Do you still have to grind to get anywhere? If so, I won't be back.
That's kind of a silly question isn't it? Progressive MMOs are all about the grind for enough gear to grind tougher mobs to get better gear to grind tougher mobs, etc... I enjoyed WoW early on, but don't feel like devoting that much time to a "game". If they ever get rid of the Flintstones graphics look I may go back and peek around, but no interest in the crazy cartoon look of the game as a time waster.
I agree that geeks are not uniform. Sociopaths and Psychopaths that don't give a rats ass who they screw over as long as they Get PAID! come immediately to mind as people that will apply for NSA jobs. This is in addition of course to a whole lot of people that see it as a way to make a decent living, you know, because McDonald's does not pay very well. Lots of other people are simply ignorant to the happenings and still believe that there are all of these bogey men to hunt.
Except when the admins are doing the system integration and expected to make it work, with no expectation of time allocated for integration (afterall the vendor said it worked) for whatever arbitary software package they brought in? As far as I can tell, I wasn't working anywhere special in those regards.
Having built and designed these systems, there is no single arbitrary package you can bring in to do everything. Sure, there are tools that can help configure systems for secure modes. I wrote the Solaris and Linux tools we used, those were unified. There was no commercial package at the time I wrote ours, and as quickly as Linux changes I have no confidence there is such a commercial package today.
Auditing as mentioned is the important part and it's a separate set of software. There are commercial packages for that, but it's hit or miss especially when trying to audit Linux and Windows.
Setting up SELinux is not trivial, as it seems like you are aware of. That said, once that is done the work really begins. Admins need tools to ensure compliance on everything all the time. Auditors need data to audit, and need to look for the right things _all_ of the time. It's the last part that usually gets the short end of the stick in contracting work because it's expensive work. It was not difficult for 30 or 40 machines to overwhelm an auditor on an average network. On a busy network, we needed a full time auditor for less than 20 machines.
Sorry, I don't follow, that was along the lines of what I thought I was saying. My statement was that, I would change password hashes and avoid knowing passwords but that a sysadmin wouldn't HAVE to have that ability. Hell that wouldn't even require SELinux, just use an external auth mechanism that he doesn't have access to make changes to.
You started by seeming to assert that the admin does not have full access, followed by claiming it may not have been configured. Since I think we agree, it could just be my perception of your words being too literal. I'll cover your hashes comment next, since you touch it again below.
However, with selinux, it should be possible to disallow direct updates to the password database even by sysadmins.
This is correct, and yet incorrect. This is where auditing is critical. By DOD standards the "root" password must be changed at a given frequency and must be of certain complexity. If you lock down the/etc/shadow file you can't maintain compliance. That said, auditors should know _every_ time a password changes. If there was no justification for the change, they need to audit who was on the system during the change. For users, you would rarely use passwd/shadow. On a network, you are required to use strong passwords and would use LDAP/TLS for all users. And even here, and auditor should know _every_ time a password is changed and investigate justification or launch an investigation if there was no justification.
On this at least, we completely agree. I would have totally recommended using it if I thought it realistic that we would have either of those.... or even the ability to push back on customers who want everything and want their software to just work even with no time allocated to integration work.
In the private sector, I'm right with you. In classified Government work, it's not supposed to be optional it's supposed to be mandatory. If the contractor failed to provide controls and audits, they should be fired and barred from Government work for the maximum penalty.
First and foremost thank you for the clarification. I realize that it can be difficult to use generalizations that can not also be perceived as personal attacks, which is why I wrote my final paragraph. I also realize that you were not the AC, I believe that I responded to both of you in turn.
It seems that we agree on nearly all points. I do wish to clarify a bit why I feel so strongly against blaming the public.
Outside of the facts I presented stating that it's factually incorrect, I believe that a few things are being propagated by the same powers that put us in our current dilemma. They want us to bicker about "who" is to blame because it keeps the focus off of them. If they can turn the debate into me blaming my neighbor for ignorance (and a lack of action based on that ignorance) then they prevent real change from happening. People are defensive, and if you come right out and tell someone "your not doing enough" or "you need to do things different" they will simply become defensive and either attack you or ignore you.
Where as, if you present to the people "you have been fooled" it takes the blame away. It's much more likely to advance the needed changes. Of course a person in the background occasionally giving them a prod once they are awake won't hurt, but it could not be the focus or start of the movements needed.
Different cultures of course react differently to the same rhetoric. What I believe will work best in the US may not work the best in another Country.
I have never seen any environment where SELinux was actually used.
I worked in DOD for more than a decade, we used SE Linux from the time it was available. Before that, we used LAUS. If you don't use it or know people that do, why are you going to make false claims like "Fully locked down SELinux is more like....faces of death."? If you never used it, you obviously should not be making bogus claims. Fully locked down and properly configured SELinux is a nightmare for auditors, not admins.
It is entirely possible to have a system administrator who does NOT have that kind of access under the NSAs mandatory access control model. That doesn't mean they have it implemented that way, but, it is possible that they could, the tools exist; and they wrote them.
No offense, but your second sentence contradicts your first claim. Is it not more likely that where he was working they were not using a properly configured access control system? System being architecture, implementation, and auditing to ensure people don't break things.
Probably because I have lived the life, I can speak first hand to knowing that not all DOD places were the same. I happened to build and design the first classified networked systems off of a military base (yeah yeah, big whoop wanna fight about it?). My primary responsibility was building and designing these systems, writing tools for the auditors, and writing tools to ensure everything worked all the time. At the same time, I spoke often with agents that had other customers that did nothing, or, used good old fashioned someone watching a person at a single terminal and writing things down manually. (no SELinux, no tools, no automation).
By Snowden's own claims he had access to things he should not. That to me indicates that the contractor he was working for had no real security in place. Anything I can bypass by killing syslogd or removing history is not "real", sorry. SELinux is the answer, but it's time consuming to get right and takes a dedicated regular staff of good auditors and admins to maintain. If you cut corners to save money and lack the proper staff, of course people can do things you don't know about. If you are doing illegal things that your staff questions, you just fucked yourself no matter how much staff you have.
Every technology has growing pains, and EVs are no different. I'm sure that there are more than a couple Oil and Combustion automotive people making a whole lot out of this story, like those that bitched that if the cars were submerged for over a day the batteries would catch fire.
Do you really believe that Tesla does not have it in their best interests to "Fix" the problems? Come now, I think you are one of those suckers PT is attributed (incorrectly) talking about.
Feds want to jump in? Sure, why not! They help investigate issues with Boeing, Northrop, etc.. More eyes on the puzzle will help find the cause so they can fix it.
The real issue here, I hinted at above. People want you to believe that Oil is the only way that the world can run. They spend billions of dollars that they fuck people over to get telling you how much you have to have it. Anyone with a brain realizes that Oil is both finite and screwing up the environment. Letting companies fix issues that remove our dependencies helps everyone except those fuckers that start wars for more oil.
My advice, be patient and let them fix it. Help them fix it if you really feel like you want to jump in and do something. By whining and complaining about the evils of EVs you maintain the status quo, which has quickly been leading us down a nasty stink hole.
I don't blame the "news" either. The media didn't vote to allow monopolization or write laws that did, in fact many journalists were the most vocal (and ignored by editors) about the monopolization and dangers journalism was facing. The media did not vote to get rid of journalism in the US. That was done by people in power behind the scenes. Hence why I stated that the strings had to be cut, and it's not a single layer of strings.
If you are lost by "The Allegory of the Cave" then you have no reason to be vocal. It's not a long read. Socrates states it much better than I have patience to do for someone so high on their horse.
In the case of smoking people were wise enough to understand what prohibition would get them. I guess since drugs and tobacco often come together, it was easy to make the connections between the 30's prohibition of alcohol (increased crime, dangerous black market) and a proposed tobacco prohibition today. If only people would make that connection to the "war on drugs" we could make social progress...
If you say the population isn't to blame, you imply that someone else should do something about it...
Incorrect, you are inventing a statement that was never made or making an implication that can not exist based on what I argued. I specifically argued about where the blame should be placed, I never implied a lack of action. * see next paragraph
Which only leaves the 'benevolent dictator' option. It's still up to the population to organize and fix things. The government isn't going to give up its control of the media and educational systems. It won't break up monopolies that serve it so well in any meaningful way.
I never stated that the public should take no action, you just made that up. I stated that the public can not be blamed for the current dilemma. In fact if you re-read my last paragraph I give a very viable first step that the public should be demanding. Not outright, I agree, but the implication should be extremely obvious.
The population still let all of that happen without much resistance. Ignorance and naiveté are convenient excuses but excuses aren't a shield from responsibility, merely a balm of sympathy to spread over the soreness of blame.
Okay, so you jump back to the blame and right back to your same position of blaming the public. I gave a rational argument for not blaming the public. You don't counter or offer any alternative reasoning, I'm just supposed to accept your opinion that the public is at fault. Well, I don't accept that opinion and gave very good reasoning not to accept that opinion.
It's up to *you* to educate whoever will listen to you about those things and teach them to do the same. You're part of the population, you're partly responsible for its progress or demise. To think of yourself as powerless is mostly a symptom of poor understanding of exponential spread.
Now we jump back to take action. It would be easier to follow if you gave each thought in sequence instead of bouncing back and forth.
I have been advocating word of mouth education for years, telling people that the media was a joke and that people needed not just real "news" but also the ability to defend themselves from fallacies. Your implication that I'm not doing so is from ignorance, therefor meaningless and just a form of ad hominem. Lastly, you invent your own statement about being powerless. I never stated "do nothing", ever! Go back through my post history and show me one time where I told someone to say "fuckit" as opposed to "go read and study Socrates (which is my favorite), but also Friedman, Gary Allen, Quixley, etc...
If you incorrectly wrote the term *you* as a generalization for the masses, we are on the same page. As you wrote it, it seems to be simply chest beating to show you are correct in blaming the public and I am incorrect in shifting blame to the people that have monopolized "news" and prevented knowledge from getting to the public.
I believe this was a joke and mistakenly modded "informative" instead of funny. Giving an endangered species more jellyfish to eat does not fix the pollution and environmental damage that caused them to become endangered to begin with.
If I had to choose between living in 1984 -- which is what we're doing -- and the consequences of not having any secret spying at all, I'd go with the consequences. I think I'm more likely to be arrested for expressing my Constitutional rights than I am to be killed by terrorists.
That's disingenuous. Best you can do is blame the population for not offering principled people who run for office, or in the rare cases where this happens, blame the population for not supporting those guys in favor of the typical establishment stooges.
How do you blame people when they are intentionally mislead, uninformed, and outright lied too? The take over of journalism started a long long time ago, and the last of the "journalists" for large print and television happened decades ago. You could blame the people that ignored the laws that allowed the monopolization of media in the 70s maybe, but corrupt journalism was rampant in the 60s even without monopolization.
People warned us that when the AP becomes the only source of "News" we are fucked, but those voters didn't even know that there were laws being cooked because the "News" prevented those laws from becoming public knowledge. If you didn't pay attention to comedians like George Carlin you simply didn't know.
Hell, if the Internet was censored as people in power want, you would still not know about any of these programs.
I agree that it's disingenuous to blame just congress, but it's just as disingenuous to blame a public that has no knowledge unless they are actively seeking it. It should bother you that "News" agencies collaborate and release stories that the administration approves of. It should bother you that instead of Television "News" programs talking about real issues, the programming focuses on celebrities first, propaganda second, and misinformation third.
The answer goes back in time and requires us to cut the strings tying all of these agencies together. Media monopolies need to be broken up, and journalism needs to once again become journalism. With an informed public we have a chance for reform. With an ignorant public there is no chance of reform, it will just be a few people that see reality bickering on sites like Slashdot.
There IS a tremendous value to a strong intelligence capability.
Strong has no definition so you may as well be advocating what has been going on with GCHQ and the NSA. I would agree that we need accountability for those programs, but not terminology or connotations that come with "Strong". Where we have friends, we should not have spying at all. It should be diplomats and everything they do should be public information in their home countries. Real journalists, like the kind we had 30+ years ago and not the "promoters" we have today, should be the gatekeepers of what goes public just like JFK stated they should. This would allow for at least one watcher outside of the Government's watching their own programs.
The blame here I place (as usual) on Congress. If they were exercising responsible, firm, intrusive oversight - with absolute, immediate, and unremitting punishment for the people involved (firing certainly, prosecution as required - and not a bunch of chattering ninnies that have proven their inability to be trusted to keep secrets secret (so as to remain closely advised by the agencies without fear of destroying the value of intel and methods with self-serving 'unattributed' leaks), I don't believe we'd have this problem.
So the President who approved and lied about these programs bears no blame? The Senators that also voted for these programs and lied about them have no blame? There is plenty of blame to go around! Every politician that voted for these programs should be impeached and the laws need to be repealed. Every politician that knew of the violations and kept quiet should be impeached and tried for treason. The liars, like Diane Feinstein and Barack Obama, are just as guilty as the lazy congress member voting for more money if not more.
But now we have self-interested politicians, committed to maintaining a political divide and advantage at ANY cost (even to the republic), who thus cannot really be trusted with anything important and who block each other (despite both sides' recognizing the need) from reforming anything substantively. I guess we lose then.
This is exactly the generalization you should use for who's to blame. Consider also, that the divides being created and propagated/prolonged are not just for self-interests but to keep people from seeing reality. We see the edges now of a reality they don't want us to know about and it's pretty disgusting. Politicians are panicked that we have gotten a glimpse of this reality, which is why they are doing everything they can to make you look away, discredit whistle blowers, and prevent more whistle blowers.
I had the same initial reaction as yours to TFA. I started to ask myself the more obvious question. Are they trying to state that higher quality media requires more bits so our data will increase by said proportion? But that is nowhere in their scheme. I am with you, TFA is simply a very bizarre set of statements.
Because if you are anonymous it's impossible to tell between you and another anonymous poster. This makes a conversation extremely difficult, and yes I have had Anonymous people yell "I never said that" if I refer to a post by someone anonymous.
Note that I don't state that I refuse to reply, I state not to expect a reply.
While I'm all for accountability this bill reeks! Most "science" funding can not and should be not tied to "national interests", they should be tied to advancing the citizens of the society as a whole.
Oh I can see it now!
"Dear Leader,
We, the poor and humble citizens are requesting a science project to defend ourselves against.. um.. Imperialism. This science will no doubt halt the enemies advances against your national interests, which is of course primarily the protection of us poor and humble servants.. erm.. citizens.
We thank the great leader for considering our humble request.
I can look in another direction and I have seen nowhere that it mentions audio advertising.
You keep making excuses and avoiding the question. This is not less intrusive than a store clerk, it's more intrusive. I have given numerous rational examples of how it's more intrusive. I see excuses and false claims, no rational argument on how it's less intrusive.
So the presence of secret courts justifies you lack of proof? That is a cop out and you know it.
Take things out of context much? I stated that you can't evaluate or scrutinize what you don't know and you claimed that there were no secret courts. I showed that you were wrong about secret courts, and I gave the Wifi rubbish bins as an example of technology abuse we "know" happened. You claim that you 'don't care if the "line" was true or false' as to the purpose or use of the tracking of you near a trash can. It's like trying to discuss right and wrong with a 4 year old that covers their ears and yells "I'm not listening".
The question proposes that if I do not agree with you I must be daft. Someone does not have to be daft to disagree with you.
Do you truly believe that you can scrutinize and evaluate information that you don't know and can't know because laws prevent you from knowing? Seriously, if you believe the answer to that question is "yes" then you are daft!
The Australian governments policy is to turn the boats back. That would require cooperation with the Indonesians to work.
No it does not require cooperation. It may be cheaper if there is cooperation, they may find out who's on the boats with cooperation (criminal vs. refugee) and be able to deliver them to a better agency with cooperation, but it's not "required". The refusal to cooperate does not mean that neither country can enforce their own immigration laws, nor does TFA state that they won't be enforcing their own laws because of the leaks.
Effective intervention against the smuggling requires both nations cooperating, just acting in their own jurisdiction isn't effective which is pretty clear if you look at the last six or so years.
Wrong, go back and read what I wrote and compare that to what you just said. It is not required that cooperation exists. The USA prosecutes drug and arms smuggling every day without cooperation with many of the places that are trying to ship in illegal drugs. Even when there is cooperation the US border operations don't change. Most of the coop programs catch acts on foreign land where the US has no jurisdiction which implies that it's removing responsibility from foreign countries at an increased cost to the US.
Also human trafficking implies that the people are being sold as goods. They're not. They are just paying money to people with boats to ferry them to Australia instead of waiting in refugee camps for their asylum claims to be processed.
Wrong again! Human slavery would imply that people are being sold as goods. Trafficking implies that people are being moved for numerous reasons, from illegal immigration (refugee) to slavery. The same as "smuggling" which also implies numerous reasons for transporting humans.
First, you pulled out a single statement from the speech to ignore what was stated. I quoted the majority of the speech above.
Just as importantly the MIC includes much more than Defense spending, and it should not take much thought to grasp that. The TSA, DHS, CIA, FBI, NSA, ATF, are also parts of the same MIC. The "War on Drugs" and "War on Terror" have increased spending for military operations by insane amounts. General Dynamics may not be making much more money but Halliburton has made hundreds of billions. I won't discuss black budget items which have increased over the years.
So if you take Eisenhower out of context and ignore the majority of modern spending on militant operations you have a point. Seems like a bizarre way of looking at the world to me, but if you are happy in your delusion go for it.
The New World Order, Illuminati, and other "Shadow Government" conspiracies state that there is a secret one-world government which controls the actual (puppet) governments. Without them being aware, of course.
Wrong mostly, but I'll grant that there are a few exceptions. Most conspiracies state that there are people trying to establish this web and have been in the process for quite a long time, gaining lots of ground because people are ignorant to the conspiracy.
The difference between a wacko conspiracy nut and a regular person is the wackjobs consider lack of any evidence for a theory to be proof of the theory.
A word of caution: There are numerous people that deny facts in order to maintain that there are numerous 'wacko conspiracy nuts'. Not many people know who the Bilderberg group is, let alone what they do and where they meet. The CFR, Trilateral Commission, WHO, are never discussed yet have tremendous impact on Governments. People deny recorded words of Bush (both of them), Cameron, and written words of David Rockefeller even when you show them where to find the prints or hear the words.
When people all around you in power are trying to manipulate your reality, do you really know who is delusional? For the record, I'm not stating either side is right. I'm saying that it should be investigated openly and every tidbit should be scrutinized. There is enough evidence of collusion to give merit to the conspiracy.
Robots will do what ever they are programmed to do. Programming them to recognize that stabbing someone is wrong is no different than programming them to claim stabbing is right. Simply change a 0 to a 1.
The same can be said for any act of harm mind you, not just using a knife. Smarter people than me have warned about things you should never try and teach in artificial intelligence (hinted at in TFA). The Military pretty much said "fuck them" when DARPA started developing AI to shoot and blow people up autonomously. Trying to pacify people now does what exactly? Are they going to try and convince us that nobody could ever change the bit in memory? Puhleaze!
Slashdot Mirror
Do you still have to grind to get anywhere? If so, I won't be back.
That's kind of a silly question isn't it? Progressive MMOs are all about the grind for enough gear to grind tougher mobs to get better gear to grind tougher mobs, etc... I enjoyed WoW early on, but don't feel like devoting that much time to a "game". If they ever get rid of the Flintstones graphics look I may go back and peek around, but no interest in the crazy cartoon look of the game as a time waster.
I agree that geeks are not uniform. Sociopaths and Psychopaths that don't give a rats ass who they screw over as long as they Get PAID! come immediately to mind as people that will apply for NSA jobs. This is in addition of course to a whole lot of people that see it as a way to make a decent living, you know, because McDonald's does not pay very well. Lots of other people are simply ignorant to the happenings and still believe that there are all of these bogey men to hunt.
Except when the admins are doing the system integration and expected to make it work, with no expectation of time allocated for integration (afterall the vendor said it worked) for whatever arbitary software package they brought in? As far as I can tell, I wasn't working anywhere special in those regards.
Having built and designed these systems, there is no single arbitrary package you can bring in to do everything. Sure, there are tools that can help configure systems for secure modes. I wrote the Solaris and Linux tools we used, those were unified. There was no commercial package at the time I wrote ours, and as quickly as Linux changes I have no confidence there is such a commercial package today.
Auditing as mentioned is the important part and it's a separate set of software. There are commercial packages for that, but it's hit or miss especially when trying to audit Linux and Windows.
Setting up SELinux is not trivial, as it seems like you are aware of. That said, once that is done the work really begins. Admins need tools to ensure compliance on everything all the time. Auditors need data to audit, and need to look for the right things _all_ of the time. It's the last part that usually gets the short end of the stick in contracting work because it's expensive work. It was not difficult for 30 or 40 machines to overwhelm an auditor on an average network. On a busy network, we needed a full time auditor for less than 20 machines.
Sorry, I don't follow, that was along the lines of what I thought I was saying. My statement was that, I would change password hashes and avoid knowing passwords but that a sysadmin wouldn't HAVE to have that ability. Hell that wouldn't even require SELinux, just use an external auth mechanism that he doesn't have access to make changes to.
You started by seeming to assert that the admin does not have full access, followed by claiming it may not have been configured. Since I think we agree, it could just be my perception of your words being too literal. I'll cover your hashes comment next, since you touch it again below.
However, with selinux, it should be possible to disallow direct updates to the password database even by sysadmins.
This is correct, and yet incorrect. This is where auditing is critical. By DOD standards the "root" password must be changed at a given frequency and must be of certain complexity. If you lock down the /etc/shadow file you can't maintain compliance. That said, auditors should know _every_ time a password changes. If there was no justification for the change, they need to audit who was on the system during the change. For users, you would rarely use passwd/shadow. On a network, you are required to use strong passwords and would use LDAP/TLS for all users. And even here, and auditor should know _every_ time a password is changed and investigate justification or launch an investigation if there was no justification.
On this at least, we completely agree. I would have totally recommended using it if I thought it realistic that we would have either of those.... or even the ability to push back on customers who want everything and want their software to just work even with no time allocated to integration work.
In the private sector, I'm right with you. In classified Government work, it's not supposed to be optional it's supposed to be mandatory. If the contractor failed to provide controls and audits, they should be fired and barred from Government work for the maximum penalty.
First and foremost thank you for the clarification. I realize that it can be difficult to use generalizations that can not also be perceived as personal attacks, which is why I wrote my final paragraph. I also realize that you were not the AC, I believe that I responded to both of you in turn.
It seems that we agree on nearly all points. I do wish to clarify a bit why I feel so strongly against blaming the public.
Outside of the facts I presented stating that it's factually incorrect, I believe that a few things are being propagated by the same powers that put us in our current dilemma. They want us to bicker about "who" is to blame because it keeps the focus off of them. If they can turn the debate into me blaming my neighbor for ignorance (and a lack of action based on that ignorance) then they prevent real change from happening. People are defensive, and if you come right out and tell someone "your not doing enough" or "you need to do things different" they will simply become defensive and either attack you or ignore you.
Where as, if you present to the people "you have been fooled" it takes the blame away. It's much more likely to advance the needed changes. Of course a person in the background occasionally giving them a prod once they are awake won't hurt, but it could not be the focus or start of the movements needed.
Different cultures of course react differently to the same rhetoric. What I believe will work best in the US may not work the best in another Country.
I have never seen any environment where SELinux was actually used.
I worked in DOD for more than a decade, we used SE Linux from the time it was available. Before that, we used LAUS. If you don't use it or know people that do, why are you going to make false claims like "Fully locked down SELinux is more like....faces of death."? If you never used it, you obviously should not be making bogus claims. Fully locked down and properly configured SELinux is a nightmare for auditors, not admins.
It is entirely possible to have a system administrator who does NOT have that kind of access under the NSAs mandatory access control model. That doesn't mean they have it implemented that way, but, it is possible that they could, the tools exist; and they wrote them.
No offense, but your second sentence contradicts your first claim. Is it not more likely that where he was working they were not using a properly configured access control system? System being architecture, implementation, and auditing to ensure people don't break things.
Probably because I have lived the life, I can speak first hand to knowing that not all DOD places were the same. I happened to build and design the first classified networked systems off of a military base (yeah yeah, big whoop wanna fight about it?). My primary responsibility was building and designing these systems, writing tools for the auditors, and writing tools to ensure everything worked all the time. At the same time, I spoke often with agents that had other customers that did nothing, or, used good old fashioned someone watching a person at a single terminal and writing things down manually. (no SELinux, no tools, no automation).
By Snowden's own claims he had access to things he should not. That to me indicates that the contractor he was working for had no real security in place. Anything I can bypass by killing syslogd or removing history is not "real", sorry. SELinux is the answer, but it's time consuming to get right and takes a dedicated regular staff of good auditors and admins to maintain. If you cut corners to save money and lack the proper staff, of course people can do things you don't know about. If you are doing illegal things that your staff questions, you just fucked yourself no matter how much staff you have.
Every technology has growing pains, and EVs are no different. I'm sure that there are more than a couple Oil and Combustion automotive people making a whole lot out of this story, like those that bitched that if the cars were submerged for over a day the batteries would catch fire.
Do you really believe that Tesla does not have it in their best interests to "Fix" the problems? Come now, I think you are one of those suckers PT is attributed (incorrectly) talking about.
Feds want to jump in? Sure, why not! They help investigate issues with Boeing, Northrop, etc.. More eyes on the puzzle will help find the cause so they can fix it.
The real issue here, I hinted at above. People want you to believe that Oil is the only way that the world can run. They spend billions of dollars that they fuck people over to get telling you how much you have to have it. Anyone with a brain realizes that Oil is both finite and screwing up the environment. Letting companies fix issues that remove our dependencies helps everyone except those fuckers that start wars for more oil.
My advice, be patient and let them fix it. Help them fix it if you really feel like you want to jump in and do something. By whining and complaining about the evils of EVs you maintain the status quo, which has quickly been leading us down a nasty stink hole.
I don't blame the "news" either. The media didn't vote to allow monopolization or write laws that did, in fact many journalists were the most vocal (and ignored by editors) about the monopolization and dangers journalism was facing. The media did not vote to get rid of journalism in the US. That was done by people in power behind the scenes. Hence why I stated that the strings had to be cut, and it's not a single layer of strings.
If you are lost by "The Allegory of the Cave" then you have no reason to be vocal. It's not a long read. Socrates states it much better than I have patience to do for someone so high on their horse.
In the case of smoking people were wise enough to understand what prohibition would get them. I guess since drugs and tobacco often come together, it was easy to make the connections between the 30's prohibition of alcohol (increased crime, dangerous black market) and a proposed tobacco prohibition today. If only people would make that connection to the "war on drugs" we could make social progress...
Everyone now thinks I'm crazy for laughing hysterically at my computer monitor...
If you say the population isn't to blame, you imply that someone else should do something about it...
Incorrect, you are inventing a statement that was never made or making an implication that can not exist based on what I argued. I specifically argued about where the blame should be placed, I never implied a lack of action. * see next paragraph
Which only leaves the 'benevolent dictator' option. It's still up to the population to organize and fix things. The government isn't going to give up its control of the media and educational systems. It won't break up monopolies that serve it so well in any meaningful way.
I never stated that the public should take no action, you just made that up. I stated that the public can not be blamed for the current dilemma. In fact if you re-read my last paragraph I give a very viable first step that the public should be demanding. Not outright, I agree, but the implication should be extremely obvious.
The population still let all of that happen without much resistance. Ignorance and naiveté are convenient excuses but excuses aren't a shield from responsibility, merely a balm of sympathy to spread over the soreness of blame.
Okay, so you jump back to the blame and right back to your same position of blaming the public. I gave a rational argument for not blaming the public. You don't counter or offer any alternative reasoning, I'm just supposed to accept your opinion that the public is at fault. Well, I don't accept that opinion and gave very good reasoning not to accept that opinion.
It's up to *you* to educate whoever will listen to you about those things and teach them to do the same. You're part of the population, you're partly responsible for its progress or demise. To think of yourself as powerless is mostly a symptom of poor understanding of exponential spread.
Now we jump back to take action. It would be easier to follow if you gave each thought in sequence instead of bouncing back and forth.
I have been advocating word of mouth education for years, telling people that the media was a joke and that people needed not just real "news" but also the ability to defend themselves from fallacies. Your implication that I'm not doing so is from ignorance, therefor meaningless and just a form of ad hominem. Lastly, you invent your own statement about being powerless. I never stated "do nothing", ever! Go back through my post history and show me one time where I told someone to say "fuckit" as opposed to "go read and study Socrates (which is my favorite), but also Friedman, Gary Allen, Quixley, etc...
If you incorrectly wrote the term *you* as a generalization for the masses, we are on the same page. As you wrote it, it seems to be simply chest beating to show you are correct in blaming the public and I am incorrect in shifting blame to the people that have monopolized "news" and prevented knowledge from getting to the public.
I believe this was a joke and mistakenly modded "informative" instead of funny. Giving an endangered species more jellyfish to eat does not fix the pollution and environmental damage that caused them to become endangered to begin with.
If I had to choose between living in 1984 -- which is what we're doing -- and the consequences of not having any secret spying at all, I'd go with the consequences. I think I'm more likely to be arrested for expressing my Constitutional rights than I am to be killed by terrorists.
Brilliant statement! Yes, I am being sincere.
That's disingenuous. Best you can do is blame the population for not offering principled people who run for office, or in the rare cases where this happens, blame the population for not supporting those guys in favor of the typical establishment stooges.
How do you blame people when they are intentionally mislead, uninformed, and outright lied too? The take over of journalism started a long long time ago, and the last of the "journalists" for large print and television happened decades ago. You could blame the people that ignored the laws that allowed the monopolization of media in the 70s maybe, but corrupt journalism was rampant in the 60s even without monopolization.
People warned us that when the AP becomes the only source of "News" we are fucked, but those voters didn't even know that there were laws being cooked because the "News" prevented those laws from becoming public knowledge. If you didn't pay attention to comedians like George Carlin you simply didn't know.
Hell, if the Internet was censored as people in power want, you would still not know about any of these programs.
I agree that it's disingenuous to blame just congress, but it's just as disingenuous to blame a public that has no knowledge unless they are actively seeking it. It should bother you that "News" agencies collaborate and release stories that the administration approves of. It should bother you that instead of Television "News" programs talking about real issues, the programming focuses on celebrities first, propaganda second, and misinformation third.
The answer goes back in time and requires us to cut the strings tying all of these agencies together. Media monopolies need to be broken up, and journalism needs to once again become journalism. With an informed public we have a chance for reform. With an ignorant public there is no chance of reform, it will just be a few people that see reality bickering on sites like Slashdot.
There IS a tremendous value to a strong intelligence capability.
Strong has no definition so you may as well be advocating what has been going on with GCHQ and the NSA. I would agree that we need accountability for those programs, but not terminology or connotations that come with "Strong". Where we have friends, we should not have spying at all. It should be diplomats and everything they do should be public information in their home countries. Real journalists, like the kind we had 30+ years ago and not the "promoters" we have today, should be the gatekeepers of what goes public just like JFK stated they should. This would allow for at least one watcher outside of the Government's watching their own programs.
The blame here I place (as usual) on Congress. If they were exercising responsible, firm, intrusive oversight - with absolute, immediate, and unremitting punishment for the people involved (firing certainly, prosecution as required - and not a bunch of chattering ninnies that have proven their inability to be trusted to keep secrets secret (so as to remain closely advised by the agencies without fear of destroying the value of intel and methods with self-serving 'unattributed' leaks), I don't believe we'd have this problem.
So the President who approved and lied about these programs bears no blame? The Senators that also voted for these programs and lied about them have no blame? There is plenty of blame to go around! Every politician that voted for these programs should be impeached and the laws need to be repealed. Every politician that knew of the violations and kept quiet should be impeached and tried for treason. The liars, like Diane Feinstein and Barack Obama, are just as guilty as the lazy congress member voting for more money if not more.
But now we have self-interested politicians, committed to maintaining a political divide and advantage at ANY cost (even to the republic), who thus cannot really be trusted with anything important and who block each other (despite both sides' recognizing the need) from reforming anything substantively. I guess we lose then.
This is exactly the generalization you should use for who's to blame. Consider also, that the divides being created and propagated/prolonged are not just for self-interests but to keep people from seeing reality. We see the edges now of a reality they don't want us to know about and it's pretty disgusting. Politicians are panicked that we have gotten a glimpse of this reality, which is why they are doing everything they can to make you look away, discredit whistle blowers, and prevent more whistle blowers.
"Hello, I am your new computer aided driver Ray Charles. Are you ready to boogie to a possible destination?"
I had the same initial reaction as yours to TFA. I started to ask myself the more obvious question. Are they trying to state that higher quality media requires more bits so our data will increase by said proportion? But that is nowhere in their scheme. I am with you, TFA is simply a very bizarre set of statements.
Because if you are anonymous it's impossible to tell between you and another anonymous poster. This makes a conversation extremely difficult, and yes I have had Anonymous people yell "I never said that" if I refer to a post by someone anonymous.
Note that I don't state that I refuse to reply, I state not to expect a reply.
While I'm all for accountability this bill reeks! Most "science" funding can not and should be not tied to "national interests", they should be tied to advancing the citizens of the society as a whole.
Oh I can see it now!
"Dear Leader,
We, the poor and humble citizens are requesting a science project to defend ourselves against.. um.. Imperialism. This science will no doubt halt the enemies advances against your national interests, which is of course primarily the protection of us poor and humble servants.. erm.. citizens.
We thank the great leader for considering our humble request.
Sincerely, the Scientists researching Astronomy.
ps. please send more rice, we are starving!
I can look in another direction and I have seen nowhere that it mentions audio advertising.
You keep making excuses and avoiding the question. This is not less intrusive than a store clerk, it's more intrusive. I have given numerous rational examples of how it's more intrusive. I see excuses and false claims, no rational argument on how it's less intrusive.
So the presence of secret courts justifies you lack of proof? That is a cop out and you know it.
Take things out of context much? I stated that you can't evaluate or scrutinize what you don't know and you claimed that there were no secret courts. I showed that you were wrong about secret courts, and I gave the Wifi rubbish bins as an example of technology abuse we "know" happened. You claim that you 'don't care if the "line" was true or false' as to the purpose or use of the tracking of you near a trash can. It's like trying to discuss right and wrong with a 4 year old that covers their ears and yells "I'm not listening".
The question proposes that if I do not agree with you I must be daft. Someone does not have to be daft to disagree with you.
Do you truly believe that you can scrutinize and evaluate information that you don't know and can't know because laws prevent you from knowing? Seriously, if you believe the answer to that question is "yes" then you are daft!
The Australian governments policy is to turn the boats back. That would require cooperation with the Indonesians to work.
No it does not require cooperation. It may be cheaper if there is cooperation, they may find out who's on the boats with cooperation (criminal vs. refugee) and be able to deliver them to a better agency with cooperation, but it's not "required". The refusal to cooperate does not mean that neither country can enforce their own immigration laws, nor does TFA state that they won't be enforcing their own laws because of the leaks.
Effective intervention against the smuggling requires both nations cooperating, just acting in their own jurisdiction isn't effective which is pretty clear if you look at the last six or so years.
Wrong, go back and read what I wrote and compare that to what you just said. It is not required that cooperation exists. The USA prosecutes drug and arms smuggling every day without cooperation with many of the places that are trying to ship in illegal drugs. Even when there is cooperation the US border operations don't change. Most of the coop programs catch acts on foreign land where the US has no jurisdiction which implies that it's removing responsibility from foreign countries at an increased cost to the US.
Also human trafficking implies that the people are being sold as goods. They're not. They are just paying money to people with boats to ferry them to Australia instead of waiting in refugee camps for their asylum claims to be processed.
Wrong again! Human slavery would imply that people are being sold as goods. Trafficking implies that people are being moved for numerous reasons, from illegal immigration (refugee) to slavery. The same as "smuggling" which also implies numerous reasons for transporting humans.
First, you pulled out a single statement from the speech to ignore what was stated. I quoted the majority of the speech above.
Just as importantly the MIC includes much more than Defense spending, and it should not take much thought to grasp that. The TSA, DHS, CIA, FBI, NSA, ATF, are also parts of the same MIC. The "War on Drugs" and "War on Terror" have increased spending for military operations by insane amounts. General Dynamics may not be making much more money but Halliburton has made hundreds of billions. I won't discuss black budget items which have increased over the years.
So if you take Eisenhower out of context and ignore the majority of modern spending on militant operations you have a point. Seems like a bizarre way of looking at the world to me, but if you are happy in your delusion go for it.
The New World Order, Illuminati, and other "Shadow Government" conspiracies state that there is a secret one-world government which controls the actual (puppet) governments. Without them being aware, of course.
Wrong mostly, but I'll grant that there are a few exceptions. Most conspiracies state that there are people trying to establish this web and have been in the process for quite a long time, gaining lots of ground because people are ignorant to the conspiracy.
The difference between a wacko conspiracy nut and a regular person is the wackjobs consider lack of any evidence for a theory to be proof of the theory.
A word of caution: There are numerous people that deny facts in order to maintain that there are numerous 'wacko conspiracy nuts'. Not many people know who the Bilderberg group is, let alone what they do and where they meet. The CFR, Trilateral Commission, WHO, are never discussed yet have tremendous impact on Governments. People deny recorded words of Bush (both of them), Cameron, and written words of David Rockefeller even when you show them where to find the prints or hear the words.
When people all around you in power are trying to manipulate your reality, do you really know who is delusional? For the record, I'm not stating either side is right. I'm saying that it should be investigated openly and every tidbit should be scrutinized. There is enough evidence of collusion to give merit to the conspiracy.
I am going to ask you one last time to stop trolling my posts. Do not respond to this request with more trolling.
Robots will do what ever they are programmed to do. Programming them to recognize that stabbing someone is wrong is no different than programming them to claim stabbing is right. Simply change a 0 to a 1.
The same can be said for any act of harm mind you, not just using a knife. Smarter people than me have warned about things you should never try and teach in artificial intelligence (hinted at in TFA). The Military pretty much said "fuck them" when DARPA started developing AI to shoot and blow people up autonomously. Trying to pacify people now does what exactly? Are they going to try and convince us that nobody could ever change the bit in memory? Puhleaze!