It is absolutely critical, in many cases, to conceal the identity of the accused. Otherwise, political and satirical material, which is some of the most protected speech, may be blocked by fears of discovery for using completely 'Fair Use' quotes or video, and taken down immediately and with little recourse with fraudulent 'DMCA' notices.
When does the light interact enough with that surrounding cloud of ruined matter and broadcasting energy to be caught there and blocked? Such a big black hole seems likely to have a fairly noticeable and thick shell. This is basically a shielding problem for the black hole, according to this paper. And that shell is likely to grow from whatever source created the black hole in the first place, such as a galaxy's mass, until it reaches some stable or semi-stable state.
You can't ignore the existence of that shell and say that EM will somehow magically pass through it untouched, anymore than you can say X-rays penetrate tissue without noticing the lead apron in front of it.
> 1. US attorneys have been pressured to bring politically motivated investigations and cases against opposing officeholders, officials and candidates.
Here, I fixed that for you. Government by lawsuit is an old and powerful institution. And I'll agree that the Republicans have a worse history of such abuse, although neither party is innocent. But your claims were so badly stated that it really looked like you were saying that the Democrats were more likely to be the ones doing the abuse.
I wish there could be. Unfortunately, Terry Pratchett has Alzheimer's Disease, so I wouldn't expect more such books unless he opens it up as a franchise.
You're making a huge assumption. That the office is controlled enough by Democrats that the person making the decision to go poking into Joe the Plumber's files must therefore also be Democrat. That's an assumption that's possible to be true, but hardly certain. So tarring Democrats with the idea that they'd do something illegal just because an office is Democratic is a smear, anda deliberate one.
BWA-HA-HA!!!! I'm working in the UK right now. The amount of access I have to your personal data, today, via NHS files is stunning. It feels like 'Brazil' here, surrounded by incompetent bureaucrats concerned about their little procedures and quarterly reports when I'm staring at the billing information of 500,000 people in an unsecured public folder sitting open on their desktop.
If you don't think that information gets casually read and accessed by nosy bureaucrats and pencil pushers, then you've never worked in a British bureaucracy. The only thing that protects you from 1984 style monitoring and management is the sheer incompetence of those little managers, running through all their files, muttering 'Tuttle, Tuttle, Tuttle, where the deuce is the file marked Tuttle?' They couldn't organize a thorough investigation if their coffee money and parking space depended on it. (Yes, they drink coffee, and my god, it's bad coffee.)
That's a variation of 'The Peter Principle', the idea that people rise to their level of incompetence and stop getting promoted. It's a very powerful law in the middle management world, and NASA has become very enmeshed in its results. It's not cleaqr that's what's going on here, but the Shuttle was amazingly burdened with the results of it.
Are you somehow under the impr4ssion that a fairly large group, like an attorney general's office or those of a typical child support bureaucracy are under such tight micro-management that they don't have Republican employees or managers who can also poke into politically sensitive personal records? Or that political skullduggery isn't a hobby of Republicans, as well?
Saying otherwise without more evidence than that is a complete fallacy without a lot more information.
Because the existence of such a warrant may be sealed. It's easier to just not report any such requests based on warrants, than to provide tracking records to show that a warrant was used.
Of course, it might also show that the police or investigators lied like bandits about where and how they got their information, especially if it's used to violate client-attorney privilege. It's hard to know what evidence to have thrown out, or that might be used for political harassment, if you are never allowed to know that such a search was done. And while I may deserve a tinfoil hat for such suspicion, it's a justified hat with the history of warrant-free searches for 'terrorists' under this government.
You also see the uniquely British forms of such centralization of power and control of thought. It's very familiar to the British from their own adventures with royalty and empire and the ideas that violating protocol is, itself, a crime.
No, it's not illegal. Go read the Patriot Act: there are plenty of circumstances right now in which such probing is not only legal, but reporting that you've been forced to do such probing is a criminal offense.
Because recruiters, and HR personnel, ask for it that way. They use it to add their own notes on a candidate, to feed it to forms processors, to put it on their own corporate letterhead, and if they're sneaky, to check the document history and see what you've edited. (I've done that to Word documents I've received: it's enlightening.)
By default, it shouldbe _off_. The time wasted at bootup is far more than outweighed by its assistance in normal searching. And it's worse: once you've tried to turn it off for a whole drive, it must traverse the entire drive to turn off for _each folder_. If you interrupt that process, the only way to gracefully turn it off for the rest of the system is to turn it back _on_ for the while folder, and then turn it back _off_ for the whole system. This is simply stupid.
And yes, that 'background' indexing is at far, far, far too high a priority. On a modest, 2 GHz laptop, the initial indexing effectively makes the laptop effectively useless for minutes after bootup. The problem may have been eased in Vista, but on XP it's awful. It's typical demoware, exciting in a demo but next to useless in the real world.
Norton is a problem. It's so busy scanning every write to disk, every network connection, every web page, and every registry change that there's no time left to do any work. The performance loss from Norton is so large, it's often cheaper and faster to use less powerful and effective tools (like ClamAV for email processing) and suffer the malware and zombied machine performance losses.
And my goodness, Norton and McAfee screw around with your kernels in undocumented ways that break other software in unpredictable and difficult to debug fashion. "Reboot the PC' only works to clear it after "Uninstalling the anti-virus software". Merely turning off the anti-virus software is not enough: it remains resident in your kernels and drivers until deleted.
And indexing. Don't forget how useless that usually is, and that it could run as a low priority background for 5 minutes after booting and almost no one would care.
But it's not necessary! The LinuxBIOS and its competitors have established for years that the old BIOS infrastructure can be optimized into usefulness, by opening up the code and throwing huge amounts of its accumulated and inappropriate tests and probes completely out. That's not a Microsoft issue, it's a BIOS vendor issue.
Your breakdown is correct: I'm glad I scrolled down instead of starting my own thread.
* BIOS boot) This takes time because it's in a minimal feature mode, BIOS RAM is quite expensive to deal with. And it's looking for a load of ancient cruft you don't have installed. BIOS's are some of the buggiest, nasty, proprietary, vendor specific, burdened with workarounds crap you will ever see. The fix is simple: open up the BIOS and clean out all the stuff you don't need on that motherboard. LinuxBIOS does _exactly_ this, which is why the OLPC project has incredibly fast BIOS load times. I really wish motherboard makers would take the hint and sell their features, instead of wasting their engineering time re-inventing the IBOS and continually getting it wrong.
* OS boot) This is also a problem. People keep re-inventing the wheel here as well, and never quite getting it right. Every OS and boot-time software loader needs to deal with a huge stack of dependencies, assuring that the startup tools occur in the right order and negotiating their own requirements, each in their own way. And every one has to deal with the manufacturer's ideas, and the legacy work of the previous OS's, and the legacy of other critical software. It's a mess. And it's not just the kernel, it's the video drivers, the network drivers, the various web servers and update tools and debris.
Fortunately, it's easy to optimize. Modern operating systems are multi-threaded, and a lot of it can be set to low priority as long as the dependency chains are well documented and clear. Network is needed to get your DHCP hostname and start up your X server, or your web server, or your shared network drives? Then network comes *FIRST*, or very, very early. And that relies on detecting your network ports, correctly. That means USB and PCI and built-in drivers need to be detected and loaded, which takes time.
* App level) Here is a the remaining mess, as you mentioned. And it's a mess. X and displays won't run without the hostname set? Then you did something wrong, as the developer. They should be configured for localhost, not an unstable hostname. You need to reboot to load a patch? Then you usually did something wrong. It should be configurable in userland, and not force resetting of your system boot procedures.
External shielding is often a bad idea for space hardware. The shielding is heavy (as it must be to stop particles), and itself becomes radio-active over time as it is exposed to wonderful effects like gamma rays. We get this free shielding of miles of atmosphere, here on Earth, and we get even more shielding from solar radiation half of the day. (The technical term for this is 'night-time'). That Earth shielding also gets rid of a lot of the more intense interstellar radiation as well.
You can't replace that with a NASA bright idea. You need to work with the physics and chemistry available to you. And frankly, Hubble was not intended to last this long without regular, Space Shuttle provided maintenance. It's a tribute to the original engineering that it's survived as well as it has.
Yes, I do. Silver corrodes, and so does copper. The exposed surfaces of both oxidize and lose their thermal conductivity rather readily. And the very soft gold contacts assure excellent thermal contact with the substrate of the circuit, or of the component to which it is mounted. The difficulty with softness can be reduced by alloying, as can the oxidation of silver and copper, but that tends to reduce the thermal conductivity.
If it wasn't so expensive, it would be much more widely used.
Gold also has industrial value: its use in various metal processing, and in electrical contacts, should not be under-estimated. Gold also makes _wonderful_ heat sinks, as long as you don't run it too hot. It's amazingly thermally conductive, and as a noble metal, it's corrosion free.
I wish it was cheap enough to use for electronics instead of copper, I really do. Put a diamond thermal coating on it to protect the board, and you've got some amazingly durable electronics.
There was _also_ basic fraud at various levels. The amount of land being sold at overhyped prices, with a pyramid scheme in place to drive the prices up and the realtors and mortgage holders taking their cut of every sale, was obscured and lied about on many occasions. (I had some fascinating chats with realtors telling me to sell and reinvest in this pyramid scheme: it really looked like the dot-bomb, but with housing, not web companies.)
The fraud wasn't the main source of the problem, but it certainly didn't help.
With a merely US Internet control, you can leave the country. (Witness www.thepiratebay.org, and www.wikileaks.com.) With international control, you'll have interference both with semi-criminal endeavors (like Bittorrent) and legitimate free speech (such as Wikileaks and Chinese dissidents).
So, in the first case you invested an estimate of 80 hours of worktime, many man-hours of their time, negotiated your way through numerous hierarchies and departmental jurisdictional adventers and got... nothing. You're frankly quite lucky. My reports have frequently been stonewalled, and I've usually lacked the support from my own employers to spend that much time in a fruitless pursuit.
A local prosecution is much, much easier. I suspect that if the second time had not been local, your request would have been dropped again on some other pretext. Really, they're not good about computer crime at any level.
Slashdot Mirror
It is absolutely critical, in many cases, to conceal the identity of the accused. Otherwise, political and satirical material, which is some of the most protected speech, may be blocked by fears of discovery for using completely 'Fair Use' quotes or video, and taken down immediately and with little recourse with fraudulent 'DMCA' notices.
When does the light interact enough with that surrounding cloud of ruined matter and broadcasting energy to be caught there and blocked? Such a big black hole seems likely to have a fairly noticeable and thick shell. This is basically a shielding problem for the black hole, according to this paper. And that shell is likely to grow from whatever source created the black hole in the first place, such as a galaxy's mass, until it reaches some stable or semi-stable state.
You can't ignore the existence of that shell and say that EM will somehow magically pass through it untouched, anymore than you can say X-rays penetrate tissue without noticing the lead apron in front of it.
You wrote:
> 1. US attorneys have been pressured to bring politically motivated investigations and cases against opposing officeholders, officials and candidates.
Here, I fixed that for you. Government by lawsuit is an old and powerful institution. And I'll agree that the Republicans have a worse history of such abuse, although neither party is innocent. But your claims were so badly stated that it really looked like you were saying that the Democrats were more likely to be the ones doing the abuse.
I wish there could be. Unfortunately, Terry Pratchett has Alzheimer's Disease, so I wouldn't expect more such books unless he opens it up as a franchise.
You're making a huge assumption. That the office is controlled enough by Democrats that the person making the decision to go poking into Joe the Plumber's files must therefore also be Democrat. That's an assumption that's possible to be true, but hardly certain. So tarring Democrats with the idea that they'd do something illegal just because an office is Democratic is a smear, anda deliberate one.
BWA-HA-HA!!!! I'm working in the UK right now. The amount of access I have to your personal data, today, via NHS files is stunning. It feels like 'Brazil' here, surrounded by incompetent bureaucrats concerned about their little procedures and quarterly reports when I'm staring at the billing information of 500,000 people in an unsecured public folder sitting open on their desktop.
If you don't think that information gets casually read and accessed by nosy bureaucrats and pencil pushers, then you've never worked in a British bureaucracy. The only thing that protects you from 1984 style monitoring and management is the sheer incompetence of those little managers, running through all their files, muttering 'Tuttle, Tuttle, Tuttle, where the deuce is the file marked Tuttle?' They couldn't organize a thorough investigation if their coffee money and parking space depended on it. (Yes, they drink coffee, and my god, it's bad coffee.)
That's a variation of 'The Peter Principle', the idea that people rise to their level of incompetence and stop getting promoted. It's a very powerful law in the middle management world, and NASA has become very enmeshed in its results. It's not cleaqr that's what's going on here, but the Shuttle was amazingly burdened with the results of it.
Are you somehow under the impr4ssion that a fairly large group, like an attorney general's office or those of a typical child support bureaucracy are under such tight micro-management that they don't have Republican employees or managers who can also poke into politically sensitive personal records? Or that political skullduggery isn't a hobby of Republicans, as well? Saying otherwise without more evidence than that is a complete fallacy without a lot more information.
Because the existence of such a warrant may be sealed. It's easier to just not report any such requests based on warrants, than to provide tracking records to show that a warrant was used.
Of course, it might also show that the police or investigators lied like bandits about where and how they got their information, especially if it's used to violate client-attorney privilege. It's hard to know what evidence to have thrown out, or that might be used for political harassment, if you are never allowed to know that such a search was done. And while I may deserve a tinfoil hat for such suspicion, it's a justified hat with the history of warrant-free searches for 'terrorists' under this government.
You also see the uniquely British forms of such centralization of power and control of thought. It's very familiar to the British from their own adventures with royalty and empire and the ideas that violating protocol is, itself, a crime.
No, it's not illegal. Go read the Patriot Act: there are plenty of circumstances right now in which such probing is not only legal, but reporting that you've been forced to do such probing is a criminal offense.
Because recruiters, and HR personnel, ask for it that way. They use it to add their own notes on a candidate, to feed it to forms processors, to put it on their own corporate letterhead, and if they're sneaky, to check the document history and see what you've edited. (I've done that to Word documents I've received: it's enlightening.)
By default, it shouldbe _off_. The time wasted at bootup is far more than outweighed by its assistance in normal searching. And it's worse: once you've tried to turn it off for a whole drive, it must traverse the entire drive to turn off for _each folder_. If you interrupt that process, the only way to gracefully turn it off for the rest of the system is to turn it back _on_ for the while folder, and then turn it back _off_ for the whole system. This is simply stupid.
And yes, that 'background' indexing is at far, far, far too high a priority. On a modest, 2 GHz laptop, the initial indexing effectively makes the laptop effectively useless for minutes after bootup. The problem may have been eased in Vista, but on XP it's awful. It's typical demoware, exciting in a demo but next to useless in the real world.
Norton is a problem. It's so busy scanning every write to disk, every network connection, every web page, and every registry change that there's no time left to do any work. The performance loss from Norton is so large, it's often cheaper and faster to use less powerful and effective tools (like ClamAV for email processing) and suffer the malware and zombied machine performance losses. And my goodness, Norton and McAfee screw around with your kernels in undocumented ways that break other software in unpredictable and difficult to debug fashion. "Reboot the PC' only works to clear it after "Uninstalling the anti-virus software". Merely turning off the anti-virus software is not enough: it remains resident in your kernels and drivers until deleted.
And indexing. Don't forget how useless that usually is, and that it could run as a low priority background for 5 minutes after booting and almost no one would care.
But it's not necessary! The LinuxBIOS and its competitors have established for years that the old BIOS infrastructure can be optimized into usefulness, by opening up the code and throwing huge amounts of its accumulated and inappropriate tests and probes completely out. That's not a Microsoft issue, it's a BIOS vendor issue.
Your breakdown is correct: I'm glad I scrolled down instead of starting my own thread.
* BIOS boot) This takes time because it's in a minimal feature mode, BIOS RAM is quite expensive to deal with. And it's looking for a load of ancient cruft you don't have installed. BIOS's are some of the buggiest, nasty, proprietary, vendor specific, burdened with workarounds crap you will ever see. The fix is simple: open up the BIOS and clean out all the stuff you don't need on that motherboard. LinuxBIOS does _exactly_ this, which is why the OLPC project has incredibly fast BIOS load times. I really wish motherboard makers would take the hint and sell their features, instead of wasting their engineering time re-inventing the IBOS and continually getting it wrong.
* OS boot) This is also a problem. People keep re-inventing the wheel here as well, and never quite getting it right. Every OS and boot-time software loader needs to deal with a huge stack of dependencies, assuring that the startup tools occur in the right order and negotiating their own requirements, each in their own way. And every one has to deal with the manufacturer's ideas, and the legacy work of the previous OS's, and the legacy of other critical software. It's a mess. And it's not just the kernel, it's the video drivers, the network drivers, the various web servers and update tools and debris.
Fortunately, it's easy to optimize. Modern operating systems are multi-threaded, and a lot of it can be set to low priority as long as the dependency chains are well documented and clear. Network is needed to get your DHCP hostname and start up your X server, or your web server, or your shared network drives? Then network comes *FIRST*, or very, very early. And that relies on detecting your network ports, correctly. That means USB and PCI and built-in drivers need to be detected and loaded, which takes time.
* App level) Here is a the remaining mess, as you mentioned. And it's a mess. X and displays won't run without the hostname set? Then you did something wrong, as the developer. They should be configured for localhost, not an unstable hostname. You need to reboot to load a patch? Then you usually did something wrong. It should be configurable in userland, and not force resetting of your system boot procedures.
External shielding is often a bad idea for space hardware. The shielding is heavy (as it must be to stop particles), and itself becomes radio-active over time as it is exposed to wonderful effects like gamma rays. We get this free shielding of miles of atmosphere, here on Earth, and we get even more shielding from solar radiation half of the day. (The technical term for this is 'night-time'). That Earth shielding also gets rid of a lot of the more intense interstellar radiation as well.
You can't replace that with a NASA bright idea. You need to work with the physics and chemistry available to you. And frankly, Hubble was not intended to last this long without regular, Space Shuttle provided maintenance. It's a tribute to the original engineering that it's survived as well as it has.
Yes, I do. Silver corrodes, and so does copper. The exposed surfaces of both oxidize and lose their thermal conductivity rather readily. And the very soft gold contacts assure excellent thermal contact with the substrate of the circuit, or of the component to which it is mounted. The difficulty with softness can be reduced by alloying, as can the oxidation of silver and copper, but that tends to reduce the thermal conductivity. If it wasn't so expensive, it would be much more widely used.
Gold also has industrial value: its use in various metal processing, and in electrical contacts, should not be under-estimated. Gold also makes _wonderful_ heat sinks, as long as you don't run it too hot. It's amazingly thermally conductive, and as a noble metal, it's corrosion free.
I wish it was cheap enough to use for electronics instead of copper, I really do. Put a diamond thermal coating on it to protect the board, and you've got some amazingly durable electronics.
There was _also_ basic fraud at various levels. The amount of land being sold at overhyped prices, with a pyramid scheme in place to drive the prices up and the realtors and mortgage holders taking their cut of every sale, was obscured and lied about on many occasions. (I had some fascinating chats with realtors telling me to sell and reinvest in this pyramid scheme: it really looked like the dot-bomb, but with housing, not web companies.)
The fraud wasn't the main source of the problem, but it certainly didn't help.
You mean the first game won't be invented until after hell freezes over?
You forgot the cane toads. (http://www.badmovies.org/movies/canetoads/_
With a merely US Internet control, you can leave the country. (Witness www.thepiratebay.org, and www.wikileaks.com.) With international control, you'll have interference both with semi-criminal endeavors (like Bittorrent) and legitimate free speech (such as Wikileaks and Chinese dissidents).
So, in the first case you invested an estimate of 80 hours of worktime, many man-hours of their time, negotiated your way through numerous hierarchies and departmental jurisdictional adventers and got... nothing. You're frankly quite lucky. My reports have frequently been stonewalled, and I've usually lacked the support from my own employers to spend that much time in a fruitless pursuit.
A local prosecution is much, much easier. I suspect that if the second time had not been local, your request would have been dropped again on some other pretext. Really, they're not good about computer crime at any level.