Looks too efficient for TSA, their dream is a luggage shredder instead of a x-ray scanner, and a wipeout style obstacle course(that you have to run naked, with live streams to the public internet filming it all) with blaring sirens and powertripping functionaries with bullwhips lining the course to drive the herds onwards.
Contracted at a cost of $12 billions, annually.
Nah, you're confusing management and the rank and file. Your typical TSO's fantasy looks more like this:
On Monday Bob gets a promotion, with a brand new uniform with a designer jacket, cooler boots and shades, and just loaded with ribbons and medals and bangles and crap, and of course there are all kinds of speeches and celebration. Then Tuesday and Wednesday Bob does some security training which would, naturally, include a reflexive fire course, advanced driver's course, and a computer hacking course. Bob arrives at the airport for work Thursday, and spends the morning talking to his friends, and walking around dispensing wisdom and guidance to the clueless herds. He arrives at a terminal and checks bags for a few minutes, until some suspicious individual just doesn't look right... All the machines pass him, but Bob has a gut feeling that this individual is suspicious, and then he notices a bulge and says, "Sir... I just need... to check that bag one more time." Naturally, the suspicious individual knows he's caught, tries to run for it, and Bob takes him out with a few well-placed kung fu moves. The rest of Thursday is spent with Bob assisting a joint federal taskforce in taking down the terrorist organization he's just uncovered.
Just so you know, some folks who are far more technologically advanced than us have worked out a solution to this problem. That's why the Visitors have settled on the standard anal implant interface.
It really is enough. No one, not even the NSA or Chinese hackers, is going to run your goddamned hard drives through an electron microscope and try to reconstruct a spreadsheet based on the drive head's quantum wobbliness. It's just fucking impossible.
And even if the drive you recovered a few bad sectors from originated in a highly secure military compound, sure, there's some sensitive documents in there. But it's amidst the powerpoint presentation of funny pictures someone downloaded from the Internet, the endless videos of training events, people's MP3 collections, or one of one thousands copies of the 5 MB Word document announcing the Thanksgiving potluck. All examples are based on actual files found / emails received during my time at Fort Polk, LA. I wasn't intel, but I knew plenty of people who were, and they're hardly any more computer literate than people working on unclassified stuff.
Government and corporate employees routinely lose entire fucking laptops. Bradley Manning carried entire DVDs that he copied off the shared drive. Soldiers blab about their missions on Facebook, Twitter, Skype, etc. Spy agencies have more data than they know what to do with. So why would any spy agency set up a multi-tens of millions of dollars scanner to try to recover a few sectors from drives that, in the best possible scenario, would have a completely context-less fragment of intel that is years old?
I wanna know my link to Kevin Bacon. Do you think FB would tell all of us how we get back to him?
Facebook can't, because ever since the introduction of CCTV and police cruiser dashboard cams, they've had to rename it the Six Degrees of Lindsey Lohan.
Actually, the word possessor was built around that dialog. It could spell check file names, different paragraphs were different files, and you could print your whole file system.
It would have been revolutionary. But MS screwed it up!
I never knew Utah was such a hotbed of innovation. If only!
The project wasn't completed by a government developer. It was done by a contractor, because everybody knows that the government is inefficient and costs a lot of money.
So they demand that they outsource it to the private sector, which means all kinds of extra overhead. Private contractors, being driven by the profit motive, will turn in crappy work unless you spend huge amounts of effort clarifying precisely what's required, followed by meetings to ensure that they have done it. Just the product spec meeting cost more than the time spent actually doing it. All because the Government is Bad.
So the next time, they're going to install even more extra levels of control, thus raising the costs. The alternative, decreasing the right-wing screech machine so that the government could just let some in-house developer bang out an app for a request that somebody needs, won't even be considered as an option.
Speaking as someone who works at a contracting firm: It's not simply that the government is inefficient. It's that they don't have the expertise and can't recruit or retain the expertise.
They're actually acutely aware that they're spending other people's money, and as such they have tons of controls to prevent wasting money, which usually means they that are highly risk-averse. So if you're a professional looking to do cutting edge stuff, you simply don't go into the government. Further, everything is based on rank and seniority, so if you're a young wunderkind, you're not going to be rewarded for your talents. Worse, you're going to have to take direction from your mediocre boss who, even if he recognizes your talent, can't reward you.
Private contractors are usually people like me who were in the government (or military, in my case) and still want to make a difference by working as closely as they can. If there were a way I could do what I'm doing now and still be in the Army (or, hell, I'd go to the dark side and join the Air Force), I'd do it. But I would have had to wait 10 years before I was senior enough to get to choose what I wanted to do. Instead, I get out, and within a few months I'm doing exactly what I want and what I'm good at.
All because the Government is Bad.
Really, the only "bad" party here is you. You're self-righteousness is matched only by your ignorance and stupidity: you've clearly never actually worked with the government, you have no idea what the problems are, and yet you're ready to lay blame and insult the men and women who are seriously committed to making our government work. Most of the contractors working for the government are ex-military or ex-government themselves, but you dismiss them as some idiotic caricature of Capitalists Motivated By Greed. Fuck you, buddy.
"The company said Gates duped it into thinking he would include its WordPerfect writing program in the new Windows system then backed out because he feared it was too good."
The whole story seems to be about the namespace extensions thing. So where is Novell claiming that MS agreed to bundle WordPerfect with Windows?
Namespace extensions are things that let you mess with Windows Explorer and add your own contextual menus and folder layout. How could that sink a word processor? From the user's point of view, are they really not going to buy the word processor because they can't initiate feature X from explorer? I don't even know of any word processor that even has a feature like that, and it's been 15 years since Windows 95 came out.
I don't doubt that MS over-promised on what features the OS would deliver, given that they've done that with every OS release I can recall, but to say that they shelved a viable feature to sink Novell, and that it was actually the cause of Novell going under is a real stretch.
A year or more ago, I commented that I didn't think the Tea Party would have a long-term affect because they weren't motivated enough to burn down an ROTC building nor were the police scared enough of them to hit them with tear gas....
The Occupy movement is going to leave a mark upon this country because they are willing to have skin in the game.
Remind me, which party gained control of the House and almost took the Senate in the 2010 elections? And which party gained seats in the elections that happened a few weeks ago?
In what way is OWS not part of the 99%? You're claiming the hippies are the top 1% earners in America?
wut?
Fortunately, since you have to fill out detailed information when you're arrested, and since OWS is basically a crime wave, we've got plenty of data. Turns out they're significantly wealthier, whiter and more educated than the average American. source.
That's because 500 military personnel deaths would be a death rate of ~1:3000 (~1.5 million active personnel) while the driving deaths are ~1:7000 (about 240 million licensed drivers). So since one rate is more than double the other it's not surprising one gets more outrage.
I think 1.5 million is counting all the reserves... there are more like 600,000 active duty, and of those, only about 60 to 100 thousand are actually combat personnel, and they take the brunt of the casualties, naturally. So the death rate for ground pounders would be more like ~1:200.
Simple fact is, before autonomous cars will really become commercially viable, a lot of laws have to change, mainly around liability of the manufacturer since they're taking on more responsibility. Most likely though, the operator will retain the majority of the liability, and we're unlikely to see in our lifetimes a car where you can punch in a destination and take a nap. It'll be more like an advanced cruise control. The operator still has total ability to control, is required to keep hands on the wheel and attention on the road at all times, and is responsible for intervening in the case of an emergency.
Since we're doing predictions, I'm going to predict a future headline:
"Study shows operator intervention responsible for causing or exacerbating majority of autonomous vehicle accidents."
We need an encryption package that has *two* passwords:
One normal one that decrypts as usual;
A second one that formats the disk and installs a standard version of Windows
You use password #1, but if arrested you give up password #2.
That's brilliant, but how do you get the police to use this software? Especially after they've pulled the drive out and plugged it into their forensics kit?
Please see this video. Long story short, $443 million isn't a lot of money in the grand scheme of things. Now, $70 billion in tax cuts for the rich? Well, we're starting to talk some real money. The cost of the Iraq war? Yeah, about that...
66% of federal outlays are direct payments to individuals... not tax cuts, not war, we're putting our children in debt writing ourselves checks.
If it were a Republican President, nobody would mention it, and Fox News would scream that anybody daring to question it was a Communist, a Traitor and hated Jesus who called upon us to heal the Lepers!
Actually, the closest anyone has come to saying stuff like that would be Joe Biden calling the Tea Party terrorists, or good old Jimmy Hoffa declaring war on them, but thanks for playing.
Real trolling would be pointing out that the whole premise of universal healthcare is that the collective wisdom of the government can make better decisions about how to spend money on health than individuals can. Yet here we have the same government blowing a billion dollars on a vaccine for a disease that doesn't exist any more. Meanwhile, people are suffering and dying because the FDA is holding up lifesaving experimental medicine.
(BTW I've been watching since The Doctor regenerated as Tom Baker. The first time. Any geek who didn't want Leela is lying.)
The hot original series companions were plenty hot, Leela obviously, but both Romanas were beautiful, and Perry was hot even in spite of her awful attempt at an American accent.
I think you've really got to watch the reboot as an entirely new production. Sure, it continues with a few iconic characters, but beyond that, it just doesn't make sense. The romance and attachments are a good example: in the old series, when the Doctor left an assistant, that was it, they just went back to their old lives. In the new series, he comes back to Sarah Jane, and she almost hysterical upon seeing him. There can't be any explanation that really makes sense to explain why people never cared in the old series but they do now.
And for all the faults of the new writing, the old writing could be *really* bad at times. I don't miss lame plot devices like mines that turned people into trees, which lead to the Master exclaiming, "ah, I can see there are going to be a lot of trees." And the new series' romance can be a bit over the top, but it's still far more likable than, say, the unbearable awkwardness of Star Trek romance.
Legalize drugs, and let their income of blood money vanish.
How would legalizing drugs cut into their profits?
If you increase supply while demand stays the same, the price-point equilibrium drops. But they'll still have many costs that will be hard to get rid of, such as guns, people to fire the guns, networks of bribery, all the elaborate systems for bypassing detection, etc.
They have extremely inefficient operations with rampant corruption that are profitable because of the incredibly high prices. Compare that to a typical US drug company that can make a profit off something as cheap as aspirin.
Yes, all of this is essentially happening because governments have been tampering with markets.
FTFA: "I COULD have contested the legality of the investigation and gotten a lawyer. But I thought that would make things messier. It was clear who had the power in this situation."
No, American police, whether FBI or state or local, have no power unless you let them interrogate you without a lawyer. This isn't Europe where police investigations start with a beating: you just have to ask, politely, for a lawyer, and you hold all the cards.
He gave them all the power. Was he justifiably scared? Sure, I can completely understand that. He probably wasn't prepared to be grilled.
But this is all the preparation anyone needs: just remember to say, "I'd be happy to help you, officer, but to answer any questions I'll need a lawyer."
In case you're wondering when the zombie thing is going to end, here's the lifecycle of stupid trends.
Black people start doing it. Black people stop doing it because it's not cool any more. White kids start doing it. It becomes an Internet meme. White kids stop doing it. The media picks it up and doesn't get it. White kids' parents start doing it. People write books about it. Parents stop doing it after their kids tell them how embarrassing it is. The government and corporate PR start doing it... <=== we are here And then stop when someone sues them. It's filed away in a historical record of memes. People who don't realize they're 20 years late to the party are still trying to do it.
Slashdot Mirror
Looks too efficient for TSA, their dream is a luggage shredder instead of a x-ray scanner, and a wipeout style obstacle course(that you have to run naked, with live streams to the public internet filming it all) with blaring sirens and powertripping functionaries with bullwhips lining the course to drive the herds onwards.
Contracted at a cost of $12 billions, annually.
Nah, you're confusing management and the rank and file. Your typical TSO's fantasy looks more like this:
On Monday Bob gets a promotion, with a brand new uniform with a designer jacket, cooler boots and shades, and just loaded with ribbons and medals and bangles and crap, and of course there are all kinds of speeches and celebration. Then Tuesday and Wednesday Bob does some security training which would, naturally, include a reflexive fire course, advanced driver's course, and a computer hacking course. Bob arrives at the airport for work Thursday, and spends the morning talking to his friends, and walking around dispensing wisdom and guidance to the clueless herds. He arrives at a terminal and checks bags for a few minutes, until some suspicious individual just doesn't look right... All the machines pass him, but Bob has a gut feeling that this individual is suspicious, and then he notices a bulge and says, "Sir... I just need... to check that bag one more time." Naturally, the suspicious individual knows he's caught, tries to run for it, and Bob takes him out with a few well-placed kung fu moves. The rest of Thursday is spent with Bob assisting a joint federal taskforce in taking down the terrorist organization he's just uncovered.
And, of course, Bob doesn't work Fridays.
Just so you know, some folks who are far more technologically advanced than us have worked out a solution to this problem. That's why the Visitors have settled on the standard anal implant interface.
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdx
is free, faster, and just as good.
FTFY.
It really is enough. No one, not even the NSA or Chinese hackers, is going to run your goddamned hard drives through an electron microscope and try to reconstruct a spreadsheet based on the drive head's quantum wobbliness. It's just fucking impossible.
And even if the drive you recovered a few bad sectors from originated in a highly secure military compound, sure, there's some sensitive documents in there. But it's amidst the powerpoint presentation of funny pictures someone downloaded from the Internet, the endless videos of training events, people's MP3 collections, or one of one thousands copies of the 5 MB Word document announcing the Thanksgiving potluck. All examples are based on actual files found / emails received during my time at Fort Polk, LA. I wasn't intel, but I knew plenty of people who were, and they're hardly any more computer literate than people working on unclassified stuff.
Government and corporate employees routinely lose entire fucking laptops. Bradley Manning carried entire DVDs that he copied off the shared drive. Soldiers blab about their missions on Facebook, Twitter, Skype, etc. Spy agencies have more data than they know what to do with. So why would any spy agency set up a multi-tens of millions of dollars scanner to try to recover a few sectors from drives that, in the best possible scenario, would have a completely context-less fragment of intel that is years old?
I wanna know my link to Kevin Bacon. Do you think FB would tell all of us how we get back to him?
Facebook can't, because ever since the introduction of CCTV and police cruiser dashboard cams, they've had to rename it the Six Degrees of Lindsey Lohan.
Turns out they're significantly wealthier, whiter and more educated than the average American.
Do you understand percentages? Above average is still included in 99% ...
I do, and the word you're looking for is "percentiles," but thanks for playing.
just rewrite the save and load dialogs
Actually, the word possessor was built around that dialog. It could spell check file names, different paragraphs were different files, and you could print your whole file system.
It would have been revolutionary. But MS screwed it up!
I never knew Utah was such a hotbed of innovation. If only!
The project wasn't completed by a government developer. It was done by a contractor, because everybody knows that the government is inefficient and costs a lot of money.
So they demand that they outsource it to the private sector, which means all kinds of extra overhead. Private contractors, being driven by the profit motive, will turn in crappy work unless you spend huge amounts of effort clarifying precisely what's required, followed by meetings to ensure that they have done it. Just the product spec meeting cost more than the time spent actually doing it. All because the Government is Bad.
So the next time, they're going to install even more extra levels of control, thus raising the costs. The alternative, decreasing the right-wing screech machine so that the government could just let some in-house developer bang out an app for a request that somebody needs, won't even be considered as an option.
Speaking as someone who works at a contracting firm: It's not simply that the government is inefficient. It's that they don't have the expertise and can't recruit or retain the expertise.
They're actually acutely aware that they're spending other people's money, and as such they have tons of controls to prevent wasting money, which usually means they that are highly risk-averse. So if you're a professional looking to do cutting edge stuff, you simply don't go into the government. Further, everything is based on rank and seniority, so if you're a young wunderkind, you're not going to be rewarded for your talents. Worse, you're going to have to take direction from your mediocre boss who, even if he recognizes your talent, can't reward you.
Private contractors are usually people like me who were in the government (or military, in my case) and still want to make a difference by working as closely as they can. If there were a way I could do what I'm doing now and still be in the Army (or, hell, I'd go to the dark side and join the Air Force), I'd do it. But I would have had to wait 10 years before I was senior enough to get to choose what I wanted to do. Instead, I get out, and within a few months I'm doing exactly what I want and what I'm good at.
All because the Government is Bad.
Really, the only "bad" party here is you. You're self-righteousness is matched only by your ignorance and stupidity: you've clearly never actually worked with the government, you have no idea what the problems are, and yet you're ready to lay blame and insult the men and women who are seriously committed to making our government work. Most of the contractors working for the government are ex-military or ex-government themselves, but you dismiss them as some idiotic caricature of Capitalists Motivated By Greed. Fuck you, buddy.
"The company said Gates duped it into thinking he would include its WordPerfect writing program in the new Windows system then backed out because he feared it was too good."
The whole story seems to be about the namespace extensions thing. So where is Novell claiming that MS agreed to bundle WordPerfect with Windows?
Namespace extensions are things that let you mess with Windows Explorer and add your own contextual menus and folder layout. How could that sink a word processor? From the user's point of view, are they really not going to buy the word processor because they can't initiate feature X from explorer? I don't even know of any word processor that even has a feature like that, and it's been 15 years since Windows 95 came out.
I don't doubt that MS over-promised on what features the OS would deliver, given that they've done that with every OS release I can recall, but to say that they shelved a viable feature to sink Novell, and that it was actually the cause of Novell going under is a real stretch.
A year or more ago, I commented that I didn't think the Tea Party would have a long-term affect because they weren't motivated enough to burn down an ROTC building nor were the police scared enough of them to hit them with tear gas. ...
The Occupy movement is going to leave a mark upon this country because they are willing to have skin in the game.
Remind me, which party gained control of the House and almost took the Senate in the 2010 elections? And which party gained seats in the elections that happened a few weeks ago?
In what way is OWS not part of the 99%? You're claiming the hippies are the top 1% earners in America?
wut?
Fortunately, since you have to fill out detailed information when you're arrested, and since OWS is basically a crime wave, we've got plenty of data. Turns out they're significantly wealthier, whiter and more educated than the average American. source.
That's because 500 military personnel deaths would be a death rate of ~1:3000 (~1.5 million active personnel) while the driving deaths are ~1:7000 (about 240 million licensed drivers). So since one rate is more than double the other it's not surprising one gets more outrage.
I think 1.5 million is counting all the reserves... there are more like 600,000 active duty, and of those, only about 60 to 100 thousand are actually combat personnel, and they take the brunt of the casualties, naturally. So the death rate for ground pounders would be more like ~1:200.
Simple fact is, before autonomous cars will really become commercially viable, a lot of laws have to change, mainly around liability of the manufacturer since they're taking on more responsibility. Most likely though, the operator will retain the majority of the liability, and we're unlikely to see in our lifetimes a car where you can punch in a destination and take a nap. It'll be more like an advanced cruise control. The operator still has total ability to control, is required to keep hands on the wheel and attention on the road at all times, and is responsible for intervening in the case of an emergency.
Since we're doing predictions, I'm going to predict a future headline:
"Study shows operator intervention responsible for causing or exacerbating majority of autonomous vehicle accidents."
There are many truly funny web comics out there, written by very bright people who combine intellect and artistic skill in a remarkable way.
Yeah, and why ride horses when there are all those unicorns?
We need an encryption package that has *two* passwords:
You use password #1, but if arrested you give up password #2.
That's brilliant, but how do you get the police to use this software? Especially after they've pulled the drive out and plugged it into their forensics kit?
Please see this video. Long story short, $443 million isn't a lot of money in the grand scheme of things. Now, $70 billion in tax cuts for the rich? Well, we're starting to talk some real money. The cost of the Iraq war? Yeah, about that...
66% of federal outlays are direct payments to individuals... not tax cuts, not war, we're putting our children in debt writing ourselves checks.
If it were a Republican President, nobody would mention it, and Fox News would scream that anybody daring to question it was a Communist, a Traitor and hated Jesus who called upon us to heal the Lepers!
Actually, the closest anyone has come to saying stuff like that would be Joe Biden calling the Tea Party terrorists, or good old Jimmy Hoffa declaring war on them, but thanks for playing.
You're just being partisan.
Real trolling would be pointing out that the whole premise of universal healthcare is that the collective wisdom of the government can make better decisions about how to spend money on health than individuals can. Yet here we have the same government blowing a billion dollars on a vaccine for a disease that doesn't exist any more. Meanwhile, people are suffering and dying because the FDA is holding up lifesaving experimental medicine.
(BTW I've been watching since The Doctor regenerated as Tom Baker. The first time. Any geek who didn't want Leela is lying.)
The hot original series companions were plenty hot, Leela obviously, but both Romanas were beautiful, and Perry was hot even in spite of her awful attempt at an American accent.
I think you've really got to watch the reboot as an entirely new production. Sure, it continues with a few iconic characters, but beyond that, it just doesn't make sense. The romance and attachments are a good example: in the old series, when the Doctor left an assistant, that was it, they just went back to their old lives. In the new series, he comes back to Sarah Jane, and she almost hysterical upon seeing him. There can't be any explanation that really makes sense to explain why people never cared in the old series but they do now.
And for all the faults of the new writing, the old writing could be *really* bad at times. I don't miss lame plot devices like mines that turned people into trees, which lead to the Master exclaiming, "ah, I can see there are going to be a lot of trees." And the new series' romance can be a bit over the top, but it's still far more likable than, say, the unbearable awkwardness of Star Trek romance.
Well you get what you paid for.... Oh that's right, you didn't pay the editors anything.
I'm pretty sure all three of /.'s paid subscribers would beg to differ.
Legalize drugs, and let their income of blood money vanish.
How would legalizing drugs cut into their profits?
If you increase supply while demand stays the same, the price-point equilibrium drops. But they'll still have many costs that will be hard to get rid of, such as guns, people to fire the guns, networks of bribery, all the elaborate systems for bypassing detection, etc.
They have extremely inefficient operations with rampant corruption that are profitable because of the incredibly high prices. Compare that to a typical US drug company that can make a profit off something as cheap as aspirin.
Yes, all of this is essentially happening because governments have been tampering with markets.
How is USAA's OFX support?
FTFA:
"I COULD have contested the legality of the investigation and gotten a lawyer. But I thought that would make things messier. It was clear who had the power in this situation."
No, American police, whether FBI or state or local, have no power unless you let them interrogate you without a lawyer. This isn't Europe where police investigations start with a beating: you just have to ask, politely, for a lawyer, and you hold all the cards.
He gave them all the power. Was he justifiably scared? Sure, I can completely understand that. He probably wasn't prepared to be grilled.
But this is all the preparation anyone needs: just remember to say, "I'd be happy to help you, officer, but to answer any questions I'll need a lawyer."
In case you're wondering when the zombie thing is going to end, here's the lifecycle of stupid trends.
Black people start doing it.
Black people stop doing it because it's not cool any more.
White kids start doing it.
It becomes an Internet meme.
White kids stop doing it.
The media picks it up and doesn't get it.
White kids' parents start doing it.
People write books about it.
Parents stop doing it after their kids tell them how embarrassing it is.
The government and corporate PR start doing it... <=== we are here
And then stop when someone sues them.
It's filed away in a historical record of memes.
People who don't realize they're 20 years late to the party are still trying to do it.
I had no idea he had died. RIP. (November can't come soon enough!)