This system is self-reinforcing by the way. As active government is generally bad government, the give and take of control of the houses of government give time for the voters to vote out the dominant group as soon as they do something. Government doing something - anything - is perceived by voters as bad because change is bad, so once one party gets control enough and starts to implement their change platform, the people vote them out. This works in all cases except severe external threats like WW II, or extreme internal threats like the Great Depression.
The one flaw is the lack of external and internal threats for a long period of time. Such a thing had never before existed, and they could not have anticipated that it would. In that case the whole thing self destructs.
Do the math. Bicameral legislature with a lower house population interest based and an upper house geographical interest based, and an approved law has to pass both. Add in executive veto and a two-party system and you have gridlock. By design. This is an architecture that needs an external threat to do anything at all. The founders were not shy about admitting this was their intent. To them effective government was a threat to liberty. They were wise.
If this plays out like I think it will, you will devoutly wish for a day when the Affordable Care Act, Obama, or partisan politics was something you might be concerned about. We are headed for a time when such concerns were the good old days.
In two weeks when we have defaulted on the national debt you will forget these trivialities. We will have bigger stuff to worry about, like how to feed your family when dollars are not worth the paper they are printed on.
I can expand on this. It orgs grew organically in an era when nobody had a clue and the security situation kept getting worse and worse. The people doing the gatekeeping know they are now out of their depth and their situation is dire. They are a ripe field for "security" salesmen who will sell them bigfoot repellent. Their goal is not to get someone in who can fix it. It is to not be found out before they retire. Hiring the clueful person is contrary to their personal interest because obviously his first order of business will be to point out how clueless and disastrous their decisions have been. Pretending to be clueless is how you get through this gate.
The US political system is deliberately designed to create gridlock. The philosophy is that the less government can do, the better. Obviously nothing is idiot proof. Yelling about how one side is evil and the other good, while the other side takes the same tone is just part of the plan. Eventually though someone involved is supposed to be mature enough to ensure the essential stuff happens.
It looks like nVidia is getting more serious about Linux and Steam of late. Intel too. Probably more to do with AMD winning both XB One and PS4 that love of open standards, but hey - whatever works. These are some hefty specs for a Linux TV/game console. I hope people will be willing to pay up. The Titan GPU by itself is $1000. It would also be nice if Valve would port their dev tools, since just gaming on this gear is a waste.
They will both be interesting. Galileo will be available in November for $60. This comes in the spring and price is not yet announced. Time to start playing with robots.
Ok look, I don't know where wikipedia gets their info but 40 years ago in the third grade I was tested and found to have college level skills in English, math and science in US national standardized tests. By age four I had taught my older brother how to read. Maybe I wasn't there on Guinness day. The Guinness group doesn't claim omniscience.
I assure you both my wunderkind could read full English by age two. We were standing in line at Walmart waiting for the Black Friday doors to open and my 18 months old babe in arms was reading the signs, astonishing passers-by. He was amazing the family by reciting the alphabet and associating the foam letter blocks, putting them in alphabet order and spelling words at less than 12 months. He tests at 95th percentile. Remarkable, right? His little sister two years younger still corrects his spelling and grammar - and mine. He thinks he's an intellectual dwarf because he stands in her shadow, and he tests at 95th percentile. Yes, they are freaks. But they're my freaks and I adore them.
As for her, she scares me. She tests off the charts - 99th percentile. I'm well into the genius range - 99.8+% according to some tests, but her ability to absorb information and integrate it truly scares me. If we can't teach her some morals and ethics she could be truly bad - and she seems resistant to such instruction.
Have you had the experience where a little child explains things to you in a way that is meaningful and correct? It is an eerie thing when you have been explaining things as simply as you can to people who are intellectually challenged your whole life. Moreso when she is right and it alters your view.
Look, none of the people actually know. They can sell solutions but not understand them. When Intel bought McAffee I cried because it implied even Intel didn't understand.
In my experience revealing what you really know about systems security is a guaranteed way to lose the job interview if you have any clue at all. The only way to help an organization get real operations security is to worm your way in under false pretenses and then gradually migrate them to a secure position. An MCSE cert helps here, as it drives away suspicion that you might actually know what you're doing.
And yet many people will (have) sign up if it means it will (does) help them get to work on time. Go ahead and not opt in. They don't need you.
Why do you care? Is your mobile phone on? Do you pay it in your own name? Then it continuously transmits its location, triangulated by cellular towers to within 30 feet, screaming your name. The towers need this info to route your calls to you. They use unencrypted backhaul to aggregate that info, and the backhaul is almost certainly tapped by the NSA, giving them real-time tracking on your location archived for all time. Providers are not required to, and do not always, use their own backhaul, but the Internet, meaning that any transit pipe with a mirror port could be capturing all location data for entire metro areas. Your cellular phone is a tracking device, and it always has been. That feature is required for and implied by the function of the device even if your GPS is nominally turned off. There is room for debate about whether the GPS is actually turned off when the software says it is, or if the "GPS off" feature just turns off access to the phone's apps while leaving the hardware and system software fully operational.
It is convenient that people don't have to know how their technology works, but sometimes it is annoying when people who don't know how their technology works complain about things that are intrinsically implied.
Google just bought a company, waze, that allows people to share their google enhanced gps location data in return for realtime traffic reporting and routing. It is a popular service.
Of course they stopped. Backhaul is compromised and the location data is transmitted in the clear, making phone company voluntary compliance redundant and more error prone than sniffing the data out.
At the current and long standing rate his divestment will be complete in 2018, so he has been waving goodbye for a quarter century. By coincidence this is just after Steve Ballmer's long expected departure when his youngest child graduates high school.
Now Ballmer is cutting out early and so is he. At least giving the appearance. But wait - as a billionaire with his own investment groups that manage not only his vast wealth he could actually be the one calling for his own ouster. That way he can escape the infamy while retaining control.
While now only a fourth of his wealth his direct Microsoft holdings are still a significant amout of wealth to recover for his Foundation. Hence an immense dividend and buyback program to keep the cash up, followed by a turn and burn hotshot to ramp the share price temporarily as he divests.
OK, now it makes sense. The company dies, erasing the stain on his charitable legacy, at the same time maximizing the Foundation's benefit. Everybody wins, and because he was kicked out rather than fled it is not his fault what happened after. Brilliant!
It takes a visionary painter to invent selling paintings. People will give Gates credit for a lot of things he does not deserve, and I am not one of those. But he did pretty much invent the commercial software market, for good or ill.
Slashdot Mirror
Does it look like this?
They would never lie to us.
In these times it is best not to broadcast that you have guns and ammunition, even though most folks do.
This system is self-reinforcing by the way. As active government is generally bad government, the give and take of control of the houses of government give time for the voters to vote out the dominant group as soon as they do something. Government doing something - anything - is perceived by voters as bad because change is bad, so once one party gets control enough and starts to implement their change platform, the people vote them out. This works in all cases except severe external threats like WW II, or extreme internal threats like the Great Depression.
The one flaw is the lack of external and internal threats for a long period of time. Such a thing had never before existed, and they could not have anticipated that it would. In that case the whole thing self destructs.
This is true, but at least back then we let people pretend they were worth something. Once we default, that game is over.
Do the math. Bicameral legislature with a lower house population interest based and an upper house geographical interest based, and an approved law has to pass both. Add in executive veto and a two-party system and you have gridlock. By design. This is an architecture that needs an external threat to do anything at all. The founders were not shy about admitting this was their intent. To them effective government was a threat to liberty. They were wise.
If this plays out like I think it will, you will devoutly wish for a day when the Affordable Care Act, Obama, or partisan politics was something you might be concerned about. We are headed for a time when such concerns were the good old days.
Actually, the US military does not have more guns than the US citizenry. In the US guns outnumber people to operate them.
In two weeks when we have defaulted on the national debt you will forget these trivialities. We will have bigger stuff to worry about, like how to feed your family when dollars are not worth the paper they are printed on.
I can expand on this. It orgs grew organically in an era when nobody had a clue and the security situation kept getting worse and worse. The people doing the gatekeeping know they are now out of their depth and their situation is dire. They are a ripe field for "security" salesmen who will sell them bigfoot repellent. Their goal is not to get someone in who can fix it. It is to not be found out before they retire. Hiring the clueful person is contrary to their personal interest because obviously his first order of business will be to point out how clueless and disastrous their decisions have been. Pretending to be clueless is how you get through this gate.
The US political system is deliberately designed to create gridlock. The philosophy is that the less government can do, the better. Obviously nothing is idiot proof. Yelling about how one side is evil and the other good, while the other side takes the same tone is just part of the plan. Eventually though someone involved is supposed to be mature enough to ensure the essential stuff happens.
It looks like nVidia is getting more serious about Linux and Steam of late. Intel too. Probably more to do with AMD winning both XB One and PS4 that love of open standards, but hey - whatever works. These are some hefty specs for a Linux TV/game console. I hope people will be willing to pay up. The Titan GPU by itself is $1000. It would also be nice if Valve would port their dev tools, since just gaming on this gear is a waste.
For this sort of system the Intel CPU is a glorified I/O concentrator. An accessory to the main compute unit.
They will both be interesting. Galileo will be available in November for $60. This comes in the spring and price is not yet announced. Time to start playing with robots.
Ok look, I don't know where wikipedia gets their info but 40 years ago in the third grade I was tested and found to have college level skills in English, math and science in US national standardized tests. By age four I had taught my older brother how to read. Maybe I wasn't there on Guinness day. The Guinness group doesn't claim omniscience.
I assure you both my wunderkind could read full English by age two. We were standing in line at Walmart waiting for the Black Friday doors to open and my 18 months old babe in arms was reading the signs, astonishing passers-by. He was amazing the family by reciting the alphabet and associating the foam letter blocks, putting them in alphabet order and spelling words at less than 12 months. He tests at 95th percentile. Remarkable, right? His little sister two years younger still corrects his spelling and grammar - and mine. He thinks he's an intellectual dwarf because he stands in her shadow, and he tests at 95th percentile. Yes, they are freaks. But they're my freaks and I adore them.
As for her, she scares me. She tests off the charts - 99th percentile. I'm well into the genius range - 99.8+% according to some tests, but her ability to absorb information and integrate it truly scares me. If we can't teach her some morals and ethics she could be truly bad - and she seems resistant to such instruction.
Have you had the experience where a little child explains things to you in a way that is meaningful and correct? It is an eerie thing when you have been explaining things as simply as you can to people who are intellectually challenged your whole life. Moreso when she is right and it alters your view.
Look, none of the people actually know. They can sell solutions but not understand them. When Intel bought McAffee I cried because it implied even Intel didn't understand.
In my experience revealing what you really know about systems security is a guaranteed way to lose the job interview if you have any clue at all. The only way to help an organization get real operations security is to worm your way in under false pretenses and then gradually migrate them to a secure position. An MCSE cert helps here, as it drives away suspicion that you might actually know what you're doing.
And yet many people will (have) sign up if it means it will (does) help them get to work on time. Go ahead and not opt in. They don't need you.
Why do you care? Is your mobile phone on? Do you pay it in your own name? Then it continuously transmits its location, triangulated by cellular towers to within 30 feet, screaming your name. The towers need this info to route your calls to you. They use unencrypted backhaul to aggregate that info, and the backhaul is almost certainly tapped by the NSA, giving them real-time tracking on your location archived for all time. Providers are not required to, and do not always, use their own backhaul, but the Internet, meaning that any transit pipe with a mirror port could be capturing all location data for entire metro areas. Your cellular phone is a tracking device, and it always has been. That feature is required for and implied by the function of the device even if your GPS is nominally turned off. There is room for debate about whether the GPS is actually turned off when the software says it is, or if the "GPS off" feature just turns off access to the phone's apps while leaving the hardware and system software fully operational.
It is convenient that people don't have to know how their technology works, but sometimes it is annoying when people who don't know how their technology works complain about things that are intrinsically implied.
Google just bought a company, waze, that allows people to share their google enhanced gps location data in return for realtime traffic reporting and routing. It is a popular service.
Of course they stopped. Backhaul is compromised and the location data is transmitted in the clear, making phone company voluntary compliance redundant and more error prone than sniffing the data out.
At the current and long standing rate his divestment will be complete in 2018, so he has been waving goodbye for a quarter century. By coincidence this is just after Steve Ballmer's long expected departure when his youngest child graduates high school.
Now Ballmer is cutting out early and so is he. At least giving the appearance. But wait - as a billionaire with his own investment groups that manage not only his vast wealth he could actually be the one calling for his own ouster. That way he can escape the infamy while retaining control.
While now only a fourth of his wealth his direct Microsoft holdings are still a significant amout of wealth to recover for his Foundation. Hence an immense dividend and buyback program to keep the cash up, followed by a turn and burn hotshot to ramp the share price temporarily as he divests.
OK, now it makes sense. The company dies, erasing the stain on his charitable legacy, at the same time maximizing the Foundation's benefit. Everybody wins, and because he was kicked out rather than fled it is not his fault what happened after. Brilliant!
It takes a visionary painter to invent selling paintings. People will give Gates credit for a lot of things he does not deserve, and I am not one of those. But he did pretty much invent the commercial software market, for good or ill.
Meh. The misspelling of "quite" just proves the point, which was that I am certain I am uncertain.
I am qiute certain that I am not so smart as I think I am.
I beg to differ, AC. Nought new was ever achieved by following the well worn path.