1. Trial will be drawn out for six months to two years by motions, security considerations, etc. 2. Regardless of rulings, appeals will take a further two to five years. 3. Meanwhile, the government will continue to do as it damned well pleases. 4. Through it all, 99% of the public will pay more attention to American Idol or Nascar. 5. Poor ~pj at Groklaw will be driven to distraction by the huge briefs and exhibits expected to be filed. 6. Major media will spin everything pro-government. 7. At the end of it all, regardless of legal gymnastics, there will be no practical difference.
I hear ya. I had a 26 year old step-daughter who did get a the job at Starbucks...and got fired for bad attendance within the month. Back to Facebook and Angry Birds, full-time.
Funny, a week after I booted her useless ass out she had a new job at a book store, and within the month had graduated from couch surfing to her own cozy efficiency.
Parents shouldn't whine about their sweet, precious babies laying around their house. They need to put a boot in their ass.
While the Egyptian Army is certainly no paragon of freedom (or battle prowess, but that's another story...), at least there is a formidable power in Egypt that leans toward secular sanity and against Islamist lunacy. Egypt could again one day stand with Turkey (for all its troubles) and Jordan as examples of modern, stable states among the insane theocracies that surround them.
Yep yup. Funny how our chronically dysfunctional Congress always seems to come together when it comes to pandering to their Big Biz masters and sell the American dream ever farther down the river, while their media buddies keep John Q. Public preoccupied with single-issue zealotry (abortion, LGBT, 2nd Amendment, w/e) or benumbed with network television.
If one must vote in this charade in hope of change, vote Green or Purple or Pink, anything but Red or Blue. Reinstalling the perpetrators only prolongs the agony.
RMS's comments about OS back-doors are rather dated, since M$ made Win2K source available to governments many years ago. It gave a whole new meaning to the Windows joke, "That's not a bug, that's a feature!"
He is, however, spot on about "the cloud". No engineer or admin in his right mind would entrust his/her organization's data to a medium riddled with security, privacy, and reliability flaws.
Bean counters are all for the cost savings of "the cloud" until you clearly spell out the risks involved. Accountants and executives hate taking big risks for only a tiny commensurate potential for gain.
I've never been in a Foxconn plant, but I wonder how many of these so-called robots are just dumb 2- or 3-axis pick-and-place gadgets. "Robot" sounds more impressive to journalists and investors, but among industrial automation professionals the term has specific meanings. Of course, to the layperson a self-basting turkey could be called "robotic" by colloquial usage.
Without comprehensive, cooperative, enforceable international standards and practices, it's all just political showmanship. Given the interwoven economic, i.e. selfish capitalist, constituencies of all the nations, unilateral grand-standing and token half-measures are futile.
When global issues are at stake, global cooperation is required. It might start with a less-corrupt, more efficient United Nations with unselfish participation by the member states to give it a sense of legitimacy. That would be the ideal.
My gut feeling is that nothing, if anything, substantial will be done until the international capital oligarchs sense a real financial threat. Good intentions create politics; money creates policy.
He's giving you a number, and taking away your name.
How can any of us with more database experience than the average five-year-old think that once indentifiable data is in the wild, on any corporate or government server of any kind, all it takes is access to said data for it to be parsed against every other available database and have it filtered to a single common file? Do you really think your credit report, email history, school transcripts, and every bloody thing else can't be centralized once the access door is opened?
Yeah, go ahead with home-baked encrypted email, abandon Facebook, and use prepaid phones. You're still fucked.
The government owns us. And it's our own damned faults.
I have friends in state-level law enforcement. A great deal of "private personal" data about search phrases, download histories, email, and sites visited, is shared via FBI-CIA-NSA "cooperation" with the NCIS. It then migrates into lexisnexis and the other legal big data houses.
Pro Tip: If you value your job, never, ever access a personal home account from a work client, even to plan a trip, play Angry Birds at lunchtime, or pay a bill. Once the two identities are linked, they're linked forever.
And remember, your employer and the law do not pay damages or apologize for false positives from faulty algorithms. You are guilty until proven dead.
The whole sordid wiretapping & internet monitoring mess comes as no shock to some (those who care about the associated issues and have keep abreast of the situation), and as no big deal to the vast majority (those who don't). In a trans-national globalized world, the quintessential paradox of government v. freedom now knows no flag or borders.
As the sound-bite value of the initial shock fades and the lowing herd is calmed by condescending platitudes, we sink back into business as usual, as it has since the first paleolithic tribal chief.
A lot of us saw the dawn of the information age as the potential for a second Enlightenment, when a universally free flow of ideas and wisdom would lift mankind as a whole into an era of freedom and prosperity. Universal education and information was going to save humanity. Silly us. All we really did was give the despots more tools.
The old Party oligarchs in Russia gave up on the disfunctional Marxist police state in favor of an overtly fascist police state so they could 1) become as wealthy as Western oligarchs, 2) flaunt it like Western oligarchs, and 3) give the masses a few more consumer shinies to keep them fairly passive, all with a nice facade of democracy.
Yeltsin set the stage, and Putin has made it a tour de force in how to re-brand oppression. "There is no such thing as a former Chekist", as Uncle Boris likes to say.
Russian has become more like the USA, and the USA becomes more like Russia.
Slashdot Mirror
See [2.]
I know nothing of Narcotics Anonymous. Apparently you do.
1. Trial will be drawn out for six months to two years by motions, security considerations, etc.
2. Regardless of rulings, appeals will take a further two to five years.
3. Meanwhile, the government will continue to do as it damned well pleases.
4. Through it all, 99% of the public will pay more attention to American Idol or Nascar.
5. Poor ~pj at Groklaw will be driven to distraction by the huge briefs and exhibits expected to be filed.
6. Major media will spin everything pro-government.
7. At the end of it all, regardless of legal gymnastics, there will be no practical difference.
I hear ya. I had a 26 year old step-daughter who did get a the job at Starbucks...and got fired for bad attendance within the month. Back to Facebook and Angry Birds, full-time.
Funny, a week after I booted her useless ass out she had a new job at a book store, and within the month had graduated from couch surfing to her own cozy efficiency.
Parents shouldn't whine about their sweet, precious babies laying around their house. They need to put a boot in their ass.
It is not a trade war to boycott someone's products. It is a boycott. Words have specific meanings, except to politicians and their shills like you.
Good question. I've been wondering about the number of posts from young accounts who seem to have no sci/tech/math connection.
And no, I have no tinfoil hat. My wife used it all on sun tan reflectors.
While the Egyptian Army is certainly no paragon of freedom (or battle prowess, but that's another story...), at least there is a formidable power in Egypt that leans toward secular sanity and against Islamist lunacy. Egypt could again one day stand with Turkey (for all its troubles) and Jordan as examples of modern, stable states among the insane theocracies that surround them.
Or better yet, a way for the dead to hear what we're saying.
Yep yup. Funny how our chronically dysfunctional Congress always seems to come together when it comes to pandering to their Big Biz masters and sell the American dream ever farther down the river, while their media buddies keep John Q. Public preoccupied with single-issue zealotry (abortion, LGBT, 2nd Amendment, w/e) or benumbed with network television.
If one must vote in this charade in hope of change, vote Green or Purple or Pink, anything but Red or Blue. Reinstalling the perpetrators only prolongs the agony.
Number two, some of them may be chubby but nobody is fat enough to sit ON even 1000 Americans at once, let alone millions.
Roseanne Barr comes pretty close.
Until the first robo-Airbus slams into a mountain due to a minor hardware failure, program bug, or solar storm.
That's why automated mass transit trains still have operators on board and GPS-navigated ships still have deck officers.
I miss free AOL cd's...now I have to buy roadside mailbox reflectors and party coasters.
Or I need to make a beer run.
-Some old guy.
RMS's comments about OS back-doors are rather dated, since M$ made Win2K source available to governments many years ago. It gave a whole new meaning to the Windows joke, "That's not a bug, that's a feature!"
He is, however, spot on about "the cloud". No engineer or admin in his right mind would entrust his/her organization's data to a medium riddled with security, privacy, and reliability flaws.
Bean counters are all for the cost savings of "the cloud" until you clearly spell out the risks involved. Accountants and executives hate taking big risks for only a tiny commensurate potential for gain.
Japan should be building an army of Pikachu bots to launch aboard all deep space probes.
Won't the ET's be surprised when, expecting to be visiting a world of cute little yellow guys, and find...us?
I've never been in a Foxconn plant, but I wonder how many of these so-called robots are just dumb 2- or 3-axis pick-and-place gadgets. "Robot" sounds more impressive to journalists and investors, but among industrial automation professionals the term has specific meanings. Of course, to the layperson a self-basting turkey could be called "robotic" by colloquial usage.
Without comprehensive, cooperative, enforceable international standards and practices, it's all just political showmanship. Given the interwoven economic, i.e. selfish capitalist, constituencies of all the nations, unilateral grand-standing and token half-measures are futile.
When global issues are at stake, global cooperation is required. It might start with a less-corrupt, more efficient United Nations with unselfish participation by the member states to give it a sense of legitimacy. That would be the ideal.
My gut feeling is that nothing, if anything, substantial will be done until the international capital oligarchs sense a real financial threat. Good intentions create politics; money creates policy.
He's giving you a number, and taking away your name.
How can any of us with more database experience than the average five-year-old think that once indentifiable data is in the wild, on any corporate or government server of any kind, all it takes is access to said data for it to be parsed against every other available database and have it filtered to a single common file? Do you really think your credit report, email history, school transcripts, and every bloody thing else can't be centralized once the access door is opened?
Yeah, go ahead with home-baked encrypted email, abandon Facebook, and use prepaid phones. You're still fucked.
The government owns us. And it's our own damned faults.
I have friends in state-level law enforcement. A great deal of "private personal" data about search phrases, download histories, email, and sites visited, is shared via FBI-CIA-NSA "cooperation" with the NCIS. It then migrates into lexisnexis and the other legal big data houses.
Pro Tip: If you value your job, never, ever access a personal home account from a work client, even to plan a trip, play Angry Birds at lunchtime, or pay a bill. Once the two identities are linked, they're linked forever.
And remember, your employer and the law do not pay damages or apologize for false positives from faulty algorithms. You are guilty until proven dead.
This is obvious to a diligent engineer. One central lot of despots and bureaucrats to bribe and cajole instead of lots of little national ones.
We can combine the efficiency of the EU with the scale of the UN. Brilliant!
The whole sordid wiretapping & internet monitoring mess comes as no shock to some (those who care about the associated issues and have keep abreast of the situation), and as no big deal to the vast majority (those who don't). In a trans-national globalized world, the quintessential paradox of government v. freedom now knows no flag or borders.
As the sound-bite value of the initial shock fades and the lowing herd is calmed by condescending platitudes, we sink back into business as usual, as it has since the first paleolithic tribal chief.
A lot of us saw the dawn of the information age as the potential for a second Enlightenment, when a universally free flow of ideas and wisdom would lift mankind as a whole into an era of freedom and prosperity. Universal education and information was going to save humanity. Silly us. All we really did was give the despots more tools.
What comes next? We'll probably have to wait for http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izQB2-Kmiic
The old Party oligarchs in Russia gave up on the disfunctional Marxist police state in favor of an overtly fascist police state so they could 1) become as wealthy as Western oligarchs, 2) flaunt it like Western oligarchs, and 3) give the masses a few more consumer shinies to keep them fairly passive, all with a nice facade of democracy.
Yeltsin set the stage, and Putin has made it a tour de force in how to re-brand oppression. "There is no such thing as a former Chekist", as Uncle Boris likes to say.
Russian has become more like the USA, and the USA becomes more like Russia.
New World Order, anyone?
A breath of IP sanity from SCOTUS? And unanimously at that?
Pinch me. Surely I dream.
Obviously governments and corporations are always evil.
FTFY
Yes, dear friends, soon heavy industry will make it possible for everyone to have their own coffee!
Monsanto wouldn't have it any other way.
It could also be used to breed extra-noxious stink bugs for en-masse deployment at bachelor parties, graduations, and other prime prank targets.
Or would the NSA brand me a terrorist?