When I used to attend environmental (forest conservation) protests, the "unbiased" mainstream media would routinely do two things.
First, they would film and interview the one or two actual "nutters" who showed up out of 2000 people at the protest. e.g. the naked pot activists cavorting in the fountain who had decided to borrow our protest, and Second, they would only use narrow angle close up shots of small portions of the whole crowd, again focussed on the most stereotypical dreadlock types. This gave the impression that a few tens of dreadlocked hippies and naked pot activists had showed up to try to save the forest.
Be careful what you allow yourself to perceive, when intermediaries are feeding it to you.
Global warming 'is three times faster than worst predictions' By Geoffrey Lean, Environment Editor Sunday, 3 June 2007
Global warming is accelerating three times more quickly than feared, a series of startling, authoritative studies has revealed.
They have found that emissions of carbon dioxide have been rising at thrice the rate in the 1990s. The Arctic ice cap is melting three times as fast - and the seas are rising twice as rapidly - as had been predicted.
The study, published by the US National Academy of Sciences, shows that carbon dioxide emissions have been increasing by about 3 per cent a year during this decade, compared with 1.1 per cent a year in the 1990s.
The significance is that this is much faster than even the highest scenario outlined in this year's massive reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) - and suggests that their dire forecasts of devastating harvests, dwindling water supplies, melting ice and loss of species are likely to be understating the threat facing the world.
The study found that nearly three-quarters of the growth in emissions came from developing countries, with a particularly rapid rise in China. The country, however, will resist being blamed for the problem, pointing out that its people on average still contribute only about a sixth of the carbon dioxide emitted by each American. And, the study shows, developed countries, with less than a sixth of the world's people, still contribute more than two-thirds of total emissions of the greenhouse gas.
On the ground, a study by the University of California's National Snow and Ice Data Center shows that Arctic ice has declined by 7.8 per cent a decade over the past 50 years, compared with an average estimate by IPCC computer models of 2.5 per cent.
Further reading: Go to pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.0700609104
I guess I would appeal to the "Occam's Razor" principle, which says, if you can explain the observed phenomena while positing fewer entities and fewer and simpler relationships, this is in general more likely as a cause of the phenomenon than an explanation that posits additional entities and relationships.
Positing God as an explanation for phenomena is positing an extra entity and positing extra, complex, relationships, for which no scientifically credible evidence has ever been found.
Now in a previous world where there were no credible scientific explanations for many things, it was not possible to outright discount the God hypothesis. But as science now reaches back to explanations of the generation of the current form of the physical universe all the way back at least 14 billion years, and reaches (with generalized evolutionary theory) into the explanation by simple principles of the generation of complex layered, emergent-property physical matter-energy systems, such as life and its higher forms like human behaviour and societal behaviour, the need and the "room" for an EXTRA explanatory agent concept (i.e. GOD) recedes.
(By scientifically credible evidence, I mean evidence gathered by a logically valid and repeatable experiment, and evidence which does not have more likely alternate explanations. )
And keep doing things the easy, cheap, and unsustainable way, you'd have to convince me that global warming denial or human causation denial is not just self-serving rhetoric.
Once we got past that problem in the debate, and were both willing to just open-mindedly say "Well lets see where the data takes us, using our best modelling techniques", then we could have an objective scientific debate about this sort of issue.
I really hate positions which run essentially like this: "I really really want/need things to be this way (X), so I will believe and try to convince you that (X) is the case." This is political manoeuvring, not rational scientific debate or investigation about what actually, and perhaps inconveniently, is the case.
Why is a person who is aware of and opposed to the large-scale destructive effects and massive alterations we are having on Earth's ecosystems and climate called a "nutter" (translation for US audience: "Crazy wackjob")
whereas
someone who is either ignorant of these problems, incapable of comprehending them and rationally analyzing them, or willfully denying our negative environmental effects in order to selfishly further a comfortable but unethical and unsustainable lifestyle, is presumeable called a normal sane member of society?
Things that make you go hmmmmmmm.
But the real data is worse than the models predict
on
The Global Warming Heretic
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Particularly unfortunate then that the real data over the last decade has been showing across several indicators that the reality of warming is worse than the consensus model interpretations are predicting.
So he may be right that the models are inaccurate, but the general theory of the greenhouse effect is simple and correct, and is impacting us more than models guessed.
A second point on the topic of "You can't disprove God scientifically either".
That longstanding comfort may be eroding.
Please read "Evolution for Everyone" by David Sloan Wilson. In this remarkable book, David goes a long way toward applying evolutionary theory to explain the appearance and continuation of the God concept and religious group behaviours in human society.
There has been other work on the plausibility of humans, with our brains' great capacity for analogical reasoning, and our life experience beginning with perceiving the agency of our parents and other powerful human agents, imputing grand-scale "intelligent agency" to the mysterious workings of large-scale complex but semi-regular systems, like extreme weather, or disease epidemics, or prey food shortages, for example. And also the plausibility of us generalizing the moral game playing which is central to the functioning of our civil society (reward for good or cooperative behaviour, punishment for bad or selfish or cheating etc) to cast the grand-scale system "agent" in the role as moral authority and enforcer (i.e. societal governor, for the benefit of society's peaceful and stable continuation.)
When the "systems theory, sociological, and game theory" and "evolution of cooperation as an adaptive benefit" theory starts very plausibly and simply explaining the emergence and continuation of "God" concepts and religious behaviour, at some point we have to say that we have a very strong scientific explanation for the persistent misperception by humans of the true external existence of a "God".
This does not disprove the existence of "real God" as opposed to "God as uninstantiated but societally powerful concept", but it certainly renders the latter much more likely than the former, as an explanation for all the "God" artifacts and concern in human society.
Re: "You can't disprove God scientifically either."
The distinction is this: A currently accepted scientific theory has two things going for it: 1. It explains, often with a description of a simple (ergo likely) and elegant mechanism, a large body of observations, or key and formerly puzzling observations. 2. It has not yet been falsified by experiment or observation.
The existence of God hypothesis meets criterion 2. but not 1. except in the logically tautological and "begging the question" sense wherein one might say: "I observed this, and we can't explain it, therefore it must be the work of God, therefore God exists." Here we have simply defined God as "the mysterious hidden agent behind unknown causes and effects."
Scientific method says "question everything, but have a rational means of determining which hypotheses are more likely true."
What this basically means is count the strength of evidence of different claims, bearing in mind that each claim (in science) is built on a foundation of other tested claims. You have to do a recursive evidence-strength analysis of the whole house of cards.
A claim may be new, and not have a lot of evidence for it yet, nor have a significant number of other related claims that it is part of the consistent support for.
So scientific method says question that new claim quite a bit, particularly if it is inconsistent with a house of individually tested and inter-supporting claims.
But scientific method also says that once a card (a claim) has been unfalsified (using rationally designed experiments) for a long time, AND if as well that claim is a PART BUT NOT ALL of the foundation for many other claims which have also been successfully tested against the world, then you are free to question it, but you are probably wasting your time. Occasionally, very occasionally, a CORE early claim of a scientific field is overturned by new evidence and more comprehensive or correct theory, but more usually, the old claim is seen to have been a slight misperception or limited perception (containing some correct elements) of a similar but more general case in the new theory.
Turns out that believing whatever the group leader says and what other group members have been coerced into saying they believe, rather than checking things out for yourself, is evolutionarily adaptive. The group (the church or religion in this case) becomes a super-organism whose members help each other survive by agreeing alot. Collectively agreeing that you believe in X (substitute your favorite particular myth here) might be a way of practicing "collective agreement" itself, which you can then apply to all kinds of practical matters, like say, sheltering someone who believed they could afford their mortgage.
These little help-me-outs add up to a thriving superorganism. Exactly what the content of what the members agree to co-believe is doesn't matter much, as long as some of that content is about incentives and punishments for sharing and not sharing, respectively, or agreeing and not agreeing with the group, respectively.
(ps I know this is a "Just So" story, but at least it isn't a "just isn't so" story.)
A friend of mine lost their job in one of the legion of small, hopelessly underfunded tech companies because of the bad blood generated when she refused to use stolen software. She tried to be constructive about it, finding and using FOSS alternatives, but overall she just got the rep of "not a team player".
I am proud of how she acted. Essentially, small, ridiculously in debt tech companies should use FOSS and be happy it's out there.
In retrospect it was just a litmous test of the bad management at the company. I don't see that company succeeding, more on the basis of how they treat honest and creative employees, than on their level of honesty vs financial desperation.
If these piss-ant dictators and foaming moralists won't leave well enough alone, we'll just have to encrypt (TOR) the lot of it.
I am really serious. If we don't start using encrypted traffic routinely and by default on the Internet soon, then doing so will without doubt be made illegal.
Seriously, I am getting really tired of reading incoherent code written by coders with post-grad degrees. This code is like:
"When the box disk smiles, go down to the hairy river,
axe the question, be not sequitur music library))
Or like this: i ( a n 0 ][ ][H1 NK strat
Learn literate programming, world modeling using occam's razor, appropriate factoring and abstraction, elegance and analogy, then really learn at least one language and its libraries like the back of your hand. C++ = fast and ugly, and dangerous, unless you really work against it to make it beautiful and safe. Java = a beautiful baby that grew up into an old man before its time, burdened by layer upon heavy layer of painful baggage from a failed enterprise.
Python or Ruby = really nimble and powerful if you are good enough to avoid making a godawful mess, because they won't protect you from yourself.
Arguably, signal cuts through noise. If millions of people are wrong about it but in random directions, the handful of people that are completely right about it, and the elite cadre who are just slightly more right than wrong about it, might turn into a usable few bits of info on the subject.
I find it vastly amusing the amount of press that browser "speed" gets (compared to trivialities, like, say, "usability in peoples' computer-based work patterns").
Ok sure, javascript engine speed might be important, but javascript clearly is inadequate as a rich-client development platform anyway.
I for one do not sit here on my macbook or my dual-core 2.6GHz 2G RAM pc and think to my self "damn these 70 browser windows and tabs are rendering slow - damn damn damn". No, I pretty much never have to think about that, thanks to good work done by hardware and software engineers over the last 15 years or so.
Speed is SO NOT the key issue anymore. Netbooks prove this. Usability in the context of always-on info and my persistent context and where the hell is the stuff I was working on etc. is way way more important as a surfing quality of life issue.
According to TFA: Ts'o says that the application should be fixed so it does not write and rewrite small files. He advises that "this is really more of an application design problem more than anything else."
Unbelievable that this guy is the main author of a file system. To paraphrase him: "My file system is awesome. Just don't expect that when you issue a file write command that the file system will ensure that the file will be written."
From the 1960s, draconian British radio broadcasting restrictions forced would-be music broadcasters to park ships in the North Sea and transmit "pirate radio" stations to the UK.
Perhaps its time for pirate radio 2.0 : unlicensed digital packet radio mesh edition.
I Want My iTV
on
Why TV Lost
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
In Wired in 1998, I ranted as follows:
(Microsoft VP) Craig Mundie's statement that "we view the Internet as one of the 'features' of digital TV services" demonstrates the same lack of vision that caused Microsoft to miss the start of the Internet phenomenon. As communications technologies converge, TV will be one of the services of the Internet, not the other way around.
Not to say ITYS but ITYS.
Couldn't part of the reason for this win be that people over the age of two don't actually like being spoonfed their entertainment, their desires (mu-u-u-st SHOP!), and their political opinions?
On the Internet, I can not only drive, but plan out the whole route, if I want. Heck, I can build my own railway for other people to ride. Much more engaging than TV.
U.S. military in Afghanistan: Shopkeepers outside the U.S.-led coalition headquarters in Afghanistan were found selling computer memory drives stolen from inside the base. The drives contained seemingly sensitive military data, including the Social Security numbers of four American generals. The thefts were announced in April.
----
The State Departmentâ(TM)s computer security team has lost 400-odd laptop computers, CQâ(TM)s Jeff Stein reports.
Hundreds of employee laptops are unaccounted for at the U.S. Department of State, which conducts delicate, often secret, diplomatic relations with foreign countries, an internal audit has found.
As many as 400 of the unaccounted for laptops belong to the departmentâ(TM)s Anti-Terrorism Assistance Program, according to officials familiar with the findings. The program provides counterterrorism training and equipment, including laptops, to foreign police, intelligence and security forces. Ironically, the Anti-Terrorism Assistance Program is administered by the State Departmentâ(TM)s Bureau of Diplomatic Security (DS), which is responsible for the security of the departmentâ(TM)s computer networks and sensitive equipment, including laptops, among other duties. It also protects foreign diplomats during visits here.
To the originator of the story, I suggest you direct your P2P searching efforts toward finding a file containing the secret locations of the Iraqi WMDs.
Yes I have been a victim of this. Some moron who shares my name is a moderately infamous white supremacist.
Needless to say he has a prominent wikipedia and google presence.
I have actually lost business due to this, as someone looked him up, thought it was about me, and wrote smearing emails about me to my client. I cleared it up with the client but the FUD damaged the relationship and no further business ensued. And who knows, maybe it has cost me job interviews as well.
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, as they say.
on these installs and configs boggles the mind. No wonder the US economy is tanking. Everyone "smart" is trying to get their netbook to talk to the interweb.
While I'm sympathetic to the linux ethic and wouldn't use much else for servers, my fanboy side can't help pleading for an apple netbook.
Just freakin work please. I have actual work to do.
Slashdot Mirror
When I used to attend environmental (forest conservation) protests, the "unbiased" mainstream media would routinely do two things.
First, they would film and interview the one or two actual "nutters" who showed up out of 2000 people at the protest. e.g. the naked pot activists cavorting in the fountain who had decided to borrow our protest, and
Second, they would only use narrow angle close up shots of small portions of the whole crowd, again focussed on the most stereotypical dreadlock types. This gave the impression that a few tens of dreadlocked hippies and naked pot activists had showed up to try to save the forest.
Be careful what you allow yourself to perceive, when intermediaries are feeding it to you.
Global warming 'is three times faster than worst predictions'
By Geoffrey Lean, Environment Editor
Sunday, 3 June 2007
Global warming is accelerating three times more quickly than feared, a series of startling, authoritative studies has revealed.
They have found that emissions of carbon dioxide have been rising at thrice the rate in the 1990s. The Arctic ice cap is melting three times as fast - and the seas are rising twice as rapidly - as had been predicted.
The study, published by the US National Academy of Sciences, shows that carbon dioxide emissions have been increasing by about 3 per cent a year during this decade, compared with 1.1 per cent a year in the 1990s.
The significance is that this is much faster than even the highest scenario outlined in this year's massive reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) - and suggests that their dire forecasts of devastating harvests, dwindling water supplies, melting ice and loss of species are likely to be understating the threat facing the world.
The study found that nearly three-quarters of the growth in emissions came from developing countries, with a particularly rapid rise in China. The country, however, will resist being blamed for the problem, pointing out that its people on average still contribute only about a sixth of the carbon dioxide emitted by each American. And, the study shows, developed countries, with less than a sixth of the world's people, still contribute more than two-thirds of total emissions of the greenhouse gas.
On the ground, a study by the University of California's National Snow and Ice Data Center shows that Arctic ice has declined by 7.8 per cent a decade over the past 50 years, compared with an average estimate by IPCC computer models of 2.5 per cent.
Further reading: Go to pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.0700609104
I guess I would appeal to the "Occam's Razor" principle, which says, if you can explain the observed phenomena while positing fewer entities and fewer and simpler relationships, this is in general more likely as a cause of the phenomenon than an explanation that posits additional entities and relationships.
Positing God as an explanation for phenomena is positing an extra entity and positing extra, complex, relationships, for which no scientifically credible evidence has ever been found.
Now in a previous world where there were no credible scientific explanations for many things, it was not possible to outright discount the God hypothesis. But as science now reaches back to explanations of the generation of the current form of the physical universe all the way back at least 14 billion years, and reaches (with generalized evolutionary theory) into the explanation by simple principles of the generation of complex layered, emergent-property physical matter-energy systems, such as life and its higher forms like human behaviour and societal behaviour, the need and the "room" for an EXTRA explanatory agent concept (i.e. GOD) recedes.
(By scientifically credible evidence, I mean evidence gathered by a logically valid and repeatable experiment, and evidence which does not have more likely alternate explanations. )
And keep doing things the easy, cheap, and unsustainable way,
you'd have to convince me that global warming denial or human causation denial is not just self-serving rhetoric.
Once we got past that problem in the debate, and were both willing to just open-mindedly say "Well lets see where the data takes us, using our best modelling techniques", then we could have an objective scientific debate about this sort of issue.
I really hate positions which run essentially like this: "I really really want/need things to be this way (X), so I will believe and try to convince you that (X) is the case." This is political manoeuvring, not rational scientific debate or investigation about what actually, and perhaps inconveniently, is the case.
Why is a person who is aware of and opposed to the large-scale destructive effects and massive alterations we are having on Earth's ecosystems and climate called a "nutter" (translation for US audience: "Crazy wackjob")
whereas
someone who is either ignorant of these problems, incapable of comprehending them and rationally analyzing them, or willfully denying our negative environmental effects in order to selfishly further a comfortable but unethical and unsustainable lifestyle,
is presumeable called a normal sane member of society?
Things that make you go hmmmmmmm.
Particularly unfortunate then that the real data over the last decade has been showing across several indicators that the reality of warming is worse than the consensus model interpretations are predicting.
So he may be right that the models are inaccurate, but the general theory of the greenhouse effect is simple and correct, and is impacting us more than models guessed.
A second point on the topic of
"You can't disprove God scientifically either".
That longstanding comfort may be eroding.
Please read "Evolution for Everyone" by David Sloan Wilson. In this remarkable book, David goes a long way toward applying evolutionary theory to explain the appearance and continuation of the God concept and religious group behaviours in human society.
There has been other work on the plausibility of humans, with our brains' great capacity for analogical reasoning, and our life experience beginning with perceiving the agency of our parents and other powerful human agents, imputing grand-scale "intelligent agency" to the mysterious workings of large-scale complex but semi-regular systems, like extreme weather, or disease epidemics, or prey food shortages, for example. And also the plausibility of us generalizing the moral game playing which is central to the functioning of our civil society (reward for good or cooperative behaviour, punishment for bad or selfish or cheating etc) to
cast the grand-scale system "agent" in the role as moral authority and enforcer (i.e. societal governor, for the benefit of society's peaceful and stable continuation.)
When the "systems theory, sociological, and game theory" and "evolution of cooperation as an adaptive benefit" theory starts very plausibly and simply explaining the emergence and continuation of "God" concepts and religious behaviour, at some point we have to say that we have a very strong scientific explanation for the persistent misperception by humans of the true external existence of a "God".
This does not disprove the existence of "real God" as opposed to "God as uninstantiated but societally powerful concept", but it certainly renders the latter much more likely than the former, as an explanation for all the "God" artifacts and concern in human society.
Thank you for the thoughtful debate.
Re: "You can't disprove God scientifically either."
The distinction is this:
A currently accepted scientific theory has two things going for it:
1. It explains, often with a description of a simple (ergo likely) and elegant mechanism, a large body of observations, or key and formerly puzzling observations.
2. It has not yet been falsified by experiment or observation.
The existence of God hypothesis meets criterion 2. but not 1. except in the logically tautological and "begging the question" sense wherein one might say: "I observed this, and we can't explain it, therefore it must be the work of God, therefore God exists." Here we have simply defined God as "the mysterious hidden agent behind unknown causes and effects."
The fragment:
"has been unfalsified (using rationally designed experiments) for a long time"
should be replaced by:
"has not been falsified, despite many attempts to falsify it by scientific experiment"
Scientific method says "question everything, but have a rational means of determining which hypotheses are more likely true."
What this basically means is count the strength of evidence of different claims, bearing in mind that each claim (in science) is built on a foundation of other tested claims. You have to do a recursive evidence-strength analysis of the whole house of cards.
A claim may be new, and not have a lot of evidence for it yet, nor have a significant number of other related claims that it is part of the consistent support for.
So scientific method says question that new claim quite a bit, particularly if it is inconsistent with a house of individually tested and inter-supporting claims.
But scientific method also says that once a card (a claim) has been unfalsified (using rationally designed experiments) for a long time, AND if as well that claim is a PART BUT NOT ALL of the foundation for many other claims which have also been successfully tested against the world, then you are free to question it, but you are probably wasting your time. Occasionally, very occasionally, a CORE early claim of a scientific field is overturned by new evidence and more comprehensive or correct theory, but more usually, the old claim is seen to have been a slight misperception or limited perception (containing some correct elements) of a similar but more general case in the new theory.
Turns out that believing whatever the group leader says and what other group members have been coerced into saying they believe, rather than checking things out for yourself, is evolutionarily adaptive. The group (the church or religion in this case) becomes a super-organism whose members help each other survive by agreeing alot. Collectively agreeing that you believe in X (substitute your favorite particular myth here) might be a way of practicing "collective agreement" itself, which you can then apply to all kinds of practical matters, like say, sheltering someone who believed they could afford their mortgage.
These little help-me-outs add up to a thriving superorganism. Exactly what the content of what the members agree to co-believe is doesn't matter much, as long as some of that content is about incentives and punishments for sharing and not sharing, respectively, or agreeing and not agreeing with the group, respectively.
(ps I know this is a "Just So" story, but at least it isn't a "just isn't so" story.)
A friend of mine lost their job in one of the legion of small, hopelessly underfunded tech companies because of the bad blood generated when she refused to use stolen software.
She tried to be constructive about it, finding and using FOSS alternatives, but overall she just got the rep of "not a team player".
I am proud of how she acted. Essentially, small, ridiculously in debt tech companies should use FOSS and be happy it's out there.
In retrospect it was just a litmous test of the bad management at the company. I don't see that company succeeding, more on the basis of how they treat honest and creative employees, than on their level of honesty vs financial desperation.
If these piss-ant dictators and foaming moralists won't leave well enough alone, we'll just have to encrypt (TOR) the lot of it.
I am really serious. If we don't start using encrypted traffic
routinely and by default on the Internet soon, then doing so
will without doubt be made illegal.
It's definitely worth the $500 to avoid malware.
It's worth the $500 to avoid dealing with the frustrations of bad user interface design
combined with randomly thrown together
hardware design.
Seriously, I am getting really tired of reading incoherent code written by coders with post-grad degrees. This code is like:
"When the box disk smiles, go down to the
hairy river,
axe
the question, be not
sequitur music library))
Or like this: i ( a n 0 ][ ][H1 NK strat
Learn literate programming, world modeling using occam's razor, appropriate
factoring and abstraction, elegance and analogy, then really learn at least one language and its libraries like the back of your hand.
C++ = fast and ugly, and dangerous, unless you
really work against it to make it beautiful and safe.
Java = a beautiful baby that grew up into an old man before its time, burdened by layer upon heavy
layer of painful baggage from a failed enterprise.
Python or Ruby = really nimble and powerful if you are good enough to avoid making a godawful mess, because they won't protect you from yourself.
Arguably, signal cuts through noise. If millions of people are wrong about it but in random directions, the handful of people that are completely right about it, and the elite cadre who are just slightly more right than wrong about it, might turn into a usable few bits of info on the subject.
help
I find it vastly amusing the amount of press that browser "speed" gets (compared to trivialities, like, say, "usability in peoples' computer-based work patterns").
Ok sure, javascript engine speed might be important, but javascript clearly is inadequate as a rich-client development platform anyway.
I for one do not sit here on my macbook or my dual-core 2.6GHz 2G RAM pc and think to my self "damn these 70 browser windows and tabs are rendering slow - damn damn damn". No, I pretty much never have to think about that, thanks to good work done by hardware and software engineers over the last 15 years or so.
Speed is SO NOT the key issue anymore. Netbooks prove this. Usability in the context of always-on info and my persistent context and where the hell is the stuff I was working on etc. is way way more important as a surfing quality of life issue.
According to TFA:
Ts'o says that the application should be fixed so it does not write and rewrite small files. He advises that "this is really more of an application design problem more than anything else."
Unbelievable that this guy is the main author of a file system. To paraphrase him:
"My file system is awesome. Just don't expect that when you issue a file write command that the file system will ensure that the file
will be written."
Cool.
From the 1960s, draconian British radio broadcasting restrictions forced would-be music broadcasters to park ships in the North Sea and transmit "pirate radio" stations to the UK.
Perhaps its time for pirate radio 2.0 : unlicensed digital packet radio mesh edition.
In Wired in 1998, I ranted as follows:
(Microsoft VP) Craig Mundie's statement that "we view the Internet as one of the 'features' of digital TV services" demonstrates the same lack of vision that caused Microsoft to miss the start of the Internet phenomenon. As communications technologies converge, TV will be one of the services of the Internet, not the other way around.
Not to say ITYS but ITYS.
Couldn't part of the reason for this win be that people over the age of two don't actually like being spoonfed their entertainment, their desires (mu-u-u-st SHOP!), and their political opinions?
On the Internet, I can not only drive, but plan out the whole route, if I want. Heck, I can build my own railway for other people to ride. Much more engaging than TV.
U.S. military in Afghanistan: Shopkeepers outside the U.S.-led coalition headquarters in Afghanistan were found selling computer memory drives stolen from inside the base. The drives contained seemingly sensitive military data, including the Social Security numbers of four American generals. The thefts were announced in April.
----
The State Departmentâ(TM)s computer security team has lost 400-odd laptop computers, CQâ(TM)s Jeff Stein reports.
Hundreds of employee laptops are unaccounted for at the U.S. Department of State, which conducts delicate, often secret, diplomatic relations with foreign countries, an internal audit has found.
As many as 400 of the unaccounted for laptops belong to the departmentâ(TM)s Anti-Terrorism Assistance Program, according to officials familiar with the findings. The program provides counterterrorism training and equipment, including laptops, to foreign police, intelligence and security forces. Ironically, the Anti-Terrorism Assistance Program is administered by the State Departmentâ(TM)s Bureau of Diplomatic Security (DS), which is responsible for the security of the departmentâ(TM)s computer networks and sensitive equipment, including laptops, among other duties. It also protects foreign diplomats during visits here.
You have a very good point there.
Let the info-wars begin (again).
To the originator of the story, I suggest you direct your P2P searching efforts toward finding a file containing
the secret locations of the Iraqi WMDs.
Yes I have been a victim of this. Some moron who shares my name is a moderately infamous white supremacist.
Needless to say he has a prominent wikipedia and google presence.
I have actually lost business due to this, as someone looked him up, thought it was about me, and wrote smearing emails about me to my client. I cleared it up with the client but the FUD damaged the relationship and no further business ensued. And who knows, maybe it has cost me job interviews as well.
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, as they say.
on these installs and configs boggles the mind.
No wonder the US economy is tanking.
Everyone "smart" is trying to get their netbook
to talk to the interweb.
While I'm sympathetic to the linux ethic and wouldn't use much else for servers, my fanboy side can't help pleading for an apple netbook.
Just freakin work please. I have actual work to do.