While history shows us secrecy is frequently used to cover up incompetence or prohibited activity, it's ALSO used because it's a lot easier to accomplish certain goals if you don't tell everyone what you're doing first.
Imagine if the cops had to give criminals access to their active investigation documents, for instance. Similar concerns apply at higher levels of government.
It would be really nice to live in a world where we all get along, but we don't. As long as there are different groups in competition, the side that gives up secrecy will lose.
>Security clearances mean fuck all. It only proves you passed a background check.
I have worked government contracts in semi-secure environments (just police checks, not full background investigations). Nobody gets past the front desk without being cleared, so if you're a vendor and want a contract, it's incredibly useful to be pre-cleared.
I've seen a few instances where someone got checked last minute at the front door and didn't pass. It's stupid that they tried, embarrassing for the vendor, and delays the work.
The only SJW stuff on Orville so far has been episode 3. That was such ham-fisted propaganda that the writers of Let That Be Your Last Battlefield are subtle to the point of inscrutability in comparison.
Though I should say, in complete harmony with Trek... the 'science' behind it was so bad it was cringe-worthy.
First, I'd like whoever decided an 'all-male' species could be a thing without cloning or somesuch to take a basic biology course.
>maybe include some exposed DIP switches to kill the camera, microphone, GPS, bluetooth transceiver, etc
Broken traces inline with each device on the board, with a nice snap-in hardware switch over them to connect as desired. Mechanical switches die, so you want them easily replaceable.
I want to know when I flip the switch that I've killed power to the target device, not that I've sent a signal to the OS to disable it.
And while you're at it - make the flash have a 3-way switch so I can force it on when I want a flashlight without having to unlock my phone.
When the best thing you can say about your 'winner' is "Don't pay attention to all the shit he does because the 'loser' once did something we say is sketchy even though that's been proven bullshit multiple times"...
I mean, if all you have is deflection you could at least try to find something that is current and at least superficially relevant.
They ban the POTUS' account. Most of it's just stupid shit that's 'not presidential', but some of it is hate-mongering.
Prediction: Twitter will continue to hide behind a bullshit exemption (if they acknowledge the exception at all) because Trump's bile draws eyeballs like a traffic accident.
I can't wait for the current white guilt dad to pass. My kids are getting more native propaganda than actual useful instruction in school right now. Because all the problems with the treaties and reservation system will all be resolved if we just brainwash the white kids enough...
Sell supplies and advertise twice the lifetime they actually have. Fold the company, let the scandal go public after investing in the company most likely to get rich fixing the problems caused by your fraud.
>According to them, it was so crowded that they had to stagger start and end times to get people in and out of the buildings efficiently.
Ahh... FlexTime. That brings back memories.
It didn't take them long to figure out that this reduced efficiency because people weren't all on the same shift schedule. Don't forget, whatever the 'stagger' is gets doubled because not only does employee B show up an hour after employee A, but employee A leaves an hour before employee B. That's 25% of a standard work day where they can't communicate.
It turns out that - from the company's perspective - it's a lot more efficient just to demand people be in on time and let them worry about how long they need to queue to do it.
That's a foolish absolute to stand behind, since you do it all the time in your day to day life.
>'Backdooring' encryption RUINS it, plain and simple; there is no compromise that can or should be made there. EVER.
Another silly stance to take. For general encryption, absolutely... but there's nothing wrong with a proprietary system with a back door in it, as long as it's understood to be less than perfectly secured and that it will eventually be cracked (or the back door simply leaked) if there's enough interest in doing so.
Most web surfing involves text, images, and perhaps video in a well-defined box. Anything else is generally crap that doesn't benefit the surfer.
I'd say rather than a percentage of total CPU utilization, they ought to be measuring against a percentage of the browser's CPU usage. Any non-whitelisted script that is taking more juice than it would take to render a straight text-and-image page can be throttled to zero, in my opinion.
Consider for a moment that while governments may ultimately be varying degrees of evil, that is an emergent property that isn't necessarily present in the humans who make it up.
Now imagine you're a cop or a politician, and you have criminals and pressure to stop them from getting organized or simply 'getting away with it', and you KNOW there's evidence you could hang them with if you could get your hands on it.
Of course they're going to try and get official back doors. Now you say those back doors will only ever keep out the stupid criminals (and end up serving the needs of the smarter criminals) - but most of us lock our front doors with the full knowledge that it only stops the casual / amateur criminal.
>Are they really so blind to all this, or is it just another power-grab?
To summarize... no. They don't have to be blind or power hungry to want this. It may even be the most efficient way to address the problem given the tools available and the rules they have to work within.
Our job as citizens is to inform our politicians (emphatically, continuously, and in significant numbers) where we want to be on the freedom/security scale. If we don't do that, political mechanisms will inevitably seek security at the expense of freedom.
>Slashdot has been almost run into the ground, with a large number of the stories having little to do with technology,
I'm (partially) OK with that. Too much focus and there's less draw to visit frequently or stay as long. Not enough and... well, everything gets watered down, which encourages lower quality posts and drives the cycle further. I would suggest the owners not let things slip any further since the 'generic noise' social media niche is well occupied by Reddit and they're not rolling in the bucks either.
>And the user interface is stuck somewhere in the previous decade.
Again, I'm on the fence. Yes, it's annoying... but it might also be one of the reasons we haven't finished the race to the bottom just yet.
Actually... yes. There has been a small but steady decrease in average brain size in homo sapiens for some time now. (http://discovermagazine.com/2010/sep/25-modern-humans-smart-why-brain-shrinking)
Either our brains are getting more efficient or they're shedding unnecessary redundancy or functionality. I'd tend to believe the latter since that would be the simpler change in evolutionary terms.
Keep in mind there's no need to translate the above to the belief we're getting less intelligent. There are probably all sorts of brain functions that were extremely helpful to pre-Stone Age humans that we haven't relied upon for a very long time, so some atrophy isn't all that astonishing. I'm actually rather more interested in why there's a net shrinkage when I'd have expected growing social needs to have caused other parts of the brain to be under selection pressure for expansion.
>No more paying Boeing 20 times the amount needed? (as hidden subsidies, so that they can still exist on the world market?)
No need to hide it, Trump just claims Bombardier has an unfair advantage, gets tariffs levied against them as competition, and ignores any inconvenient facts about US government support of Boeing. Sorry, not "ignores", "lies and says they don't exist".
>Google's attempt to promote a healthy lifestyle caused a number of people to lambast the feature on Twitter, claiming it would "shame" and even "trigger" those with eating disorders.
Those people are poisoning our society. They need to be ostracized and allowed to wallow in whatever ghetto they manage to find refuge in.
I consider the equivalent of "unsatisfactory" to be termination of employment.
"Satisfactory" can (unfortunately) mean anything from "it isn't yet worth the trouble of replacing you, so we're going to try and get you to improve before we fire you" to "you're a great employee but not particularly special".
It'd be lovely to have a more exact scale, but people told they're heading to the chopping block sometimes choose to sabotage the company instead of either finding a way to satisfy the company's expectations or finding alternate employment.
>Let me search by one or more of director, by movie rating, actor/actress, publish date, rotten tomatoes score, etc
Genre, recommended viewer age, content (violence/sex/swearing/whatever) year (with +/-), director, actor, writer, studio, nation or geographic region of production, box office, major award wins... and except for year, multiple simultaneous selections and/or exclusions for each.
Maybe I want to see a historical porn comedy with no horror elements made in approximately 1985 in Europe but not Germany.
And I can see that happening with a pretty damn simple GUI, too.
Slashdot Mirror
>I thought that was the Canadian Broadcast Service or something
We have the CBC - the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and they do television and radio pretty much across the whole country.
While history shows us secrecy is frequently used to cover up incompetence or prohibited activity, it's ALSO used because it's a lot easier to accomplish certain goals if you don't tell everyone what you're doing first.
Imagine if the cops had to give criminals access to their active investigation documents, for instance. Similar concerns apply at higher levels of government.
It would be really nice to live in a world where we all get along, but we don't. As long as there are different groups in competition, the side that gives up secrecy will lose.
>Security clearances mean fuck all. It only proves you passed a background check.
I have worked government contracts in semi-secure environments (just police checks, not full background investigations). Nobody gets past the front desk without being cleared, so if you're a vendor and want a contract, it's incredibly useful to be pre-cleared.
I've seen a few instances where someone got checked last minute at the front door and didn't pass. It's stupid that they tried, embarrassing for the vendor, and delays the work.
The only SJW stuff on Orville so far has been episode 3. That was such ham-fisted propaganda that the writers of Let That Be Your Last Battlefield are subtle to the point of inscrutability in comparison.
Though I should say, in complete harmony with Trek... the 'science' behind it was so bad it was cringe-worthy.
First, I'd like whoever decided an 'all-male' species could be a thing without cloning or somesuch to take a basic biology course.
>maybe include some exposed DIP switches to kill the camera, microphone, GPS, bluetooth transceiver, etc
Broken traces inline with each device on the board, with a nice snap-in hardware switch over them to connect as desired. Mechanical switches die, so you want them easily replaceable.
I want to know when I flip the switch that I've killed power to the target device, not that I've sent a signal to the OS to disable it.
And while you're at it - make the flash have a 3-way switch so I can force it on when I want a flashlight without having to unlock my phone.
When the best thing you can say about your 'winner' is "Don't pay attention to all the shit he does because the 'loser' once did something we say is sketchy even though that's been proven bullshit multiple times"...
I mean, if all you have is deflection you could at least try to find something that is current and at least superficially relevant.
>The Russians deserve a helluva lot of credit too
No shit. If they hadn't become 'the enemy' we'd probably still feel badly about how much they got burned by the Great Patriotic War.
They ban the POTUS' account. Most of it's just stupid shit that's 'not presidential', but some of it is hate-mongering.
Prediction: Twitter will continue to hide behind a bullshit exemption (if they acknowledge the exception at all) because Trump's bile draws eyeballs like a traffic accident.
Err... 'fad', not 'dad'. Posted from my phone and 'helped' by iOS autocorrect.
I can't wait for the current white guilt dad to pass. My kids are getting more native propaganda than actual useful instruction in school right now. Because all the problems with the treaties and reservation system will all be resolved if we just brainwash the white kids enough...
Nice that you like all that stuff. If you weren't being such an ass with your final statement, I would have been nicer in my reply.
You're an idiot. Not because you like those things, but because you think limiting script CPU as I described would make them all fail.
Sell supplies and advertise twice the lifetime they actually have. Fold the company, let the scandal go public after investing in the company most likely to get rich fixing the problems caused by your fraud.
Double the profit, double the fun!
>According to them, it was so crowded that they had to stagger start and end times to get people in and out of the buildings efficiently.
Ahh... FlexTime. That brings back memories.
It didn't take them long to figure out that this reduced efficiency because people weren't all on the same shift schedule. Don't forget, whatever the 'stagger' is gets doubled because not only does employee B show up an hour after employee A, but employee A leaves an hour before employee B. That's 25% of a standard work day where they can't communicate.
It turns out that - from the company's perspective - it's a lot more efficient just to demand people be in on time and let them worry about how long they need to queue to do it.
Are you saying webmasters need no longer fear the /. effect?
There is absolutely ZERO need for autoplay video if you're not an advertiser looking to force something into someone else's eyeballs.
Every browser should, by default, put a placeholder in for video and require user interaction just to start loading it, never mind actually play it.
Back when most video was Flash and Firefox was king of the alternate browsers, I used the FlashBlock extension and it was glorious.
>You NEVER trade freedom for security. EVER.
That's a foolish absolute to stand behind, since you do it all the time in your day to day life.
>'Backdooring' encryption RUINS it, plain and simple; there is no compromise that can or should be made there. EVER.
Another silly stance to take. For general encryption, absolutely... but there's nothing wrong with a proprietary system with a back door in it, as long as it's understood to be less than perfectly secured and that it will eventually be cracked (or the back door simply leaked) if there's enough interest in doing so.
Most web surfing involves text, images, and perhaps video in a well-defined box. Anything else is generally crap that doesn't benefit the surfer.
I'd say rather than a percentage of total CPU utilization, they ought to be measuring against a percentage of the browser's CPU usage. Any non-whitelisted script that is taking more juice than it would take to render a straight text-and-image page can be throttled to zero, in my opinion.
Consider for a moment that while governments may ultimately be varying degrees of evil, that is an emergent property that isn't necessarily present in the humans who make it up.
Now imagine you're a cop or a politician, and you have criminals and pressure to stop them from getting organized or simply 'getting away with it', and you KNOW there's evidence you could hang them with if you could get your hands on it.
Of course they're going to try and get official back doors. Now you say those back doors will only ever keep out the stupid criminals (and end up serving the needs of the smarter criminals) - but most of us lock our front doors with the full knowledge that it only stops the casual / amateur criminal.
>Are they really so blind to all this, or is it just another power-grab?
To summarize... no. They don't have to be blind or power hungry to want this. It may even be the most efficient way to address the problem given the tools available and the rules they have to work within.
Our job as citizens is to inform our politicians (emphatically, continuously, and in significant numbers) where we want to be on the freedom/security scale. If we don't do that, political mechanisms will inevitably seek security at the expense of freedom.
>Slashdot has been almost run into the ground, with a large number of the stories having little to do with technology,
I'm (partially) OK with that. Too much focus and there's less draw to visit frequently or stay as long. Not enough and... well, everything gets watered down, which encourages lower quality posts and drives the cycle further. I would suggest the owners not let things slip any further since the 'generic noise' social media niche is well occupied by Reddit and they're not rolling in the bucks either.
>And the user interface is stuck somewhere in the previous decade.
Again, I'm on the fence. Yes, it's annoying... but it might also be one of the reasons we haven't finished the race to the bottom just yet.
Actually... yes. There has been a small but steady decrease in average brain size in homo sapiens for some time now. (http://discovermagazine.com/2010/sep/25-modern-humans-smart-why-brain-shrinking)
Either our brains are getting more efficient or they're shedding unnecessary redundancy or functionality. I'd tend to believe the latter since that would be the simpler change in evolutionary terms.
Keep in mind there's no need to translate the above to the belief we're getting less intelligent. There are probably all sorts of brain functions that were extremely helpful to pre-Stone Age humans that we haven't relied upon for a very long time, so some atrophy isn't all that astonishing. I'm actually rather more interested in why there's a net shrinkage when I'd have expected growing social needs to have caused other parts of the brain to be under selection pressure for expansion.
>No more paying Boeing 20 times the amount needed?
(as hidden subsidies, so that they can still exist on the world market?)
No need to hide it, Trump just claims Bombardier has an unfair advantage, gets tariffs levied against them as competition, and ignores any inconvenient facts about US government support of Boeing. Sorry, not "ignores", "lies and says they don't exist".
America has a post-fact economy now.
>Google's attempt to promote a healthy lifestyle caused a number of people to lambast the feature on Twitter, claiming it would "shame" and even "trigger" those with eating disorders.
Those people are poisoning our society. They need to be ostracized and allowed to wallow in whatever ghetto they manage to find refuge in.
I consider the equivalent of "unsatisfactory" to be termination of employment.
"Satisfactory" can (unfortunately) mean anything from "it isn't yet worth the trouble of replacing you, so we're going to try and get you to improve before we fire you" to "you're a great employee but not particularly special".
It'd be lovely to have a more exact scale, but people told they're heading to the chopping block sometimes choose to sabotage the company instead of either finding a way to satisfy the company's expectations or finding alternate employment.
More than that, when the movie ends you should be offered the chance to agree or disagree with the categorization and offer suggested changes.
95% of exit polls agree on a category? Auto-update the database. Easy-peasy.
>Let me search by one or more of director, by movie rating, actor/actress, publish date, rotten tomatoes score, etc
Genre, recommended viewer age, content (violence/sex/swearing/whatever) year (with +/-), director, actor, writer, studio, nation or geographic region of production, box office, major award wins... and except for year, multiple simultaneous selections and/or exclusions for each.
Maybe I want to see a historical porn comedy with no horror elements made in approximately 1985 in Europe but not Germany.
And I can see that happening with a pretty damn simple GUI, too.