Whether or not any of it is valid, no advanced state of consciousness is going to overcome the simple truth of the following quote from Poor Richard's Almanac:
"If you would persuade, you must appeal to interest rather than intellect."
Well, sure...Snowden was a sysadmin, therefore sysadmins are bad. Sounds like typical managerial "logic" to me.
Can you imagine the chaos that will be sown by all those disgruntled syadmins, right before they get fired? Whether in the form of logic bombs, or further disclosure of secret illegal practices? I'm practically giddy thinking about it.
Tricky Dick Nixon was hounded into resignation over illegally wiretapping a handful of phone lines at the DNC headquarters back in 1972. The Bush and Obama administrations are each guilty of billions of counts of the same crime. Why the FUCK isn't anyone getting impeached?
Perhaps this quote from Joseph Stalin will provide illumination:
"A single death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic."
He ran on "we are going to be the most transparent administration in history" and then proceeded to be one of the most corrupt, opaque, anti-Constitutional administrations, ever (despite him being a Constitutional lawyer - go figure).
Apparently, he learned the Constitution so that he could become an expert in subverting it.
One would hope all the naive idiots who ran around like children at Christmas believing that they were going to change the world campaigning and voting for him would learn from this and become better and more demanding citizens. Unfortunately, that's not going to happen and neither will the old-guard become less party-affiliated and more principle-oriented.
This is an endless cycle that will go on.
No, actually, it won't go on. The history of human civilization is one of empires rising and then falling, with periods in between, euphemistically referred to as "dark ages", where the vast majority of human knowledge is lost. We only came out of our last Dark Ages about 400 years ago. (And before that was another major civilization, commonly referred to as Atlantis, which crashed so hard that most people don't even believe it ever existed. But the evidence exists in various places around the globe...mostly stone edifices that can't be constructed with current technology, but that date to more than 12,000 years ago. We didn't discover agriculture 9,000 years ago -- we rediscovered agriculture after a Dark Age that lasted 3,000 years.)
There is nothing that says our corrupt, incompetent civilization will continue to exist. As the old saying goes, if something cannot possibly continue...it won't.
Amen. Three years ago, I moved 650+ miles to take a new job. Sequestration caused my team's contract to get cancelled. Tomorrow I move 200+ miles to take a new job.
Even with 20 years experience...I'm a freaking migrant worker.
Moms, don't let your kids grow up to be computer programmers.
This is another reason why I hate the, "if you've nothing to hide" nonsense.
I certainly have something to hide from the NYPD cannibal cop that abused a restricted law-enforcement database.
I have nothing to hide from a just government, but we don't have one of those, given that it's comprised of people. Our Founding Fathers knew that, and tried to write a Constitution forming a government with limited powers.
Which is what I don't understand. Why is that necessary? Is the existence of blatantly unconstitutional practices not harm enough for them, or do they like giving the government yet another reason to keep everything secret?
Unfortunately, our system isn't based on common sense, or even passing the giggle test. All our system offers is the chance to take them to court. And our courts aren't impartial arbiters of facts; a trial is more like a poorly-produced stage play.
But this is supposed to be better than the alternative.
Do the wardens of our panopticon really consider the terrorists that stupid, that they would A) try the same attack again, and B) really need to Google the concept of a backpack?
That's the problem. One of the truisms in the armed forces is that the generals are always fighting the last war. Similarly, our anti-terrorism forces are always trying to prevent the last attack. Thanks to the Unabomber, we still can't mail packages bigger than 16 ounces unless we do it in person. Thanks to the shoe-bomber, we have to take off our shoes when we go through the metal detector at the airport. Now we can't Google for pressure cookers and backpacks. Fer Crissakes.
God forbid that some clever terrorists decide to Google for suspicious terms, with the intent of luring anti-terrorism forces into an ambush. I wonder how our somewhat dim and reactionary anti-terrorism forces would deal with that. Good thing that the average jihadist is too stupid to play that type of chess.
And to think I was turned down for an Army info-sec position...I have exactly the sort of devious mind it takes to stay several steps ahead of the bad guys. Sadly, they prefer people with "N years of experience in this field, N years of experience in that field"...sigh.
And the worst thing about this...it means that the terrorists have won. They never claimed to be able to destroy our country, or overwhelm us in a military sense...they said they wanted to destroy our way of life. Well, our freedom has been replaced with a paranoid, reactionary, technologically-supercharged fascist surveillance state. The terrorists didn't even have to impose it; the western world imposed it on themselves. Somewhere, two guys with a lot of Mohammeds in their name are toasting the defeat of their enemy.
The idea that life had to start on Earth assumes that Earth is some sort of sterile petri dish.
I think it's far more likely that the first life on Earth was extraterrestrial in origin.
Given the general quality of people I've met in my life, I believe that life on this planet arose from fecal bacteria, deposited during an interplanetary "bathroom break".
if you can make a case about what the 'something completely different' would be that a) is compatible enough with our biology to infect us, and b) able to bypass our immune system entirely I would love to hear it.
These weather-predicting supercomputers will be shut down by the politicians as soon as they calculate that climate change has nothing to do with human activity, and everything to do with that massive hydrogen-fusion reactor only 93 million miles away.
If memories can be implanted from outside, then education can be delivered this way, and the services of unionized teachers will no longer be necessary...watch for them to oppose this research and make several ad-hominem attacks on it.
Given that the NSA has imposed a totalitarian surveillance state on us, why can't it stop these things from happening?
Sadly, the point of the NSA surveillance isn't crime prevention, it's political control.
Did the America I knew and loved ever really exist? Or were my history books just effective marketing campaigns?
Slashdot Mirror
I already can't afford to retire. How am I supposed to afford living forever? Do you expect me to work forever? The hell with that.
Whether or not any of it is valid, no advanced state of consciousness is going to overcome the simple truth of the following quote from Poor Richard's Almanac:
"If you would persuade, you must appeal to interest rather than intellect."
Well, sure...Snowden was a sysadmin, therefore sysadmins are bad. Sounds like typical managerial "logic" to me.
Can you imagine the chaos that will be sown by all those disgruntled syadmins, right before they get fired? Whether in the form of logic bombs, or further disclosure of secret illegal practices? I'm practically giddy thinking about it.
We're sorry too.
Tricky Dick Nixon was hounded into resignation over illegally wiretapping a handful of phone lines at the DNC headquarters back in 1972. The Bush and Obama administrations are each guilty of billions of counts of the same crime. Why the FUCK isn't anyone getting impeached?
Perhaps this quote from Joseph Stalin will provide illumination:
"A single death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic."
The President is a Constitutional lawyer, and therefore, an expert in the fact that it's just a goddamn piece of paper.
Obama has no idea why ordinary people would be worried about their data being stored and ignored forever. I'm not sure I understand it myself.
So you're fine with the NYPD cannibal cop that abused a restricted law-enforcement database?
Do you really think he'll be the only one that ever abuses this information?
I can't even fathom your faith in the goodness of people.
He ran on "we are going to be the most transparent administration in history" and then proceeded to be one of the most corrupt, opaque, anti-Constitutional administrations, ever (despite him being a Constitutional lawyer - go figure).
Apparently, he learned the Constitution so that he could become an expert in subverting it.
One would hope all the naive idiots who ran around like children at Christmas believing that they were going to change the world campaigning and voting for him would learn from this and become better and more demanding citizens. Unfortunately, that's not going to happen and neither will the old-guard become less party-affiliated and more principle-oriented.
This is an endless cycle that will go on.
No, actually, it won't go on. The history of human civilization is one of empires rising and then falling, with periods in between, euphemistically referred to as "dark ages", where the vast majority of human knowledge is lost. We only came out of our last Dark Ages about 400 years ago. (And before that was another major civilization, commonly referred to as Atlantis, which crashed so hard that most people don't even believe it ever existed. But the evidence exists in various places around the globe...mostly stone edifices that can't be constructed with current technology, but that date to more than 12,000 years ago. We didn't discover agriculture 9,000 years ago -- we rediscovered agriculture after a Dark Age that lasted 3,000 years.)
There is nothing that says our corrupt, incompetent civilization will continue to exist. As the old saying goes, if something cannot possibly continue...it won't.
Amen. Three years ago, I moved 650+ miles to take a new job. Sequestration caused my team's contract to get cancelled. Tomorrow I move 200+ miles to take a new job.
Even with 20 years experience...I'm a freaking migrant worker.
Moms, don't let your kids grow up to be computer programmers.
That sounds like tripwire to me.
Plus, that link doesn't lead to information about blockwatch, but instead immediately tries to download a file. Not very friendly.
Blue House.
When did Smurfs become a terrorist threat...?
So you can still be clean after the dollar is completely debased and civilization collapses?
This is another reason why I hate the, "if you've nothing to hide" nonsense.
I certainly have something to hide from the NYPD cannibal cop that abused a restricted law-enforcement database.
I have nothing to hide from a just government, but we don't have one of those, given that it's comprised of people. Our Founding Fathers knew that, and tried to write a Constitution forming a government with limited powers.
Legalize the Constitution!
Gen. Keith Alexander? Is that you?
But he has a Constitutional right to be a boingboing contributor without being summarily executed by overzealous police.
Which is what I don't understand. Why is that necessary? Is the existence of blatantly unconstitutional practices not harm enough for them, or do they like giving the government yet another reason to keep everything secret?
Unfortunately, our system isn't based on common sense, or even passing the giggle test. All our system offers is the chance to take them to court. And our courts aren't impartial arbiters of facts; a trial is more like a poorly-produced stage play.
But this is supposed to be better than the alternative.
Do the wardens of our panopticon really consider the terrorists that stupid, that they would A) try the same attack again, and B) really need to Google the concept of a backpack?
That's the problem. One of the truisms in the armed forces is that the generals are always fighting the last war. Similarly, our anti-terrorism forces are always trying to prevent the last attack. Thanks to the Unabomber, we still can't mail packages bigger than 16 ounces unless we do it in person. Thanks to the shoe-bomber, we have to take off our shoes when we go through the metal detector at the airport. Now we can't Google for pressure cookers and backpacks. Fer Crissakes.
God forbid that some clever terrorists decide to Google for suspicious terms, with the intent of luring anti-terrorism forces into an ambush. I wonder how our somewhat dim and reactionary anti-terrorism forces would deal with that. Good thing that the average jihadist is too stupid to play that type of chess.
And to think I was turned down for an Army info-sec position...I have exactly the sort of devious mind it takes to stay several steps ahead of the bad guys. Sadly, they prefer people with "N years of experience in this field, N years of experience in that field"...sigh.
And the worst thing about this...it means that the terrorists have won. They never claimed to be able to destroy our country, or overwhelm us in a military sense...they said they wanted to destroy our way of life. Well, our freedom has been replaced with a paranoid, reactionary, technologically-supercharged fascist surveillance state. The terrorists didn't even have to impose it; the western world imposed it on themselves. Somewhere, two guys with a lot of Mohammeds in their name are toasting the defeat of their enemy.
The idea that life had to start on Earth assumes that Earth is some sort of sterile petri dish.
I think it's far more likely that the first life on Earth was extraterrestrial in origin.
Given the general quality of people I've met in my life, I believe that life on this planet arose from fecal bacteria, deposited during an interplanetary "bathroom break".
if you can make a case about what the 'something completely different' would be that a) is compatible enough with our biology to infect us, and b) able to bypass our immune system entirely I would love to hear it.
Ummm...maybe a human immunodeficiency virus that attacks our immune system itself?
These weather-predicting supercomputers will be shut down by the politicians as soon as they calculate that climate change has nothing to do with human activity, and everything to do with that massive hydrogen-fusion reactor only 93 million miles away.
If memories can be implanted from outside, then education can be delivered this way, and the services of unionized teachers will no longer be necessary...watch for them to oppose this research and make several ad-hominem attacks on it.
From the "Dream On" episode:
Beavis: "But Master, does not the fire need water too? Does not the mountain need the storm? Does not your scrotum need kicking?"
*Meekly raises hand*
I, um... I had to look it up.
Ooooh...we'll have to punch a hole out of your nerd card.
Given that the NSA has imposed a totalitarian surveillance state on us, why can't it stop these things from happening?
Sadly, the point of the NSA surveillance isn't crime prevention, it's political control.
Did the America I knew and loved ever really exist? Or were my history books just effective marketing campaigns?
...about SQL injections