Oh man, there must be a video link of this somewhere. Anyone willing to find one? All I found was this one about scaring one goose off a roof from the PoV of the copter but I want to see a 3rd-person view of the drone scuttling on the ground and scaring them off...
Plus, it gives time for the government to try to fix PR problems by denying certain claims, and then have the media release a document which totally kiboshes said statement with documentation supporting it's really happening.
Yeah, this has been the most awesome part of it all.
"I have proof the NSA is spying on the American people."
"No, we're not spying on the American people. Nothing of the sort. No sir."
"Actually yes, here's proof you record all the metadata of emails and phone calls and stuff."
"Ok yes yes but we promise it is only the metadata, we don't see anything else."
"No actually, see you record everything, here's the slides you use to train people how to do it."
"Ok ok well we might do that but we swear it's all with oversight and there are no abuses. We caught 300 terrorists!"
"No dude, see, here is your own internal memo which revealed thousands of abuses. And did you really catch 300 terrorists?"
"Well um no it really just sort of helped us to capture one... but we swear we only keep this data for 5 days! 5 days seriously!"
Now it's just a matter of time until we have proof of the date after which they started archiving everything, forever.
Actually I think it's definitely better to do a slow-release. Snowden may even be planning it this way. Think about it: if it's released all at once, who the fuck is going to go through thousands of documents to see what the gov is up to? Plus once the story is out it'll be forgotten within a few weeks. This way it's constantly in the news, people are always talking about it, it remains in people's minds, and the findings are summarized to make it easier to understand what is really going on. Good stuff, I say.
This doesn't work if the lambda is embedded inside of an expression. I have found a reasonable (read: hacky and nobody should do it) solution: have the lambda return a tuple. Each element in the tuple is an expression and will get executed in order. The only problem is you can't do variable assignment, but everything that's an expression works...
I'm still using Python 2.6. No real reason to change yet and this way I don't have to deal with a bunch of issues that'll come from switching. Maybe when I start a new project that will not have to interact with anything I've written in 2.6 I'll try 3.2.
Compound question here: what part of Python is or became your favorite, and what's the worst thing, something that you would change if you knew now what you did then?
Pathetic? This is amazingly incredible! This is something that is so incredibly blatant, so ridiculously obvious, so patently indicative of the ultimate lack of care Government (as a concept; not just ours in particular) has about the rights of its citizens, that it at least has more than a snowball's chance in hell of getting some people to change their minds about the nature of Government.
Actually they did a study, something along these lines: they'd pick a divisive topic, and then show people arguments for and against either side of the topic. The people would also rate the effectiveness of the argument. They also marked down how strongly they believed in their position before and after reading the arguments.
When people read arguments for the side they already agreed with, they would end up agreeing even more strongly - no surprise there. Yet it turned out that when people read arguments against the side they agreed with, they would *still* end up agreeing even more strongly with their own position. In fact, the more well-rated an argument was by people who agreed with that side, the more it would cause someone who already disagreed to disagree even further.
Unfortunately that was a bit laboured and I have no links handy, but I'm pretty sure that's how it went. The net take-away is, you can't convince anybody via textual arguments if they already strongly agree with something. The internet's archives are ample proof of this.
I'd pay $1 or $2 to watch it as soon as it comes out, as a high-quality DRM-free stream or download, without ads. Otherwise, screw it, I don't want to get cable and have to set up recording it and only be able to watch it on one device and it has ads that I have to fast-forward through etc.
Sure, but why make that easier for them? A difference in degree does matter. It's better for you if you only get ticketed for a random traffic violation when a cop happens to see you, pull you over, & issue a ticket, vs. automatically getting billed for every single one on whichever road you are driving and having it automatically taken out of your bank account, for example.
The average professional in this country wakes up in the morning, goes to work, comes home, eats dinner, and then goes to sleep, unaware that he or she has likely committed several federal crimes that day. Why? The answer lies in the very nature of modern federal criminal laws, which have exploded in number but also become impossibly broad and vague. In Three Felonies a Day, Harvey A. Silverglate reveals how federal criminal laws have become dangerously disconnected from the English common law tradition and how prosecutors can pin arguable federal crimes on any one of us, for even the most seemingly innocuous behavior.
You're saying you don't mind if the government has access to absolutely everything you do, when at any time they could use that information to put you in jail - or at least make your life miserable - for years?
Yes, but if they have a target they can analyze the data with respect to that target. If you get on their radar they can pull up & analyze everything they have on you. And it's cheap to store massive amounts of data. What it comes down to is the government will have supreme power over anybody they don't like... which is not a good thing.
No, money evolved out of the barter system. First people would just barter. Then they realized they could use certain goods as a medium of exchange. That's what "money" naturally is. Coinage is another step.
The link you provided doesn't debunk that myth at all... can you provide a better one? Cause I found many which say salt was a very high-value commodity and was thus used as currency.
Our economy, yes. That is why it is failing. But a sane economy would not have a government-sponsored currency and it would be based on production & material wealth instead of consumption & debt. However that would require a power structure which has no power.
However, because currency does not have an intrinsic value by itself, it can be manipulated and used in certain ways that are not naturally regulated. In that sense, currency needs some sort of regulation. I don't know how much, and I think it should be as little as required, but I can accept that it may need a lot.
Oh, so woefully backwards. Nutria who said "Unless the currency is backed by something tangible and rare" also has it quite backwards.
Money naturally evolved as a good, just like any other. It has the same price mechanism as any other good, that is - whatever somebody is willing to pay for it. Money is just a good which a lot of people happen to want because a lot of other people also want it. So you get gold, silver, salt, etc., naturally used as money. You know if you take a bit of gold for your hat, you can give that bit of gold to someone else for a dinner. That is literally all there is to it..... until the government steps in, of course.
All government serves to do is usurp the currency. They notice that everybody uses gold coins as currency. So they start making diluted gold coins and trying to pass them off as worth as much as the original. People aren't stupid so they stop accepting government-minted coins, or treat them at their lower value, as appropriate - same as anyone would do with privately-minted coins of a lower quality. However, the government has the advantage of being able to make the laws. So they make it illegal to mint coins, and also make it illegal not to treat any government coin as having the value it says it does. This is an early form of inflation. What ends up happening is that 'bad money drives out the good' - people hoard the high-quality coins and just use the lower-quality ones, which makes sense... but anyway, all this serves to do is to funnel money in a gradual fashion towards those people closest to the government - the ones who get to use the lower-value as if it has higher-value, first.
What makes this all a lot easier and less obvious is if you can just use pieces of paper to represent the gold coins, and then just print more pieces of paper. Then it's really not that obvious what's going on. Note there's nothing inherently wrong with using pieces of paper instead of gold. That can happen without inflation. The theft of the wealth of the country occurs when paper is printed that has no backing & is then forced to be taken as having value.
Of *course* at *that* point you need to regulate the "currency", because it's only propped up artificially by the force of the government anyway.
The more I learn about this stuff the sadder I get.
The first has a now-standardized solution in the shape of TOR.
That's assuming the feds aren't running a sufficiently large amount of TOR nodes such that the chances they will have enough nodes on a route to compromise anonymity are fairly high.
Slashdot Mirror
7/10. Took a while to figure out you were trolling, but -1 cause I figured it out eventually and -2 cause AC gave it away.
Oh man, there must be a video link of this somewhere. Anyone willing to find one? All I found was this one about scaring one goose off a roof from the PoV of the copter but I want to see a 3rd-person view of the drone scuttling on the ground and scaring them off...
Plus, it gives time for the government to try to fix PR problems by denying certain claims, and then have the media release a document which totally kiboshes said statement with documentation supporting it's really happening.
Yeah, this has been the most awesome part of it all.
"I have proof the NSA is spying on the American people."
"No, we're not spying on the American people. Nothing of the sort. No sir."
"Actually yes, here's proof you record all the metadata of emails and phone calls and stuff."
"Ok yes yes but we promise it is only the metadata, we don't see anything else."
"No actually, see you record everything, here's the slides you use to train people how to do it."
"Ok ok well we might do that but we swear it's all with oversight and there are no abuses. We caught 300 terrorists!"
"No dude, see, here is your own internal memo which revealed thousands of abuses. And did you really catch 300 terrorists?"
"Well um no it really just sort of helped us to capture one... but we swear we only keep this data for 5 days! 5 days seriously!"
Now it's just a matter of time until we have proof of the date after which they started archiving everything, forever.
Actually I think it's definitely better to do a slow-release. Snowden may even be planning it this way. Think about it: if it's released all at once, who the fuck is going to go through thousands of documents to see what the gov is up to? Plus once the story is out it'll be forgotten within a few weeks. This way it's constantly in the news, people are always talking about it, it remains in people's minds, and the findings are summarized to make it easier to understand what is really going on. Good stuff, I say.
This doesn't work if the lambda is embedded inside of an expression. I have found a reasonable (read: hacky and nobody should do it) solution: have the lambda return a tuple. Each element in the tuple is an expression and will get executed in order. The only problem is you can't do variable assignment, but everything that's an expression works...
I'm still using Python 2.6. No real reason to change yet and this way I don't have to deal with a bunch of issues that'll come from switching. Maybe when I start a new project that will not have to interact with anything I've written in 2.6 I'll try 3.2.
Compound question here: what part of Python is or became your favorite, and what's the worst thing, something that you would change if you knew now what you did then?
Hate to throw a curveball here, but answer honestly: why is Python such an awesome language?
You're right, they aren't. It was more a jab at the submitter who wrote "Anti-secrecy organization WikiLeaks[...]".
An "anti-secrecy" organization using secrecy to promote its agenda.
Pathetic? This is amazingly incredible! This is something that is so incredibly blatant, so ridiculously obvious, so patently indicative of the ultimate lack of care Government (as a concept; not just ours in particular) has about the rights of its citizens, that it at least has more than a snowball's chance in hell of getting some people to change their minds about the nature of Government.
Or maybe I'm being overly optimistic...
Actually they did a study, something along these lines: they'd pick a divisive topic, and then show people arguments for and against either side of the topic. The people would also rate the effectiveness of the argument. They also marked down how strongly they believed in their position before and after reading the arguments.
When people read arguments for the side they already agreed with, they would end up agreeing even more strongly - no surprise there. Yet it turned out that when people read arguments against the side they agreed with, they would *still* end up agreeing even more strongly with their own position. In fact, the more well-rated an argument was by people who agreed with that side, the more it would cause someone who already disagreed to disagree even further.
Unfortunately that was a bit laboured and I have no links handy, but I'm pretty sure that's how it went. The net take-away is, you can't convince anybody via textual arguments if they already strongly agree with something. The internet's archives are ample proof of this.
I'd pay $1 or $2 to watch it as soon as it comes out, as a high-quality DRM-free stream or download, without ads. Otherwise, screw it, I don't want to get cable and have to set up recording it and only be able to watch it on one device and it has ads that I have to fast-forward through etc.
Sure, but why make that easier for them? A difference in degree does matter. It's better for you if you only get ticketed for a random traffic violation when a cop happens to see you, pull you over, & issue a ticket, vs. automatically getting billed for every single one on whichever road you are driving and having it automatically taken out of your bank account, for example.
You got it!
They should just analyze every bit of information they receive. I don't have a problem with the NSA collecting information about me.
Then you are insane, because you probably commit several felonies a day:
The average professional in this country wakes up in the morning, goes to work, comes home, eats dinner, and then goes to sleep, unaware that he or she has likely committed several federal crimes that day. Why? The answer lies in the very nature of modern federal criminal laws, which have exploded in number but also become impossibly broad and vague. In Three Felonies a Day, Harvey A. Silverglate reveals how federal criminal laws have become dangerously disconnected from the English common law tradition and how prosecutors can pin arguable federal crimes on any one of us, for even the most seemingly innocuous behavior.
You're saying you don't mind if the government has access to absolutely everything you do, when at any time they could use that information to put you in jail - or at least make your life miserable - for years?
Yes, but if they have a target they can analyze the data with respect to that target. If you get on their radar they can pull up & analyze everything they have on you. And it's cheap to store massive amounts of data. What it comes down to is the government will have supreme power over anybody they don't like... which is not a good thing.
i sniggered
Hahahahahha
No, money evolved out of the barter system. First people would just barter. Then they realized they could use certain goods as a medium of exchange. That's what "money" naturally is. Coinage is another step.
The link you provided doesn't debunk that myth at all... can you provide a better one? Cause I found many which say salt was a very high-value commodity and was thus used as currency.
Our economy, yes. That is why it is failing. But a sane economy would not have a government-sponsored currency and it would be based on production & material wealth instead of consumption & debt. However that would require a power structure which has no power.
However, because currency does not have an intrinsic value by itself, it can be manipulated and used in certain ways that are not naturally regulated. In that sense, currency needs some sort of regulation. I don't know how much, and I think it should be as little as required, but I can accept that it may need a lot.
Oh, so woefully backwards. Nutria who said "Unless the currency is backed by something tangible and rare" also has it quite backwards.
Money naturally evolved as a good, just like any other. It has the same price mechanism as any other good, that is - whatever somebody is willing to pay for it. Money is just a good which a lot of people happen to want because a lot of other people also want it. So you get gold, silver, salt, etc., naturally used as money. You know if you take a bit of gold for your hat, you can give that bit of gold to someone else for a dinner. That is literally all there is to it..... until the government steps in, of course.
All government serves to do is usurp the currency. They notice that everybody uses gold coins as currency. So they start making diluted gold coins and trying to pass them off as worth as much as the original. People aren't stupid so they stop accepting government-minted coins, or treat them at their lower value, as appropriate - same as anyone would do with privately-minted coins of a lower quality. However, the government has the advantage of being able to make the laws. So they make it illegal to mint coins, and also make it illegal not to treat any government coin as having the value it says it does. This is an early form of inflation. What ends up happening is that 'bad money drives out the good' - people hoard the high-quality coins and just use the lower-quality ones, which makes sense... but anyway, all this serves to do is to funnel money in a gradual fashion towards those people closest to the government - the ones who get to use the lower-value as if it has higher-value, first.
What makes this all a lot easier and less obvious is if you can just use pieces of paper to represent the gold coins, and then just print more pieces of paper. Then it's really not that obvious what's going on. Note there's nothing inherently wrong with using pieces of paper instead of gold. That can happen without inflation. The theft of the wealth of the country occurs when paper is printed that has no backing & is then forced to be taken as having value.
Of *course* at *that* point you need to regulate the "currency", because it's only propped up artificially by the force of the government anyway.
The more I learn about this stuff the sadder I get.
Isn't rap already legal? Why outlaw a form of music?
The first has a now-standardized solution in the shape of TOR.
That's assuming the feds aren't running a sufficiently large amount of TOR nodes such that the chances they will have enough nodes on a route to compromise anonymity are fairly high.