On the first point: Someone may be named using archaic Chinese characters in their native language, but if they're studying in, say, Germany, or in the United States, they're required to choose a Latin form of their name, which is what will be used for legal purposes. If they're studying in Russia, they must render it in the Cyrillic alphabet, and in Greece, in the Greek alphabet. If you're in one of those legal contexts, you can assume all employees and students have a name conforming to the local legal requirements. I have students from many countries in my classes, but they all use names written in Latin characters when signing up for courses or turning in homework.
On the second: The artist legally named Prince Rogers Nelson never changed his name. He's just used a variety of stage names.
If the person is a United States resident, at least, they have something filled in in the "surname" and "given name" sections of their birth certificate (if born in the US) naturalization certificate, green card, or visa document. That might not be true in all western countries, but I know it's true in Denmark as well: to work or study legally in the country you need to register with the Citizen Register and list something in those boxes. Then the university will just use whatever your state registration says.
University usernames aren't typically anonymous anyway. They're often pretty trivially generated from real names, e.g. bgates, and in any case you can usually go to university.edu/~username/ to look the person up.
In a university setting, some kind of western name assumption is typically already made: students and employees are in a database with family names and given names listed, and all sorts of communication is already generated from that (e.g. paychecks).
To me, not filing internal disciplinary charges, but instead working with the FBI to prosecute him, has it exactly backwards. If indeed he did something wrong and damaged the MIT network, why not discipline him internally rather than calling in the FBI? Not everything needs to be a federal criminal case, especially when the institution is large and wealthy enough, as MIT is, to handle its own problems.
The latter was actually banned under these merchant agreements also: they forbid credit-card users being charged a different price from the cash price, regardless of whether it was structured as a surcharge for one or a discount for the other. However, some states overrode that with state law that allowed different cash/credit prices in certain markets, the two most common being gas stations and liquor stores.
In Texas, for example, merchants aren't allowed to give a cash discount in general, except that liquor stores are allowed to. So most liquor stores in Texas give a 3-5% cash discount.
Judging by the fact that retailers typically offer cash/debit discounts where they're legally allowed to do so, it must cost them less, or there would be no reason to try to incentivize people away from credit cards.
It's fairly common for these kinds of nonsense figures to include: 1) the cost of doing stuff they would've needed to do anyway, like fix misconfigurations or patch security holes; and 2) salaries for regular staff who would've been paid the salary either way, like a sysadmin who had to take some time away from posting on Slashdot to respond to the incident.
I could RTFA but that would be against the true spirit of/. so I will just ask. Is there something about the new 802.11ac standard that makes it better for use inside buildings and other structurally dense environments?
I agree, although I'm not sure any U.S. president would. It'd certainly be a tough decision: attacking North Korea is very likely to result in retaliation against Seoul, which has millions of people living within artillery range of North Korea.
I probably wouldn't actually use a Linux-distro-now-with-BSD-kernel for regular usage, but the porting efforts tend to do a good job uncovering not-quite-portable parts of supposedly portable code, which makes everything more robust. So I like that they exist, because the fact that they work at all gives me some more confidence that portable code is working like it's supposed to.
I think you have a rather ignorant view of what's going on, which doesn't match historical record or reality. Support for jihadists in Muslim countries has waxed and waned for various reasons. It's completely sensible, if you want to have an actually fact-based policy which causes improvements, rather than a blind-faith-based policy which makes you feel like you're playing a cool videogame and killin' dem brown people, to look at which U.S. policies contribute to waxing versus waning. And I don't think the "fire-and-forget" use of drones is mainly aimed at that kind of optimization. Rather, it's aimed at getting people reelected (and this goes for whether it's Bush or Obama trying to get reelected).
In short, I think your fondness for action films, and possibly some kind of weird bigotry, is clouding your judgment, which is true of many of my countrymen, to the detriment of America's safety. But killin' dem Muslims gets American politicians elected, so they'll keep doing it even when it's dumb. Shock 'n' awe, duuuuude! Mission accomplished! It's like a bunch of you fucking frat boys are in charge; I'd rather have some adults.
I don't think you have to be a jihadist to worry that the U.S.'s policy for combating it is insufficiently cautious about "collateral damage". There is also a realpolitik question of whether it's actually effective: bombing the bad guys may feel good, but from a rational perspective feeling good and killing bad guys is not sufficient, and is counterproductive if you cause so much negative sentiment that you inflame anti-American sentiment among the local population, increasing terrorist groups' ability to recruit new members and find sympathetic people to shelter them. In some cases bombing works, and in other cases it does not work, and I think it's legitimate to ask whether the strategy the U.S. is currently pursuing is actually working, or is intended just to make it look like they're doing something, to please U.S. voters.
Here's a fun game you can play in which you wipe out terrorists by bombing them.
Furthermore, the prosecutor can't just go out and charge whoever he likes, he needs to convince a grand jury that the charges are reasonable. That means a majority of about 20 regular people have to agree that the person should get charged.
This used to be a major safeguard, but has been ineffective for some decades now. A prosecutor can get an indictment from a grand jury, if he wants one, in just about any case: of the circa 20,000 cases brought to a grand jury per year, fewer than 100 will result in a "no bill" (refusal to indict), for an indictment rate of around 99.5%.
It varies based on the country. The German Pirate Party has turned into something of a civil-libertarian party with a focus on technological issues, vaguely like an EFF Party or something. They got a lot of younger people who in previous eras might've voted FDP, a libertarian-ish party that is now associated too much with rich businessmen to get much of the younger liberal vote. Also some ex-Greens moved over for various reasons.
Given that he's at Harvard, the practical resolution is that he'd have to get the experiment approved by Harvard's Committee on the Use of Human Subjects in Research, and their likely answer is going to be "no".
They do maintain servers in other data centers, in Amsterdam and San Francisco, and use them for offsite backups and read-only Squid caches. They don't live-replicate DBs to them, though, I believe due to the decreased normal-case reliability and performance that you get when trying to replicate DB servers between data centers on different continents. The architecture of centralized DB with worldwide caches performs a lot better and more reliably. But if the VA servers were offline for an extended period of time, they could fail over to the Amsterdam cluster.
Slashdot Mirror
On the first point: Someone may be named using archaic Chinese characters in their native language, but if they're studying in, say, Germany, or in the United States, they're required to choose a Latin form of their name, which is what will be used for legal purposes. If they're studying in Russia, they must render it in the Cyrillic alphabet, and in Greece, in the Greek alphabet. If you're in one of those legal contexts, you can assume all employees and students have a name conforming to the local legal requirements. I have students from many countries in my classes, but they all use names written in Latin characters when signing up for courses or turning in homework.
On the second: The artist legally named Prince Rogers Nelson never changed his name. He's just used a variety of stage names.
If the person is a United States resident, at least, they have something filled in in the "surname" and "given name" sections of their birth certificate (if born in the US) naturalization certificate, green card, or visa document. That might not be true in all western countries, but I know it's true in Denmark as well: to work or study legally in the country you need to register with the Citizen Register and list something in those boxes. Then the university will just use whatever your state registration says.
University usernames aren't typically anonymous anyway. They're often pretty trivially generated from real names, e.g. bgates, and in any case you can usually go to university.edu/~username/ to look the person up.
In a university setting, some kind of western name assumption is typically already made: students and employees are in a database with family names and given names listed, and all sorts of communication is already generated from that (e.g. paychecks).
That's true for Swartz; I was responding to the comment about LaMacchia, who was an MIT student, so could've been handled internally.
To me, not filing internal disciplinary charges, but instead working with the FBI to prosecute him, has it exactly backwards. If indeed he did something wrong and damaged the MIT network, why not discipline him internally rather than calling in the FBI? Not everything needs to be a federal criminal case, especially when the institution is large and wealthy enough, as MIT is, to handle its own problems.
From this comment, can we infer that #67, a track entitled "On Top" by musical artist "Flume" (featuring guest artist "T-Shirt") is on your playlist?
The latter was actually banned under these merchant agreements also: they forbid credit-card users being charged a different price from the cash price, regardless of whether it was structured as a surcharge for one or a discount for the other. However, some states overrode that with state law that allowed different cash/credit prices in certain markets, the two most common being gas stations and liquor stores.
In Texas, for example, merchants aren't allowed to give a cash discount in general, except that liquor stores are allowed to. So most liquor stores in Texas give a 3-5% cash discount.
Judging by the fact that retailers typically offer cash/debit discounts where they're legally allowed to do so, it must cost them less, or there would be no reason to try to incentivize people away from credit cards.
Maybe it wasn't a "who" but a "what".
I often agree, but some of them were just... so in-your-face that it hardly requires much analysis. I mean, Jar-Jar's entire character is not subtle.
It's fairly common for these kinds of nonsense figures to include: 1) the cost of doing stuff they would've needed to do anyway, like fix misconfigurations or patch security holes; and 2) salaries for regular staff who would've been paid the salary either way, like a sysadmin who had to take some time away from posting on Slashdot to respond to the incident.
Well, I could quote what Cisco's whitepaper has to say about it:
802.11ac, the emerging standard from the IEEE, is like the movie The Godfather Part II. It takes something great and makes it even better.
The whitepaper doesn't say anything about walls though.
I agree, although I'm not sure any U.S. president would. It'd certainly be a tough decision: attacking North Korea is very likely to result in retaliation against Seoul, which has millions of people living within artillery range of North Korea.
I probably wouldn't actually use a Linux-distro-now-with-BSD-kernel for regular usage, but the porting efforts tend to do a good job uncovering not-quite-portable parts of supposedly portable code, which makes everything more robust. So I like that they exist, because the fact that they work at all gives me some more confidence that portable code is working like it's supposed to.
I think you have a rather ignorant view of what's going on, which doesn't match historical record or reality. Support for jihadists in Muslim countries has waxed and waned for various reasons. It's completely sensible, if you want to have an actually fact-based policy which causes improvements, rather than a blind-faith-based policy which makes you feel like you're playing a cool videogame and killin' dem brown people, to look at which U.S. policies contribute to waxing versus waning. And I don't think the "fire-and-forget" use of drones is mainly aimed at that kind of optimization. Rather, it's aimed at getting people reelected (and this goes for whether it's Bush or Obama trying to get reelected).
In short, I think your fondness for action films, and possibly some kind of weird bigotry, is clouding your judgment, which is true of many of my countrymen, to the detriment of America's safety. But killin' dem Muslims gets American politicians elected, so they'll keep doing it even when it's dumb. Shock 'n' awe, duuuuude! Mission accomplished! It's like a bunch of you fucking frat boys are in charge; I'd rather have some adults.
I don't think you have to be a jihadist to worry that the U.S.'s policy for combating it is insufficiently cautious about "collateral damage". There is also a realpolitik question of whether it's actually effective: bombing the bad guys may feel good, but from a rational perspective feeling good and killing bad guys is not sufficient, and is counterproductive if you cause so much negative sentiment that you inflame anti-American sentiment among the local population, increasing terrorist groups' ability to recruit new members and find sympathetic people to shelter them. In some cases bombing works, and in other cases it does not work, and I think it's legitimate to ask whether the strategy the U.S. is currently pursuing is actually working, or is intended just to make it look like they're doing something, to please U.S. voters.
Here's a fun game you can play in which you wipe out terrorists by bombing them.
And what about Germany and France, which have both lower incarceration rates and lower violent crime rates?
And not just slightly lower incarceration rates: about 85% lower.
Northern Europe has much less overcriminalization. Just look at how much smaller their prison populations are.
Furthermore, the prosecutor can't just go out and charge whoever he likes, he needs to convince a grand jury that the charges are reasonable. That means a majority of about 20 regular people have to agree that the person should get charged.
This used to be a major safeguard, but has been ineffective for some decades now. A prosecutor can get an indictment from a grand jury, if he wants one, in just about any case: of the circa 20,000 cases brought to a grand jury per year, fewer than 100 will result in a "no bill" (refusal to indict), for an indictment rate of around 99.5%.
It varies based on the country. The German Pirate Party has turned into something of a civil-libertarian party with a focus on technological issues, vaguely like an EFF Party or something. They got a lot of younger people who in previous eras might've voted FDP, a libertarian-ish party that is now associated too much with rich businessmen to get much of the younger liberal vote. Also some ex-Greens moved over for various reasons.
"Open up the internet" certainly isn't something they're going to listen to.
Given that he's at Harvard, the practical resolution is that he'd have to get the experiment approved by Harvard's Committee on the Use of Human Subjects in Research, and their likely answer is going to be "no".
They have a major datacenter in Amsterdam, which backs up all the data, and runs Squid caches to reduce the read latency for European readers.
They do maintain servers in other data centers, in Amsterdam and San Francisco, and use them for offsite backups and read-only Squid caches. They don't live-replicate DBs to them, though, I believe due to the decreased normal-case reliability and performance that you get when trying to replicate DB servers between data centers on different continents. The architecture of centralized DB with worldwide caches performs a lot better and more reliably. But if the VA servers were offline for an extended period of time, they could fail over to the Amsterdam cluster.