Saddam would still be in power? Who cares? Christ we put him in power to do exactly what he did: prevent a theocratic state from forming in Iraq. We didn't give a damn about his genocide when he was actually doing it, back in the 90's, so it's disingenuous to get pissy about it now.
As for the rest:
"Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction." (emphasis mine)
Both quoted from the ultra liberal "Whitehouse.gov" political site...No doubt they were planted there. At the very least those are misrepresentations, because there damn well was doubt, and those facilities were actually not used for chemical weapons at that time.
Ring led by the goddamn media? Lot of people were ring led by the media, to think that the war was going to be quick and painless. To think that our reasons for going to war were good, to think that the dumbasses in the government knew what the hell they were talking about, and the dem's are just as much to blame; the only dems who didn't vote for war were the goddamn peaceniks. Fucking H.Clinton has quotes almost as damning, as does that weenie Kerry.
You need to open your eyes. It was a stupid war to get into, it was prosecuted in a stupid manner, and it will be prolonged indefinitely by the government in a desperate attempt to cover their bleeding asses with a flag of victory, and there is no goddamn hope of anything decent coming out of it unless the fucking people stop acting like fucking robots and following the goddamn party lines.
You also have no understanding of how the systems that produced that intelligence work.
I would say the answer to that is, "Poorly."
We stuck ourselves in a stupid war. Regardless of why, that it was mismanaged is glaringly obvious. That no one saw it coming I find frankly impossible to believe, as it is obvious that Bush Sr. clearly understood very well what would happen if we took over Iraq, and I find it hard to believe that a goodly number of senior officers were incapable of learning the historical lessons from afganistan and vietnam.
That it is so clearly obvious that they did not see it coming suggests very strongly that they were listening only to things that they wanted to hear, and that they would do that with regards to the prosecution of the war suggests that they would do the same with regards to the evidence they used to justify the war in the first place.
During the lead up to Iraq, I heard a lot of people quoting historical data, things that we "knew" the Iraqi's had in their arsenal. I heard some unproven testimony about fissionables. I heard a lot of talk about questionable links to terrorist groups. Damn near every bit of that was inaccurate. If it wasn't malicious, it was pathetic, and it sure as hell wasn't enough to justify this moronic war.
I've worked at a number of places where they used oddball naming conventions. as long as they're grouped correctly, and LABELED, what does it matter?
I mean sure, if you take greek gods and name every fricking server after one and don't label them, you're going to have problems.
But if you name the accounting servers after demons, the web servers after presidents, the file infrastructure after animals, etc, then label them clearly, set them up in alphabetical order within their category, you're good to go. The names are easy to remember, the "role" of the machine is obvious from the name, and you don't forever have to recheck the name you scrawled on your hand while you're wandering through the server room looking for a machine with a hugely unpronouncable name.
Now this only flies if you don't have to worry about 1000 machines all doing the exact same thing...That's really what the "standard" naming system is meant for. But since most businesses aren't in that situation, it doesn't make sense to get all gestapo on the naming conventions for a few dozen machines.
The idea of someone being "good" with HTML is hilariously outdated. There are any number of wysiwyg editors that take care of all the annoying html for you. Myself being a coder rather than a graphic artist, I've waded through a lot of HTML in my time, and I can't remember the last time I saw HTML that wasn't machine generated. It was probably back in college.
Now javascript, as it is today rather than the comparatively primitive javascript of 6-7 years ago is pretty valuable, but it's not something I'd want to base my career on.
Technically, a sitting president can't even be charged with a crime.
That's really what impeachment is: charging an official with a crime. If that passes, then you move to second stage impeachment: conviction. If that passes, then the official is removed from office, and can face other charges, and be forbidden from ever again holding public office.
It wouldn't be an issue if we didn't still have all the fricking flamebait headlines. Every SINGLE time this issue comes up, the headline is always "Someone is taxing virtual worlds" and in every single case that is woefully incorrect.
Meh. I never buy short term...All you get is capital gains tax and heartache. Buy a blue chip, and stick with them.
That being said...Apple is up about 30% since February, and that screams SELL to my mind. On the other hand, they're not seriously overcapitalized, they've got cash reserves, and their P/E is normal for a tech company (Lower mid 30s), and last time their stock hit 60 bucks a share they split it (and it's twice that value now).
I'll probably ride it out for a while. If they can really pull off the iPhone (and so far so good) it'll be worth it, and if they can't I'm not so exposed on their stock that I can't afford to take a bit of a hit. The drop right now suggests that a lot of people woke up this morning and realized (like you did) that Apple was WAY the hell up for the year, and their big product release was released, and this might be a good time to get out...Still, this is a the first generation iPhone and people are losing their minds; remember the difference between 1st gen iPod and 2nd gen iPod? If they improve it on that level, the stock will only increase.
Pssh. First off, who wants HD Porn? Some thing's are not meant to be seen in high def. 'Nuff said.
Secondly, who the hell buys porn on hard media anymore? Far far far more people download porn than get it any other way. The internet is, indeed, for porn.
The whole "Porn decides all format wars" line would be a lot more useful and relevant if we had a pool of results that was larger than, you know, one. Just because adoption followed porn once, doesn't mean it will ever do so again.
AACis an open standard. You can produce AAC encoded music all day long, and you've got no problems...Now, try and write your own codec, and you'll be sued by the consortium who finalized it (said group includes Dolby, AT&T, and Sony, as well as the Fraunhofer IIS (they did a little format called "mp3" as well)....But does not include Apple).
You're thinking the Fairplay DRM, which is proprietary to Apple, and built on top of AAC.
They already do that with the "Report this bug to Microsoft?" screens that pop up in XP every time a program crashes...And frankly, I SHOULD be able to opt out if I choose to do so. Hell, they should want me to be able to opt out, so if I do something and crash a program, I don't send them weird data.
The OP is right; this is a precursor to a subscription based OS; that's microsoft's dream, where everyone just pays the OS tax on a monthly/yearly basis, and gets "free" upgrades on a once-a-decade cycle.
I've got most of the high level access at the place where I work; the only guy who has access to things that I don't, I could recognize his handwriting easily.
Of course, I also know his password off the top of my head, and he never changes it, so I guess the current situation isn't any better.
I didn't say it was secure, I said it was more secure.
An even better system would be to select a semi-random series of numbers, letters, and punctuation, that we could key in to uniquely identify ourselves...We could call it a "Secret Word" or a "Pass phrase" or something. "Password?" Nah. Not catchy enough.
That wouldn't be much different from "Site key" style two-factor authentication schemes. It's still just a matter of guessing to crack it, and you could program a computer to guess slower, or get a person to guess more quickly.
I have distinctive handwriting, but it would still take me a few seconds (as long or longer than it takes me to type my average 10 character password) to identify my own handwriting out of a random selection of a dozen or two decoy samples.
I just don't think "Picking the correct answer" will ever be all that secure. The right answer is necessarily right there on the screen somewhere, as opposed to a strong password which is impossible for a human to guess, and extremely difficult to brute force.
I could quite easily recognize my own...But so could anyone else who has ever seen it. Then there are those people with bland, unmemorable handwriting...How would you pick your handwriting out of a crowd when your handwriting looks like handwriting is supposed to look.
Additionally, the number of samples would have to be constrained to what a normal person could be expected to go through, so the odds of someone being able to guess it are huge. I mean, I could set my password to the crappy "Guess,15" and it would take millions of brute force guesses to figure it out, as opposed to checking 20 something handwriting samples.
Why bother? My desk is covered with my clearly recognizable scrawl, and most of it is numeric just to add insult to injury.
While the idea of a system that depends on recognition is interesting (though in my mind, not terribly secure for the exact reason you stated), handwriting is probably the poorest example because we leave handwriting samples everywhere. It'd be much more secure to have the system be "Recognize a picture of your own genitalia" because at least then you only have to worry about former significant others...And hell, for this crowd, you don't even have to worry about that.
Actually, I'd say it is. If you don't like someone's opinion and start dumping abuse and profanity on them, that's definitely a form of attempted intimidation. Doesn't matter if you know his actual name, especially in an online forum with persistent history.
All teenagers are easy targets, unfortunately, but dealing with the assholes is part of what being a teenager is about. Some people are cruel. Some people are cruel beyond bounds...It happened to me, it happened to a lot of people. Hopefully you learned something from it, and stood up for someone else.
Or maybe not. In the end, that's what you need: other people who care enough to stand up for you. Not the law, not the official authority figures; they don't matter really.
Amusing. I think he was referring to the fact that you dumped a metric assload of bile and scorn on him because you didn't like his opinion about cyberbullying.
One of you needs a thicker skin, but I'm not sure which one.
Ah, see 3% with a grain of salt. 3% DOA would be ridiculous, I agree, but 3% failing within a year? Or 3% failing after 2,880 hours of use (4 whole months of play time)? It's hard to say.
Then you've got to count all the possible failures. Harddrive failure rates are around 2-4% according to some surveys, so that could account for the whole thing by itself (even though it doesn't). Laptops, as a more mobile platform, are between 15 and 20% likely to crap out on a yearly basis, according to a Gartner press release from last year...Same release put desktop failure rates at around 5% in the first year. Compared to those rates 3% looks godlike.
Sure, but it screws your chances for more mod points, which makes it a tactic that won't work very often at all, and is still likely to backfire. I mean, the non-fan boys are as rabid as the fan boys around here. I got downmodded a couple of days ago for suggesting that Sony wasn't out to screw someone.
I often wish you could see how many people modded your post all together...It's be interesting with a controversial post to know. I guess they hide it to keep the info about how many points are given out on the dl.
I'd say it's more likely the Mac was protecting him from himself, which is something Windows and Linux don't necessarily do. When I programmed on my MS machine, and installed lots of software, I had to reinstall all the damn time. Now? Every year and a half or so. I program a lot on Linux machines, but I'm super careful, and I always run as a user, not a superuser...Still, I've screwed 'em up a few times, just dicking around with non-standard libraries and custom compiles.
Mac? You just don't have those issues. Mac software installs are hilarious if you're used to Windows. It doesn't expose it's system files in userland, and it hides superuser access altogether.
Statistically, there is always that one guy. You know the guy; wins the lottery, gets hit by a meteor, eats a thousand big macs and doesn't die, gets rich of a get rich quick scheme.
Yea. That guy.
This is the "Guy who gets broken Xbox 360s." Out of all the people who have them, there's got to be one guy who always gets a bad one.
Still, MS claims the failure rate is around 3%, so that's pretty fricking improbable assuming that they're not lying...We're talking.03^11 (a 5.31441x10^-17 percent chance that you'd have 11 crap out in a row), though you're also taking that 3% with a huge grain of salt because it's a percentage of failures over an undisclosed period of time, which could be a month, a day, or a year for all we know. Obviously the percentage chance of failure would be 100%, given enough time.
If I were them, I'd start looking for an external factor. Does he live in an area with an unusually large number of electrical storms per year? Does he have bad wiring? Does he live in a really dusty environment? Is he a huge slob? Does he have the UPS guy from hell? Even if the failure rate on a 360 was 10% (which would be really hard to hide), the odds would still be 100,000,000 to 1 against getting 11 bad ones in a row...'Course they could be sending out refurbs to people who have problems, which very well may have a significantly higher fail rate...
That's where metamod comes in...If your posts are reasonable and yet get "trolled" or "flamebaited" then metamodders will generally catch it, and people whose mods get reversed a lot are less likely to get mod points.
I wonder if they check for serial abuse of the "Overrated" mod...Got a couple of guys who like to go through and "Overrated" my stuff a few days after the article is off the front page. Not sure what the hell is up with that, other than that they're clearly sensitive to metamod issues.
Either way, I'd be surprised if they could keep down the detractors; I always mod up people who cry schill with evidence, and you tend to get hordes of "Mod parent up!" posts if people agree with you and you're getting seriously downmodded...Slashdot isn't usually a good environment for censorship.
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Saddam would still be in power? Who cares? Christ we put him in power to do exactly what he did: prevent a theocratic state from forming in Iraq. We didn't give a damn about his genocide when he was actually doing it, back in the 90's, so it's disingenuous to get pissy about it now.
As for the rest:
"Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction." (emphasis mine)
Dick Cheney August 26, 2002
"Right now, Iraq is expanding and improving facilities that were used for the production of biological weapons."
George W. Bush September 12, 2002
Both quoted from the ultra liberal "Whitehouse.gov" political site...No doubt they were planted there. At the very least those are misrepresentations, because there damn well was doubt, and those facilities were actually not used for chemical weapons at that time.
Ring led by the goddamn media? Lot of people were ring led by the media, to think that the war was going to be quick and painless. To think that our reasons for going to war were good, to think that the dumbasses in the government knew what the hell they were talking about, and the dem's are just as much to blame; the only dems who didn't vote for war were the goddamn peaceniks. Fucking H.Clinton has quotes almost as damning, as does that weenie Kerry.
You need to open your eyes. It was a stupid war to get into, it was prosecuted in a stupid manner, and it will be prolonged indefinitely by the government in a desperate attempt to cover their bleeding asses with a flag of victory, and there is no goddamn hope of anything decent coming out of it unless the fucking people stop acting like fucking robots and following the goddamn party lines.
You also have no understanding of how the systems that produced that intelligence work.
I would say the answer to that is, "Poorly."
We stuck ourselves in a stupid war. Regardless of why, that it was mismanaged is glaringly obvious. That no one saw it coming I find frankly impossible to believe, as it is obvious that Bush Sr. clearly understood very well what would happen if we took over Iraq, and I find it hard to believe that a goodly number of senior officers were incapable of learning the historical lessons from afganistan and vietnam.
That it is so clearly obvious that they did not see it coming suggests very strongly that they were listening only to things that they wanted to hear, and that they would do that with regards to the prosecution of the war suggests that they would do the same with regards to the evidence they used to justify the war in the first place.
During the lead up to Iraq, I heard a lot of people quoting historical data, things that we "knew" the Iraqi's had in their arsenal. I heard some unproven testimony about fissionables. I heard a lot of talk about questionable links to terrorist groups. Damn near every bit of that was inaccurate. If it wasn't malicious, it was pathetic, and it sure as hell wasn't enough to justify this moronic war.
We had the "Cereal" servers; Kix, Fruitloops, Frostedflakes, etc. I loved sending mail from the subdomain...
I've worked at a number of places where they used oddball naming conventions. as long as they're grouped correctly, and LABELED, what does it matter?
I mean sure, if you take greek gods and name every fricking server after one and don't label them, you're going to have problems.
But if you name the accounting servers after demons, the web servers after presidents, the file infrastructure after animals, etc, then label them clearly, set them up in alphabetical order within their category, you're good to go. The names are easy to remember, the "role" of the machine is obvious from the name, and you don't forever have to recheck the name you scrawled on your hand while you're wandering through the server room looking for a machine with a hugely unpronouncable name.
Now this only flies if you don't have to worry about 1000 machines all doing the exact same thing...That's really what the "standard" naming system is meant for. But since most businesses aren't in that situation, it doesn't make sense to get all gestapo on the naming conventions for a few dozen machines.
The idea of someone being "good" with HTML is hilariously outdated. There are any number of wysiwyg editors that take care of all the annoying html for you. Myself being a coder rather than a graphic artist, I've waded through a lot of HTML in my time, and I can't remember the last time I saw HTML that wasn't machine generated. It was probably back in college.
Now javascript, as it is today rather than the comparatively primitive javascript of 6-7 years ago is pretty valuable, but it's not something I'd want to base my career on.
Technically, a sitting president can't even be charged with a crime.
That's really what impeachment is: charging an official with a crime. If that passes, then you move to second stage impeachment: conviction. If that passes, then the official is removed from office, and can face other charges, and be forbidden from ever again holding public office.
It wouldn't be an issue if we didn't still have all the fricking flamebait headlines. Every SINGLE time this issue comes up, the headline is always "Someone is taxing virtual worlds" and in every single case that is woefully incorrect.
Meh. I never buy short term...All you get is capital gains tax and heartache. Buy a blue chip, and stick with them.
That being said...Apple is up about 30% since February, and that screams SELL to my mind. On the other hand, they're not seriously overcapitalized, they've got cash reserves, and their P/E is normal for a tech company (Lower mid 30s), and last time their stock hit 60 bucks a share they split it (and it's twice that value now).
I'll probably ride it out for a while. If they can really pull off the iPhone (and so far so good) it'll be worth it, and if they can't I'm not so exposed on their stock that I can't afford to take a bit of a hit. The drop right now suggests that a lot of people woke up this morning and realized (like you did) that Apple was WAY the hell up for the year, and their big product release was released, and this might be a good time to get out...Still, this is a the first generation iPhone and people are losing their minds; remember the difference between 1st gen iPod and 2nd gen iPod? If they improve it on that level, the stock will only increase.
It's all gambling though.
Pssh. First off, who wants HD Porn? Some thing's are not meant to be seen in high def. 'Nuff said.
Secondly, who the hell buys porn on hard media anymore? Far far far more people download porn than get it any other way. The internet is, indeed, for porn.
The whole "Porn decides all format wars" line would be a lot more useful and relevant if we had a pool of results that was larger than, you know, one. Just because adoption followed porn once, doesn't mean it will ever do so again.
AAC is an open standard. You can produce AAC encoded music all day long, and you've got no problems...Now, try and write your own codec, and you'll be sued by the consortium who finalized it (said group includes Dolby, AT&T, and Sony, as well as the Fraunhofer IIS (they did a little format called "mp3" as well)....But does not include Apple).
You're thinking the Fairplay DRM, which is proprietary to Apple, and built on top of AAC.
They already do that with the "Report this bug to Microsoft?" screens that pop up in XP every time a program crashes...And frankly, I SHOULD be able to opt out if I choose to do so. Hell, they should want me to be able to opt out, so if I do something and crash a program, I don't send them weird data.
The OP is right; this is a precursor to a subscription based OS; that's microsoft's dream, where everyone just pays the OS tax on a monthly/yearly basis, and gets "free" upgrades on a once-a-decade cycle.
Heh. Well, since that's basically what this whole system boils down to, it's as good an example as any.
I've got most of the high level access at the place where I work; the only guy who has access to things that I don't, I could recognize his handwriting easily.
Of course, I also know his password off the top of my head, and he never changes it, so I guess the current situation isn't any better.
I didn't say it was secure, I said it was more secure.
An even better system would be to select a semi-random series of numbers, letters, and punctuation, that we could key in to uniquely identify ourselves...We could call it a "Secret Word" or a "Pass phrase" or something. "Password?" Nah. Not catchy enough.
That wouldn't be much different from "Site key" style two-factor authentication schemes. It's still just a matter of guessing to crack it, and you could program a computer to guess slower, or get a person to guess more quickly.
I have distinctive handwriting, but it would still take me a few seconds (as long or longer than it takes me to type my average 10 character password) to identify my own handwriting out of a random selection of a dozen or two decoy samples.
I just don't think "Picking the correct answer" will ever be all that secure. The right answer is necessarily right there on the screen somewhere, as opposed to a strong password which is impossible for a human to guess, and extremely difficult to brute force.
I could quite easily recognize my own...But so could anyone else who has ever seen it. Then there are those people with bland, unmemorable handwriting...How would you pick your handwriting out of a crowd when your handwriting looks like handwriting is supposed to look.
Additionally, the number of samples would have to be constrained to what a normal person could be expected to go through, so the odds of someone being able to guess it are huge. I mean, I could set my password to the crappy "Guess,15" and it would take millions of brute force guesses to figure it out, as opposed to checking 20 something handwriting samples.
Why bother? My desk is covered with my clearly recognizable scrawl, and most of it is numeric just to add insult to injury.
While the idea of a system that depends on recognition is interesting (though in my mind, not terribly secure for the exact reason you stated), handwriting is probably the poorest example because we leave handwriting samples everywhere. It'd be much more secure to have the system be "Recognize a picture of your own genitalia" because at least then you only have to worry about former significant others...And hell, for this crowd, you don't even have to worry about that.
Actually, I'd say it is. If you don't like someone's opinion and start dumping abuse and profanity on them, that's definitely a form of attempted intimidation. Doesn't matter if you know his actual name, especially in an online forum with persistent history.
And all he said was it was ironic, which it is.
All teenagers are easy targets, unfortunately, but dealing with the assholes is part of what being a teenager is about. Some people are cruel. Some people are cruel beyond bounds...It happened to me, it happened to a lot of people. Hopefully you learned something from it, and stood up for someone else.
Or maybe not. In the end, that's what you need: other people who care enough to stand up for you. Not the law, not the official authority figures; they don't matter really.
Amusing. I think he was referring to the fact that you dumped a metric assload of bile and scorn on him because you didn't like his opinion about cyberbullying.
One of you needs a thicker skin, but I'm not sure which one.
Ah, see 3% with a grain of salt. 3% DOA would be ridiculous, I agree, but 3% failing within a year? Or 3% failing after 2,880 hours of use (4 whole months of play time)? It's hard to say.
Then you've got to count all the possible failures. Harddrive failure rates are around 2-4% according to some surveys, so that could account for the whole thing by itself (even though it doesn't). Laptops, as a more mobile platform, are between 15 and 20% likely to crap out on a yearly basis, according to a Gartner press release from last year...Same release put desktop failure rates at around 5% in the first year. Compared to those rates 3% looks godlike.
But there's just not enough data.
Sure, but it screws your chances for more mod points, which makes it a tactic that won't work very often at all, and is still likely to backfire. I mean, the non-fan boys are as rabid as the fan boys around here. I got downmodded a couple of days ago for suggesting that Sony wasn't out to screw someone.
I often wish you could see how many people modded your post all together...It's be interesting with a controversial post to know. I guess they hide it to keep the info about how many points are given out on the dl.
I'd say it's more likely the Mac was protecting him from himself, which is something Windows and Linux don't necessarily do. When I programmed on my MS machine, and installed lots of software, I had to reinstall all the damn time. Now? Every year and a half or so. I program a lot on Linux machines, but I'm super careful, and I always run as a user, not a superuser...Still, I've screwed 'em up a few times, just dicking around with non-standard libraries and custom compiles.
Mac? You just don't have those issues. Mac software installs are hilarious if you're used to Windows. It doesn't expose it's system files in userland, and it hides superuser access altogether.
Statistically, there is always that one guy. You know the guy; wins the lottery, gets hit by a meteor, eats a thousand big macs and doesn't die, gets rich of a get rich quick scheme.
.03^11 (a 5.31441x10^-17 percent chance that you'd have 11 crap out in a row), though you're also taking that 3% with a huge grain of salt because it's a percentage of failures over an undisclosed period of time, which could be a month, a day, or a year for all we know. Obviously the percentage chance of failure would be 100%, given enough time.
Yea. That guy.
This is the "Guy who gets broken Xbox 360s." Out of all the people who have them, there's got to be one guy who always gets a bad one.
Still, MS claims the failure rate is around 3%, so that's pretty fricking improbable assuming that they're not lying...We're talking
If I were them, I'd start looking for an external factor. Does he live in an area with an unusually large number of electrical storms per year? Does he have bad wiring? Does he live in a really dusty environment? Is he a huge slob? Does he have the UPS guy from hell? Even if the failure rate on a 360 was 10% (which would be really hard to hide), the odds would still be 100,000,000 to 1 against getting 11 bad ones in a row...'Course they could be sending out refurbs to people who have problems, which very well may have a significantly higher fail rate...
Bah. Puppy needs more data.
That's where metamod comes in...If your posts are reasonable and yet get "trolled" or "flamebaited" then metamodders will generally catch it, and people whose mods get reversed a lot are less likely to get mod points.
I wonder if they check for serial abuse of the "Overrated" mod...Got a couple of guys who like to go through and "Overrated" my stuff a few days after the article is off the front page. Not sure what the hell is up with that, other than that they're clearly sensitive to metamod issues.
Either way, I'd be surprised if they could keep down the detractors; I always mod up people who cry schill with evidence, and you tend to get hordes of "Mod parent up!" posts if people agree with you and you're getting seriously downmodded...Slashdot isn't usually a good environment for censorship.