Interesting, you have something there. If Obama wants to keep the faith with us, he needs to 1) say "all right, there's no way in hell we're publicising the NSA Dirty Tricks Manual, deal," and 2) "Having protected our national security techniques, i will now take the lead in repealing this bogus immunity law and restore our mortally-wounded justice system to some small measure of health by restoring the constitutional process, so this never happens again."
From TFA:
The Justice Department said Friday that government agents monitored only communications in which "a participant was reasonably believed to be associated with al Qaeda or an affiliated terrorist organization." But proving that the surveillance program did not sweep in ordinary phone customers would require "disclosure of highly classified NSA intelligence sources and methods," the department said.
"We're not lying to you, and you have only the option of taking our word that our word is good."
No.
Their assertion is BS. They attempt to get you to believe that the only solution is to "disclose... methods," and having set that up, they knock it down with an emphatic "are you crazy?" And in that narrow scope, they are correct.
What they do not mention, and want you not to think about while they do their little dance and wave their arms screaming "LOOK HERE, NOT OVER THERE," is that the obvious solution of precedent is oversight by another arm of the government, or preferably multiple units. NSA/DoJ policing the NSA/DoJ with a "trust us" policy - while, remember, they are pushing to be the sole gatekeepers to the nation's CyberSecurity! - is just fucking stupid.
It's also not, you know, how our government was designed. A major goddammned point of this system was that there be oversight at the highest levels, ensuring that someone is keeping an eye on what the kids are up to - and that they are answerable for not just their methods, but their results.
Put it this way: is giving your teenager your car and credit card, and then paying absolutely no attention to what they do, the best way to make them responsible, effective people? Or will an isolated, sacrosanct NSA begin to really suck at what they NEED to be doing, while becoming very effective at snooping on people they have personal or institutional prejudice against?
You can laugh, but this needs - at *least* - congressional oversight and inquiry. And that laughter is telling. How well we're trained, that we take for granted our nation's top policymakers and oversight committees making huge wads of cash, while learning nothing about the subjects they have dominion over. It's time we started expecting them to earn their keep.
Obama has a prime opportunity here. This will show us if he really can "reach across the aisle" and address both security and privacy, or if he's just gonna take advantage of these tools of fascism while playing off that their existence is Bush's fault.
The President has stated that Lincoln was his hero. Well, Mr. President,
Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power.
-- Abraham Lincoln
Look at the "Eve Never Fades" trailer (halfway down this page).
That was made by a fan who, IIRC, was given a high-end rig to make it on, and i assume someone got the rights / permission from JunkieXL to use that song. I seem to remember the creator being someone who'd made a bunch of movies that impressed everyone, and was thusly equipped to make the trailer, but that's where my recall of the facts might get hazy.
Yah, i have to agree. By and large, the reason it hasn't happened IMHO is it would be footbullet to major badguy players; they're using their zombies to make money. They can't do that without an internets.
Anyone with the knowlege to wreck the net probably realizes they'd have not just the law, but the criminals after them as well. GLWT.
Well, that's what you get for listening to Archvillains.
In other news, there's a flickr user calling herself Jay Peg. Maybe just 'jaypeg.' There's also a racehorse named Jay Peg. I'm gonna put down the Google and back away slowly with my hands in the air now.
You present the second line as proof of the truth of the first; however, they are two unrelated statements.
In fact, I believe the first assertion could even be quantified among stations by a standard scale - but we'd all have to agree on the validity of the scale and its interpretation first, so GLWT.
Can we play "6 degrees" with manuals...? Like, how far can we link them, what kind of language coverage would we get, i wonder? That is a really cool and disturbing point you have there, Burdell...
"The 10,000 year library." That is exactly what I was thinking of, and that page will probably occupy me for quite some time now. I thank you; my productivity throws tomatoes at you:)
Fifty to ninety percent of the world's languages are predicted to disappear in the next century, many with little or no significant documentation.
That's my point, actually... the Stone was a lucky find. No one *knows* how to read it - it's not an active language, it isn't taught, we got lucky and found a concordance and re-learned it.
Therefore, instead of hoping the future is lucky enough to find an intact then-to-be-named Holy Eight-Track of Antoich, include a Rosetta Stone of sorts with all long-term data storage. Maybe it's more DNA than stonelike, recursive encoding, i dunno.
How many people could read the 'glyphs until the Stone was found? That seems like a problem to me:)
Interesting, TFA goes on about strategies for making sure stuff lasts. But he even touches on the more interesting facet of this briefly - no one can read the damn Hieroglyphs any more, so what does it matter that it lasted 4000 years?
What is more interesting to me is a way to cheaply, efficiently, include a sort of Rosetta Stone along with archival data meant for long-term storage. Hell, even the devices themselves... he talks at the end a bit about format issues, frex. Some kind of key to the interface or logic needed to reconstruct the method of reading the medium..? Anyone got a wax cylander lying around? If you ran across one, how long would it take you to be able to hear what was on it - and what're the odds of you damaging it in the process, especially if you had to dig up schematics and build a player yourself..?
No power utility has enough spare distribution transformers on hand to replace all of them after they go. They are usually built to order and take 12 months or more to produce.
They go boom, they get replaced or otherwise repaired.
"a few days" coupled with the knowlege that a localized event will be corrected is one thing.
Frying every transformer on the continent and taking months to replace them is another, i think.
I don't get the phrase "don't susbcribe to these scenarios." Do you mean you think it won't happen; that if it does happen, it won't matter; or something else entirely? I don't see TEOTWAWKI either, but i do see the potential for harm beyond minor inconvenience and some opportunistic looting, which is what we've experienced so far when our tech borks.
Blowing out communications and power for more than, oh, two weeks... you can get away with that kind of thing more easily as you constrict the area it occurs in. Across a nation? Across a continent..?
Of course most of us will survive, and most of the problems will be people's behaviour. But it would still be rather ugly, and if it can be planned for and mitigated without creating a new parasitic industry of panic, it should be.
if a news organization cannot survive in the market it doesn't deserve to exist.
Feels good to say, but their revenue is based on the ads they sell, not the quality of their product (reporting) or even volume (subscribers / readers). Ad revenue. That's all.
Everything else goes in the "news hole" - the industry term for the space left over after the ads are sold and placed.
Newspapers are dying on a slower form of the principle of the dotcom crash: you provide nothing i can't now get easier, and better, or never needed in the first place, and your ads require ACTUAL WORK to follow up on and can't be tracked, unlike click-through. Imagine, also, you had to throw your monitor away every time you finished reading the day's headlines:P. I'm sorry, welcome to a transitional economy. Grab your helmets; the impact is going to suck for lots of people, but newspapers are toast.
I'm right with you on the NYTimes Online thing, tho. That was a big WTF the first time i saw it, and i laughed too. Meh, maybe i misinterpreted your first line: not "a news organization," but "a medium?"
Guh, right. You are quite correct, i made it too broad. Posting at work and using a buzzword i like too much. Then again, you are also clearly posting at work yet caught that, so there goes my excuse:)
I still wonder if anyone's preemptively announced an intention to relax any restrictions in such a way, tho; even if they don't go as far as to say "screw it, it's yours, go crazy," which would be a better prereq for calling it abandonware.
As soon as the rabid "It's still DRM" crowd either
a) Get's over their kneejerk reaction
b) Get's ignored since they don't buy games anyway
c) Get's distracted by the next Sony DRM debacle
people will realize that this is exactly what the industry needs. MMO's don't have (much) of a piracy problem
i'm distracted by your superfluous single-quotes, actually,-)
That out of the way, i don't see a "rabid" reaction. I see a bunch of "Huh? How is a new way of restricting what i do with my purchase by screwing with the data on my hard drive not DRM?" which, frankly, deserves an equally rational answer.
What MMOs have is not piracy, but a massive RMT problem - which is too complex and offtopic to go in to here, and i'm not sure how it applies to this.
I don't see how anyone against the basic principles of DRM can "realize" that this is "exactly what the industry needs," as we've been mulling (and shouting, and hair-pulling) over DRM for some time now and this is the same but with a shiny pink ribbon on top. Your assertion that we don't buy games if we oppose DRM is strawman. What i buy are games without DRM; not quite the same. As for me personally, i will sometimes try a DRM'd game, quite a while after it comes out, usually in the bargain bin, if it has a good reputation and the game/DRM are not too hard to remove when i'm done with it.
Water company engineers spotted the object when they lifted up a fire hydrant cover during work on a street in Shoreditch, east London.
If it's the mass-produced replica pictured - does the goddamn thing look like an explosive device? Do you think maybe the word GRENADE on it had almost everything to do with this?
"spotted a cheap piece of crap and kicked it away as they got to work" would have been the events of the day, had that placard not been on it, i betcha. So some genius thought a bright gold beanbag with a silver cross and a plastic gem on it was a bomb, because it said HOLY BOMB on it.
Add to that years of pandering to public idiocy and paranoia, and you wonder if a city couldn't be shut down overnight by putting little post-its with the word BOMB on it all over the place. "Well, we can't take the chance! We have to assume it is!"
Bah, i'm not explaining this as clearly as i'd like. And maybe TFA doesn't fully explain the context, i grant you. Bottom line, i believe the only reason this happened is this very un-bomb-like object had the word GRENADE on it. -shudder-
Your name is quite ironic. Step back a sec and let's take a look at this:
Your question on Bush - well, that might be somewhat subjective, but you can easily judge that for yourself by looking around/., yeah?
I also see a really serious disconnect between the content of TFA and your doom-laden proclaimation of "typical posting... he's the same old boss." Yes, the dept. blurb is provocative. But it's, you know, not always the most serious part of the posting.
When "the other side," whomever you perceive them to be, close ranks; do not question the boss; blindly support; and generally don't watchdog their own: isn't that some of the crap we've all been screaming about for, um, ever? Yes, it's good to keep an eye on those who you feel are opposed to you. Y'know what, it's even more important to reality-check the ones who you put your hope in. And i think FOIA requests, frex, are well within the established interest zone of this site's denizens, innit? Or are you suggesting we just sit back and Trust Everything's Gonna Be Okay..? That's the path that leads to "America - love it or leave it!" T-shirts.
I worry when anyone takes criticism of a public figure too personally. And i feel, thus far, your worry is unwarranted:
Squirrely things have been noted in contrast to promises of transparency; pressure was applied; steps are being taken; watchdogs are being invited to participate.
While the meaning of this is obvious, i had never encountered it before, and did a quick google to see how widespread it was and maybe find an approximate age.
However, this worthy nerdly pursuit was cut off upon seeing the second Google hit is for some poor bastard on Facebook named Ian App. I'm going to go back to work now before my coworkers come over to see what all the noise is about:P
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting, you have something there. If Obama wants to keep the faith with us, he needs to 1) say "all right, there's no way in hell we're publicising the NSA Dirty Tricks Manual, deal," and 2) "Having protected our national security techniques, i will now take the lead in repealing this bogus immunity law and restore our mortally-wounded justice system to some small measure of health by restoring the constitutional process, so this never happens again."
From TFA:
The Justice Department said Friday that government agents monitored only communications in which "a participant was reasonably believed to be associated with al Qaeda or an affiliated terrorist organization." But proving that the surveillance program did not sweep in ordinary phone customers would require "disclosure of highly classified NSA intelligence sources and methods," the department said.
"We're not lying to you, and you have only the option of taking our word that our word is good."
No.
Their assertion is BS. They attempt to get you to believe that the only solution is to "disclose ... methods," and having set that up, they knock it down with an emphatic "are you crazy?" And in that narrow scope, they are correct.
What they do not mention, and want you not to think about while they do their little dance and wave their arms screaming "LOOK HERE, NOT OVER THERE," is that the obvious solution of precedent is oversight by another arm of the government, or preferably multiple units. NSA/DoJ policing the NSA/DoJ with a "trust us" policy - while, remember, they are pushing to be the sole gatekeepers to the nation's CyberSecurity! - is just fucking stupid.
It's also not, you know, how our government was designed. A major goddammned point of this system was that there be oversight at the highest levels, ensuring that someone is keeping an eye on what the kids are up to - and that they are answerable for not just their methods, but their results.
Put it this way: is giving your teenager your car and credit card, and then paying absolutely no attention to what they do, the best way to make them responsible, effective people? Or will an isolated, sacrosanct NSA begin to really suck at what they NEED to be doing, while becoming very effective at snooping on people they have personal or institutional prejudice against?
You can laugh, but this needs - at *least* - congressional oversight and inquiry. And that laughter is telling. How well we're trained, that we take for granted our nation's top policymakers and oversight committees making huge wads of cash, while learning nothing about the subjects they have dominion over. It's time we started expecting them to earn their keep.
Obama has a prime opportunity here. This will show us if he really can "reach across the aisle" and address both security and privacy, or if he's just gonna take advantage of these tools of fascism while playing off that their existence is Bush's fault.
The President has stated that Lincoln was his hero. Well, Mr. President,
Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power.
-- Abraham Lincoln
Look at the "Eve Never Fades" trailer (halfway down this page).
That was made by a fan who, IIRC, was given a high-end rig to make it on, and i assume someone got the rights / permission from JunkieXL to use that song. I seem to remember the creator being someone who'd made a bunch of movies that impressed everyone, and was thusly equipped to make the trailer, but that's where my recall of the facts might get hazy.
How's your Swedish gramper? /getcoat
Yah, i have to agree. By and large, the reason it hasn't happened IMHO is it would be footbullet to major badguy players; they're using their zombies to make money. They can't do that without an internets.
Anyone with the knowlege to wreck the net probably realizes they'd have not just the law, but the criminals after them as well. GLWT.
Well, that's what you get for listening to Archvillains.
In other news, there's a flickr user calling herself Jay Peg. Maybe just 'jaypeg.' There's also a racehorse named Jay Peg. I'm gonna put down the Google and back away slowly with my hands in the air now.
No more biased than any of the other stations.
They all have agendas.
You present the second line as proof of the truth of the first; however, they are two unrelated statements.
In fact, I believe the first assertion could even be quantified among stations by a standard scale - but we'd all have to agree on the validity of the scale and its interpretation first, so GLWT.
Can we play "6 degrees" with manuals...? Like, how far can we link them, what kind of language coverage would we get, i wonder? That is a really cool and disturbing point you have there, Burdell...
"The 10,000 year library." That is exactly what I was thinking of, and that page will probably occupy me for quite some time now. I thank you; my productivity throws tomatoes at you :)
Fifty to ninety percent of the world's languages are predicted to disappear in the next century, many with little or no significant documentation.
... good heavens.
That's my point, actually... the Stone was a lucky find. No one *knows* how to read it - it's not an active language, it isn't taught, we got lucky and found a concordance and re-learned it.
Therefore, instead of hoping the future is lucky enough to find an intact then-to-be-named Holy Eight-Track of Antoich, include a Rosetta Stone of sorts with all long-term data storage. Maybe it's more DNA than stonelike, recursive encoding, i dunno.
How many people could read the 'glyphs until the Stone was found? That seems like a problem to me :)
Interesting, TFA goes on about strategies for making sure stuff lasts. But he even touches on the more interesting facet of this briefly - no one can read the damn Hieroglyphs any more, so what does it matter that it lasted 4000 years?
What is more interesting to me is a way to cheaply, efficiently, include a sort of Rosetta Stone along with archival data meant for long-term storage. Hell, even the devices themselves... he talks at the end a bit about format issues, frex. Some kind of key to the interface or logic needed to reconstruct the method of reading the medium..? Anyone got a wax cylander lying around? If you ran across one, how long would it take you to be able to hear what was on it - and what're the odds of you damaging it in the process, especially if you had to dig up schematics and build a player yourself..?
No power utility has enough spare distribution transformers on hand to replace all of them after they go. They are usually built to order and take 12 months or more to produce.
They go boom, they get replaced or otherwise repaired.
Are you just trolling now, or what?
"a few days" coupled with the knowlege that a localized event will be corrected is one thing.
Frying every transformer on the continent and taking months to replace them is another, i think.
I don't get the phrase "don't susbcribe to these scenarios." Do you mean you think it won't happen; that if it does happen, it won't matter; or something else entirely? I don't see TEOTWAWKI either, but i do see the potential for harm beyond minor inconvenience and some opportunistic looting, which is what we've experienced so far when our tech borks.
Blowing out communications and power for more than, oh, two weeks... you can get away with that kind of thing more easily as you constrict the area it occurs in. Across a nation? Across a continent..?
Of course most of us will survive, and most of the problems will be people's behaviour. But it would still be rather ugly, and if it can be planned for and mitigated without creating a new parasitic industry of panic, it should be.
the CueCat people are howling.
if a news organization cannot survive in the market it doesn't deserve to exist.
Feels good to say, but their revenue is based on the ads they sell, not the quality of their product (reporting) or even volume (subscribers / readers). Ad revenue. That's all.
Everything else goes in the "news hole" - the industry term for the space left over after the ads are sold and placed.
Newspapers are dying on a slower form of the principle of the dotcom crash: you provide nothing i can't now get easier, and better, or never needed in the first place, and your ads require ACTUAL WORK to follow up on and can't be tracked, unlike click-through. Imagine, also, you had to throw your monitor away every time you finished reading the day's headlines :P. I'm sorry, welcome to a transitional economy. Grab your helmets; the impact is going to suck for lots of people, but newspapers are toast.
I'm right with you on the NYTimes Online thing, tho. That was a big WTF the first time i saw it, and i laughed too. Meh, maybe i misinterpreted your first line: not "a news organization," but "a medium?"
"Richard at work" beat you there by a day and a half in his reply already. Look down :)
but i plan on losing weight this summer.
Sorry, mister. I'll get off your lawn now.
Guh, right. You are quite correct, i made it too broad. Posting at work and using a buzzword i like too much. Then again, you are also clearly posting at work yet caught that, so there goes my excuse :)
I still wonder if anyone's preemptively announced an intention to relax any restrictions in such a way, tho; even if they don't go as far as to say "screw it, it's yours, go crazy," which would be a better prereq for calling it abandonware.
if Steam's servers are taken offline, access controls will be removed.
Very interesting. Has any other game company announced ahead of time that they would agree they are abandonware if they go belly-up..?
As soon as the rabid "It's still DRM" crowd either
a) Get's over their kneejerk reaction
b) Get's ignored since they don't buy games anyway
c) Get's distracted by the next Sony DRM debacle
people will realize that this is exactly what the industry needs. MMO's don't have (much) of a piracy problem
i'm distracted by your superfluous single-quotes, actually ,-)
That out of the way, i don't see a "rabid" reaction. I see a bunch of "Huh? How is a new way of restricting what i do with my purchase by screwing with the data on my hard drive not DRM?" which, frankly, deserves an equally rational answer.
What MMOs have is not piracy, but a massive RMT problem - which is too complex and offtopic to go in to here, and i'm not sure how it applies to this.
I don't see how anyone against the basic principles of DRM can "realize" that this is "exactly what the industry needs," as we've been mulling (and shouting, and hair-pulling) over DRM for some time now and this is the same but with a shiny pink ribbon on top. Your assertion that we don't buy games if we oppose DRM is strawman. What i buy are games without DRM; not quite the same. As for me personally, i will sometimes try a DRM'd game, quite a while after it comes out, usually in the bargain bin, if it has a good reputation and the game/DRM are not too hard to remove when i'm done with it.
The marketing sense.
We have a winner!
But what if he wants to go to law school? Think of the children!!
Hmmm. From TFA:
Water company engineers spotted the object when they lifted up a fire hydrant cover during work on a street in Shoreditch, east London.
If it's the mass-produced replica pictured - does the goddamn thing look like an explosive device? Do you think maybe the word GRENADE on it had almost everything to do with this?
"spotted a cheap piece of crap and kicked it away as they got to work" would have been the events of the day, had that placard not been on it, i betcha. So some genius thought a bright gold beanbag with a silver cross and a plastic gem on it was a bomb, because it said HOLY BOMB on it.
Add to that years of pandering to public idiocy and paranoia, and you wonder if a city couldn't be shut down overnight by putting little post-its with the word BOMB on it all over the place. "Well, we can't take the chance! We have to assume it is!"
Bah, i'm not explaining this as clearly as i'd like. And maybe TFA doesn't fully explain the context, i grant you. Bottom line, i believe the only reason this happened is this very un-bomb-like object had the word GRENADE on it. -shudder-
Your name is quite ironic. Step back a sec and let's take a look at this:
Your question on Bush - well, that might be somewhat subjective, but you can easily judge that for yourself by looking around /., yeah?
I also see a really serious disconnect between the content of TFA and your doom-laden proclaimation of "typical posting ... he's the same old boss." Yes, the dept. blurb is provocative. But it's, you know, not always the most serious part of the posting.
When "the other side," whomever you perceive them to be, close ranks; do not question the boss; blindly support; and generally don't watchdog their own: isn't that some of the crap we've all been screaming about for, um, ever? Yes, it's good to keep an eye on those who you feel are opposed to you. Y'know what, it's even more important to reality-check the ones who you put your hope in. And i think FOIA requests, frex, are well within the established interest zone of this site's denizens, innit? Or are you suggesting we just sit back and Trust Everything's Gonna Be Okay..? That's the path that leads to "America - love it or leave it!" T-shirts.
I worry when anyone takes criticism of a public figure too personally. And i feel, thus far, your worry is unwarranted:
Squirrely things have been noted in contrast to promises of transparency; pressure was applied; steps are being taken; watchdogs are being invited to participate.
Isn't that how it's supposed to happen?
IANAPP
While the meaning of this is obvious, i had never encountered it before, and did a quick google to see how widespread it was and maybe find an approximate age.
However, this worthy nerdly pursuit was cut off upon seeing the second Google hit is for some poor bastard on Facebook named Ian App. I'm going to go back to work now before my coworkers come over to see what all the noise is about :P