True, but the voters are the ones to blame for this. Lobbyists can promote candidates, but they can't vote for them.
I want to stress, by the way, that this isn't a republican or democrat thing and I'd hope to nip those blame games in the bud. The problem here is people not bothering to look at who they vote for. Among things that people vote for are this: whether it's a D or an R next to their name, whether or not their friends are voting for them, whether or not they like their appearance, or most recently the color of their skin (seriously, my sister voted for no reason other than she thought it would be good to have a black president.)
If any of you have ever seen v for vendetta, he paints equal blame for an oppressive government on the citizens themselves. And that is exactly the thing - we're basically reaping what we've sown. And please, for gods sakes, don't go around telling people who they should vote for either. Tell them to either think for themselves about what they are voting for, or else do everybody else a favor and don't vote at all.
If you want proof of this, just read slashdot. Not the articles, but the comments. It's pretty hard to find a liberal that is in favor of gun control, yet still they vote in droves for politicians who are in favor of gun control. It's hard to find a conservative that is in favor of big government, yet they still vote in droves for politicians that are in favor of big government. Quit voting for the god damn letter, and always second guess those advertisements that e.g. say Joe the politician voted against education funding when in reality the bill he voted against was aimed at something else entirely, but had education as an earmark.
One that will really bake your noodle is: Why the fuck are taxpayers being forced to pay some guy to stick a crucifix inside of a jar full of piss?
I'm not religious so the message of the art doesn't bother me, but...damn. It's not even art that I'm interested in, yet I have to contribute to it anyways. This is what us libertarians complain about when it comes to wasteful spending, but it takes a religious uproar to bring it to the forefront.
Unless they have either a correct password or gpg private key and an exact port number and protocol, they aren't even going to have the slightest idea that a computer even exists at the IP address they are scanning.
This is one reason why I don't bother to vote any more except in certain obvious situations (E.g. I voted for Jeff Flake for senate 2012 due to his anti-SOPA stance, and left the rest of the ballot blank.)
My sister voted for Obama because she likes having a black man in office. All too often I meet people who vote for x candidate because that's who their friends are voting for.
It's pretty rare that I actually meet anybody who knows the first thing about any major issue that they support. Nobody really gives a crap about any issues any more, they just vote for somebody either based on their gut or "because he's one cool dude". I was reading something Matt Stone and Trey Parker said about how if you haven't researched the issues or are just apathetic about politics, don't vote, you'll probably do more harm than good.
Honestly I am no longer going to register to vote.
During the last election season I got a call from somebody representing Matt Salmon who was trying to get me to vote for him. I was open to it (I voted for him for a different office a long time ago) so I asked why. He said he would fight Obamacare and lower taxes. I said that while I don't want Obamacare, I do think we spend too much on health care, and I know people in the medical field who say that there is too much red tape. So I ask what does he propose to do to fix the problem. The guy kind of paused for a minute, and then said he would deregulate. Ok, being a libertarian I can accept that answer, but what is he going to deregulate, and how will that fix things? He then stopped and said "you know what, I'll have Matt Salmon give you a call personally." Ok fine, I'd like to directly add my input, as would anybody else. I never got that phone call.
But that's not all. Later when I was walking around campus, some people had a booth up to get people registered to vote. I happened to pass by, and they asked me if I was registered to vote, I said something to the effect of "yeah I'm registered, but I probably won't vote anyways". They asked me why, I explained basically everything I said above, and then they started giving me this rant about Joe Arpaio and why I should vote him out. Ok, so I ask why. This one girl goes on to say how he doesn't treat the inmates well because he only spends $60 a week on them, meanwhile he is spending all kinds of money to defend lawsuits, as well as separating families.
Hmm...he spends $60 a week on inmates, whereas other prisons spend $120 per day (on average) on inmates. How is that a bad thing? I've known people who have gone to tent city, all of them who either are or were pieces of shit (not just for the law they allegedly broke, but just because of the kind of person they are) and yeah they say it sucks there. So when I ask if they'd like to go back to tent city, they say hell no. Well, it's pretty damn easy to stay out of tent city, and if the thought of going back to tent city makes them stop breaking the law, then so much the better.
As for the lawsuits...well, apparently every sheriff gets slapped with lawsuits, just Joe more so than others. Further, it seems that he wins most of those lawsuits, and most of them are filed by people who oppose Arizona's laws, but otherwise have nothing to do with Arizona (it's about as obnoxious as how the US Government told New Zealand to arrest Dotcom.) As a result, I'm having a hard time figuring out how Joe is wrong on this one. Any idiot with money can file a lawsuit.
And then the separating families turns out that illegal immigrants are being sent home. Well, they break the law by moving in, and then have a beef with being pushed back out? The hypocrisy of this is astounding. America is about the most tolerant country of illegal immigrants there is. Mexico sticks them in jail for a long time before kicking them out. Legal immigrants in Mexico aren't allowed to peacefully protest, and if a Mexican citizen wants a job that a legal immigrant has, the employer is forced to fire the immigrant and take the Mexican in their place. Non
Meat is absolutely not a luxury. Vegetarian diets are unsustainable without supplementation through artificial means. Everything about our anatomy tells us that we are omnivores, not herbivores. Unlike herbivores, we have a simple stomach which can't break down the majority of common plant matter, and we lack a cecum to process cellulose with. Our bodies aren't even capable of producing all 20 amino acid groups; we have to get most of them in an already existing form which is usually meat, unless you take artificial or at least exotic supplements. And even then, the amino acid groups found in these plant based supplements aren't quite as good as those found in meat.
Also indigenous tribes that live off of 80%+ meat diets are known to have longer natural lifespans than all others. These would include the American Inuit and Australian aboriginals. It wasn't until Europeans came into their land that their lifespans declined quickly due to disease. Another thing you can observe is that American natives, who again consumed large amounts of meat, are now eating European diets which consist of mostly plant matter, and are frequently overweight and diabetic. We've had a long period to adapt to this kind of food, but they haven't.
One really bad food that we eat in huge abundance is bread. Wheat is actually not very nourishing, and the gluten it contains is rather toxic to our intestines (but most of us can tolerate it.) The advantage of bread is that it is relatively cheap and is filling, but it isn't really something we should be eating.
One of the things they mention in there is insulation. It's a bit hard to insulate big glass windows, which new york has a lot of. Yes you can double pane them and even (very expensively) vacuum the middle but they still transfer heat pretty well.
Unless of course you got rid of those windows, but they said without removing any creature comforts. I don't know about anybody else, but sunlight fits into my definition of a creature comfort.
To be honest I stopped wearing a watch after I got my smartphone, it just seemed kind of superfluous. But my smartphone doesn't hold a garrote wire, and I've always wanted to carry around a garrote wire but I hate having things in my pockets, so on the wrist would be great.
Actually BIOS compatibility is just another module that is loaded into UEFI. I don't recall the name of it, but it just emulates enough bios functions to get legacy hardware and software running. On proper UEFI implementations, you can disable it entirely so long as all of your hardware is fully UEFI aware and your OS supports UEFI boot. (My radeon 7850 isn't uefi aware, so I can't disable it on mine.)
ICANN is a private organization, and ICANN makes it pretty clear what the rules are on domain name ownership, and what domain names can and can't be used for. That effectively, as the blog points out, makes domain names leased rather than owned (especially considering you have to pay for them each year, even if only a small amount.)
ICANN has designated a few entities as arbiters to these rules. The UN happens to be one of them. Had ICANN made Timothy Lord one of these arbiters, then Ron Paul would have to have gone to Timothy Lord with this dispute instead of the UN. Would that mean Ron Paul, or anybody else for that matter, would be forced to recognize Timothy Lord as being an authority on global governance? I really don't think so.
As a libertarian myself, I don't support Ron Paul. However, similar to him, I am against the UN. Some things that the UN takes into *serious* consideration are implementing global blaspheme laws and removing IANA from the US department of commerce, handing it to oversight which includes heavy influence from countries like China and Russia, who really don't like the free internet as it exists today. If a private organization like ICANN says that it won't take any action unless I talk to X entity first, then I'll oblige.
While I don't read Finnish (or whatever language this is in) this website looks like it's a lampoon, which if it is, falls under fair use regardless of whether or not the kopimi symbol is there. I mean it has a picture of a sinking corsair ffs.
The ones about UEFI annoy me the most. Too many people, even on slashdot of all places, think UEFI is just a graphical addon to BIOS that also adds DRM. It's nothing of the sort, most existing UEFI systems on OEM computers have a text based configuration tool and don't even secure boot. (Windows 8 mandates the change of the later of course.) Further, BIOS also had DRM capability.
UEFI is a complete replacement of BIOS. BIOS had a ton of restrictions related to all sorts of things, e.g. partition count and size on the bootable hard disk, BIOS requires POST (which in modern systems needlessly adds to the boot time) as well as a ton of reserved and now useless for decades interrupts. These new things that you find with UEFI (e.g. graphical configuration tool) are simply new features that UEFI allows for, but aren't required.
What console hasn't been about sales? Pretty much all of the best selling ones were sold at either a loss or a very tiny profit margin so that they could make money off of selling the games. Effectively just a computer designed for content consumption.
Now they're simply adding more content to consume. Makes sense for the consumer when you think about it - no need turn it off, turn on another device, and change inputs when you switch from playing a game to watching movies.
The annoying thing about xbox though is that you have to have an xbox live subscription in order to consume other content. E.g. pay microsoft to watch netflix.
I like the new windows 8 transfer bar that shows instantaneous transfer rates (not average) as it progresses left to right. This gives you a very accurate idea of when the transfer will finish, as it can slow down or speed up based on either network congestion or file size (a bunch of small files transfer slower than few big files.)
Visa and mastercard give all kinds of consumer protection benefits just for using the card, though I don't know whether they apply to both debit and credit. For example, my card includes a free extra year of warranty on anything I buy, free insurance on rental cars, guaranteed 30 day money back on anything I buy as well as accidental damage.
I use a credit card though, supposedly their top tier (they call it world mastercard). I quality for it in spite of paying zero interest (and so many people keep insisting that I should never pay the bill in full every month because it doesn't help my credit - they're as wrong as wrong can be.)
From my observation of 10ish years on slashdot (I didn't register until some time of lurking,) slashdot *was* almost entirely in favor of apple, but no longer.
The common argument in favor of apple at the time was how open they are (e.g. using posix rules, incorporating samba, etc.) I frequently pointed out that if apple was as dominant as microsoft, they would impose far worse restrictions on user freedom than microsoft ever did. I was shot down at the time, but it turns out that I was right.
Anyways, most of slashdot now agrees with that assessment and is largely anti-apple these days.
I think there are much worse things destroying the environment in China. Have you seen Beijing? The smog is so bad you can't even see 30 feet in front of you.
I'm not sure how you can argue that we were lied to. EVERYBODY believed he had WMD's, that would include the russians, the french, the chinese, the british, and many others who independently found evidence of it.
Last month a drone strike killed 24 civilians, with zero enemy combatants present. Bush would get blamed for this kind of thing outright, yet nobody blames obama.
I think any "entity" (wikileaks being one, even if not legally defined as such) be it a group or individual has skeletons in its closet. Wikileaks is as far game as anything else.
If I was an eco-activist, I think I would be happy that solar panels are being made available at lower prices to increase adoption.
Let's suppose you got your tariff though. Who outside of the US will buy American made solar panels when they can still get them cheaper elsewhere? And does it make you happy that solar power adoption will stagnate due to higher prices?
That's what I'm getting that. If you metered data, you can't know whether or not it made it at its destination.
And yes, you can get horrible packet loss without the ISP being involved at all. In fact, that is currently happening at the peering level with AT&T and Cogent. They've had a few saturated links at their border routers somewhere near Illinois for several months now and haven't done a damn thing about it. It is mainly effecting several west coast ISP's whose users get horrible latency with blizzards chicago datacenter (the delays are caused by the constant TCP retransmits as blizzard doesn't use UDP for their newer games, so it doesn't show up as packet loss to the end user when in reality that is exactly what it is.) Most other users don't notice the problem because they are usually accessing websites, which are much more tolerant of 200ms to 500ms latency.
There's not much that blizzard or the ISP's can do about it until AT&T and Cogent get their heads out of their asses. Meanwhile, those dropped egress packets still count towards the meters.
Slashdot Mirror
True, but the voters are the ones to blame for this. Lobbyists can promote candidates, but they can't vote for them.
I want to stress, by the way, that this isn't a republican or democrat thing and I'd hope to nip those blame games in the bud. The problem here is people not bothering to look at who they vote for. Among things that people vote for are this: whether it's a D or an R next to their name, whether or not their friends are voting for them, whether or not they like their appearance, or most recently the color of their skin (seriously, my sister voted for no reason other than she thought it would be good to have a black president.)
If any of you have ever seen v for vendetta, he paints equal blame for an oppressive government on the citizens themselves. And that is exactly the thing - we're basically reaping what we've sown. And please, for gods sakes, don't go around telling people who they should vote for either. Tell them to either think for themselves about what they are voting for, or else do everybody else a favor and don't vote at all.
If you want proof of this, just read slashdot. Not the articles, but the comments. It's pretty hard to find a liberal that is in favor of gun control, yet still they vote in droves for politicians who are in favor of gun control. It's hard to find a conservative that is in favor of big government, yet they still vote in droves for politicians that are in favor of big government. Quit voting for the god damn letter, and always second guess those advertisements that e.g. say Joe the politician voted against education funding when in reality the bill he voted against was aimed at something else entirely, but had education as an earmark.
One that will really bake your noodle is: Why the fuck are taxpayers being forced to pay some guy to stick a crucifix inside of a jar full of piss?
I'm not religious so the message of the art doesn't bother me, but...damn. It's not even art that I'm interested in, yet I have to contribute to it anyways. This is what us libertarians complain about when it comes to wasteful spending, but it takes a religious uproar to bring it to the forefront.
I'm a libertarian, and I approve this message.
Better than port knocking is single packet authorization.
http://www.cipherdyne.org/fwknop/docs/SPA.html
Unless they have either a correct password or gpg private key and an exact port number and protocol, they aren't even going to have the slightest idea that a computer even exists at the IP address they are scanning.
This is one reason why I don't bother to vote any more except in certain obvious situations (E.g. I voted for Jeff Flake for senate 2012 due to his anti-SOPA stance, and left the rest of the ballot blank.)
My sister voted for Obama because she likes having a black man in office. All too often I meet people who vote for x candidate because that's who their friends are voting for.
It's pretty rare that I actually meet anybody who knows the first thing about any major issue that they support. Nobody really gives a crap about any issues any more, they just vote for somebody either based on their gut or "because he's one cool dude". I was reading something Matt Stone and Trey Parker said about how if you haven't researched the issues or are just apathetic about politics, don't vote, you'll probably do more harm than good.
Honestly I am no longer going to register to vote.
During the last election season I got a call from somebody representing Matt Salmon who was trying to get me to vote for him. I was open to it (I voted for him for a different office a long time ago) so I asked why. He said he would fight Obamacare and lower taxes. I said that while I don't want Obamacare, I do think we spend too much on health care, and I know people in the medical field who say that there is too much red tape. So I ask what does he propose to do to fix the problem. The guy kind of paused for a minute, and then said he would deregulate. Ok, being a libertarian I can accept that answer, but what is he going to deregulate, and how will that fix things? He then stopped and said "you know what, I'll have Matt Salmon give you a call personally." Ok fine, I'd like to directly add my input, as would anybody else. I never got that phone call.
But that's not all. Later when I was walking around campus, some people had a booth up to get people registered to vote. I happened to pass by, and they asked me if I was registered to vote, I said something to the effect of "yeah I'm registered, but I probably won't vote anyways". They asked me why, I explained basically everything I said above, and then they started giving me this rant about Joe Arpaio and why I should vote him out. Ok, so I ask why. This one girl goes on to say how he doesn't treat the inmates well because he only spends $60 a week on them, meanwhile he is spending all kinds of money to defend lawsuits, as well as separating families.
Hmm...he spends $60 a week on inmates, whereas other prisons spend $120 per day (on average) on inmates. How is that a bad thing? I've known people who have gone to tent city, all of them who either are or were pieces of shit (not just for the law they allegedly broke, but just because of the kind of person they are) and yeah they say it sucks there. So when I ask if they'd like to go back to tent city, they say hell no. Well, it's pretty damn easy to stay out of tent city, and if the thought of going back to tent city makes them stop breaking the law, then so much the better.
As for the lawsuits...well, apparently every sheriff gets slapped with lawsuits, just Joe more so than others. Further, it seems that he wins most of those lawsuits, and most of them are filed by people who oppose Arizona's laws, but otherwise have nothing to do with Arizona (it's about as obnoxious as how the US Government told New Zealand to arrest Dotcom.) As a result, I'm having a hard time figuring out how Joe is wrong on this one. Any idiot with money can file a lawsuit.
And then the separating families turns out that illegal immigrants are being sent home. Well, they break the law by moving in, and then have a beef with being pushed back out? The hypocrisy of this is astounding. America is about the most tolerant country of illegal immigrants there is. Mexico sticks them in jail for a long time before kicking them out. Legal immigrants in Mexico aren't allowed to peacefully protest, and if a Mexican citizen wants a job that a legal immigrant has, the employer is forced to fire the immigrant and take the Mexican in their place. Non
But you've already broken the first rule of internet fight club, so you lost the argument before you started.
Whoosh.
He was making a play on words "right and 'good'win".
Meat is absolutely not a luxury. Vegetarian diets are unsustainable without supplementation through artificial means. Everything about our anatomy tells us that we are omnivores, not herbivores. Unlike herbivores, we have a simple stomach which can't break down the majority of common plant matter, and we lack a cecum to process cellulose with. Our bodies aren't even capable of producing all 20 amino acid groups; we have to get most of them in an already existing form which is usually meat, unless you take artificial or at least exotic supplements. And even then, the amino acid groups found in these plant based supplements aren't quite as good as those found in meat.
Also indigenous tribes that live off of 80%+ meat diets are known to have longer natural lifespans than all others. These would include the American Inuit and Australian aboriginals. It wasn't until Europeans came into their land that their lifespans declined quickly due to disease. Another thing you can observe is that American natives, who again consumed large amounts of meat, are now eating European diets which consist of mostly plant matter, and are frequently overweight and diabetic. We've had a long period to adapt to this kind of food, but they haven't.
One really bad food that we eat in huge abundance is bread. Wheat is actually not very nourishing, and the gluten it contains is rather toxic to our intestines (but most of us can tolerate it.) The advantage of bread is that it is relatively cheap and is filling, but it isn't really something we should be eating.
Nuclear has a very low carbon footprint.
One of the things they mention in there is insulation. It's a bit hard to insulate big glass windows, which new york has a lot of. Yes you can double pane them and even (very expensively) vacuum the middle but they still transfer heat pretty well.
Unless of course you got rid of those windows, but they said without removing any creature comforts. I don't know about anybody else, but sunlight fits into my definition of a creature comfort.
To be honest I stopped wearing a watch after I got my smartphone, it just seemed kind of superfluous. But my smartphone doesn't hold a garrote wire, and I've always wanted to carry around a garrote wire but I hate having things in my pockets, so on the wrist would be great.
Actually BIOS compatibility is just another module that is loaded into UEFI. I don't recall the name of it, but it just emulates enough bios functions to get legacy hardware and software running. On proper UEFI implementations, you can disable it entirely so long as all of your hardware is fully UEFI aware and your OS supports UEFI boot. (My radeon 7850 isn't uefi aware, so I can't disable it on mine.)
ICANN is a private organization, and ICANN makes it pretty clear what the rules are on domain name ownership, and what domain names can and can't be used for. That effectively, as the blog points out, makes domain names leased rather than owned (especially considering you have to pay for them each year, even if only a small amount.)
ICANN has designated a few entities as arbiters to these rules. The UN happens to be one of them. Had ICANN made Timothy Lord one of these arbiters, then Ron Paul would have to have gone to Timothy Lord with this dispute instead of the UN. Would that mean Ron Paul, or anybody else for that matter, would be forced to recognize Timothy Lord as being an authority on global governance? I really don't think so.
As a libertarian myself, I don't support Ron Paul. However, similar to him, I am against the UN. Some things that the UN takes into *serious* consideration are implementing global blaspheme laws and removing IANA from the US department of commerce, handing it to oversight which includes heavy influence from countries like China and Russia, who really don't like the free internet as it exists today. If a private organization like ICANN says that it won't take any action unless I talk to X entity first, then I'll oblige.
While I don't read Finnish (or whatever language this is in) this website looks like it's a lampoon, which if it is, falls under fair use regardless of whether or not the kopimi symbol is there. I mean it has a picture of a sinking corsair ffs.
The ones about UEFI annoy me the most. Too many people, even on slashdot of all places, think UEFI is just a graphical addon to BIOS that also adds DRM. It's nothing of the sort, most existing UEFI systems on OEM computers have a text based configuration tool and don't even secure boot. (Windows 8 mandates the change of the later of course.) Further, BIOS also had DRM capability.
UEFI is a complete replacement of BIOS. BIOS had a ton of restrictions related to all sorts of things, e.g. partition count and size on the bootable hard disk, BIOS requires POST (which in modern systems needlessly adds to the boot time) as well as a ton of reserved and now useless for decades interrupts. These new things that you find with UEFI (e.g. graphical configuration tool) are simply new features that UEFI allows for, but aren't required.
What console hasn't been about sales? Pretty much all of the best selling ones were sold at either a loss or a very tiny profit margin so that they could make money off of selling the games. Effectively just a computer designed for content consumption.
Now they're simply adding more content to consume. Makes sense for the consumer when you think about it - no need turn it off, turn on another device, and change inputs when you switch from playing a game to watching movies.
The annoying thing about xbox though is that you have to have an xbox live subscription in order to consume other content. E.g. pay microsoft to watch netflix.
I like the new windows 8 transfer bar that shows instantaneous transfer rates (not average) as it progresses left to right. This gives you a very accurate idea of when the transfer will finish, as it can slow down or speed up based on either network congestion or file size (a bunch of small files transfer slower than few big files.)
Visa and mastercard give all kinds of consumer protection benefits just for using the card, though I don't know whether they apply to both debit and credit. For example, my card includes a free extra year of warranty on anything I buy, free insurance on rental cars, guaranteed 30 day money back on anything I buy as well as accidental damage.
I use a credit card though, supposedly their top tier (they call it world mastercard). I quality for it in spite of paying zero interest (and so many people keep insisting that I should never pay the bill in full every month because it doesn't help my credit - they're as wrong as wrong can be.)
From my observation of 10ish years on slashdot (I didn't register until some time of lurking,) slashdot *was* almost entirely in favor of apple, but no longer.
The common argument in favor of apple at the time was how open they are (e.g. using posix rules, incorporating samba, etc.) I frequently pointed out that if apple was as dominant as microsoft, they would impose far worse restrictions on user freedom than microsoft ever did. I was shot down at the time, but it turns out that I was right.
Anyways, most of slashdot now agrees with that assessment and is largely anti-apple these days.
I think there are much worse things destroying the environment in China. Have you seen Beijing? The smog is so bad you can't even see 30 feet in front of you.
I'm not sure how you can argue that we were lied to. EVERYBODY believed he had WMD's, that would include the russians, the french, the chinese, the british, and many others who independently found evidence of it.
Last month a drone strike killed 24 civilians, with zero enemy combatants present. Bush would get blamed for this kind of thing outright, yet nobody blames obama.
I think any "entity" (wikileaks being one, even if not legally defined as such) be it a group or individual has skeletons in its closet. Wikileaks is as far game as anything else.
If I was an eco-activist, I think I would be happy that solar panels are being made available at lower prices to increase adoption.
Let's suppose you got your tariff though. Who outside of the US will buy American made solar panels when they can still get them cheaper elsewhere? And does it make you happy that solar power adoption will stagnate due to higher prices?
What about Normandy? Lots of American soldiers buried there.
That's what I'm getting that. If you metered data, you can't know whether or not it made it at its destination.
And yes, you can get horrible packet loss without the ISP being involved at all. In fact, that is currently happening at the peering level with AT&T and Cogent. They've had a few saturated links at their border routers somewhere near Illinois for several months now and haven't done a damn thing about it. It is mainly effecting several west coast ISP's whose users get horrible latency with blizzards chicago datacenter (the delays are caused by the constant TCP retransmits as blizzard doesn't use UDP for their newer games, so it doesn't show up as packet loss to the end user when in reality that is exactly what it is.) Most other users don't notice the problem because they are usually accessing websites, which are much more tolerant of 200ms to 500ms latency.
There's not much that blizzard or the ISP's can do about it until AT&T and Cogent get their heads out of their asses. Meanwhile, those dropped egress packets still count towards the meters.