ntivirus is for checking that executables and libraries are free of malicious code. I just cannot possibly fathom why an executable or library could be running on a server if nobody had checked it beforehand.
. You are making assumptions about things you don't and can't know. Is the a vulnerability in you web application that lets someone put a file? Could they then get some server side processing to happen on that file with another crafted URL?
As much as we try to prevent them these things happen. Unless you as an admin are also auditing the source code to every server process you run; its entirely possible your box will be pwnd due to the mistakes of others.
To say nothing of your own mistakes. AV on servers do make sense. Its part of defense in depth. You are correct job one is do everything you can think of to keep malicious code off the sever. Its still a good idea to have an AV scanner there to catch what you did not think of. None of us or infallible.
That makes no attempt to control for any number of other factors. Its not scientific at all. There are any number of social difference between the US and those other countries that may impact homicide rates. Your own link points out we are pretty average in terms of other crimes. You expect us to just accept that all these people using guns to kill each other would just decide to stay home if they had to stab on another instead. Bullshit.
You don't know anything based on those numbers. You have at most an observation and a hypothesis that the availability of firearms may explain the increased homicide rates. There is nothing rising to the level of proof that we have fewer homicides in the USA with more restricted gun rights. There is even less evidence to support we would have few mass homicides.
I think that is the saddest part of the entire thing. All the evidence for gun control is anecdotal. Some of the recent mass shootings have been tragic for those involved but they simply should not rise to the scale of a national tragedy. Statistically you are at almost not risk of being killed in a mass shooting. Infringing our second amendment rights is for not.
This latest anecdote should show that a deranged individual or group that wants to hurt a bunch of people can find a away; in an even moderately free society. Had these things been a few feet off the ground it would have been scores killed and a few just injured rather than the other way around.
The issue we should be focusing on is why are people choosing to become mass murders not how. How isn't the issue you can never address all the hows. Dealing only with the how won't make people safer and it will limit freedoms; dealing with why might actually make people safer and does not necessarily mean limiting freedoms.
post-WWII data for countries that had a high debt load and high growth
It would be hard to not have had high growth after WWII for most of Europe. Given most of those economies had been pounded into next to nothing by the war. If you have a GDP of $1 in 1945 and $2 in 1946, why that is 100% year over year growth!
Next debt load and austerity are not the same thing. The UK had a high debt load post WWII and was also rationing food. So it had high debt AND austerity. Using debt to invest in critical infrastructure like roads and basic sanitation for example you don't have or is no longer workable, and perhaps providing minimal nutrition to the needy is an entirely different proposition than making sure every dope who masters long division gets to hang out for four years at University.
Public debt is not always bad when there is clear ROI on where the revenues for its issuance are being directed. Debt should not be used to fund blue sky efforts, nor should it be used to provide comfort. If 'austerity' today had any relationship what what it meant in the 1940s-1950s than I might be included to agree it would be going to far for the present situation to justify, but as its used today it might as well just be a synonym for 'waste'.
My point was assuming 386 enhanced mode was enabled and enhanced disk I/O was enabled, and it should have been on most i386 machines. Windows pretty much did everything it needed to do with the hardware directly. Did it use some DOS sys calls yes, but it also did its own thing for the most part. Its that fact that DOS remained resident in memory and Windows continued to call some DOS routines that makes DOS 'a little more than a boot loader' in the case of running Windows 3, not its command line. GRUB and Lilo have command lines but your would not hesitate to call them boot loaders.
Windows 3.x was certainly more than an 'application' running on top of DOS. Windows did its own disk I/O on i386 hardware, its own memory management, its own task scheduling, its own video etc. It did what an OS does and shared that hardware and furnished higher level SYS and API calls to applications. DOS was hardly more than a boot loader for Windows 3.x It just happens that windows preserved the environment and allowed you to return to it.
Its a bit of matter of semantics and what definitions of things you like to use; but Windows 3 was not just an 'Application' in the modern user of the term, nor was it quite an OS.
See now its that kinda thinking that leads to AA's entire fleet being grounded. I mean seriously you comment is a single point of failure. What if I'd scrolled past it? What is slashdot's web server failed to post your form post?
You single comment is just the sorta cowboy IT work that causes these disasters.
That is true and it isn't. Microsoft has in the past put lots of effort into backward compatibility. They have gone as far as putting special cases in the memory allocation scheme win95 used to accommodate the behavior of specific DOS binaries.
Microsoft's problems is IMHO is they are trying to segment the market to much. Yes there is some price discrimination to be done. Home vs Pro kinda makes sense. There are way to many versions of Win7 and they double the mess with Win8 vs Win8RT.
Windows is single biggest sell points are 1) backward compatibility and 2) You don't have to think about it.
2) They are messing up 2 with badly with so many versions. A consumer is forced to have to learn quite about about the product to decide which they need. Yes I am aware they can 'up sell' after the fact but psychologically nobody likes that; it feels like a gotcha. Truly the bundle model is a gotcha. Its pay to much for Ultimate Enterprise Ponies Edition and get a huge pile of stuff you will never need. Make it one simple base Windows license with nothing included and then offer a Chinese menu of additional licensed components so its completely a la cart; or just do (Pro Or Home) X ( ARM OR 86-64 ) and stop there.
1) Make compatibility a priority again. Okay don't try to make x86 binaries run on ARM, and they have already abandon win16 at this point, but make damn sure any application that ran on XP works on Windows $NEXT.
Really there failures here are what is killing them. The argument has always been "lets stay with Windows because it leverages our existing investment". There are other things Windows does well too, of course that make it a reasonable choice but the above is really what cut the legs off of any discussion of changing platforms.
I am right. Its been a lot years, and I don't have VB6 handy but I do have excel and I can write some VBA in it. This should be functionally similar. I can change the content of a variable, and make class, but as soon as I modify the code document execution stops.
Your memory is a bit off. You could modify variables, call subs, functions, that might change values from immediate while stepping or stopped on a break point. You could not change code; though.
I think you need to examine just how true that statement really is. Consider for a moment that in the "natural" state young people would be probably following their parents around learning to hunt, gather, build, etc. The relationship of adolescents to adults would probably be very very different than your typical American high-school with a ration of 30:1.
In a usual high-school setting the students don't do much socializing with the adults either, rather the functional inter operate with them in a narrowly defined system of rules.
In a high school you have adolescents primarily socializing not with mature members of our society but with their equally immature peers. By and large instead of getting their social ques from adults they are getting them from each other; and in the context of a rather contrived situation to boot. What other part of your post high school life are you going to find yourself locked in a building with everyone being your exact age, and doing the exact same 'job' again?
If anyone bothered to actually look up the definition of currency they would find one of its defined attributes is the condition of being generally accepted as a medium of exchange. Bitcoin is *NOT* generally accepted. That does not mean it can't become so; but it isn't a currency today.
The real problem with society at so many levels comes down to people trying to use our currencies for that which they were never really designed. Currency, money, and commodity are not fully interchangeable.
Money implies a wealth store; some currencies are money, but not all. Commodities that are durable like gold are money; but are not always currencies.
I actually think the nobody wants them argument is one of the only really reasonable excuses for the situation. Suppose the president decided to pardon some of the detainees he thinks are innocent. Where could they go? You can't repatriate them to a nation that does not recognize them as citizens any more. They'd probably just wind up right back in a cell somewhere, or killed.
You can't bring them to this country; it would violate immigration laws, and no-way is this congress going to give you a special resolution to grant them visas let alone citizenship.
One solution is even though our lease on the gitmo base is not up for a long time; Cuba has in the past said they want the land back. One answer, of highly contestable ethics, would be to just pull out one day leaving the detainees in their cells and tell the Cubans its all your but these people are also your problem now. I have no idea how that would work out for the detainees or if it would improve our harm our relations with Cuba.
While the GOP certainly has created obstacles to the token efforts Obama has made toward cleaning up this mess its precisely because its in military courts we can hold the president almost completely accountable. The cynic in my thinks Obama wanted this moved into the civilian courts so he could duck responsibility .
Whatever happens in civilian courts the president could have simply said, its a judicial matter and I can't as the executive interfere. As it is he is the Commander and Chief, its certainly is within his power to insist the military tribunals be conducted quickly and fairly, rather than let the be the kangaroo courts they have become. It is within his power to move or remove any military personnel that interfere or obstruct that agenda. In either military or civilian courts its within his power to pardon; the ones he believes to be innocent could certainly be freed if he wanted to do so.
So I think we can conclude one more of the following is true: 1. Obama really does not care about the issue, it was all just sound bites to help win an election. 2. Obama does not think these victim's lives are worth the political capital it would cost him to see justice served. 3. Obama does not want them release now because of what they may now do, now that we have 'radicalized' them. 4. Obama does not want them release because as bad as holding people indefinitely without or with obviously sham trials does not make his and the previous administration look nearly as bad or as lawless what these folks may reveal if released. 5. Obama believes them all to be guilty and that justice is being served; independent of the integrity of the trial process.
That is an interesting proposition actually. Apple has a market cap almost four times Intel's, and close to it just in assets. Apple probably could pull off a hostile take over of Intel if they were really determined.
Well, being bitten is something else that they planned for--by having an enormous mountain of cash.
Yes and no. On the surface you are correct Apple has so much money not matter what problem they face they can probably write a check to make the immediate issue go away. They have such great contribution margin on many of their products they many even still be profitable writing that big check.
Trouble is as always Wall Street. The institutional share holders don't like that Apple has left them out of the profits; no dividend payments. Right now a goodly chunk of Apple's market cap is directly supported by the cash pile, 30-40%. There is a growing consensus that their cash cow iDevice market is being commoditized so expectations of profit growth there are shirking just on the loss of pricing power. Now you add increasing production costs and it starts to look like lots of head wind.
Wall Street does not like that cash pile for another reason too; control. APPL does not need outside investor interest or credit to fund its operation and won't need it even if it were shoveling dollars through a turbofan all day long for years. The stock is widely held so doing anything about the board would also be impossibly expensive. So there is and will be more fear about what happens: If APPL goes off the rails will I be able to get out? How can they possibly continue to meet expectations without opening new markets; and can they do that without Steve?
In the short term the company is very much isolated from the performance of their shares on the market. If that cash pile runs out though they won't want the reputation of their stock being a dog. It took them years to shake that the last.
I would have characterized that as "covering for misdeeds" but yes perfectly plausible. So I come back to why should this be considered tolerable behavior. Why is okay for the government to have a domestic surveillance program? Why are supposed to be perfectly okay sitting by and letting the "Justice" department trade legal favors to strong arm private companies to help them spy?
Seems like another government department doing things it was never supposed to be doing in the first place. Guess we need to cut the budget some more. Stave the beast, is the only thing that works.
I think the better question is Why does the DOJ ever need to have secrecy in a civil matter after the case has been settled.
I can see for some criminal matters, I can see it for stuff that pertains to a current inquiry or a case that is currently working thru the court system. I can't see what possible legitimacy could exist for secrecy around a closed civil matter in our "free society." Its really hard to imagine any reasons other than covering for missdeeds.
At a college level nobody should even care if you attend classes, so long as you learn the material.
I don't buy into this. The real value a college course offers that your public library does not is a professor to ask questions and an opportunity to discuss with people who are encountering the material at the same time you are.
Similarly if your school has big lectures with 500 people and nobody in class knows your name you are not getting your moneys worth either.
and that is the real problem. I think a better broader question to be asking is should a "free and democratic society with government by the people and for the people" have agencies spreading disinformation to the people?
I ask this because there is already large portion of the population that has a very cynical mistrustful view of government (myself included). When officials are known to provide inaccurate information to the public it harms societies ability to trust any other information from government. Most of us are taught honesty is a virtue; when we see government being purposely dishonest it degrades our respect for its institutions.
I don't deny the short term usefulness it might provide certain law enforcement efforts. I would further suggest there is some line to be drawn between broadly announcing disinformation like "we can't intercept/read iMessages" in hopes of drawing in stupid criminals, and providing disinformation in a very targeted way to someone who is already a suspect. Directly E-mailing a recipe for explosives made form easily obtained materials, that dose not really work to a bomb plot suspect for example.
I also understand we need military secrets and disinformation about our capabilities there in makes some sense as well provided the real target of that disinformation is foreign threats.
I care about ocean ecology to the point that it continues to be feed me and billions of others. Use it but don't abuse it. Natural resources are there for us; our use is there purpose. That means we do have to be careful with them, we do have moderate our use of them, but saying we should not use them is wrong.
Conservation is important, I think of the planet as humanities bank account. We get regular deposits in the form of sun light. We also get interest from the operation of the ecosystem, we have to be vigilant though not to exceed the income and interest, because if we burn to much of the principle we won't have anymore interest in the future. We are failing at this today.
It sounds nice but what tends to happen is it settle to floor, get picked up by pants and tiny creatures concentrating it again, the eaten by fewer bigger creatures concentrating it more, and finally poisioning us we we go to eat fish.
Yes if you had some way to spread it over a very very large area of sea it would be fine probably, but you'd likely need to move it out to deep water with container ships, and then you'd have to do something with the contaminated ships. I suppose you might just scuttle them. Anyway just dump it in the ocean sounds simple but doing right ( if there is a right way ) is risky and expensive.
Unloading it was never "nessesary" in the first place. I am not familiar with the case but why did the babysitter need to unload the guy. What was stoping them from leaving up high safely out of reach of the kids? What made this idiot think they had any business messing with an obviously dangerous machine they did not know how to operate? Why was the gun pointed at the kid? Even people with no gun safety training mostly know you never allow the barrel to be pointed at anything you would not be okay with being shot while you handle a weapon.
Frankly it sounds as if this was purely the sitters fault. Seriously how is this really different than if he'd gone down to the basement to play with the power tools? It's tragic an innocent was harmed because of someone's agreesive stupidity but this person sounds like a hazard to himself and others in the most general sense.
I guess the only other issue is why wasn't the gun stored more securely? I know a weapon for home defense has to be accessible, but it should be secured when others are watching your home unless they are aware of it and capable of using it; so some falt lies with the parents here too.
Slashdot Mirror
ntivirus is for checking that executables and libraries are free of malicious code. I just cannot possibly fathom why an executable or library could be running on a server if nobody had checked it beforehand.
.
You are making assumptions about things you don't and can't know. Is the a vulnerability in you web application that lets someone put a file? Could they then get some server side processing to happen on that file with another crafted URL?
As much as we try to prevent them these things happen. Unless you as an admin are also auditing the source code to every server process you run; its entirely possible your box will be pwnd due to the mistakes of others.
To say nothing of your own mistakes. AV on servers do make sense. Its part of defense in depth. You are correct job one is do everything you can think of to keep malicious code off the sever. Its still a good idea to have an AV scanner there to catch what you did not think of. None of us or infallible.
That makes no attempt to control for any number of other factors. Its not scientific at all. There are any number of social difference between the US and those other countries that may impact homicide rates. Your own link points out we are pretty average in terms of other crimes. You expect us to just accept that all these people using guns to kill each other would just decide to stay home if they had to stab on another instead. Bullshit.
You don't know anything based on those numbers. You have at most an observation and a hypothesis that the availability of firearms may explain the increased homicide rates. There is nothing rising to the level of proof that we have fewer homicides in the USA with more restricted gun rights. There is even less evidence to support we would have few mass homicides.
So yea nice try.
I think that is the saddest part of the entire thing. All the evidence for gun control is anecdotal. Some of the recent mass shootings have been tragic for those involved but they simply should not rise to the scale of a national tragedy. Statistically you are at almost not risk of being killed in a mass shooting. Infringing our second amendment rights is for not.
This latest anecdote should show that a deranged individual or group that wants to hurt a bunch of people can find a away; in an even moderately free society. Had these things been a few feet off the ground it would have been scores killed and a few just injured rather than the other way around.
The issue we should be focusing on is why are people choosing to become mass murders not how. How isn't the issue you can never address all the hows. Dealing only with the how won't make people safer and it will limit freedoms; dealing with why might actually make people safer and does not necessarily mean limiting freedoms.
post-WWII data for countries that had a high debt load and high growth
It would be hard to not have had high growth after WWII for most of Europe. Given most of those economies had been pounded into next to nothing by the war. If you have a GDP of $1 in 1945 and $2 in 1946, why that is 100% year over year growth!
Next debt load and austerity are not the same thing. The UK had a high debt load post WWII and was also rationing food. So it had high debt AND austerity. Using debt to invest in critical infrastructure like roads and basic sanitation for example you don't have or is no longer workable, and perhaps providing minimal nutrition to the needy is an entirely different proposition than making sure every dope who masters long division gets to hang out for four years at University.
Public debt is not always bad when there is clear ROI on where the revenues for its issuance are being directed. Debt should not be used to fund blue sky efforts, nor should it be used to provide comfort. If 'austerity' today had any relationship what what it meant in the 1940s-1950s than I might be included to agree it would be going to far for the present situation to justify, but as its used today it might as well just be a synonym for 'waste'.
My point was assuming 386 enhanced mode was enabled and enhanced disk I/O was enabled, and it should have been on most i386 machines. Windows pretty much did everything it needed to do with the hardware directly. Did it use some DOS sys calls yes, but it also did its own thing for the most part. Its that fact that DOS remained resident in memory and Windows continued to call some DOS routines that makes DOS 'a little more than a boot loader' in the case of running Windows 3, not its command line. GRUB and Lilo have command lines but your would not hesitate to call them boot loaders.
'operating environment' -- I like that, its a fair description.
Windows 3.x was certainly more than an 'application' running on top of DOS. Windows did its own disk I/O on i386 hardware, its own memory management, its own task scheduling, its own video etc. It did what an OS does and shared that hardware and furnished higher level SYS and API calls to applications. DOS was hardly more than a boot loader for Windows 3.x It just happens that windows preserved the environment and allowed you to return to it.
Its a bit of matter of semantics and what definitions of things you like to use; but Windows 3 was not just an 'Application' in the modern user of the term, nor was it quite an OS.
Only in this comment...
See now its that kinda thinking that leads to AA's entire fleet being grounded. I mean seriously you comment is a single point of failure. What if I'd scrolled past it? What is slashdot's web server failed to post your form post?
You single comment is just the sorta cowboy IT work that causes these disasters.
That is true and it isn't. Microsoft has in the past put lots of effort into backward compatibility. They have gone as far as putting special cases in the memory allocation scheme win95 used to accommodate the behavior of specific DOS binaries.
If you really want to make it work you can.
Microsoft's problems is IMHO is they are trying to segment the market to much. Yes there is some price discrimination to be done. Home vs Pro kinda makes sense. There are way to many versions of Win7 and they double the mess with Win8 vs Win8RT.
Windows is single biggest sell points are 1) backward compatibility and 2) You don't have to think about it.
2) They are messing up 2 with badly with so many versions. A consumer is forced to have to learn quite about about the product to decide which they need. Yes I am aware they can 'up sell' after the fact but psychologically nobody likes that; it feels like a gotcha. Truly the bundle model is a gotcha. Its pay to much for Ultimate Enterprise Ponies Edition and get a huge pile of stuff you will never need. Make it one simple base Windows license with nothing included and then offer a Chinese menu of additional licensed components so its completely a la cart; or just do (Pro Or Home) X ( ARM OR 86-64 ) and stop there.
1) Make compatibility a priority again. Okay don't try to make x86 binaries run on ARM, and they have already abandon win16 at this point, but make damn sure any application that ran on XP works on Windows $NEXT.
Really there failures here are what is killing them. The argument has always been "lets stay with Windows because it leverages our existing investment". There are other things Windows does well too, of course that make it a reasonable choice but the above is really what cut the legs off of any discussion of changing platforms.
I am right. Its been a lot years, and I don't have VB6 handy but I do have excel and I can write some VBA in it. This should be functionally similar. I can change the content of a variable, and make class, but as soon as I modify the code document execution stops.
Your memory is a bit off. You could modify variables, call subs, functions, that might change values from immediate while stepping or stopped on a break point. You could not change code; though.
I think you need to examine just how true that statement really is. Consider for a moment that in the "natural" state young people would be probably following their parents around learning to hunt, gather, build, etc. The relationship of adolescents to adults would probably be very very different than your typical American high-school with a ration of 30:1.
In a usual high-school setting the students don't do much socializing with the adults either, rather the functional inter operate with them in a narrowly defined system of rules.
In a high school you have adolescents primarily socializing not with mature members of our society but with their equally immature peers. By and large instead of getting their social ques from adults they are getting them from each other; and in the context of a rather contrived situation to boot. What other part of your post high school life are you going to find yourself locked in a building with everyone being your exact age, and doing the exact same 'job' again?
If anyone bothered to actually look up the definition of currency they would find one of its defined attributes is the condition of being generally accepted as a medium of exchange. Bitcoin is *NOT* generally accepted. That does not mean it can't become so; but it isn't a currency today.
The real problem with society at so many levels comes down to people trying to use our currencies for that which they were never really designed. Currency, money, and commodity are not fully interchangeable.
Money implies a wealth store; some currencies are money, but not all.
Commodities that are durable like gold are money; but are not always currencies.
I actually think the nobody wants them argument is one of the only really reasonable excuses for the situation. Suppose the president decided to pardon some of the detainees he thinks are innocent. Where could they go? You can't repatriate them to a nation that does not recognize them as citizens any more. They'd probably just wind up right back in a cell somewhere, or killed.
You can't bring them to this country; it would violate immigration laws, and no-way is this congress going to give you a special resolution to grant them visas let alone citizenship.
One solution is even though our lease on the gitmo base is not up for a long time; Cuba has in the past said they want the land back. One answer, of highly contestable ethics, would be to just pull out one day leaving the detainees in their cells and tell the Cubans its all your but these people are also your problem now. I have no idea how that would work out for the detainees or if it would improve our harm our relations with Cuba.
While the GOP certainly has created obstacles to the token efforts Obama has made toward cleaning up this mess its precisely because its in military courts we can hold the president almost completely accountable. The cynic in my thinks Obama wanted this moved into the civilian courts so he could duck responsibility .
Whatever happens in civilian courts the president could have simply said, its a judicial matter and I can't as the executive interfere. As it is he is the Commander and Chief, its certainly is within his power to insist the military tribunals be conducted quickly and fairly, rather than let the be the kangaroo courts they have become. It is within his power to move or remove any military personnel that interfere or obstruct that agenda. In either military or civilian courts its within his power to pardon; the ones he believes to be innocent could certainly be freed if he wanted to do so.
So I think we can conclude one more of the following is true:
1. Obama really does not care about the issue, it was all just sound bites to help win an election.
2. Obama does not think these victim's lives are worth the political capital it would cost him to see justice served.
3. Obama does not want them release now because of what they may now do, now that we have 'radicalized' them.
4. Obama does not want them release because as bad as holding people indefinitely without or with obviously sham trials does not make his and the previous administration look nearly as bad or as lawless what these folks may reveal if released.
5. Obama believes them all to be guilty and that justice is being served; independent of the integrity of the trial process.
Apple is not buying Intel
That is an interesting proposition actually. Apple has a market cap almost four times Intel's, and close to it just in assets. Apple probably could pull off a hostile take over of Intel if they were really determined.
That would radically alter the market.
Well, being bitten is something else that they planned for--by having an enormous mountain of cash.
Yes and no. On the surface you are correct Apple has so much money not matter what problem they face they can probably write a check to make the immediate issue go away. They have such great contribution margin on many of their products they many even still be profitable writing that big check.
Trouble is as always Wall Street. The institutional share holders don't like that Apple has left them out of the profits; no dividend payments. Right now a goodly chunk of Apple's market cap is directly supported by the cash pile, 30-40%. There is a growing consensus that their cash cow iDevice market is being commoditized so expectations of profit growth there are shirking just on the loss of pricing power. Now you add increasing production costs and it starts to look like lots of head wind.
Wall Street does not like that cash pile for another reason too; control. APPL does not need outside investor interest or credit to fund its operation and won't need it even if it were shoveling dollars through a turbofan all day long for years. The stock is widely held so doing anything about the board would also be impossibly expensive. So there is and will be more fear about what happens: If APPL goes off the rails will I be able to get out? How can they possibly continue to meet expectations without opening new markets; and can they do that without Steve?
In the short term the company is very much isolated from the performance of their shares on the market. If that cash pile runs out though they won't want the reputation of their stock being a dog. It took them years to shake that the last.
I would have characterized that as "covering for misdeeds" but yes perfectly plausible. So I come back to why should this be considered tolerable behavior. Why is okay for the government to have a domestic surveillance program? Why are supposed to be perfectly okay sitting by and letting the "Justice" department trade legal favors to strong arm private companies to help them spy?
Seems like another government department doing things it was never supposed to be doing in the first place. Guess we need to cut the budget some more. Stave the beast, is the only thing that works.
I think the better question is Why does the DOJ ever need to have secrecy in a civil matter after the case has been settled.
I can see for some criminal matters, I can see it for stuff that pertains to a current inquiry or a case that is currently working thru the court system. I can't see what possible legitimacy could exist for secrecy around a closed civil matter in our "free society." Its really hard to imagine any reasons other than covering for missdeeds.
At a college level nobody should even care if you attend classes, so long as you learn the material.
I don't buy into this. The real value a college course offers that your public library does not is a professor to ask questions and an opportunity to discuss with people who are encountering the material at the same time you are.
Similarly if your school has big lectures with 500 people and nobody in class knows your name you are not getting your moneys worth either.
and that is the real problem. I think a better broader question to be asking is should a "free and democratic society with government by the people and for the people" have agencies spreading disinformation to the people?
I ask this because there is already large portion of the population that has a very cynical mistrustful view of government (myself included). When officials are known to provide inaccurate information to the public it harms societies ability to trust any other information from government. Most of us are taught honesty is a virtue; when we see government being purposely dishonest it degrades our respect for its institutions.
I don't deny the short term usefulness it might provide certain law enforcement efforts. I would further suggest there is some line to be drawn between broadly announcing disinformation like "we can't intercept/read iMessages" in hopes of drawing in stupid criminals, and providing disinformation in a very targeted way to someone who is already a suspect. Directly E-mailing a recipe for explosives made form easily obtained materials, that dose not really work to a bomb plot suspect for example.
I also understand we need military secrets and disinformation about our capabilities there in makes some sense as well provided the real target of that disinformation is foreign threats.
I care about ocean ecology to the point that it continues to be feed me and billions of others. Use it but don't abuse it. Natural resources are there for us; our use is there purpose. That means we do have to be careful with them, we do have moderate our use of them, but saying we should not use them is wrong.
Conservation is important, I think of the planet as humanities bank account. We get regular deposits in the form of sun light. We also get interest from the operation of the ecosystem, we have to be vigilant though not to exceed the income and interest, because if we burn to much of the principle we won't have anymore interest in the future. We are failing at this today.
It sounds nice but what tends to happen is it settle to floor, get picked up by pants and tiny creatures concentrating it again, the eaten by fewer bigger creatures concentrating it more, and finally poisioning us we we go to eat fish.
Yes if you had some way to spread it over a very very large area of sea it would be fine probably, but you'd likely need to move it out to deep water with container ships, and then you'd have to do something with the contaminated ships. I suppose you might just scuttle them. Anyway just dump it in the ocean sounds simple but doing right ( if there is a right way ) is risky and expensive.
Unloading it was never "nessesary" in the first place. I am not familiar with the case but why did the babysitter need to unload the guy. What was stoping them from leaving up high safely out of reach of the kids? What made this idiot think they had any business messing with an obviously dangerous machine they did not know how to operate? Why was the gun pointed at the kid? Even people with no gun safety training mostly know you never allow the barrel to be pointed at anything you would not be okay with being shot while you handle a weapon.
Frankly it sounds as if this was purely the sitters fault. Seriously how is this really different than if he'd gone down to the basement to play with the power tools? It's tragic an innocent was harmed because of someone's agreesive stupidity but this person sounds like a hazard to himself and others in the most general sense.
I guess the only other issue is why wasn't the gun stored more securely? I know a weapon for home defense has to be accessible, but it should be secured when others are watching your home unless they are aware of it and capable of using it; so some falt lies with the parents here too.