Abraham Lincoln suspended habeus corpus during the American Civil War, and ignored Chief Justice Roger Taney when Taney declared Lincoln's proclamation unconstitutional. (Note that Taney was a Confederate sympathizer who privately approved of secession). Lincoln also jailed Maryland politicians in order to prevent Maryland from seceding, which would have left Washington City surrounded by the Confederacy from both the north and the south.
Not trying to equate Lincoln's actions with those of the current administration -- clearly the very fate of our nation was at stake during Lincoln's terms of office and he was forced to take many highly unusual steps -- but there is indeed precedent for the suspension of habeas corpus. And, of course, the Bush administration has used almost the same language as my previous sentence to justify many of its actions.
We live in an instant gratification-based society where a very large percentage of the population can't be bothered to do things like read instructions or even a slip of paper. If it doesn't work when it's plugged in and / or switched on, people assume it's broken and return it. And since the competing router comes with security switched off (and seems to "work" when powered up), the consumer translates that into well-thought Amazon reviews such as "WHAT A PIECE OF CRAP... COULDNT GET TO WORK AFTER AND HOUR, TOOK IT BACK TO BESTBUY AND GOT THE LINKSYS NOUF SAID." That's really the only reason Linksys / Netgear / et al ship their stuff with security disabled.
Fuck these guys. War should be fought by people. It should be a horrific ordeal and one that is not entered into lightly. Making decisions based on the knowledge that there are no repercussions is tantamount to driving down Route 66 with a blindfold. Maybe you'll miss everything in the road. However the more likely outcome is that you'll kill everyone out there and evenutally yourself. This type of weapon makes America more unsafe, more prone to domestic terrorism, and more likely to get involved in other frivolous wars.
What do you want, a baseball game? 'Cuz if it's not an even match, it won't be "fair," right? Wrong. If you're going to fight a war and you give a shit about concepts like what's fair, you're already teeing yourself up for a loss.
Like many modern military advances, the idea of this vehicle is deterrence through overwhelming technological superiority, so that our *enemies* think twice before doing their little evil deeds. US airborne drones, while not autonomous, have been so effective that everyone -- even the Palestinians -- are trying to copy them. An added bonus is saving friendly lives, and in this case, with US convoys being a primary target in Iraq, many of us think this technology can't be deployed fast enough.
'Those snippets -- taken every 30 seconds and altered mathematically so any conversation is made unintelligible
And of course the folks whose servers this stuff ends up on also have a way to unencode the original soundbite. Even if they say they can't, don't or "would never do such a thing," given the current poor behavior of media / marketing corporations, why trust them?
ImageMagick's function library is also accessible through a variety of APIs for your favorite language -- scripting or otherwise. If you haven't used it, try it . . . it's GPL and it Rawks (with a capital "r").;-)
I just had to link back to the classic typical iBlog post from a few months back . . . great stuff!
This is NOT an Oracle thing -- it's an acquisition
on
Oracle to Layoff 2000 Jobs
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Layoffs are inevitable when one company buys another one. It's not "sad," it's a part of working in high-tech. Redundant positions are eliminated while typically (most of) the best people in sales, marketing, PS and dev are kept. Legal, HR, finance etc. usually totally get wiped out. Get over it and use it as an opportunity to find a better job.
As for the Larry-bashing crowd: say what you want about Oracle and / or Ellison, but the fact is that it didn't really matter who bought Siebel -- layoffs were inevitable. The same thing happens when Google buys a company. I've personally been through two of them already in my relatively young career and everyone knew that layoffs were part of the deal.
Besides, do you really think people who had been working for Tom Siebel were worried about something like losing their jobs?;-)
They'll watch their convenience stores go bankrupt as many of them make a decent profit on cigarettes.
Extremely unlikely. I work for a retail software vendor who sells to c-stores and I can tell you that both cigarettes and fuel have become commoditized to the point that unless a particularly huge store is selling amazing numbers of smokes (like at a truck stop on a busy interstate, for example), getting rid of cigarettes, while it would affect the store's bottom line somewhat, wouldn't come close to shutting it down. Most c-stores recognized this commoditization years ago and are already diversifying and expanding their business models in other ways (e.g., through food service).
I absolutely guarantee you that New Yorkers (or anyone else in the NE for that matter) will NOT see lower taxes because of this, or anything else, anytime soon. RTFA . . . they're talking about increased tax revenue in rural counties, not reducing the tax rates. Counties in NY, MA, MD, CT and elsewhere which are currently flush with cash because of property taxes aren't reducing tax rates or paying back a dividend . . . why would you expect this to be any different?
Additionally, some people who live in the "country" (rural areas) genuinely want to see NOTHING but farm land . . . no man-made structures of any type save rustic 100+ year old barns etc. While I agree that these wind farms may certainly make sense from a financial and green power standpoint, it's going to be a harder sell to folks who really think of it as a destruction of pristine green space.
How is this possible given current cost of RAM? Isn't notebook RAM typically more expensive than its desktop equivalent? Might we be seeing evidence of collusion among the RAM manufacturers after all?
Plus, radio ads themselves are less memorable and creative, these executives said."
Ever notice that 90% of the stuff pitched on traditional radio is the same crap that we're constantly spammed with? I'm talking "herbal" sexual aids, non-FDA approved hair loss and weight products, "start your home business" and other get rich quick scams, "learn to be an MSCE for $10K" ads, etc. The targeted demographic doesn't care how creative the ads are.
Folks may be (perhaps legitimately) worried that property values might drop significantly in the surrounding area if this guy gets his way (I know it's Alaska, but let's pretend it's Anytown, USA). I understand that argument that it's your property and therefore your right to do whatever you want with it, neighbors be damned, etc., but if that's the way you feel, think about Joe Anchorage when he gets transferred back to the Continental US in six months and finds that his property's value just took a 33% cyclotron nose dive . . . just making the point that it might not be safety issue as much as a money issue. When in doubt, follow the $$$.
Maybe beatable, yes, but still 99%+ effective and definitely not obsolete in practice. Most of the successful existing CAPTCHA attacks use a dictionary matched to the default wordlist that ships with the CAPTCHA and can usually be defeated by running the CAPTCHA in random mode with a few more characters than usual. I get maybe four or five hand-entered spam comments / week, which are usually quickly blocked after the first attempt by blacklisting the target "online drugstore" / poker / whatever site's URL. If I shut my CAPTCHA off I get *thousands* of spam comments / week. So while the technology has its limitations (such as, for instance, excluding blind users), it's a tradeoff that most individual blog owners find beats sifting through hundreds or thousands of spammed comments / week.
Despite the marketing hype, XM / Sirius quality is somewhere between FM radio and typical mp3 quality, but the compression is clearly audible. It's great for a car environment but one can easily tell the difference between satellite audio and a higher-quality source. So why bother making illegal mp3s of lower-quality source material in the first place?
Slashdot Mirror
. . . about Real Ultimate Power?
Abraham Lincoln suspended habeus corpus during the American Civil War, and ignored Chief Justice Roger Taney when Taney declared Lincoln's proclamation unconstitutional. (Note that Taney was a Confederate sympathizer who privately approved of secession). Lincoln also jailed Maryland politicians in order to prevent Maryland from seceding, which would have left Washington City surrounded by the Confederacy from both the north and the south.
Not trying to equate Lincoln's actions with those of the current administration -- clearly the very fate of our nation was at stake during Lincoln's terms of office and he was forced to take many highly unusual steps -- but there is indeed precedent for the suspension of habeas corpus. And, of course, the Bush administration has used almost the same language as my previous sentence to justify many of its actions.
We live in an instant gratification-based society where a very large percentage of the population can't be bothered to do things like read instructions or even a slip of paper. If it doesn't work when it's plugged in and / or switched on, people assume it's broken and return it. And since the competing router comes with security switched off (and seems to "work" when powered up), the consumer translates that into well-thought Amazon reviews such as "WHAT A PIECE OF CRAP ... COULDNT GET TO WORK AFTER AND HOUR, TOOK IT BACK TO BESTBUY AND GOT THE LINKSYS NOUF SAID." That's really the only reason Linksys / Netgear / et al ship their stuff with security disabled.
Fuck these guys. War should be fought by people. It should be a horrific ordeal and one that is not entered into lightly. Making decisions based on the knowledge that there are no repercussions is tantamount to driving down Route 66 with a blindfold. Maybe you'll miss everything in the road. However the more likely outcome is that you'll kill everyone out there and evenutally yourself. This type of weapon makes America more unsafe, more prone to domestic terrorism, and more likely to get involved in other frivolous wars.
What do you want, a baseball game? 'Cuz if it's not an even match, it won't be "fair," right? Wrong. If you're going to fight a war and you give a shit about concepts like what's fair, you're already teeing yourself up for a loss.
Like many modern military advances, the idea of this vehicle is deterrence through overwhelming technological superiority, so that our *enemies* think twice before doing their little evil deeds. US airborne drones, while not autonomous, have been so effective that everyone -- even the Palestinians -- are trying to copy them. An added bonus is saving friendly lives, and in this case, with US convoys being a primary target in Iraq, many of us think this technology can't be deployed fast enough.
'Those snippets -- taken every 30 seconds and altered mathematically so any conversation is made unintelligible
And of course the folks whose servers this stuff ends up on also have a way to unencode the original soundbite. Even if they say they can't, don't or "would never do such a thing," given the current poor behavior of media / marketing corporations, why trust them?
An oldie but goodie . . .
while (1){
status = GetRadarInfo();
if (status = 1)
LaunchMissiles();
}
ImageMagick's function library is also accessible through a variety of APIs for your favorite language -- scripting or otherwise. If you haven't used it, try it . . . it's GPL and it Rawks (with a capital "r"). ;-)
I just had to link back to the classic typical iBlog post from a few months back . . . great stuff!
Layoffs are inevitable when one company buys another one. It's not "sad," it's a part of working in high-tech. Redundant positions are eliminated while typically (most of) the best people in sales, marketing, PS and dev are kept. Legal, HR, finance etc. usually totally get wiped out. Get over it and use it as an opportunity to find a better job. As for the Larry-bashing crowd: say what you want about Oracle and / or Ellison, but the fact is that it didn't really matter who bought Siebel -- layoffs were inevitable. The same thing happens when Google buys a company. I've personally been through two of them already in my relatively young career and everyone knew that layoffs were part of the deal. Besides, do you really think people who had been working for Tom Siebel were worried about something like losing their jobs? ;-)
They'll watch their convenience stores go bankrupt as many of them make a decent profit on cigarettes.
Extremely unlikely. I work for a retail software vendor who sells to c-stores and I can tell you that both cigarettes and fuel have become commoditized to the point that unless a particularly huge store is selling amazing numbers of smokes (like at a truck stop on a busy interstate, for example), getting rid of cigarettes, while it would affect the store's bottom line somewhat, wouldn't come close to shutting it down. Most c-stores recognized this commoditization years ago and are already diversifying and expanding their business models in other ways (e.g., through food service).
You forgot: - The Humongous ***********************
people will discover they like lower taxes
I absolutely guarantee you that New Yorkers (or anyone else in the NE for that matter) will NOT see lower taxes because of this, or anything else, anytime soon. RTFA . . . they're talking about increased tax revenue in rural counties, not reducing the tax rates. Counties in NY, MA, MD, CT and elsewhere which are currently flush with cash because of property taxes aren't reducing tax rates or paying back a dividend . . . why would you expect this to be any different?
Additionally, some people who live in the "country" (rural areas) genuinely want to see NOTHING but farm land . . . no man-made structures of any type save rustic 100+ year old barns etc. While I agree that these wind farms may certainly make sense from a financial and green power standpoint, it's going to be a harder sell to folks who really think of it as a destruction of pristine green space.
. . . Brandon Routh to open for Lenny Kravitz.
How is this possible given current cost of RAM? Isn't notebook RAM typically more expensive than its desktop equivalent? Might we be seeing evidence of collusion among the RAM manufacturers after all?
Plus, radio ads themselves are less memorable and creative, these executives said."
Ever notice that 90% of the stuff pitched on traditional radio is the same crap that we're constantly spammed with? I'm talking "herbal" sexual aids, non-FDA approved hair loss and weight products, "start your home business" and other get rich quick scams, "learn to be an MSCE for $10K" ads, etc. The targeted demographic doesn't care how creative the ads are.
Folks may be (perhaps legitimately) worried that property values might drop significantly in the surrounding area if this guy gets his way (I know it's Alaska, but let's pretend it's Anytown, USA). I understand that argument that it's your property and therefore your right to do whatever you want with it, neighbors be damned, etc., but if that's the way you feel, think about Joe Anchorage when he gets transferred back to the Continental US in six months and finds that his property's value just took a 33% cyclotron nose dive . . . just making the point that it might not be safety issue as much as a money issue. When in doubt, follow the $$$.
From Amazon.com:
Customers who bought this title also bought:
You forgot:
3. Enumerated list of the categories of top-level comments
Even more impressive than your ASCII art skills is that you got that past the crap filter. ;-)
Apparently mturk's webserver is from the 19th Century as well.
Maybe beatable, yes, but still 99%+ effective and definitely not obsolete in practice. Most of the successful existing CAPTCHA attacks use a dictionary matched to the default wordlist that ships with the CAPTCHA and can usually be defeated by running the CAPTCHA in random mode with a few more characters than usual. I get maybe four or five hand-entered spam comments / week, which are usually quickly blocked after the first attempt by blacklisting the target "online drugstore" / poker / whatever site's URL. If I shut my CAPTCHA off I get *thousands* of spam comments / week. So while the technology has its limitations (such as, for instance, excluding blind users), it's a tradeoff that most individual blog owners find beats sifting through hundreds or thousands of spammed comments / week.
Don't worry, it won't make smells transparent. ;-)
My shiny toy! Mine! Mine! WAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!
I, for one, whole-heartedly support teaching ID in schools, as I have been touched by His Noodly Appendage.
Despite the marketing hype, XM / Sirius quality is somewhere between FM radio and typical mp3 quality, but the compression is clearly audible. It's great for a car environment but one can easily tell the difference between satellite audio and a higher-quality source. So why bother making illegal mp3s of lower-quality source material in the first place?