A holiday off? We can't do that, it might interefere with someone making money. This is the USA goddammit, we can't start placing quality time or family members above making money, we've got our priorities!
Who said anything about making money? Most of the fine people celebrating at home have a pretty reasonable expectation that they will have power, heat, emergency rooms, police, fire, EMT, ATC, gas stations and their internet pr0n. Just because some baby was born in a manger does not mean we have to shut down all of civilization.
The normal thing to do here is for the business/service to decide on a minimum level of service (in the case of the police/fire/ER, hopefully not too minimal) and pay their staff enough to want to show up. Part of the pay that police, ER doctors and IT professionals receive includes being on-call for the unexpected times when the shit hits the fan. That should be spelled out in your contract, including whatever level of bonus pay you expect for such work.
You seem to be choosing the most mission-critical life-or-death jobs like police, firefighters and EMTs and then using their situation to make a generally applicable point. This doesn't work and is a good example of confirmation bias. The vast, vast majority of jobs are not life-or-death and would not constitute "shutting down all of civilization" if those folks had more time off.
In an attempt to simplify what I am trying to convey, I'll emphasize that what I am really commenting on are our priorities. We each have our own lives with people we love and things that we care about. We work and make money in order to support these things. But we act like we have lives in order to work and make money, and for what? Conspicuous consumption? Luxury items? Consumerism? These things are so much more valuable than quality time with people you love that whenever there is a schedule conflict, quality time is sacrificed? Do you believe that joyous, grateful, harmonious, fulfilled lives are built on this premise? I am not talking about how a holiday is handled. I am talking about how the way we handle a holiday is indicative of our values.
It's the sort of thing that you can't really use facts and logic to prove. I can't write an equation that will rigorously demonstrate for you that one value system is superior to another. For this reason, if you disagree with me, then I do not believe that any amount of argument is going to result in agreement. I just wanted you to better understand what you are disagreeing with, as it is something more significant than the rather trivial objection you raise.
I'm sorry here, but i have to correct you. I hear that quote a lot, how a *nix admin can handle windows but not the other way around. That always leave out one little detail. Someone with no experience as a sysadmin at all can handle Windows. You just need to know the basics. The UI is basically self explainatory.
That's fine and good, right up until there is an intrusion attempt or complex problem for which the UI doesn't have a prefabricated solution or a need to understand security in terms more advanced than "guess we need to patch it." A good sysadmin (no matter what the OS) should consider those to be eventualities.
I have been a *nix sysadmin later on in my career, and it is not hard, but you can't really just click around and guess. You'll at the very least need to google up some command names.
That might suffice for a personal project but if it were my decision, I would not hire someone who discovers he "can't really just click around and guess" to fill a sysadmin position. When I said that most *nix admins can handle Windows but most Windows admins do not know their way around a *nix system, I was referring to skilled Windows administrators versus skilled *nix administrators. My point wasn't that one or the other requires more skill to "wing it" but that Windows is generally a monoculture, and as such those who seriously use it tend not to have a lot of experience with alternatives (and thus, do not have a valid/informed preference) whereas this is far less true for *nix administrators. Therefore, your scenario of a person with little to no knowledge of the system who suddenly finds himself responsible for managing the system and your comparison of whether that's easier for Windows or *nix doesn't really address what I was saying.
Windows Server 2008 introduced a "Core" mode, where administration is done by the command line... I'll tell you, it was flipping funny watching the Unix sysadmins try to handle that after spouting the above quote so many time.
Your description alone made me laugh. That must have been quite amusing to watch.
This will be exploited only in the situation where the DBA is a complete and total moron of the highest degree.
You mean the kind of person who'd use Microsoft software in a security critical situation?
This is modded "Flamebait" but really this is just the "use the right tool for the job" idea. I know that if I were dealing with a medium or large organization and it were up to me, I would consider using Microsoft software for the end-user's desktop machines. It would be the most familiar software for the users, it's reasonably easy for them to use, and the network on which it is deployed can be locked down (which would, of course, include making sure that no Windows machine has a public IP address).
I definitely would not consider using any Microsoft product for the servers, especially if they are accessible on the public Internet. Microsoft's documented security history is one reason. My sincere personal belief that no matter what they say, Microsoft doesn't give a damn about security and they won't start caring about it so long as their products keep selling, which has always been the case, is another. Another reason is that if there is a vulnerability in open-source software, I am not completely dependent on the vendor to fix it. Also, a database may be a bad example of this, but with most open-source programs you have a variety of different ones to choose from and you could replace your current solution with another with minimal hassle. So, if one server has a critical security problem and I cannot find a patch, fix it myself, or find a workaround, I can easily replace it with something else. Compare that to Microsoft's proprietary file formats, embrace-and-extend tactics, and other deliberate incompatibilities designed to create vendorlock and then tell me how easy it would be to replace something like a database server (even if it would have zero effect in this case, do you really want to support this kind of business practice or do you prefer to deny that this is what you are doing?). The ease of remote administration of *nix would be another reason why I wouldn't use Microsoft for a server. The fact that, in general, *nix solutions simply have better uptimes and are easier for a skilled sysadmin to maintain than Windows solutions is yet another reason. Then there are extra security options available for Linux that are not available for Windows or only partially available for Windows, such as compiling from source with SSP (good luck with that on Windows), SELinux, using PaX and grsecurity to prevent stack-smashing attacks or to use RBAC, and lots of other nice options that are desirable in a secure server. License costs would be another, more distant reason, although I say that with the awareness that software licenses are usually a small part of the overall costs.
Anyway, that's how I feel about it and I have reasons for why I feel that way. I really believe that Microsoft is one of the worst available solutions for this type of server, that superior solutions with more functionality and better security can be had even for free. Maybe using Microsoft for this doesn't qualify as "a complete and total moron of the highest degree" but it shows a pro-Microsoft bias (as in "that's all we know!") in the least and might indicate poor decision-making. Ever notice that most *nix admins can handle Windows but most Windows admins do not know their way around a *nix system? It's another sign that this is not a culture of carefully considering all available options, as in show me an administrator who is highly skilled with both *nix and Windows who still prefers Windows, and I'll call that a legitimate preference (and a member of a small minority). You might not feel that way and have reasons why you disagree. Either way, it's not flamebait to say so (mods, I'm sorry, but as a group you're rather bitchy and trigger-happy lately -- apologies to the ones who don't knee-jerk).
The above is not flamebait, it's the god's honest truth.
Yeah, I've noticed the mods are rather trigger-happy lately (merry Christmas to them, too). Sometimes I think we need a "-0 I Dislike What You Said" mod so people can quit using Flamebait/Offtopic for this reason. I can look at the screwed-up priorities and materialism of this culture and I can either feel very bad about it because it's sad or I can joke about it because it's absurd. Having tried both, I choose the latter.
I don't just think Christmas or other holidays that supposedly have a religious/spiritual/otherwise immaterial tradition have become over-commercialized. I think we've effectively elevated making money, maybe going to school, and getting a job so you can have kids who grow up to make money, maybe go to school, and get a job, ad infinitum, into something like the purpose of existence since most people cannot or will not either find their own reason for being here on Earth or accept that there may not be a purpose at all.
An AC below says that you have decided to prioritize money over family. I don't believe it's quite that simple. Most of the time, going against the crowd is just a simple matter of courage, but this is one of the few areas where It's rather difficult to make other choices when almost no one else does. Let's assume (to make a point) that the vast majority of people are giving highest priority to work/money. If you don't, your employer may start to see you as unwilling, lazy, or "not a team player" when you don't want to work as many hours during the holiday season as the other employees. It's also hard to enjoy something like quality time with people who do not value it as much as you do and have decided to go make money instead. Any real change to this system would have to be a change to the culture itself; in the meantime, all you can do is lead by example.
This means their people are working writing/testing the patch too. I wonder how much nicer it might be for the internet backbones to take a holiday off.
A holiday off? We can't do that, it might interefere with someone making money. This is the USA goddammit, we can't start placing quality time or family members above making money, we've got our priorities!
<cluebat>
Other humans do what's important to them, not what's important to you.
</cluebat>
<description type="job">
You don't control people, you control machines.
You do your job so others can do theirs.
</description>
More like "other humans assume that the IT department enjoys creating work for the hell of it and that smoothly running systems which can be maintained by following simple written instructions are somehow not in their interests". How is patronizing the GP like this supposed to remedy that? You can look at an undesirable or less-than-ideal situation (i.e. the apathy of users) and accept it as the reality of the situation and work with it without ever needing to make excuses for it or justify it. Personally I find that quite a bit more appealing than saying "know your role" or "you're just the help" as though this attitude is the only way to serve others. I'm not necessarily even saying that these things aren't true; I am merely questioning the need to place so much emphasis on them.
If it's that important to perform a remote restart, drop a widget on the machine that enables remote control.
This part is good constructive criticism. When I mentioned "accept the reality of the situation and work with it" above, this is more like what I was talking about. Why create avoidable problems by asking users to manually follow instructions (however simple) that can be automated? I think the actions we would take to deal with this situation would be quite similar; it's really your point of view (and yours is a common one) that I'm addressing. I would handle this in a remotely administered, automated fashion because it's a better solution, it's more reliable, and it doesn't create unnecessary friction, not because I'm worried about whether it's sufficiently humble for my station. In my opinion, that attitude is one of the more regrettable products of corporate culture.
My point was that you have a broken system and oddly enough, you are getting bad results from this broken system. Much of what I did not go into depth about but did imply is that I believe that much of this current crisis is either engineered to begin with or at least leveraged in the classic Problem-Reaction-Solution pattern so frequently seen in modern governments. You did not address my core point which is that so long as you have a system like the Fed, you will always have more debt than dollars in circulation and no amount of tinkering will change that. The system is destined to collapse one way or another, for many of the same reasons why Ponzi schemes must eventually fail. The items you mention, like the bursting of the housing bubble, only impact when this system fails. I never claimed that you can't have a depression without a fractional reserve system, only that this built-in debt that no one in the mainstream media ever talks about (except in vague aggregate terms like "national debt") is a huge factor in the current depression.
Also, I gave a figurative illustration for the sake of simplifying the explanation. Yes, there was money in circulation before the Federal Reserve was set up. It also took a while before the gold-backed and silver-backed currencies were phased out because you don't just change your entire monetary system overnight, it's not quite so simple. None of these implementation details had much to do with my overall point, so I omitted them. It was an obvious omission and it was intended to be an obvious omission. Pointing this out is supposed to accomplish what, exactly? Do I really need to disclaim every analogy and every simplified explanation so that someone doesn't come along and say "ah-HAH!" and sincerely believe he's really nailed me this time? Because I've tried that and found that the people who want an easy "victory" that badly will ignore any disclaimers or clarifications I give. Well, I say "victory" but what they really seem to want is to dismiss you without actually addressing the points you raise. The primary motivation is not that they have reasons for disagreeing and would like to see if a consensus can be reached but because they dislike what you say. I suppose at this point I should sigh and, just for you, add something like "of course, having a primary motivation of disliking what a guy says and having actual reasons to disagree are not mutually exclusive". Generally, people don't seem very interested in truth; what they seem to want is palatable truth that makes them feel better. This is one of those things (a character weakness, actually) that I consider to be "not my problem" and I generally refuse to accommodate it.
Assuming you are sincerely interested in this, you may find it interesting to research Andrew Jackson, his stated reasons for opposing the central bank of his time, and in particular what he says about said bank's control of government and his warning to future generations. The current situation is yet another example of failure to learn from history. I'm pretty tired of these to be honest with you; I'm wondering when we'll finally make some novel mistakes.
The world is in a global economic depression and they are rigging up their beach with AC. Give me a break.
The world is in a global economic depression because everyone's too worried about the global economic depression to spend enough money to pick the economy back up. If you've got the money to spend on something that takes an enormous amount of labour it will be a great thing for the economy as the extra cash circulating will boost everyone's confidence to spend their own. Plus, if you ever wanted to have something like this built, now is the time.
The world is in a global economic depression because the wealthiest nations have all adopted a centralized banking system like the USA's Federal Reserve. This system, inherently and by design, has more debt than currency in circulation to pay that debt because interest (the "prime rate") is attached to money the moment it is created.
Let's say that the Federal Reserve has just been set up. There is currently no money in circulation so the first money is created. The prime rate (to make up a nice workable number) is 5%. Let's say the Fed creates ten billion dollars. The Fed gives the USA Government ten billion dollars. In exchange, the USA Government gives the Fed government bonds (a promise to pay back) worth $10,500,000,000 (the original ten billion plus the 5% interest). Now you have money in circulation. Except now you have a problem because there is only ten billion dollars in your entire economy and there is ten billion five-hundred million dollars in debt. The only thing you can do is keep borrowing more money (also at interest) to pay down the interest, and to borrow yet more to pay down the interest from that, ad nauseum. What you have is a downwardly-spiraling cycle of debt. Debt, the only form of slavery that's still legal. What's funny about this is that even if you could pay off all debt (and under this system, you can't), the result would be no more money in circulation!
To say that inflation is built into this system does not even begin to scratch the surface. You have more debt than you have dollars in circulation, and the dollars effectively represent debt and not wealth. That excess debt doesn't just go away. Someone ends up holding that debt. These are your bankruptcies and foreclosures and your bailouts. Bad decision-making causes many of these, but with this system they must exist no matter what and furthermore, they must get worse because it's a debt cycle. So, decision-making merely decides who winds up with this debt. And what is the result of debt and bankruptcy? The result is that the banks foreclose and become the owners of actual wealth (as opposed to fiat currency) like real estate.
That's why the debates about whether to bail out The Big Three are phony. The debate about whether efforts to give credit to people with poor credit histories caused the mortgage crisis (during which less than 5% of buyers defaulted) is also immaterial even if every point raised is valid. The system is inherently broken, no amount of tinkering will fix it, and it's not like the media is going to point this out even though this fact can be known by anyone who cares to study the Federal Reserve and fractional reserve banking.
I hope people understand why the Founding Fathers considered centralized banks to be more dangerous than standing armies or why Nathan Rothschild said "Let me issue and control a nationâ(TM)s currency and I care not who makes its laws.â Maybe you also see how the media is not your friend; they will maintain the illusion of lively debate but always in a way that can't possibly change anything because it's completely irrelevant and doesn't address the actual problem. How many examples of that do you need to see before you start thinking that maybe it isn't an accident?
IIRC, Islam also forbids the lending of money at interest.
Whereas we in the U.S. are used to a lender taking a security interest in property purchased with the help of a loan, people who subscribe to faiths where lending at interest is forbidden solve the problem by the lender taking a depreciating ownership interest in the property, sharing proportionately in it's change in value (up or down), while the loan is being paid off. The purchaser's monthly payment goes partially toward purchasing more of the property and partially toward renting the part s/he does not own. Rather clever actually.
Don't you love it when people get really clever at following the words of a law for the purpose of evading the spirit of a law?
While I'm sure that there are also moral reasons for it, the prohibitions against lending money at interest found in various religions really seem to be designed to prevent a house-of-cards situation like what the USA currently has with the Federal Reserve, where dollars represent debt, not wealth, and paying off all debt would mean no money in circulation, not that you could even do this because the system inherently has more debt than it has dollars in circulation since interest is attached to the money the moment it is created. Just like the religious prohibitions against eating i.e. pork had a real function of preventing food-borne illness for ancient people who could not have known what bacteria/viruses/microscopic parasites are, it fascinates me to wonder whether the prohibition against lending money at interest had a real function of preventing a house-of-cards economy for ancient people who could not have known what centralized banking systems are.
Early adopters are just paying more early(unless its someone/thing that needs cutting edge technology). They aren't paying the way to make it cheaper for us. It's just an early indicator of interest and a short-term way to start recouping costs. When people make more than the cost it is profit, not discounts that we see. This would be because the MFR makes the same profit either way.
In reality the cost of something is generally (not completely, but generally) far lower than the original price...this is because they know that most things start expensive and get cheaper. Competition brings it down.
When manufacturing costs find a way to make the same item cheaper, do you really think that cost savings is passed on to retail or the consumer? Absolutely not. Consumer's don't even know, for the most part.
Sorry but I think you're reading things into my previous post that I never actually said.
Regardless of how it happens, why it happens, or for whom it is profitable, computer storage generally becomes faster, cheaper, and more capacious over time. So, I see that solid-state drives are very expensive and not much better than magnetic hard drives right now and I don't doubt that this will change over time. I'm glad for this. That's all I was saying, full-stop.
I wasn't making a claim about the economics of early adopters and how they affect the market, I was merely observing that if you want one of these right now you're going to pay a lot of money for it (at least, compared to other forms of storage). When I say that early adopters pay more "until the price comes down" I was not claiming that they are doing the rest of us any favors, I was accounting for the simple fact that when the price of a formerly cutting-edge item comes down, it comes down for everyone, previous early adopters included. I appreciate your elaboration of this process but I think it was a bit misguided.
If so I'm not going to go run and buy one. I can buy a USB disk drive that has twice as much for 1/10th the price.
I think this is like many other computing/electronics items in that the early adopters pay a lot more than the rest of us are willing to pay until the prices come down. Remember how expensive the earliest CD burners were? Really I'm glad that there is more interest in non-volatile solid-state storage. Over the years I've seen so much vaporware (like the 3D gelatin cubes that are written to and read from with lasers, like a hologram) in this area that it's good to see something that is actually going to be available. Even if solid-state drives are expensive as hell and not much better than current mechanical/magnetic hard drives right now, I don't expect them to stay that way so this is a step in the right direction.
Are you sure that's the way to go about it? Tired internet memes usually get rewarded (modded up) around here. All you need now are some pants, hot grits, Natalie Portman, sharks with lasers on their heads, flying chairs, the ability to imagine a Beowulf cluster of those, and maybe some frosty piss.
In Soviet Union tired meme's reward you.
Shit, don't ask how I forgot the Russian reversals. I knew I was forgetting something when I hit Submit...
We use a Novell back end for file and print services. You know it's all half-assedly based on Suse Linux now, right? Novell dropped Netware last year, I think. Almost all of last year's Brainshare was about half-assed Linux. Good times, I'm sad to see it go.
Here, I just wanted to make some snide half-ass remark using a tired Internet meme to feel superior and smug without any actual work or knowledge on my part.
There, fixed that for you...
Are you sure that's the way to go about it? Tired internet memes usually get rewarded (modded up) around here. All you need now are some pants, hot grits, Natalie Portman, sharks with lasers on their heads, flying chairs, the ability to imagine a Beowulf cluster of those, and maybe some frosty piss.
It's not that anybody loves Internet Explorer. It's just that nobody outside of geekdom loves any browser at all. Arguing over browser popularity is like arguing over gas station popularity.
Sometimes I think that the only real definition of "geekdom" is "a solid understanding of cause and effect".
Most people don't care, and don't see any real difference. They're just going to the first one they see.
That's why when they get a compromised system or otherwise suffer, I don't see them as victims even though I'd rather they not get compromised and I'd rather they not suffer.
They are making a trade-off and are taking a risk of experiencing security flaws for the sake of convenience as the browser is already installed and knowledge of its quality and security history is not needed to use it. They have set their priorities and made their choices and now they experience the results. Really, what rational person (technical or non-technical) expects to have good results when operating an extremely complex machine that they don't understand? Is there anywhere else in life where you can take the very first option to come along without ever looking at your other options and then consider yourself to have made a good choice? That the average person can routinely use a computer this way and have everything work out as well as it does is amazing, but rather than appreciate this we instead scratch our heads and wonder why certain problems (like botnets) just aren't going away.
Maybe this makes me unusual, but I am happy with both Linux and FireFox even if both of them never become anything like mainstream. They are actively developed and have enough of a userbase to ensure this for some time to come, they do what I need them to do, and they run the way I want them to run. I can't say with any certainty that I'd derive any direct benefit from the sort of ubiquity that Windows and IE currently enjoy and I see a certain risk of stagnation if that ever did happen.
The wife and I watched it months ago.
The Internet is my TV station.
As you mention BitTorrent, I'm assuming there were no commercials in the version you received. Since you're paying a "tax" on things like blank media anyway, I'm surprised more Canadians don't do this.
There are many things you could say about the whole Joe Plumber deal, but there's one subtle message that was not lost on me. If you stick your neck out and actually question the candidates, you will become an overnight celebrity whether you want to or not. Look at the background checks that have been performed against Samuel J. Wurzelbacher and the fact that whether or not he is actually licensed as a plumber (apparently he is not, at least not in Ohio) became a very public issue. Of course none of this has anything to do with his question to Obama about taxes, and so it constitutes an ad-hominem attack. For putting a question to Obama, he was rewarded with reporters trying to dig up dirt on him. Whether they were successful or not has nothing to do with the message, which is "if you're not with the media, then sit down and shut up or we will find skeletons in your closet." That message could not have been more clear.
I know that he has written a book and therefore could profit from this experience, but whether he has something to show for it does not negate anything I am saying. I realize that much of this was because of McCain trying to use "Joe Plumber" as something of a campaign symbol, which probably made him more of a target, but really, the reason why this is the case or how it got to be that way is trivia. It might be interesting to some of you but it won't address the chilling effect that this may have on others who would otherwise stand up and ask similar questions of other candidates.
There was a lot of unnecessary foaming at the mouth from both sides about this.
And I'm sure that the large number of verifiable stories and news pieces in which young children were expelled from school for "crimes" like pointing a french fry at another student and saying "bang bang" had absolutely nothing to do with this.
I see it the opposite way: There would be an enormous, highly taxable, highly profitable market. Every level of government would take a juicy slice, numerous corporations would profit obscenely, and users would have sharply higher quality goods for a lower price. Not to mention an instant freeze on criminal syndicate funding.
I'm pretty surprised no canny pol or CEO has figured this angle and done something to tap this gigantic fountain of cash.
That's because you think money is the goal. If it were, then legalizing these things and taxing/regulating them makes a lot of sense. Our politicians are already wealthy and so are the people who got them into office; more power is what they want. The very monetary system itself always has more debt than dollars in circulation. That's right, there are never enough dollars in circulation to pay off all debt, there never will be, and this is by design because debt is also a form of control. Therefore, they are not interested in taxing drugs and using the proceeds to pay down the national debt or anything like that, because if they succeeded in paying off all debts there would be no money in circulation. They are interested in an entirely artificial, ubiquitous "crime" that the average person fears or despises that can be used to increase police power and police surveillance.
Drugs are perfect because this amounts to making a crime of things that are not crimes in and of themselves (that is, what adults do with their own bodies). As a result, it creates laws that are nearly unenforcable in that they would require a police state to enforce. Nothing has done as much damage to the Fourth Amendment as the War on (some) Drugs. Read up on the asset forfeiture laws alone to see what I mean. If you can weaken or ignore one part of the Constitution and get away with it, then you can weaken or ignore the rest as well.
To hell with that. The current classification for which drugs are legal and illegal is totally messed up in my opinion. We need to re-evaluate what we're banning before we go off on such tangents.
The problem is that there's not much political power to be had under this sort of reasoning. No new bureaus and departments to be created, no new positions to staff with your cronies, and no excuses to expand budgets and governmental power. It's such a good idea that it'll never happen without radical changes to the way things are done.
Except we want cops to catch people with illegal drugs etc.. Why restrain the cops from doing what we all need them to do? Whether its illegal aliens or a bundle of dope I prefer that 100% be detected and punished.
They cannot even keep illegal drugs out of prison (don't take my word for it -- do the research yourself). How do you propose that we do this in a relatively free society? The way it has worked is that some amount of crime is tolerated in exchange for having a free society with things like legally recognized civil rights. With drugs and lately with terrorism the (dangerous) mentality has been that we need to stop $EVIL_THING no matter how high the cost is to the rest of society. This is tunnel vision at best, a step towards a totalitarian government at worst.
But I am curious. Once you see for yourself with your own research that they cannot even keep drugs out of prisons, I would like to know this: what environment even more restrictive than prison would you propose for the entire population in order to better meet your 100% detection/punishment rate? I'd also like to know whom you would entrust with the management of this environment.
I really think this is the same mentality that eventually comes to see individual rights and due process as pesky "inefficiencies" that only interfere with "real police work". They seriously need to tell new police recruits that their job is not easy and is not supposed to be easy. If any of them don't like that they should also be told where the exits are.
I think this is another example of relatively well-meaning people who fail to comprehend how dangerous their intentions are because they don't think them through. Let's say there is a device that can be plugged into a PC (maybe the USB port?) and almost instantly tell you whether it has illegal content with no need for expert analysis. Yeah I know that I should also posit the existence of the tooth fairy but bear with me. Who makes this device? How trustworthy are they? Do competitors or other rivals oddly happen to have a higher percentage of "illegal" PCs? Is the device a black box or can the average person examine and scrutinize it? If the cops already don't have the staff or the expertise to perform forensic analysis on PCs, what's our guarantee that they will correctly use this device or that they can offer any sort of assurance that the way it is used won't violate anyone's civil rights? What's to prevent criminals from obtaining one (by whatever means) and making sure that their illegal data isn't where this thing is looking? If I can think of this in a few minutes, WTF are these people smoking that they consider this a serious proposal? Or do they simply not care about these concerns?
You know what you'll probably never see? The police "top brass" asking for a device to help make sure that their officers don't violate anyone's civil rights and that they follow all the laws concerning due process.
I told everyone it wouldn't work. But would they laugh at me? No!
I know you were joking, but I really think it won't work for reasons not specified in the article. It's such a simple reason that I can't believe it's so rarely mentioned or addressed.
The earth is built very much like a capacitor. The ground has a fairly strong positive charge and the ionosphere has a fairly strong negative charge, with an insulating layer of air in-between. Carbon nanotubes can conduct electricity; so can most other materials I have heard of that would be used for a space elevator. I imagine that any conductor (and possibly dielectrics also when you consider electrical breakdown and the sheer current involved) would vaporize as soon as this circuit is closed. Coriolis forces and weight distribution and whether thrusters would be necessary seems trivial by comparison.
Yes, you ARE implying that there's a link, and you are an idiot for doing so. It's conspiracy bullshit based on what one doctor did at one time. Wow, that's overwhelming evidence that they don't record statistics or investigate possible side effects!
He explicitly said that he intended no such implication, and I'm inclined to believe that he knows his own intentions far better than you do. Even if this is difficult for you to accept, it's quite possible to pose an honest question (even about a controversial subject, believe it or not!) without presupposing the answer. At any rate...
Either medicine should be left to expert professionals like doctors or it should not. We have decided that it should and we have built the medical industry on this idea. The doctors certainly know this because only they are authorized to practice medicine, and the average person certainly knows (or can know) this because they would face criminal charges if they attempted to practice medicine without first obtaining a license.
Having established that, when we the (medically) unwashed masses have questions about things like vaccines, we have to bring them to a doctor or other medical practitioner. When you ask a doctor in good faith, because you don't know and wish to know, about whether an MMR vaccine could have caused or precipitated a problem like cold urticaria, what you expect is a medical opinion along the lines of "yes it did/yes it could have" or "no it didn't/no it could not have" and maybe a "here's why this is so". What you don't expect is a defensive stance like what the GP reported, because a reasonable question is not an attack. Furthermore, if you are recording a session in order to have a transcript of it, you generally record everything or you record nothing. Selective omission might actually be harmless in and of itself but it's not what you would call open and honest.
Do I believe that jrumney's doctor is part of some vast vaccine conspiracy? No, I don't. I have commented before (the particular subject was the media) that if you really want to get rid of most of these conspiracy theories, then our institutions need to be more open and transparent. Decisions that are made without explanation or with partial explanations and processes that are not open to scrutiny provide fertile ground for conspiracy theories.
Personally, I believe that the doctor mishandled this situation and therefore created the possibility of a "conspiratorial" interpretation of his/her response. Maybe that doctor just dealt with some patients who were very unreasonable about this subject or was otherwise exasperated and expected more of the same from jrumney. Maybe the doctor is aware of some corruption in the pharmaceutical industry and has some residual guilt, even if said corruption is completely unrelated to the MMR vaccine. Who knows? Either way, I can tell you that when I am not attacking or even disputing a person and they immediately go on the defensive, this is something of a "red flag" for me as well. I really think that a more professional, dispassionate, and informative response from the doctor would have put the question to rest without leaving room for any "conspiratorial" interpretation.
I'll add that I believe that there really are conspiracies and that the general public's reaction to the very word "conspiracy", which is to write off the speaker as a lunatic and dismiss everything they say without examination (emphasis on "without examination," which is the only thing wrong with that) appears to be a conditioned response. I mean, if you work at a company that makes widgets, you and every other employee of the company are "conspiring" to make widgets. The word alone doesn't mean very much without context. I don't think that there are conspiracies of the "smoky back room" type; I think they're more along the lines of corruption and the fact that large organizations always act to further their own interests. I think
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A holiday off? We can't do that, it might interefere with someone making money. This is the USA goddammit, we can't start placing quality time or family members above making money, we've got our priorities!
Who said anything about making money? Most of the fine people celebrating at home have a pretty reasonable expectation that they will have power, heat, emergency rooms, police, fire, EMT, ATC, gas stations and their internet pr0n. Just because some baby was born in a manger does not mean we have to shut down all of civilization.
The normal thing to do here is for the business/service to decide on a minimum level of service (in the case of the police/fire/ER, hopefully not too minimal) and pay their staff enough to want to show up. Part of the pay that police, ER doctors and IT professionals receive includes being on-call for the unexpected times when the shit hits the fan. That should be spelled out in your contract, including whatever level of bonus pay you expect for such work.
You seem to be choosing the most mission-critical life-or-death jobs like police, firefighters and EMTs and then using their situation to make a generally applicable point. This doesn't work and is a good example of confirmation bias. The vast, vast majority of jobs are not life-or-death and would not constitute "shutting down all of civilization" if those folks had more time off.
In an attempt to simplify what I am trying to convey, I'll emphasize that what I am really commenting on are our priorities. We each have our own lives with people we love and things that we care about. We work and make money in order to support these things. But we act like we have lives in order to work and make money, and for what? Conspicuous consumption? Luxury items? Consumerism? These things are so much more valuable than quality time with people you love that whenever there is a schedule conflict, quality time is sacrificed? Do you believe that joyous, grateful, harmonious, fulfilled lives are built on this premise? I am not talking about how a holiday is handled. I am talking about how the way we handle a holiday is indicative of our values.
It's the sort of thing that you can't really use facts and logic to prove. I can't write an equation that will rigorously demonstrate for you that one value system is superior to another. For this reason, if you disagree with me, then I do not believe that any amount of argument is going to result in agreement. I just wanted you to better understand what you are disagreeing with, as it is something more significant than the rather trivial objection you raise.
That's fine and good, right up until there is an intrusion attempt or complex problem for which the UI doesn't have a prefabricated solution or a need to understand security in terms more advanced than "guess we need to patch it." A good sysadmin (no matter what the OS) should consider those to be eventualities.
That might suffice for a personal project but if it were my decision, I would not hire someone who discovers he "can't really just click around and guess" to fill a sysadmin position. When I said that most *nix admins can handle Windows but most Windows admins do not know their way around a *nix system, I was referring to skilled Windows administrators versus skilled *nix administrators. My point wasn't that one or the other requires more skill to "wing it" but that Windows is generally a monoculture, and as such those who seriously use it tend not to have a lot of experience with alternatives (and thus, do not have a valid/informed preference) whereas this is far less true for *nix administrators. Therefore, your scenario of a person with little to no knowledge of the system who suddenly finds himself responsible for managing the system and your comparison of whether that's easier for Windows or *nix doesn't really address what I was saying.
Your description alone made me laugh. That must have been quite amusing to watch.
This will be exploited only in the situation where the DBA is a complete and total moron of the highest degree.
You mean the kind of person who'd use Microsoft software in a security critical situation?
This is modded "Flamebait" but really this is just the "use the right tool for the job" idea. I know that if I were dealing with a medium or large organization and it were up to me, I would consider using Microsoft software for the end-user's desktop machines. It would be the most familiar software for the users, it's reasonably easy for them to use, and the network on which it is deployed can be locked down (which would, of course, include making sure that no Windows machine has a public IP address).
I definitely would not consider using any Microsoft product for the servers, especially if they are accessible on the public Internet. Microsoft's documented security history is one reason. My sincere personal belief that no matter what they say, Microsoft doesn't give a damn about security and they won't start caring about it so long as their products keep selling, which has always been the case, is another. Another reason is that if there is a vulnerability in open-source software, I am not completely dependent on the vendor to fix it. Also, a database may be a bad example of this, but with most open-source programs you have a variety of different ones to choose from and you could replace your current solution with another with minimal hassle. So, if one server has a critical security problem and I cannot find a patch, fix it myself, or find a workaround, I can easily replace it with something else. Compare that to Microsoft's proprietary file formats, embrace-and-extend tactics, and other deliberate incompatibilities designed to create vendorlock and then tell me how easy it would be to replace something like a database server (even if it would have zero effect in this case, do you really want to support this kind of business practice or do you prefer to deny that this is what you are doing?). The ease of remote administration of *nix would be another reason why I wouldn't use Microsoft for a server. The fact that, in general, *nix solutions simply have better uptimes and are easier for a skilled sysadmin to maintain than Windows solutions is yet another reason. Then there are extra security options available for Linux that are not available for Windows or only partially available for Windows, such as compiling from source with SSP (good luck with that on Windows), SELinux, using PaX and grsecurity to prevent stack-smashing attacks or to use RBAC, and lots of other nice options that are desirable in a secure server. License costs would be another, more distant reason, although I say that with the awareness that software licenses are usually a small part of the overall costs.
Anyway, that's how I feel about it and I have reasons for why I feel that way. I really believe that Microsoft is one of the worst available solutions for this type of server, that superior solutions with more functionality and better security can be had even for free. Maybe using Microsoft for this doesn't qualify as "a complete and total moron of the highest degree" but it shows a pro-Microsoft bias (as in "that's all we know!") in the least and might indicate poor decision-making. Ever notice that most *nix admins can handle Windows but most Windows admins do not know their way around a *nix system? It's another sign that this is not a culture of carefully considering all available options, as in show me an administrator who is highly skilled with both *nix and Windows who still prefers Windows, and I'll call that a legitimate preference (and a member of a small minority). You might not feel that way and have reasons why you disagree. Either way, it's not flamebait to say so (mods, I'm sorry, but as a group you're rather bitchy and trigger-happy lately -- apologies to the ones who don't knee-jerk).
If anything, the parent post shou
The above is not flamebait, it's the god's honest truth.
Yeah, I've noticed the mods are rather trigger-happy lately (merry Christmas to them, too). Sometimes I think we need a "-0 I Dislike What You Said" mod so people can quit using Flamebait/Offtopic for this reason. I can look at the screwed-up priorities and materialism of this culture and I can either feel very bad about it because it's sad or I can joke about it because it's absurd. Having tried both, I choose the latter.
I don't just think Christmas or other holidays that supposedly have a religious/spiritual/otherwise immaterial tradition have become over-commercialized. I think we've effectively elevated making money, maybe going to school, and getting a job so you can have kids who grow up to make money, maybe go to school, and get a job, ad infinitum, into something like the purpose of existence since most people cannot or will not either find their own reason for being here on Earth or accept that there may not be a purpose at all.
An AC below says that you have decided to prioritize money over family. I don't believe it's quite that simple. Most of the time, going against the crowd is just a simple matter of courage, but this is one of the few areas where It's rather difficult to make other choices when almost no one else does. Let's assume (to make a point) that the vast majority of people are giving highest priority to work/money. If you don't, your employer may start to see you as unwilling, lazy, or "not a team player" when you don't want to work as many hours during the holiday season as the other employees. It's also hard to enjoy something like quality time with people who do not value it as much as you do and have decided to go make money instead. Any real change to this system would have to be a change to the culture itself; in the meantime, all you can do is lead by example.
This means their people are working writing/testing the patch too. I wonder how much nicer it might be for the internet backbones to take a holiday off.
A holiday off? We can't do that, it might interefere with someone making money. This is the USA goddammit, we can't start placing quality time or family members above making money, we've got our priorities!
More like "other humans assume that the IT department enjoys creating work for the hell of it and that smoothly running systems which can be maintained by following simple written instructions are somehow not in their interests". How is patronizing the GP like this supposed to remedy that? You can look at an undesirable or less-than-ideal situation (i.e. the apathy of users) and accept it as the reality of the situation and work with it without ever needing to make excuses for it or justify it. Personally I find that quite a bit more appealing than saying "know your role" or "you're just the help" as though this attitude is the only way to serve others. I'm not necessarily even saying that these things aren't true; I am merely questioning the need to place so much emphasis on them.
This part is good constructive criticism. When I mentioned "accept the reality of the situation and work with it" above, this is more like what I was talking about. Why create avoidable problems by asking users to manually follow instructions (however simple) that can be automated? I think the actions we would take to deal with this situation would be quite similar; it's really your point of view (and yours is a common one) that I'm addressing. I would handle this in a remotely administered, automated fashion because it's a better solution, it's more reliable, and it doesn't create unnecessary friction, not because I'm worried about whether it's sufficiently humble for my station. In my opinion, that attitude is one of the more regrettable products of corporate culture.
My point was that you have a broken system and oddly enough, you are getting bad results from this broken system. Much of what I did not go into depth about but did imply is that I believe that much of this current crisis is either engineered to begin with or at least leveraged in the classic Problem-Reaction-Solution pattern so frequently seen in modern governments. You did not address my core point which is that so long as you have a system like the Fed, you will always have more debt than dollars in circulation and no amount of tinkering will change that. The system is destined to collapse one way or another, for many of the same reasons why Ponzi schemes must eventually fail. The items you mention, like the bursting of the housing bubble, only impact when this system fails. I never claimed that you can't have a depression without a fractional reserve system, only that this built-in debt that no one in the mainstream media ever talks about (except in vague aggregate terms like "national debt") is a huge factor in the current depression.
Also, I gave a figurative illustration for the sake of simplifying the explanation. Yes, there was money in circulation before the Federal Reserve was set up. It also took a while before the gold-backed and silver-backed currencies were phased out because you don't just change your entire monetary system overnight, it's not quite so simple. None of these implementation details had much to do with my overall point, so I omitted them. It was an obvious omission and it was intended to be an obvious omission. Pointing this out is supposed to accomplish what, exactly? Do I really need to disclaim every analogy and every simplified explanation so that someone doesn't come along and say "ah-HAH!" and sincerely believe he's really nailed me this time? Because I've tried that and found that the people who want an easy "victory" that badly will ignore any disclaimers or clarifications I give. Well, I say "victory" but what they really seem to want is to dismiss you without actually addressing the points you raise. The primary motivation is not that they have reasons for disagreeing and would like to see if a consensus can be reached but because they dislike what you say. I suppose at this point I should sigh and, just for you, add something like "of course, having a primary motivation of disliking what a guy says and having actual reasons to disagree are not mutually exclusive". Generally, people don't seem very interested in truth; what they seem to want is palatable truth that makes them feel better. This is one of those things (a character weakness, actually) that I consider to be "not my problem" and I generally refuse to accommodate it.
Assuming you are sincerely interested in this, you may find it interesting to research Andrew Jackson, his stated reasons for opposing the central bank of his time, and in particular what he says about said bank's control of government and his warning to future generations. The current situation is yet another example of failure to learn from history. I'm pretty tired of these to be honest with you; I'm wondering when we'll finally make some novel mistakes.
The world is in a global economic depression because everyone's too worried about the global economic depression to spend enough money to pick the economy back up. If you've got the money to spend on something that takes an enormous amount of labour it will be a great thing for the economy as the extra cash circulating will boost everyone's confidence to spend their own. Plus, if you ever wanted to have something like this built, now is the time.
The world is in a global economic depression because the wealthiest nations have all adopted a centralized banking system like the USA's Federal Reserve. This system, inherently and by design, has more debt than currency in circulation to pay that debt because interest (the "prime rate") is attached to money the moment it is created.
Let's say that the Federal Reserve has just been set up. There is currently no money in circulation so the first money is created. The prime rate (to make up a nice workable number) is 5%. Let's say the Fed creates ten billion dollars. The Fed gives the USA Government ten billion dollars. In exchange, the USA Government gives the Fed government bonds (a promise to pay back) worth $10,500,000,000 (the original ten billion plus the 5% interest). Now you have money in circulation. Except now you have a problem because there is only ten billion dollars in your entire economy and there is ten billion five-hundred million dollars in debt. The only thing you can do is keep borrowing more money (also at interest) to pay down the interest, and to borrow yet more to pay down the interest from that, ad nauseum. What you have is a downwardly-spiraling cycle of debt. Debt, the only form of slavery that's still legal. What's funny about this is that even if you could pay off all debt (and under this system, you can't), the result would be no more money in circulation!
To say that inflation is built into this system does not even begin to scratch the surface. You have more debt than you have dollars in circulation, and the dollars effectively represent debt and not wealth. That excess debt doesn't just go away. Someone ends up holding that debt. These are your bankruptcies and foreclosures and your bailouts. Bad decision-making causes many of these, but with this system they must exist no matter what and furthermore, they must get worse because it's a debt cycle. So, decision-making merely decides who winds up with this debt. And what is the result of debt and bankruptcy? The result is that the banks foreclose and become the owners of actual wealth (as opposed to fiat currency) like real estate.
That's why the debates about whether to bail out The Big Three are phony. The debate about whether efforts to give credit to people with poor credit histories caused the mortgage crisis (during which less than 5% of buyers defaulted) is also immaterial even if every point raised is valid. The system is inherently broken, no amount of tinkering will fix it, and it's not like the media is going to point this out even though this fact can be known by anyone who cares to study the Federal Reserve and fractional reserve banking.
I hope people understand why the Founding Fathers considered centralized banks to be more dangerous than standing armies or why Nathan Rothschild said "Let me issue and control a nationâ(TM)s currency and I care not who makes its laws.â Maybe you also see how the media is not your friend; they will maintain the illusion of lively debate but always in a way that can't possibly change anything because it's completely irrelevant and doesn't address the actual problem. How many examples of that do you need to see before you start thinking that maybe it isn't an accident?
IIRC, Islam also forbids the lending of money at interest. Whereas we in the U.S. are used to a lender taking a security interest in property purchased with the help of a loan, people who subscribe to faiths where lending at interest is forbidden solve the problem by the lender taking a depreciating ownership interest in the property, sharing proportionately in it's change in value (up or down), while the loan is being paid off. The purchaser's monthly payment goes partially toward purchasing more of the property and partially toward renting the part s/he does not own. Rather clever actually.
Don't you love it when people get really clever at following the words of a law for the purpose of evading the spirit of a law?
While I'm sure that there are also moral reasons for it, the prohibitions against lending money at interest found in various religions really seem to be designed to prevent a house-of-cards situation like what the USA currently has with the Federal Reserve, where dollars represent debt, not wealth, and paying off all debt would mean no money in circulation, not that you could even do this because the system inherently has more debt than it has dollars in circulation since interest is attached to the money the moment it is created. Just like the religious prohibitions against eating i.e. pork had a real function of preventing food-borne illness for ancient people who could not have known what bacteria/viruses/microscopic parasites are, it fascinates me to wonder whether the prohibition against lending money at interest had a real function of preventing a house-of-cards economy for ancient people who could not have known what centralized banking systems are.
Early adopters are just paying more early(unless its someone/thing that needs cutting edge technology). They aren't paying the way to make it cheaper for us. It's just an early indicator of interest and a short-term way to start recouping costs. When people make more than the cost it is profit, not discounts that we see. This would be because the MFR makes the same profit either way.
In reality the cost of something is generally (not completely, but generally) far lower than the original price...this is because they know that most things start expensive and get cheaper. Competition brings it down.
When manufacturing costs find a way to make the same item cheaper, do you really think that cost savings is passed on to retail or the consumer? Absolutely not. Consumer's don't even know, for the most part.
Sorry but I think you're reading things into my previous post that I never actually said.
Regardless of how it happens, why it happens, or for whom it is profitable, computer storage generally becomes faster, cheaper, and more capacious over time. So, I see that solid-state drives are very expensive and not much better than magnetic hard drives right now and I don't doubt that this will change over time. I'm glad for this. That's all I was saying, full-stop.
I wasn't making a claim about the economics of early adopters and how they affect the market, I was merely observing that if you want one of these right now you're going to pay a lot of money for it (at least, compared to other forms of storage). When I say that early adopters pay more "until the price comes down" I was not claiming that they are doing the rest of us any favors, I was accounting for the simple fact that when the price of a formerly cutting-edge item comes down, it comes down for everyone, previous early adopters included. I appreciate your elaboration of this process but I think it was a bit misguided.
$1200?
If so I'm not going to go run and buy one. I can buy a USB disk drive that has twice as much for 1/10th the price.
I think this is like many other computing/electronics items in that the early adopters pay a lot more than the rest of us are willing to pay until the prices come down. Remember how expensive the earliest CD burners were? Really I'm glad that there is more interest in non-volatile solid-state storage. Over the years I've seen so much vaporware (like the 3D gelatin cubes that are written to and read from with lasers, like a hologram) in this area that it's good to see something that is actually going to be available. Even if solid-state drives are expensive as hell and not much better than current mechanical/magnetic hard drives right now, I don't expect them to stay that way so this is a step in the right direction.
Are you sure that's the way to go about it? Tired internet memes usually get rewarded (modded up) around here. All you need now are some pants, hot grits, Natalie Portman, sharks with lasers on their heads, flying chairs, the ability to imagine a Beowulf cluster of those, and maybe some frosty piss.
In Soviet Union tired meme's reward you.
Shit, don't ask how I forgot the Russian reversals. I knew I was forgetting something when I hit Submit...
We use a Novell back end for file and print services. You know it's all half-assedly based on Suse Linux now, right? Novell dropped Netware last year, I think. Almost all of last year's Brainshare was about half-assed Linux. Good times, I'm sad to see it go.
Here, I just wanted to make some snide half-ass remark using a tired Internet meme to feel superior and smug without any actual work or knowledge on my part.
There, fixed that for you...
Are you sure that's the way to go about it? Tired internet memes usually get rewarded (modded up) around here. All you need now are some pants, hot grits, Natalie Portman, sharks with lasers on their heads, flying chairs, the ability to imagine a Beowulf cluster of those, and maybe some frosty piss.
Sometimes I think that the only real definition of "geekdom" is "a solid understanding of cause and effect".
That's why when they get a compromised system or otherwise suffer, I don't see them as victims even though I'd rather they not get compromised and I'd rather they not suffer.
They are making a trade-off and are taking a risk of experiencing security flaws for the sake of convenience as the browser is already installed and knowledge of its quality and security history is not needed to use it. They have set their priorities and made their choices and now they experience the results. Really, what rational person (technical or non-technical) expects to have good results when operating an extremely complex machine that they don't understand? Is there anywhere else in life where you can take the very first option to come along without ever looking at your other options and then consider yourself to have made a good choice? That the average person can routinely use a computer this way and have everything work out as well as it does is amazing, but rather than appreciate this we instead scratch our heads and wonder why certain problems (like botnets) just aren't going away.
Maybe this makes me unusual, but I am happy with both Linux and FireFox even if both of them never become anything like mainstream. They are actively developed and have enough of a userbase to ensure this for some time to come, they do what I need them to do, and they run the way I want them to run. I can't say with any certainty that I'd derive any direct benefit from the sort of ubiquity that Windows and IE currently enjoy and I see a certain risk of stagnation if that ever did happen.
The wife and I watched it months ago. The Internet is my TV station.
As you mention BitTorrent, I'm assuming there were no commercials in the version you received. Since you're paying a "tax" on things like blank media anyway, I'm surprised more Canadians don't do this.
Ha, more like...
Me: Is your toilet running?
Joe: Why, yes!
Me: Better hire an actual plumber to fix it.
Yes, I know this was a joke. However...
There are many things you could say about the whole Joe Plumber deal, but there's one subtle message that was not lost on me. If you stick your neck out and actually question the candidates, you will become an overnight celebrity whether you want to or not. Look at the background checks that have been performed against Samuel J. Wurzelbacher and the fact that whether or not he is actually licensed as a plumber (apparently he is not, at least not in Ohio) became a very public issue. Of course none of this has anything to do with his question to Obama about taxes, and so it constitutes an ad-hominem attack. For putting a question to Obama, he was rewarded with reporters trying to dig up dirt on him. Whether they were successful or not has nothing to do with the message, which is "if you're not with the media, then sit down and shut up or we will find skeletons in your closet." That message could not have been more clear.
I know that he has written a book and therefore could profit from this experience, but whether he has something to show for it does not negate anything I am saying. I realize that much of this was because of McCain trying to use "Joe Plumber" as something of a campaign symbol, which probably made him more of a target, but really, the reason why this is the case or how it got to be that way is trivia. It might be interesting to some of you but it won't address the chilling effect that this may have on others who would otherwise stand up and ask similar questions of other candidates.
This is what happens when too many people have their hands up the engineers and by extension the technicians' asses.
Sounds like a bunch of smelly hands.
And I'm sure that the large number of verifiable stories and news pieces in which young children were expelled from school for "crimes" like pointing a french fry at another student and saying "bang bang" had absolutely nothing to do with this.
I see it the opposite way: There would be an enormous, highly taxable, highly profitable market. Every level of government would take a juicy slice, numerous corporations would profit obscenely, and users would have sharply higher quality goods for a lower price. Not to mention an instant freeze on criminal syndicate funding. I'm pretty surprised no canny pol or CEO has figured this angle and done something to tap this gigantic fountain of cash.
That's because you think money is the goal. If it were, then legalizing these things and taxing/regulating them makes a lot of sense. Our politicians are already wealthy and so are the people who got them into office; more power is what they want. The very monetary system itself always has more debt than dollars in circulation. That's right, there are never enough dollars in circulation to pay off all debt, there never will be, and this is by design because debt is also a form of control. Therefore, they are not interested in taxing drugs and using the proceeds to pay down the national debt or anything like that, because if they succeeded in paying off all debts there would be no money in circulation. They are interested in an entirely artificial, ubiquitous "crime" that the average person fears or despises that can be used to increase police power and police surveillance.
Drugs are perfect because this amounts to making a crime of things that are not crimes in and of themselves (that is, what adults do with their own bodies). As a result, it creates laws that are nearly unenforcable in that they would require a police state to enforce. Nothing has done as much damage to the Fourth Amendment as the War on (some) Drugs. Read up on the asset forfeiture laws alone to see what I mean. If you can weaken or ignore one part of the Constitution and get away with it, then you can weaken or ignore the rest as well.
To hell with that. The current classification for which drugs are legal and illegal is totally messed up in my opinion. We need to re-evaluate what we're banning before we go off on such tangents.
The problem is that there's not much political power to be had under this sort of reasoning. No new bureaus and departments to be created, no new positions to staff with your cronies, and no excuses to expand budgets and governmental power. It's such a good idea that it'll never happen without radical changes to the way things are done.
Except we want cops to catch people with illegal drugs etc.. Why restrain the cops from doing what we all need them to do? Whether its illegal aliens or a bundle of dope I prefer that 100% be detected and punished.
They cannot even keep illegal drugs out of prison (don't take my word for it -- do the research yourself). How do you propose that we do this in a relatively free society? The way it has worked is that some amount of crime is tolerated in exchange for having a free society with things like legally recognized civil rights. With drugs and lately with terrorism the (dangerous) mentality has been that we need to stop $EVIL_THING no matter how high the cost is to the rest of society. This is tunnel vision at best, a step towards a totalitarian government at worst.
But I am curious. Once you see for yourself with your own research that they cannot even keep drugs out of prisons, I would like to know this: what environment even more restrictive than prison would you propose for the entire population in order to better meet your 100% detection/punishment rate? I'd also like to know whom you would entrust with the management of this environment.
I really think this is the same mentality that eventually comes to see individual rights and due process as pesky "inefficiencies" that only interfere with "real police work". They seriously need to tell new police recruits that their job is not easy and is not supposed to be easy. If any of them don't like that they should also be told where the exits are.
I think this is another example of relatively well-meaning people who fail to comprehend how dangerous their intentions are because they don't think them through. Let's say there is a device that can be plugged into a PC (maybe the USB port?) and almost instantly tell you whether it has illegal content with no need for expert analysis. Yeah I know that I should also posit the existence of the tooth fairy but bear with me. Who makes this device? How trustworthy are they? Do competitors or other rivals oddly happen to have a higher percentage of "illegal" PCs? Is the device a black box or can the average person examine and scrutinize it? If the cops already don't have the staff or the expertise to perform forensic analysis on PCs, what's our guarantee that they will correctly use this device or that they can offer any sort of assurance that the way it is used won't violate anyone's civil rights? What's to prevent criminals from obtaining one (by whatever means) and making sure that their illegal data isn't where this thing is looking? If I can think of this in a few minutes, WTF are these people smoking that they consider this a serious proposal? Or do they simply not care about these concerns?
You know what you'll probably never see? The police "top brass" asking for a device to help make sure that their officers don't violate anyone's civil rights and that they follow all the laws concerning due process.
I told everyone it wouldn't work. But would they laugh at me? No!
I know you were joking, but I really think it won't work for reasons not specified in the article. It's such a simple reason that I can't believe it's so rarely mentioned or addressed.
The earth is built very much like a capacitor. The ground has a fairly strong positive charge and the ionosphere has a fairly strong negative charge, with an insulating layer of air in-between. Carbon nanotubes can conduct electricity; so can most other materials I have heard of that would be used for a space elevator. I imagine that any conductor (and possibly dielectrics also when you consider electrical breakdown and the sheer current involved) would vaporize as soon as this circuit is closed. Coriolis forces and weight distribution and whether thrusters would be necessary seems trivial by comparison.
Yes, you ARE implying that there's a link, and you are an idiot for doing so. It's conspiracy bullshit based on what one doctor did at one time. Wow, that's overwhelming evidence that they don't record statistics or investigate possible side effects!
He explicitly said that he intended no such implication, and I'm inclined to believe that he knows his own intentions far better than you do. Even if this is difficult for you to accept, it's quite possible to pose an honest question (even about a controversial subject, believe it or not!) without presupposing the answer. At any rate ...
Either medicine should be left to expert professionals like doctors or it should not. We have decided that it should and we have built the medical industry on this idea. The doctors certainly know this because only they are authorized to practice medicine, and the average person certainly knows (or can know) this because they would face criminal charges if they attempted to practice medicine without first obtaining a license.
Having established that, when we the (medically) unwashed masses have questions about things like vaccines, we have to bring them to a doctor or other medical practitioner. When you ask a doctor in good faith, because you don't know and wish to know, about whether an MMR vaccine could have caused or precipitated a problem like cold urticaria, what you expect is a medical opinion along the lines of "yes it did/yes it could have" or "no it didn't/no it could not have" and maybe a "here's why this is so". What you don't expect is a defensive stance like what the GP reported, because a reasonable question is not an attack. Furthermore, if you are recording a session in order to have a transcript of it, you generally record everything or you record nothing. Selective omission might actually be harmless in and of itself but it's not what you would call open and honest.
Do I believe that jrumney's doctor is part of some vast vaccine conspiracy? No, I don't. I have commented before (the particular subject was the media) that if you really want to get rid of most of these conspiracy theories, then our institutions need to be more open and transparent. Decisions that are made without explanation or with partial explanations and processes that are not open to scrutiny provide fertile ground for conspiracy theories.
Personally, I believe that the doctor mishandled this situation and therefore created the possibility of a "conspiratorial" interpretation of his/her response. Maybe that doctor just dealt with some patients who were very unreasonable about this subject or was otherwise exasperated and expected more of the same from jrumney. Maybe the doctor is aware of some corruption in the pharmaceutical industry and has some residual guilt, even if said corruption is completely unrelated to the MMR vaccine. Who knows? Either way, I can tell you that when I am not attacking or even disputing a person and they immediately go on the defensive, this is something of a "red flag" for me as well. I really think that a more professional, dispassionate, and informative response from the doctor would have put the question to rest without leaving room for any "conspiratorial" interpretation.
I'll add that I believe that there really are conspiracies and that the general public's reaction to the very word "conspiracy", which is to write off the speaker as a lunatic and dismiss everything they say without examination (emphasis on "without examination," which is the only thing wrong with that) appears to be a conditioned response. I mean, if you work at a company that makes widgets, you and every other employee of the company are "conspiring" to make widgets. The word alone doesn't mean very much without context. I don't think that there are conspiracies of the "smoky back room" type; I think they're more along the lines of corruption and the fact that large organizations always act to further their own interests. I think
You have an awesome User ID number.
Thank you. I'm glad I'm not the only one who thought it was at least unusual (especially in a numerological sense).
Yes, mods, I know this is off-topic.