Right, got it. Those Ruskies manipulated Obama into revoking Snowden's passport and grounding international flights in order to create the extended layover in the USSR necessary for Snowden to come home from the cold as planned. Why don't you also tell us about how BP is repressing free energy devices or how NASA is hiding who really built the face on Mars? Those make equal sense.
Our rulers do make exactly such decisions, things like invading an entire country on a made up pretext, or using drones to blow up weddings. The kinds of people in control of the Executive branch have staged a soft coup, usurping legislative and judicial powers (e.g., signing statements, due process free execution/detention, executive declared wars, extremely broad executive orders). To think that such evil motherfuckers would not blow up a plane is ridiculous.
I was at a presentation in Tacoma last night where Thomas Drake spoke. He repeated a conversation he had with some Germans -- "We know we live in a post-fascist country -- you Americans don't yet know you live in a pre-fascist country."
Really, when there are no consequences for murder of American citizens (for that is what it is when done without trial), let alone others, and Agency officials have carte blanche to commit perjury without any consequences whatsoever -- we should start to realize that we do actually live in a country with rulers who would blow a plane out of the sky to get one person.
[Chelsea Manning] had used a program called âoewgetâ to download the batches of files. That program automates the retrieval of large numbers of files, but it is considered less powerful than the tool Mr. Snowden used.
So no -- not wget. Unless the NSA is lying about it.
However, if slashdot dies because of this, it won't be because of Dice. It will be because like the dinosaurs, we couldn't adapt.
Yeah, Beta is like world destroying comet, and we the inhabitants of that world.
The real question is, in what way does the fucking beta make slashdot better? Just take one example, the ridiculous amount of whitespace around posts. That's millions of monitors burning electricity displaying absolutely nothing. Secondly, because so little information is displayed, there will be a lot more scrolling required. That will contribute to wrist and elbow problems for those who don't yet have them, and for people like me who do, aggravate them.
Fucking beta is killing the planet and it's bad for your health. So yeah -- dinos like me are gonna bitch. Suck it up.
For some people, it'll never be ready because they don't care to learn something new (ironic enough given the audience).
I think you've got this all backwards. It seems that rational slashdotters have no interest in learning a new way to do the old thing. To put this in a classic car analogy, the beta is like a new car model, except the steering wheel is on the other side, the shifter works in mirror image of normal, the wiper control is where the blinker is and viceversa, and the stereo controls are in the trunk. Now, I could certainly learn to use that, but why? Why wouldn't I just go down to the next car dealer and get a car that has everything where I expect it? Unless there is some compelling reason or need, learning a new way to do an old thing is a waste of time better spent on learning something totally new. Yes, I do get that sometimes there are improvements that make it advantageous to learn a new way to do something old, but the beta is not such an example.
1) White Space is noisy. As Noisy as overly dense is. Hard to read, hard to navigate... hard on eyes.
I was shocked at how little information is viewable. I have two nice wide monitors, but they've designed the site as if I had dug my 800x600 CRT out of some 3d world recycling operation to replace my LCDs.
On a more serious note, I see Skinny Puppy's billing of the government to be a sign that they condone the use of their music in such a way. I know that's not true but a C&D letter would have been a much better political statement.
Interesting idea, but are they really able to tell certain customers they won't serve them, and others that they will? I would think the best they could get from a C&D letter, would be something along the lines of "stop using our music without paying for it." I think their demand for compensation, past and future, is probably their only option, so I don't see this as being supportive of the Govt.
How many banksters went to jail for tilting the entire fucking world economy over a cliff?
Oh yeah, zero.
You can even launder money for terrorists and drug cartels and be punished with nothing but a partial deferral of your annual bonus.
As Matt Taibi put it:
Wow. So the executives who spent a decade laundering billions of dollars will have to partially defer their bonuses during the five-year deferred prosecution agreement? Are you fucking kidding me? That's the punishment? The government's negotiators couldn't hold firm on forcing HSBC officials to completely wait to receive their ill-gotten bonuses? They had to settle on making them "partially" wait? Every honest prosecutor in America has to be puking his guts out at such bargaining tactics. What was the Justice Department's opening offer -- asking executives to restrict their Caribbean vacation time to nine weeks a year?
I see it as we either need to enforce Net Neutrality, or enable a free market, where we have more than one or two choices for broadband (or any other utility).... If we had 10+ ISP's to choose from, this wouldn't be an issue, one would not throttle, and that would force the others to compete.
Why is this not yet ranked +5 insightful.
I recently moved to a place where I can't get Comcast (thankfully). Even though I'm out in the country instead of in town -- everything is so much better. Youtube and Netflix don't buffer like they did with Comcast, they just play. My internet bill went from $75/mo to $50. So better and cheaper. Of course it could have been different as there is only one provider here too, but I got lucky this time and my provider isn't such an ass as Comcast. But that's just the luck of the draw.
You simply can't treat a monopoly like a free market -- these terms are antonyms and reality demands different treatment. Believe me, if there had been competition, I would dropped Comcast faster than a fetid turd, but there wasn't and so I bitterly paid my bill and sucked it up.
It is widely recognized that "loser pays" policies have a chilling effect on litigation because, really, every trial is a crap shoot. You could have the best case in the world, and one stray off topic comment completely prejudice a jury against you. It happens, and once people are focused on side issues, the game's up.
As for the placement info -- there are privacy concerns with just turning it over willy nilly to anyone, but that said, it's likely the school will only have a last known address -- tracking people down is fricken hard sometimes.
But then, there could be a system in place where the school discloses such information to a third party who ensures that facts back up claims... ah, that would be the regulator in question wouldn't it.
Taxpayers will pay for that free representation. You aren't going to get millions of people to work for free. Once you add it up, a reg agency is likely much cheaper. Secondly, proving even a simple case would take more than 4-5 hours of prep time.
This context is a good example -- it's easy to have a gut reaction along the lines of: $15k for 10 weeks of classes --- that's a rip!
Which is fine, but it sure ain't evidence. To start, you would want to find out how graduates fared, and six grads isn't data, it's a highly vulnerable set of anecdotes (there will likely be six others who were fabulously successful). Anyway, let's say the school turns over a list of graduates for the last 5 years without having to go through any time consuming discovery -- they just cough it up free (we're dreaming right?). You then have to interview several hundred, if not thousands, of people. The mere act of dialing that many numbers would probably be close to an hour, let alone spending somewhere between 5 and 30 minutes with each person. Think of how many hours would just go listening to "_____ is not available right now. If you would like to leave a message please press 1, or wait for the tone."
Then you'd need to investigate the qualifications of the instructors. Not being an instructor yourself, you'd have to hire an expert to evaluate your data. You'd probably want to talk to people involved in hiring, and get an idea of how favorably certs from the school are treated. And on and on and on.
As for your own client, you'll need to do at least a little looking at their past to see where he/she is vulnerable. HS dropout? Pothead? Learning disabilities -- anything along these lines the defense will be looking to use as an alternative reason for your client's failure. You need to know this stuff so you can prepare a counterattack.
I mean, this is what you do if you want to win the case. If you want an outcome equivalent to flipping a coin, you're way works great.
So it may be deduced from your lawyerly insight that there is no economic basis of regulating a hitherto unregulated school.
Either you are being intentionally obtuse or I explained badly.
What I was trying to say was that doing regulation by lawsuit would be exponentially more expensive, time consuming, and ineffective (because full and total compensation is rare, "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure"), than doing regulation by having regulatory agencies do it.
In other words, I'm pro-regulation on this issue because the damage caused by educational entities suckering people into lifelong student debt for what amounts to nothing of value, is immense. And no, 18 or 19 year old kids aren't going to make the best decisions considering they're still developing.
Libertarians have lots of good ideas, but regulation by trial is not in that set. For example, I totally agree that the War on [Some] Drugs is beyond idiotic and ridiculously wasteful (and that people should be able to make personal choices about which drugs they use). But even if you subtracted every single drug case out of the system, the system wouldn't be able to cope with the onslaught of litigation that would be required under a "regulation by lawsuit" method.
Secondly, any lawyer whose gone through enough trials will have lost cases he or she thought was a total winner, and won cases categorized as "total dog." A jury trial is a kind of gambling in the most literal sense. You put up your money to cover the costs of building a case, then get a jury pool randomly selected from the community, and then try to weed out the worst potential jurors --- but it sometimes happens that the entire pool from which you get to pick, sucks. When you draw names out of a hat, sometimes you get reasonable people and sometimes you get crazies. Occasionally, every name drawn from that hat is a nut, and you are just looking for the least worst options.
Then even if you win, the cost of trials is immense. It really is a terribly inefficient method of regulation -- it's as good of a last resort as we've been able to dream up, but for everyday stuff, it would be ridiculously expensive. If people lived in a system where day-to-day regulation, the assurance that businesses operate fairly, was done by trial, we'd all be broke from the endless lawsuits -- or more likely, all the little guys would just have to suck it up even more than we have to now.
Lawsuits and trials are about the most inefficient means of regulation imaginable. I say that as a lawyer. I know a lot of libertarians, have a libertarian bent myself, but I laugh every time I someone suggests that courts are the resolution for problems like this.
Let's just pretend a person took their last $15k and spent it on a fraudulent school. How is that person going to get his money back? You really think the prosecutor is going to prosecute? That's a joke -- the entire court system would need to be 100s of times larger (which is of course paid for by taxes).
OK, so a civil suit. Sure, you get a trial two to three years from the date of filing the case, because several times your scheduled trial date got bumped to make room for rapists' prosecutions and those take precedence. If you try to do it yourself, you'll almost certainly lose. There are outlier pro se litigants, but mostly, they lose.
So you try to hire a lawyer to run the case -- good luck. The costs of discovery will probably cost more than $15k because tracking down all the students and interviewing them, developing hiring statistics, deposing the school officials, building a case -- it's all expensive. The effect is that you won't actually be able to get an attorney unless you pony up thousands, because the case will cost more than you can win -- an attorney isn't going to gamble his own money on a losing proposition. He might offer to do it on an hourly basis if you put $20k or so in their trust account, but at the end of the day, winning will cost you more than you'll win, the attorney will tell you that, and then tell you it doesn't make financial sense for you to hire him. You of course are broke, so this last horrid option isn't even an option.
Finally, let's take the Lotto scenario, you win and get all your money back, and it doesn't cost you dime to get. You aren't getting back all the crap you went through for years -- like living in a homeless shelter and getting your eye poked out because you didn't have enough money for rent. Yeah, there's some tenuous connection to your eye, but if you think that you're getting back everything you lost while waiting for your case to resolve, you're an idiot.
The ONLY way litigation could work as a regulation device, was if the court system was expanded radically -- 100s of times larger, maybe 1000s -- AND both sides provided state paid legal counsel and investigators etc to take costs and fees out of the equation. At that point, you might as well just have reasonable regulation -- it will be cheaper and definitely way more efficient. If you did have such a system where litigation was the main tool -- everyone would be in litigation all the time. It would be like that Farscape episode where 90% of a planet's population were lawyers. You think a little regulation is bad --- makes me laugh. Being in trial your entire life would suck beyond any known measure.
and to clarify, while the power inherent in such vast data collection is only softly directed at US citizens in the present time, there is no other way this goes but toward a purely despotic control of the citizenry in the future.
Everyone you know, everywhere you go, everything you say, everything you buy.
Data like this is not about protecting us from terrorism, it is about setting up the US Federal Gov't as the largest terrorist organization in the world today, directly softly at its own citizens... for the present.
Is he saying that 1.5TB drives are all 5 years old? If you look at the table in TFA, it talks about "release date" -- which may well be some time ago, but I'm sure 1.5TB drives may had new, even if the design hasn't changed in a while.
Slashdot Mirror
Right, got it. Those Ruskies manipulated Obama into revoking Snowden's passport and grounding international flights in order to create the extended layover in the USSR necessary for Snowden to come home from the cold as planned. Why don't you also tell us about how BP is repressing free energy devices or how NASA is hiding who really built the face on Mars? Those make equal sense.
You might be interested in Last Call at The Oasis: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt20...
It streams on Netflix.
Hayes was one of the interviewees in that documentary. He shows off some of the mutant frogs too.
Our rulers do make exactly such decisions, things like invading an entire country on a made up pretext, or using drones to blow up weddings. The kinds of people in control of the Executive branch have staged a soft coup, usurping legislative and judicial powers (e.g., signing statements, due process free execution/detention, executive declared wars, extremely broad executive orders). To think that such evil motherfuckers would not blow up a plane is ridiculous.
I was at a presentation in Tacoma last night where Thomas Drake spoke. He repeated a conversation he had with some Germans -- "We know we live in a post-fascist country -- you Americans don't yet know you live in a pre-fascist country."
Really, when there are no consequences for murder of American citizens (for that is what it is when done without trial), let alone others, and Agency officials have carte blanche to commit perjury without any consequences whatsoever -- we should start to realize that we do actually live in a country with rulers who would blow a plane out of the sky to get one person.
From the TFA:
So no -- not wget. Unless the NSA is lying about it.
It's 26 F right now. I'd rather sit by the fire and surf.
And while we're fucking EU, fuck beta!
How about including some alternative time sucking black holes -- I'm not sure what I'm going to do for an entire week and need some ideas.
Yeah, Beta is like world destroying comet, and we the inhabitants of that world.
The real question is, in what way does the fucking beta make slashdot better? Just take one example, the ridiculous amount of whitespace around posts. That's millions of monitors burning electricity displaying absolutely nothing. Secondly, because so little information is displayed, there will be a lot more scrolling required. That will contribute to wrist and elbow problems for those who don't yet have them, and for people like me who do, aggravate them.
Fucking beta is killing the planet and it's bad for your health. So yeah -- dinos like me are gonna bitch. Suck it up.
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Fuck beta now, or be fucked by it forever.
I think you've got this all backwards. It seems that rational slashdotters have no interest in learning a new way to do the old thing. To put this in a classic car analogy, the beta is like a new car model, except the steering wheel is on the other side, the shifter works in mirror image of normal, the wiper control is where the blinker is and viceversa, and the stereo controls are in the trunk. Now, I could certainly learn to use that, but why? Why wouldn't I just go down to the next car dealer and get a car that has everything where I expect it? Unless there is some compelling reason or need, learning a new way to do an old thing is a waste of time better spent on learning something totally new. Yes, I do get that sometimes there are improvements that make it advantageous to learn a new way to do something old, but the beta is not such an example.
I was shocked at how little information is viewable. I have two nice wide monitors, but they've designed the site as if I had dug my 800x600 CRT out of some 3d world recycling operation to replace my LCDs.
in the eye.
also, I wanted to post as AC w/o logging out. Doesn't appear to be possible.
Back to classic. Somethings aren't right to change -- this beta is like New Coke.
Interesting idea, but are they really able to tell certain customers they won't serve them, and others that they will? I would think the best they could get from a C&D letter, would be something along the lines of "stop using our music without paying for it." I think their demand for compensation, past and future, is probably their only option, so I don't see this as being supportive of the Govt.
Wave:
http://www.wavebroadband.com/a...
It's a regional player.
How many banksters went to jail for tilting the entire fucking world economy over a cliff?
Oh yeah, zero.
You can even launder money for terrorists and drug cartels and be punished with nothing but a partial deferral of your annual bonus.
As Matt Taibi put it:
http://www.rollingstone.com/po...
Why is this not yet ranked +5 insightful.
I recently moved to a place where I can't get Comcast (thankfully). Even though I'm out in the country instead of in town -- everything is so much better. Youtube and Netflix don't buffer like they did with Comcast, they just play. My internet bill went from $75/mo to $50. So better and cheaper. Of course it could have been different as there is only one provider here too, but I got lucky this time and my provider isn't such an ass as Comcast. But that's just the luck of the draw.
You simply can't treat a monopoly like a free market -- these terms are antonyms and reality demands different treatment. Believe me, if there had been competition, I would dropped Comcast faster than a fetid turd, but there wasn't and so I bitterly paid my bill and sucked it up.
It is widely recognized that "loser pays" policies have a chilling effect on litigation because, really, every trial is a crap shoot. You could have the best case in the world, and one stray off topic comment completely prejudice a jury against you. It happens, and once people are focused on side issues, the game's up.
As for the placement info -- there are privacy concerns with just turning it over willy nilly to anyone, but that said, it's likely the school will only have a last known address -- tracking people down is fricken hard sometimes.
But then, there could be a system in place where the school discloses such information to a third party who ensures that facts back up claims ... ah, that would be the regulator in question wouldn't it.
Taxpayers will pay for that free representation. You aren't going to get millions of people to work for free. Once you add it up, a reg agency is likely much cheaper. Secondly, proving even a simple case would take more than 4-5 hours of prep time.
This context is a good example -- it's easy to have a gut reaction along the lines of: $15k for 10 weeks of classes --- that's a rip!
Which is fine, but it sure ain't evidence. To start, you would want to find out how graduates fared, and six grads isn't data, it's a highly vulnerable set of anecdotes (there will likely be six others who were fabulously successful). Anyway, let's say the school turns over a list of graduates for the last 5 years without having to go through any time consuming discovery -- they just cough it up free (we're dreaming right?). You then have to interview several hundred, if not thousands, of people. The mere act of dialing that many numbers would probably be close to an hour, let alone spending somewhere between 5 and 30 minutes with each person. Think of how many hours would just go listening to "_____ is not available right now. If you would like to leave a message please press 1, or wait for the tone."
Then you'd need to investigate the qualifications of the instructors. Not being an instructor yourself, you'd have to hire an expert to evaluate your data. You'd probably want to talk to people involved in hiring, and get an idea of how favorably certs from the school are treated. And on and on and on.
As for your own client, you'll need to do at least a little looking at their past to see where he/she is vulnerable. HS dropout? Pothead? Learning disabilities -- anything along these lines the defense will be looking to use as an alternative reason for your client's failure. You need to know this stuff so you can prepare a counterattack.
I mean, this is what you do if you want to win the case. If you want an outcome equivalent to flipping a coin, you're way works great.
+2 hilarious
Either you are being intentionally obtuse or I explained badly.
What I was trying to say was that doing regulation by lawsuit would be exponentially more expensive, time consuming, and ineffective (because full and total compensation is rare, "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure"), than doing regulation by having regulatory agencies do it.
In other words, I'm pro-regulation on this issue because the damage caused by educational entities suckering people into lifelong student debt for what amounts to nothing of value, is immense. And no, 18 or 19 year old kids aren't going to make the best decisions considering they're still developing.
Libertarians have lots of good ideas, but regulation by trial is not in that set. For example, I totally agree that the War on [Some] Drugs is beyond idiotic and ridiculously wasteful (and that people should be able to make personal choices about which drugs they use). But even if you subtracted every single drug case out of the system, the system wouldn't be able to cope with the onslaught of litigation that would be required under a "regulation by lawsuit" method.
Secondly, any lawyer whose gone through enough trials will have lost cases he or she thought was a total winner, and won cases categorized as "total dog." A jury trial is a kind of gambling in the most literal sense. You put up your money to cover the costs of building a case, then get a jury pool randomly selected from the community, and then try to weed out the worst potential jurors --- but it sometimes happens that the entire pool from which you get to pick, sucks. When you draw names out of a hat, sometimes you get reasonable people and sometimes you get crazies. Occasionally, every name drawn from that hat is a nut, and you are just looking for the least worst options.
Then even if you win, the cost of trials is immense. It really is a terribly inefficient method of regulation -- it's as good of a last resort as we've been able to dream up, but for everyday stuff, it would be ridiculously expensive. If people lived in a system where day-to-day regulation, the assurance that businesses operate fairly, was done by trial, we'd all be broke from the endless lawsuits -- or more likely, all the little guys would just have to suck it up even more than we have to now.
Lawsuits and trials are about the most inefficient means of regulation imaginable. I say that as a lawyer. I know a lot of libertarians, have a libertarian bent myself, but I laugh every time I someone suggests that courts are the resolution for problems like this.
Let's just pretend a person took their last $15k and spent it on a fraudulent school. How is that person going to get his money back? You really think the prosecutor is going to prosecute? That's a joke -- the entire court system would need to be 100s of times larger (which is of course paid for by taxes).
OK, so a civil suit. Sure, you get a trial two to three years from the date of filing the case, because several times your scheduled trial date got bumped to make room for rapists' prosecutions and those take precedence. If you try to do it yourself, you'll almost certainly lose. There are outlier pro se litigants, but mostly, they lose.
So you try to hire a lawyer to run the case -- good luck. The costs of discovery will probably cost more than $15k because tracking down all the students and interviewing them, developing hiring statistics, deposing the school officials, building a case -- it's all expensive. The effect is that you won't actually be able to get an attorney unless you pony up thousands, because the case will cost more than you can win -- an attorney isn't going to gamble his own money on a losing proposition. He might offer to do it on an hourly basis if you put $20k or so in their trust account, but at the end of the day, winning will cost you more than you'll win, the attorney will tell you that, and then tell you it doesn't make financial sense for you to hire him. You of course are broke, so this last horrid option isn't even an option.
Finally, let's take the Lotto scenario, you win and get all your money back, and it doesn't cost you dime to get. You aren't getting back all the crap you went through for years -- like living in a homeless shelter and getting your eye poked out because you didn't have enough money for rent. Yeah, there's some tenuous connection to your eye, but if you think that you're getting back everything you lost while waiting for your case to resolve, you're an idiot.
The ONLY way litigation could work as a regulation device, was if the court system was expanded radically -- 100s of times larger, maybe 1000s -- AND both sides provided state paid legal counsel and investigators etc to take costs and fees out of the equation. At that point, you might as well just have reasonable regulation -- it will be cheaper and definitely way more efficient. If you did have such a system where litigation was the main tool -- everyone would be in litigation all the time. It would be like that Farscape episode where 90% of a planet's population were lawyers. You think a little regulation is bad --- makes me laugh. Being in trial your entire life would suck beyond any known measure.
first post attempt typos:
directly: directed
and to clarify, while the power inherent in such vast data collection is only softly directed at US citizens in the present time, there is no other way this goes but toward a purely despotic control of the citizenry in the future.
Everyone you know, everywhere you go, everything you say, everything you buy.
Data like this is not about protecting us from terrorism, it is about setting up the US Federal Gov't as the largest terrorist organization in the world today, directly softly at its own citizens ... for the present.
Is he saying that 1.5TB drives are all 5 years old? If you look at the table in TFA, it talks about "release date" -- which may well be some time ago, but I'm sure 1.5TB drives may had new, even if the design hasn't changed in a while.