Email is a good documentation tool. "Clarify" the request, asking if this is what he intends for you to do. Remove the emotion. Put in only facts. Put in a piece about your not being sure, but this may be a violation of terms of service. Ask if he wants you to proceed. Forward your sent email to a personal account.
I've worked in a large company, who's name I can't reveal for fear of litigation but essentially, using email in a CYA fashion would get you fired. (Terms of contract, they can end the contract at any time for any reason, but the money was good)
This was company policy. Not just for security (sensitive things at that company) but also to protect against future legal action. No traceability.
Sad to say but in this day and age, such paranoia is commonplace. (Just look at all the elected Republicans who used private email accounts to conduct official business, just to avoid the FOIA.)
Don't get fooled into thinking that "the government" did this. It was the people of Australia who elected politicians who are doing it. It is up to the people of Australia to un-elect those politicians, by force if necessary.
You know, that's a wonderfully simplistic view of the situation, that doesn't really match reality.
Take Ireland as an example in this topic. The country has a national referendum on whether to ratify the Lisbon Treaty. They say No. The Government wants to ratify it but the people have spoken. However, every single major political party is for the treaty. And they will pass it regardless of the wishes of the people. There is no credible political party which is anti-Lisbon, even though the majority of the population doesn't want Lisbon.
The problem is, people choose a party based on more than just one position. And it can happen that there is simply no other option for the public.
If Australia had a legitimate opposition party, perhaps measures like this would not continue, because the public could go to the other party on this issue. But I suspect Australia doesn't have much of an opposition. Like America, the opposition is only different on wedge issues, like immigrants and gay marriage. This is the illusion of choice.
Like a magician that says "Pick a card, any card" and you wind up picking the one he wants, we are told "Pick a party, any party" and we get shafted.
Mark Thomas (activist/comedian) had the idea that people send CD-Roms/emails with encrypted data to their MP. Then tip off the police that illegal encrypted information is in their possession. When they demand the MP hand over the password, and the MP can't, maybe then they'd realise that the law is stupid.
Of course, this requires that the police actually investigate those in power. And we all know that never happens.:(
Go into any pharmacy/chemist in the UK and you can buy your bodyweight in homeopathic remedies.
It should be obvious to anyone with a background in science that homeopathy is quack science of the most blatant kind, yet it's available through the UK's National Health Service.
It took me three questions before Elbot replied with a non sequitur and about five minutes before it started repeating answers. It didn't take me long to realise that it had no concept of context - every reply was a reply to what I had just said, and had no relation to the last-but-one thing I'd said.
Wow. If they had broadcast that conversation on Fox, about 30% of the public would have voted for it.
I can give you two examples of people I knew. But they're not really close friends of mine, so I'm not going to give out too many details. One is a retired school teacher, who seems to blame everything bad in society on the failing school system. He blames the failing school system on the parents. And blames the bad parents on the drug taking hippie 60's. (Even though most of the parents of the kids today grew up in the era of Reaganomics.)
He is genuinely fearful of terrorism. He lives out in the sticks, not in a big major city like New York. The idea of his podunk little town being targetted is laughable to me, but not to him. As such, he eyes foreigners who live in (or worse, visit) his town with prejudice and fear.
Need I say he is a rampant Fox viewer, republican conservative?
The second person is a divorced mother raising a daughter alone. Her fears are equally vague and nebulous, though in the last few weeks economic fears have supplanted her fears of terrorism. She ranks her fear of terrorism above child kidnapping, pedophiles, drug pushers near schools, bullying, and some liberal teacher telling her child that lesbianism might be an acceptable choice in life, though she scared of all of the above. If you gave her the option of pushing a button to wipe out the middle east, most of asia, and possibly all foreigners, she'd push it in a heart beat, with no consideration for the morality or the ramifications of such an action.
She's also a Fox viewer.
I'm not particularly having a go at Fox, just mentioning it because I think it's relevant.
I'm not a shrink, but I seem to remember seeing a study where it was shown that some people have a higher fear response to new and different stimuli. Those people tend to grow up conservative and vote republican. (Something like this article, but different, and from an actual study, not a newspaper report of a study.) http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-sci-politics10sep10,0,5982337.story?coll=la-home-center
My own hypothesis (never saw a study to support it) is that people who have such a sensitive fear trigger response, are on some level deriving pleasure from the fear response. (Much like people on a roller coaster or something.) They don't want to be told that things will be okay. They want to be told to be afraid. And they will listen to (and vote for) people who tell them to be afraid. I base this on the study which showed that rationalization to allow confirmation bias results in the pleasure centres of the brain being over-stimulated. (Drew Weston http://www.psychsystems.net/lab/06_Westen_fmri.pdf )
The article says 21 times more massive. Not 21 times more dense. You may be making an invalid assumption.
I'll grant that the liklihood of it being a gas giant is near zero, since the solar wind would strip the gas from the planet, but there's nothing in the article to say it's 21 times more *dense* than Jupiter.
I keep the "If I lose these files, I'd rather just die" stuff burned to disk, copied to my virtual server 1000 miles away, and on my USB keychain drive.
The fact is, we have plenty of fact checkers that can help the average joe distinguish between what is true and accurate, and what is the latest idiotic memescare to land in his Inbox.
The problem is that Joe doesn't care.
So long as people still have a gut reaction to treat news as entertainment, and a desire to see something which confirms what they think rather than challenges it, people just won't care to fact check.
Snopes.com, Factcheck.org, and many others exist to help people sort out the real from the fake. But I'll still get "did you know" compilations featuring such untrue statements as "A ducks quack doesn't echo and no one knows why".
Oh yeah, and Obama is a Muslim, and Sarah Palin visited Iraq.
Slashdot Mirror
Email is a good documentation tool. "Clarify" the request, asking if this is what he intends for you to do. Remove the emotion. Put in only facts. Put in a piece about your not being sure, but this may be a violation of terms of service. Ask if he wants you to proceed. Forward your sent email to a personal account.
I've worked in a large company, who's name I can't reveal for fear of litigation but essentially, using email in a CYA fashion would get you fired. (Terms of contract, they can end the contract at any time for any reason, but the money was good)
This was company policy. Not just for security (sensitive things at that company) but also to protect against future legal action. No traceability.
Sad to say but in this day and age, such paranoia is commonplace. (Just look at all the elected Republicans who used private email accounts to conduct official business, just to avoid the FOIA.)
Don't get fooled into thinking that "the government" did this. It was the people of Australia who elected politicians who are doing it. It is up to the people of Australia to un-elect those politicians, by force if necessary.
You know, that's a wonderfully simplistic view of the situation, that doesn't really match reality.
Take Ireland as an example in this topic. The country has a national referendum on whether to ratify the Lisbon Treaty. They say No. The Government wants to ratify it but the people have spoken. However, every single major political party is for the treaty. And they will pass it regardless of the wishes of the people. There is no credible political party which is anti-Lisbon, even though the majority of the population doesn't want Lisbon.
The problem is, people choose a party based on more than just one position. And it can happen that there is simply no other option for the public.
If Australia had a legitimate opposition party, perhaps measures like this would not continue, because the public could go to the other party on this issue. But I suspect Australia doesn't have much of an opposition. Like America, the opposition is only different on wedge issues, like immigrants and gay marriage. This is the illusion of choice.
Like a magician that says "Pick a card, any card" and you wind up picking the one he wants, we are told "Pick a party, any party" and we get shafted.
Or erasing all those Agatha Christie stories, so that you could re-read them again?
Well that explains AOL.
Oh look! A free AOL CD! Back in a minute...
or can we expect the next comparison as "1000 times colder than a polar bear's left testicle".
Fscking Hell! Now that is cold!
You can't explain it to them.
They genuinely don't understand how someone can work on something for free.
Not everyone is working for some vague future payment. Those that are, will go away, but that won't mean the end of things like wikipedia.
and follows suit...
5...4...3...
Mark Thomas (activist/comedian) had the idea that people send CD-Roms/emails with encrypted data to their MP.
Then tip off the police that illegal encrypted information is in their possession.
When they demand the MP hand over the password, and the MP can't, maybe then they'd realise that the law is stupid.
Of course, this requires that the police actually investigate those in power. And we all know that never happens. :(
It was nice having a Bill of Rights, wasn't it?
There. Fixed that for you.
I find it kinda hard to swallow that Sulu took an additional 25 years to rank captain.
But haven't the fans complained for years about the prejudice against gays in Trek?
Or did I misunderstand that?
Go into any pharmacy/chemist in the UK and you can buy your bodyweight in homeopathic remedies.
It should be obvious to anyone with a background in science that homeopathy is quack science of the most blatant kind, yet it's available through the UK's National Health Service.
Won't be long now before the Chinese will be telling the US "All your business belong to us"
Wow. If they had broadcast that conversation on Fox, about 30% of the public would have voted for it.
I can give you two examples of people I knew. But they're not really close friends of mine, so I'm not going to give out too many details. One is a retired school teacher, who seems to blame everything bad in society on the failing school system. He blames the failing school system on the parents. And blames the bad parents on the drug taking hippie 60's. (Even though most of the parents of the kids today grew up in the era of Reaganomics.)
He is genuinely fearful of terrorism. He lives out in the sticks, not in a big major city like New York. The idea of his podunk little town being targetted is laughable to me, but not to him. As such, he eyes foreigners who live in (or worse, visit) his town with prejudice and fear.
Need I say he is a rampant Fox viewer, republican conservative?
The second person is a divorced mother raising a daughter alone. Her fears are equally vague and nebulous, though in the last few weeks economic fears have supplanted her fears of terrorism. She ranks her fear of terrorism above child kidnapping, pedophiles, drug pushers near schools, bullying, and some liberal teacher telling her child that lesbianism might be an acceptable choice in life, though she scared of all of the above. If you gave her the option of pushing a button to wipe out the middle east, most of asia, and possibly all foreigners, she'd push it in a heart beat, with no consideration for the morality or the ramifications of such an action.
She's also a Fox viewer.
I'm not particularly having a go at Fox, just mentioning it because I think it's relevant.
I'm not a shrink, but I seem to remember seeing a study where it was shown that some people have a higher fear response to new and different stimuli. Those people tend to grow up conservative and vote republican.
(Something like this article, but different, and from an actual study, not a newspaper report of a study.)
http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-sci-politics10sep10,0,5982337.story?coll=la-home-center
My own hypothesis (never saw a study to support it) is that people who have such a sensitive fear trigger response, are on some level deriving pleasure from the fear response. (Much like people on a roller coaster or something.) They don't want to be told that things will be okay. They want to be told to be afraid. And they will listen to (and vote for) people who tell them to be afraid. I base this on the study which showed that rationalization to allow confirmation bias results in the pleasure centres of the brain being over-stimulated. (Drew Weston http://www.psychsystems.net/lab/06_Westen_fmri.pdf )
Should have suspected that. They're only human after all, and just as prone to accepting pseudoscience and bullshit as the rest of gen.pop.
Thanks though!
Sorry, but I've got to ask, because I always wondered but never knew someone with a Top Secret clearance.
Why do they have things like Top Secret Poly (and other qualifiers) which use polygraphs, when the polygraph is a bullshit technology?
The article says 21 times more massive. Not 21 times more dense.
You may be making an invalid assumption.
I'll grant that the liklihood of it being a gas giant is near zero, since the solar wind would strip the gas from the planet, but there's nothing in the article to say it's 21 times more *dense* than Jupiter.
I keep the "If I lose these files, I'd rather just die" stuff burned to disk, copied to my virtual server 1000 miles away, and on my USB keychain drive.
Man, that must be AWESOME porn. :)
So you're saying... George Bush is a sexually abused maths genius?
Sheesh! Only in America, can you make a saint out of someone who is documented to be evil.
Because all it takes is for that thing to topple somehow, and we have an extinction level event when it whips into the surface.
Hey Wikipedia says it might be over too! :)
I'd be interested to know how much this launch/assemble space station is going to cost the Chinese, and then comparing how much the ISS cost.
I know they build things cheaper in China, but I thought that was just t-shirts and sneakers and stuff.
The fact is, we have plenty of fact checkers that can help the average joe distinguish between what is true and accurate, and what is the latest idiotic memescare to land in his Inbox.
The problem is that Joe doesn't care.
So long as people still have a gut reaction to treat news as entertainment, and a desire to see something which confirms what they think rather than challenges it, people just won't care to fact check.
Snopes.com, Factcheck.org, and many others exist to help people sort out the real from the fake. But I'll still get "did you know" compilations featuring such untrue statements as "A ducks quack doesn't echo and no one knows why".
Oh yeah, and Obama is a Muslim, and Sarah Palin visited Iraq.
Would the fact that we've learned something new about steel thanks to the way the Twin Towers fell, silence the conspiracy lovers?
No, of course not. What the hell was I thinking there?