If it's any consolation, I took one of those in-depth "determine your actual political alignment" tests in the late nineties and I actually fell just barely on the conservative side of centrist, with a score of something 58/100, with 100 being ultra-conservative-reactionary and 1 being ultra-radical-liberal. While I don't doubt that my political views have changed slightly in the intervening years, my views have not changed much. In the meantime, the political spectrum has shifted in front of me, and now I fall strongly into the ideas of the Democratic party even though I do not associate with any political parties. That extreme, the shift to the right has been in this country.
The United States' political involvement in the world is really no more than an extension of The Great Game that Russia and Britain participated in, but with the US taking on the role that the UK formerly held, at least at the forefront.
Sad thing is, I honestly don't know if isolationism as we used to practice would be better for us and the world or not, or if some other power would simply fill the vacuum. At least with our geographic position the US is not really in a position to take territory for itself like the European powers tried to do with each other, as we got that out of our systems after the end of the Mexican-American war in the 1840's, purchases of Alaska and Gadsten aside...
Back in the old days when one could see what moderation was applied to a comment I had a +5 Troll. I had been modded up and down a lot, but all of the up mods were scattered among the several positive categories, while all of the down mods were Troll, hence, +5 Troll...
I'd even wager that the semianonymous old man in the cheery costume coming to give presents was a way of having one "god" show up to cheer up the children in the cold of winter.
For many years after I had my Athiesm realization I didn't celebrate christmas at all. Then I realized that this retail push for Christmas is the perfect way to secularize the holiday away from religion, especially when the Christian religious component is almost completely ignored by the biggest decorators: retailers...
...that they could detect the activity required to build a tunnel.
I've never used marijuana, but at this point I don't see its' continued illegality being beneficial. Legalize it for those of-age, require standards for safety, and regulate it in a fashion similar to tobacco and alcohol, where one can't smoke it in public generally outside of the marijuana-equivalent of a beer garden similar to how tobacco consumption is prohibited in many places, where one can't drive after consuming it like a DUI, but where some businesses could get licenses to allow consumption on the property, and where people could consume it in their homes, provided that it doesn't impact their neighbors and if they're renting, that it's permitted by their landlord, similar to cigarettes. Allow employers to dismiss employees who show up high in the same fashion as dismissing employees who show up drunk.
Do that and you just gutted much of the business of the cartels, put many of the street gangs and lowlife dealers out of business, and would prevent it from being cut with dangerous chemicals.
I'd have to agree. We tried to fight a 'war' without killing anyone. But if you're not willing to WIPE THE ENEMY OUT. You're not really at war, sit down and shut the fuck up. Send in the diplomats not the army.
If on 9-12 we had wiped out two middle eastern cities... and DEMANDED that everyone involved with 9-11 be turned over to us or else...
Terrorisim would not be an issue today.
Unfortunatly we no longer have the balls for a real war. And even if attacked on a large scale. I don't think we ever will again. We're whipped. An empire on the decline by all measures now.
Who invited Rick Perry? This isn't a Republican Debate!
If we did massive carpet bombing of areas Afganastan would have been a 100 day war.
The problem is we choose to do a "friendly" war. The enemy has no problem killing civillians and children, and we tip toe carefully trying to not hurt anyone. This makes it very one sided.
If we said, screw it... "WE will start bombing the hell out of every country that has Al- Quieda in it, let god sort out the innocent from the guilty." It would do two things.
1 - solve the "terrorist" problem. 2 - stop any country or group from screwing with us again. IF we act like a pitbull of the world, quiet until poked at, then we kill your children and families, a lot of the problems would go away.
I didn't know that we sent an "Ask Slashdot" questionnaire to Michele Bachmann...
Why does the world continue to pay any attention at all to north korea...
Because of Afghanistan and other places we ignored having a tendency toward biting us in the ass from time to time.
I'm also pretty sure that Japan is quite interested in what North Korea does, given the proximity of the two countries and the cruise missiles that NK has developed...
By "Install a printer", do you mean, unbox the printer, remove all of the packaging material from it, hook it up to power and Ethernet, assign it an IP address or whatever other possible network protocol setup is required, add entries in a print server if used, and then adding it to one or more workstations, or do you just mean adding the printer queue to a workstation?
If the former, I can actually understand an hour, especially on big ones like HP Color LaserJet 4700s, but if the latter, then it should take six minutes, assuming nothing's wrong with the PC or the drivers.
As far as software theft is concerned, if he's stealing software like Office, with the addition of KMS and other network authentication systems, that problem should curtail when employees find their home installs of Office failing because the corporate version can't activate against the company's server. If enough of that happens then it should cause the employee to lose customers.
Thing I don't get is that the federal government normally requires defense contractors and the like to keep very, very close track of what employees do and to which programs they bill their time, down to the decimalized hour, essentially six-minute intervals. Technically an employee is supposed to charge time to go to the bathroom back to the company itself instead of to a particular program. The whole point of such an asinine system is to keep this kind of fraud from being possible, and to attempt to keep employees working on a particular project on-task.
I guess that the "system worked" in that they did eventually catch on to the fraud, and took some kind of action because of it. I would actually blame the companies much more than the individual himself, though he does have plenty of culpability. I don't see how the employee's actions could have gone unnoticed by the companies.
That's why one would go with a distribution that is designed around a particular level. Look at Debian. They maintain three versions officially in the form of a stable, a testing, and an unstable, and I wouldn't be surprised if maintenance on older stable releases is still performed.
If you run a business and need your software to always work, you run Stable. Granted, you don't get pretty whizbangs and you might not be able to run the absolute-latest hardware, but your kernel and software will get only maintenance revisions, not full new versions. This ensures compatibility between everything.
If you have been a real Star Trek fan then there have been significant changes in your brain that allow you to better understand social justice, equality, currency-less societal structures, diplomacy, human-alien sexual congress, and the advisability of wearing red apparel.
Until the Berman and Braga years, I'd have agreed with you... Plus the recent movie that they titled as "Star Trek"...
You might want to talk to the women who are currently bemoaning the preponderance of emo and metro 'men' hoping to become girlfriends-with-a-penis. Gender roles are being shaken up all over the joint.
If anything, among the privileged of the world, the lack of feminism in male attire was the exception for awhile, rather than the rule. Womens' high fashion was based around clothing that was designed for form instead of function, and definitely fails at allowing women to work while wearing it. Privileged mens' fashion followed a similar pattern with hosiery, ornamentation, even high heels, until within the last couple-hundred years, when it switched to what we attribute as business attire. Womens' clothing everyday clothing evolved into ornamentation on semi-practical clothing, and now some mens' fashion is following suit.
It's actually been this way for some time though. Look at the disco attire of the seventies- that certainly was not a masculine way to dress.
Must be an election year coming up, because the government's actually doing shit about stuff we've been complaining about for the past... two, three years?
Unfortunately this is about par for all government when there are problems. It takes a very long time to effect change. Even if directors want to change something, when there are too many layers of management between the person who wants the change and the person who actually is supposed to implement it, and if those at the bottom actively do not want to change then it's really hard to get to the reasons why something fails. Each level of management, as they write their reports and reviews will sugar-coat what they need to, which means a cumulative sugar-coating by the time the reviews are distilled to the top.
It doesn't matter who's in power either, this is normal. It's also normal at very large companies, where too many layers allow whole divisions to run messed up for a long time before it manifests fatally, though at least companies have to make money. Government doesn't have that trouble.
To navigate a city looks like it was planned by throwing spaghetti at a wall and calling it a map.
And to think, that's after the Great Fire of London in 1666, and the subsequent planned rebuilding strategies to improve it! I'd had to think what it was like before that!
I used to blame Bill for all of the ills in the profession I work in, but I've recently had a change of heart...
In the years I've worked I've made about $500,000 in salary. 90% of the time I've worked on Windows machines, and frequently the same Windows machines, year after year, as the problems can't truly be fixed.
I've made half-a-million bucks because of Microsoft! Woohoo!
Point the webcam away when not using it, or unplug it?
I don't see how this kind of monitoring amounts to anything on company-provided equipment used in a work-from-home setting, or honestly, even in user-supplied equipment in a work-from-home setting. As numerous others have said, this can be defeated in the former with using one's own computer for not-work-appropriate activities, and if using one's own computer (and only computer), using virtualization to create a computer-within-computer for the work stuff. Simply install the software on the virtual machine and it can't get to what's going on in the real one.
There have been several high profile cases where companies pulled electronic, non-physical-media versions of content. Fact of the matter is, unless one has control either the device or of physical media, there's no way to prevent companies from pulling things off devices or from removing things from their available catalogs.
The only way to control one's destiny is to have physical media or to have information electronically stored on a device that one controls that the content provider doesn't control. Additionally, as DVDs and other physical media become incredibly cheap, it's easy to actually do this. Storage of 4.5" discs is also easy even for those in the smallest of living spaces if one discards the packaging in favor of those software storage bags that have room for hundreds of discs in a 12"x12"x4" space...
I have considered ripping all of my movies to electronic storage, but even not doing so it's not ridiculous to store them.
They are going to need to be able to generate nearly perfect strands before that becomes an option.
I guess we're safe from China beating us in the Space Elevator race then... Based on my experiences with Chinese-made goods their quality control will never be up to the task.
At least all those batteries that the e-bike people order that keep coming inadequately packaged and deformed will be able to handle if the graphene can be deformed safely... *grin*
Using up Oxygen is a non-problem, because it's not exactly used up, just placed in another form, converting it back is a well understood chemical process that can be done by any number of mechanisms.
Or just carry plenty along, depending on which is the better choice for mass.
Probably some of both. I would expect that such a mission would have an insane number of redundancies, and there's no reason at that point to not include some new tech when there's old safeguard redundancies there. If anything they'll use tech developed for the space station, which doesn't exactly have an umbilical running back to the atmosphere- yes they get resupplied by the Shuttle^H^H^H^H^H^H^HRussians periodically, but they have to go a long time without fresh air being delivered...
My understanding is that they need to question him first to determine if charges can be filed or not.
I don't honestly know how it works in Sweden, but if he has the right to remain silent, I don't see how interviewing him would add to their ability to file a charge. Either the stories of the women involved are compelling enough or they aren't. If they aren't, and if he has the right to remain silent in Swedish law, if he's smart he's going to keep his mouth shut and let their case wither on the vine.
I wouldn't be surprised if the British court rules to offer to let Swedish officials have access to interview him while in the UK and under house arrest, and that the interview will produce nothing useful at all, and that they'll ultimately let him go.
Not really. If he wins his appeal then he's safe in the UK. If he travels anywhere else that has an extradition treaty with Sweden then he's at risk again, including possibly in his native Australia.
Slashdot Mirror
A lot of Americans do realize this.
If it's any consolation, I took one of those in-depth "determine your actual political alignment" tests in the late nineties and I actually fell just barely on the conservative side of centrist, with a score of something 58/100, with 100 being ultra-conservative-reactionary and 1 being ultra-radical-liberal. While I don't doubt that my political views have changed slightly in the intervening years, my views have not changed much. In the meantime, the political spectrum has shifted in front of me, and now I fall strongly into the ideas of the Democratic party even though I do not associate with any political parties. That extreme, the shift to the right has been in this country.
The United States' political involvement in the world is really no more than an extension of The Great Game that Russia and Britain participated in, but with the US taking on the role that the UK formerly held, at least at the forefront.
Sad thing is, I honestly don't know if isolationism as we used to practice would be better for us and the world or not, or if some other power would simply fill the vacuum. At least with our geographic position the US is not really in a position to take territory for itself like the European powers tried to do with each other, as we got that out of our systems after the end of the Mexican-American war in the 1840's, purchases of Alaska and Gadsten aside...
Back in the old days when one could see what moderation was applied to a comment I had a +5 Troll. I had been modded up and down a lot, but all of the up mods were scattered among the several positive categories, while all of the down mods were Troll, hence, +5 Troll...
I'd even wager that the semianonymous old man in the cheery costume coming to give presents was a way of having one "god" show up to cheer up the children in the cold of winter.
For many years after I had my Athiesm realization I didn't celebrate christmas at all. Then I realized that this retail push for Christmas is the perfect way to secularize the holiday away from religion, especially when the Christian religious component is almost completely ignored by the biggest decorators: retailers...
...that they could detect the activity required to build a tunnel.
I've never used marijuana, but at this point I don't see its' continued illegality being beneficial. Legalize it for those of-age, require standards for safety, and regulate it in a fashion similar to tobacco and alcohol, where one can't smoke it in public generally outside of the marijuana-equivalent of a beer garden similar to how tobacco consumption is prohibited in many places, where one can't drive after consuming it like a DUI, but where some businesses could get licenses to allow consumption on the property, and where people could consume it in their homes, provided that it doesn't impact their neighbors and if they're renting, that it's permitted by their landlord, similar to cigarettes. Allow employers to dismiss employees who show up high in the same fashion as dismissing employees who show up drunk.
Do that and you just gutted much of the business of the cartels, put many of the street gangs and lowlife dealers out of business, and would prevent it from being cut with dangerous chemicals.
Who invited Rick Perry? This isn't a Republican Debate!
I didn't know that we sent an "Ask Slashdot" questionnaire to Michele Bachmann...
Because of Afghanistan and other places we ignored having a tendency toward biting us in the ass from time to time.
I'm also pretty sure that Japan is quite interested in what North Korea does, given the proximity of the two countries and the cruise missiles that NK has developed...
By "Install a printer", do you mean, unbox the printer, remove all of the packaging material from it, hook it up to power and Ethernet, assign it an IP address or whatever other possible network protocol setup is required, add entries in a print server if used, and then adding it to one or more workstations, or do you just mean adding the printer queue to a workstation?
If the former, I can actually understand an hour, especially on big ones like HP Color LaserJet 4700s, but if the latter, then it should take six minutes, assuming nothing's wrong with the PC or the drivers.
As far as software theft is concerned, if he's stealing software like Office, with the addition of KMS and other network authentication systems, that problem should curtail when employees find their home installs of Office failing because the corporate version can't activate against the company's server. If enough of that happens then it should cause the employee to lose customers.
Thing I don't get is that the federal government normally requires defense contractors and the like to keep very, very close track of what employees do and to which programs they bill their time, down to the decimalized hour, essentially six-minute intervals. Technically an employee is supposed to charge time to go to the bathroom back to the company itself instead of to a particular program. The whole point of such an asinine system is to keep this kind of fraud from being possible, and to attempt to keep employees working on a particular project on-task.
I guess that the "system worked" in that they did eventually catch on to the fraud, and took some kind of action because of it. I would actually blame the companies much more than the individual himself, though he does have plenty of culpability. I don't see how the employee's actions could have gone unnoticed by the companies.
That's why one would go with a distribution that is designed around a particular level. Look at Debian. They maintain three versions officially in the form of a stable, a testing, and an unstable, and I wouldn't be surprised if maintenance on older stable releases is still performed.
If you run a business and need your software to always work, you run Stable. Granted, you don't get pretty whizbangs and you might not be able to run the absolute-latest hardware, but your kernel and software will get only maintenance revisions, not full new versions. This ensures compatibility between everything.
Until the Berman and Braga years, I'd have agreed with you... Plus the recent movie that they titled as "Star Trek"...
If anything, among the privileged of the world, the lack of feminism in male attire was the exception for awhile, rather than the rule. Womens' high fashion was based around clothing that was designed for form instead of function, and definitely fails at allowing women to work while wearing it. Privileged mens' fashion followed a similar pattern with hosiery, ornamentation, even high heels, until within the last couple-hundred years, when it switched to what we attribute as business attire. Womens' clothing everyday clothing evolved into ornamentation on semi-practical clothing, and now some mens' fashion is following suit.
It's actually been this way for some time though. Look at the disco attire of the seventies- that certainly was not a masculine way to dress.
Unfortunately this is about par for all government when there are problems. It takes a very long time to effect change. Even if directors want to change something, when there are too many layers of management between the person who wants the change and the person who actually is supposed to implement it, and if those at the bottom actively do not want to change then it's really hard to get to the reasons why something fails. Each level of management, as they write their reports and reviews will sugar-coat what they need to, which means a cumulative sugar-coating by the time the reviews are distilled to the top.
It doesn't matter who's in power either, this is normal. It's also normal at very large companies, where too many layers allow whole divisions to run messed up for a long time before it manifests fatally, though at least companies have to make money. Government doesn't have that trouble.
Really? I watched several Republican Primary Debates, and I have to disagree with you...
And to think, that's after the Great Fire of London in 1666, and the subsequent planned rebuilding strategies to improve it! I'd had to think what it was like before that!
I used to blame Bill for all of the ills in the profession I work in, but I've recently had a change of heart...
In the years I've worked I've made about $500,000 in salary. 90% of the time I've worked on Windows machines, and frequently the same Windows machines, year after year, as the problems can't truly be fixed.
I've made half-a-million bucks because of Microsoft! Woohoo!
Great... I wasted my space in my head on Star Trek...
Point the webcam away when not using it, or unplug it?
I don't see how this kind of monitoring amounts to anything on company-provided equipment used in a work-from-home setting, or honestly, even in user-supplied equipment in a work-from-home setting. As numerous others have said, this can be defeated in the former with using one's own computer for not-work-appropriate activities, and if using one's own computer (and only computer), using virtualization to create a computer-within-computer for the work stuff. Simply install the software on the virtual machine and it can't get to what's going on in the real one.
There have been several high profile cases where companies pulled electronic, non-physical-media versions of content. Fact of the matter is, unless one has control either the device or of physical media, there's no way to prevent companies from pulling things off devices or from removing things from their available catalogs.
The only way to control one's destiny is to have physical media or to have information electronically stored on a device that one controls that the content provider doesn't control. Additionally, as DVDs and other physical media become incredibly cheap, it's easy to actually do this. Storage of 4.5" discs is also easy even for those in the smallest of living spaces if one discards the packaging in favor of those software storage bags that have room for hundreds of discs in a 12"x12"x4" space...
I have considered ripping all of my movies to electronic storage, but even not doing so it's not ridiculous to store them.
I guess we're safe from China beating us in the Space Elevator race then... Based on my experiences with Chinese-made goods their quality control will never be up to the task.
At least all those batteries that the e-bike people order that keep coming inadequately packaged and deformed will be able to handle if the graphene can be deformed safely... *grin*
Probably some of both. I would expect that such a mission would have an insane number of redundancies, and there's no reason at that point to not include some new tech when there's old safeguard redundancies there. If anything they'll use tech developed for the space station, which doesn't exactly have an umbilical running back to the atmosphere- yes they get resupplied by the Shuttle^H^H^H^H^H^H^HRussians periodically, but they have to go a long time without fresh air being delivered...
I don't honestly know how it works in Sweden, but if he has the right to remain silent, I don't see how interviewing him would add to their ability to file a charge. Either the stories of the women involved are compelling enough or they aren't. If they aren't, and if he has the right to remain silent in Swedish law, if he's smart he's going to keep his mouth shut and let their case wither on the vine.
I wouldn't be surprised if the British court rules to offer to let Swedish officials have access to interview him while in the UK and under house arrest, and that the interview will produce nothing useful at all, and that they'll ultimately let him go.
Not really. If he wins his appeal then he's safe in the UK. If he travels anywhere else that has an extradition treaty with Sweden then he's at risk again, including possibly in his native Australia.
I wanted a better handle.
Why not a beowulf clust---
I'm sorry, I just can't. I searched the ~35 posts, browsing at -1, and no reference to a Beowulf cluster anywhere, let alone Natalie Portman or Grits.
Slashdot! You're slipping! I lament the days when even our trolls were amusing and somewhat topical to the discussion at hand! We've fallen so far!