes claim, been remarkably consistent with the things he said he'd do during the election.
And as for the right wing freak show, I'm perfectly happy to let you have the GM thing if you like, if you'll concede the people who actually manage to get time on supposedly respectable news outlets claiming that Obama's going to take everyone's guns and create re-education camps, or that somehow there's a conspiracy afoot to get rid of the dollar in favor of a One World Currency, or that his nominee for legal advisor to the State Department has said that Sharia law might be applied in the US, or that rolling back the Bush tax cuts on the upper 5% of the income earners in the US is proof positive of socialism.
Yeah, on another post here I mentioned that it might be Josef rather than Karel, but I've only seen that assertion from a single source and haven't bothered to research it; we did about a 1/2 hour in Czech class discussing words that came into English from Czech. The OED merely mentions that it comes from the Chapek play and the article we read in Czech class mentioned that it came from Josef Chapek. So, who knows. My Czech teacher said the word robota it had the connotation of slavery, both literally and figuratively, i.e., unpleasant labor you don't want to do.
The asserted relation to German is interesting; looking at a list of Indo-European roots, the postulated meaning seems to be something related to orphan. Hm. I should probably take another class on historical linguistics.
I wonder, is this the origin of the invocation "prikazyvat" in Larry Niven's "Integral Trees" where users signal the voice-activated computer that the next phrase is a command or query? The word is supposedly of Russian origin
Sounds like the (imperfective) infinitive of the Russian verb meaning "to command."
Slashdot Mirror
The article doesn't say very clearly where the wiretapped subjects were, but there's this:
From that it sounds like the tapping was entirely domestic, in terms of where the phone lines were located.
Both parties working together to do shitty stuff. Yay.
All he had to do was be more careful, and possibly boot from CD.
I didn't say it did. What I said is that if the only thing you got from reading the Tractatus was that Wittgenstein was not the clearest writer, you weren't paying much attention or trying very hard, or - worse still - you weren't taking it seriously.
What in living fuck are you talking about?
Even that fucking crazy goddamn motherfucker Barry Goldwater had some inkling of the fact that he was talking about fucking armageddon; you're just some stupid fucking prick who waves the idea around as though it's completely fucking fungible with conventional war.
You teen years may have been long ago, but you're as fucking immature and dumb as when you turned 13, you stupid goddamn asshole.
Some of us actually lived through the cold war. If you fucking teenagers are going go on about nuclear weapons, could you at least learn that the fuck you're talking about?
Asshole.
I mean, wow. They violated the law the first time, and then after the law was changed to allow that, they did it again?
I mean, holy crap, who'da thunk?
You could call that post a number of things: naive, stupid, insightful,.
Troll, however is not one of them. S/he's honest about it, however much or little you might agree.
Isn't that somewhat naive? All a better weapon like this does is kill people more efficiently.
That says nothing about the quantity of those that die.
If that's your reaction to the Tractatus, then you clearly didn't read it very carefully or understand it very well.
Lisp.
Alternately a convoluted, confusing and maddening knot of junk, and a transcending work of crystalline insight, clarity and genius, and either way, constantly leaving you with the nagging feeling that if you'd just went through it one more time with love and care, you'd finally, truly get what it's all about.
Assuming that's not sarcasm, do you really think it's unreasonable to expect a computer user to be sufficiently aware of computer security to know downloading warez and installing it can screw up your computer? What if it asks for your admin password to install stuff, like lots of software packages on lots of operating systems do?
Should average users not have the ability to install software on their computers, or should the manufacturers of the OS design software that's so fantastically advanced it knows that a given app is malware and another isn't? And if you know the secret for doing the latter 100% of the time, please, please, please let everyone else in on it so we can be rid of the spam botnets.
Periodically boot from a CD and do a disk scan. I'm not saying never use AV software. I'm saying, you don't need it running constantly, and that it generally sucks up resources for very little benefit.
Most people's personal computers run with the user logged into an administrative account, or an account that can get administrative privileges with a password prompt, so bypassing or disabling AV software isn't that difficult a task; and that's not even considering the possibility of stuff that spreads using unpatched vulnerabilities.
Hear hear!
If you do common sense things - like not running random software from the internet, keeping your machine patched, and turning off unnecessary services - you don't need anti-virus software running constantly.
The problem is, computers are widely owned by people who don't know about how to use them safely and often act as if they can't be bothered to learn.
If a user is tricked into installing malware on a machine, the machine is infected with malware.
It's a shame people think Macs are somehow magically protected against viruses and other nasty computer stuff, merely by virtue of the manufacturer and operating system. It's probably more of a shame that Apple has, in the past at least, marketed Macs as being (more?) immune to viruses than PCs - something which somewhat true, but only for statistical reasons.
It's like STDs - if you're careless and go sticking your junk everywhere without taking precautions, you'll probably catch something cruel, eventually.
The headline on the original article is kind of misleading, but here's some quotes from the article:
So, basically he's saying it's a good idea to pursue this technology because we aren't the only coal burning country, and even if we were, other large consumers of energy would still likely use coal. If your goal is reducing carbon in the atmosphere, that'd make sense.
Then:
So really it was just general comments about carbon sequestration research, possible alternative fuels, and future directions for energy technology.
It sounds like the guy is just talking about options, and appears to recognize the problems with many of those options, and the WSJ just decided to put a "clean coal" spin on it all. And then you find in the middle of the article:
So basically, the government doesn't actually appear to be backing clean coal, cause -look - they're going to not ignore environmental lawsuits in risk evaluation. And Chu is also emphasizing the importance of conservation and efficiency over any specific technological changes to energy production. And finally, the middle paragraph just kind of throws a question in there about the value of investing in technology related to clean coal, without linking it back to what Chu was talking about originally.
Bad summary, not a great article. Chu's also said in the past that nuclear energy will have to be part of any future solution to America's energy needs. The man is a scientist - he wants to evaluate all of the options, not just specific ones, and all the quotes in the article attributed to him bear this out. Mostly it just looks like the WSJ trying to create the impression of political skulduggery.
Dude, he caught you out in a unsupported blanket statement; be a man and admit you were wrong.
The DOS thing just points out your unwillingness to admit a mistake.
I felt like the Alpha got killed less because it was getting replaced by Itanic, and more of the Not Invented Here syndrome after DEC got acquired.
Pity, they were nice bits of hardware.
Yeah, exactly. It's 1) not getting that the way people make use of news sources has shifted significantly already, and 2) not understanding the nature of that shift. There's probably also the undercurrent of fear that you're losing the ability to make money from your work, something which is a pretty normal human response, sadly. It's easy to say that people should find something else to do, but it's much harder to take that attitude when it's your world that's moving out from under your feet.
Out of curiosity, how old are you? Seriously, and the question is not intended as a sleight.
I get where you're coming from, and I used to read a paper daily in high school, but have long since lost that habit in favor of online news. Maybe it's age and when you formed news consumption habits, maybe it's just how you like it irrespective of age and experience. I think you can actually get the NYT on a Kindle, but I've never actually used one, so this is vaguely remembered hearsay.
I think a big part of it was when larger media companies moved in and started buying newspapers, then expected them to turn big profits like TV stations etc. You might be able to make that happen in a really big market like New York, and it's a recipe for the failures we've seen everywhere else. People stop buying the paper when it doesn't carry any local news and the prices go up and it's all full of ads.
That and craig's list, which basically stuck a giant stake in the heart of printed classified ads
I'd be willing to bet that there's a growing chunk of the online population who, like my self, may read content from newspapers, but only do so through online aggregators.
I never check the NYT, Washington Post, NY Post, etc. directly - either the paper or online versions. If I read an article at any of their sites, it's because it's been linked to on a blog or came through in an RSS feed from an aggregator.
They're assuming that people use their websites the way people use their newspapers, and that's probably not the case anymore, and surely won't be in the future.
I personally am in favor of the stimulus bill, but that's not really my point. I was merely saying that Obama's efforts so far have, despite what his detractors sometimes claim, been remarkably consistent with the things he said he'd do during the election.
And as for the right wing freak show, I'm perfectly happy to let you have the GM thing if you like, if you'll concede the people who actually manage to get time on supposedly respectable news outlets claiming that Obama's going to take everyone's guns and create re-education camps, or that somehow there's a conspiracy afoot to get rid of the dollar in favor of a One World Currency, or that his nominee for legal advisor to the State Department has said that Sharia law might be applied in the US, or that rolling back the Bush tax cuts on the upper 5% of the income earners in the US is proof positive of socialism.
But, where do you stand on the bank bailouts?
Yeah, on another post here I mentioned that it might be Josef rather than Karel, but I've only seen that assertion from a single source and haven't bothered to research it; we did about a 1/2 hour in Czech class discussing words that came into English from Czech. The OED merely mentions that it comes from the Chapek play and the article we read in Czech class mentioned that it came from Josef Chapek. So, who knows. My Czech teacher said the word robota it had the connotation of slavery, both literally and figuratively, i.e., unpleasant labor you don't want to do.
The asserted relation to German is interesting; looking at a list of Indo-European roots, the postulated meaning seems to be something related to orphan. Hm. I should probably take another class on historical linguistics.
Sounds like the (imperfective) infinitive of the Russian verb meaning "to command."