I'm writing this after the game. EA's Madden thought Denver was the winner. Wolfram Alpha thought a free account didn't have enough free CPU time to get the result. So in my experience, EA was wrong, and Wolfram was correct but not helpful.
Friends of mine do a party where we do record it, watch the commercials, and fast-forward over the game, occasionally stopping if the football's interesting.
Since I'm writing this afterwards, it's not a spoiler, but while this year's commercials were below average, they were a lot better than the game.
There were some really good points to it - putting the story into coherent form requires somebody reading through immense piles of documentation to find the interesting individual parts and the interesting trends from the big pile of other data, and releasing it at a pace that's going to keep the public's attention rather than either not getting noticed or having their eyes glaze over (how much of the public actually read through the whole Pentagon Papers - or needed to do so to get the general idea of what their government was doing?)
And yes, there are parts that it's important NOT to release without redaction - the EFF's slide about "Why Metadata Matters" also means that there might be documents in the Snowden collection that are metadata about "people who are not targets and we're, like, totally not 'collecting' data on" that the government shouldn't have collected, like "AIDS Clinic A called Person X, who called Dr. D and Insurance Company I", or "Hey, Agent Smith, here's the data we've got on Ahmed A, is it enough to put him on the no-fly list?" "No, not really".
But except for any personal data that ought to be redacted, I think it makes sense to have the whole pile available to the public. The NSA's argument that it might reveal "sources and methods" just says "Hey, dude, not fair releasing metadata on us!"
If by that, you mean that the right wing uses DiFi for posters recruiting for their side, maybe so, but those are cartoon versions of her used for their own side's purposes, and the two aren't really equivalent or parallel. Darth Cheney's evil, and the left wing hates him, but he's a military-industrial-complex radical, not a social-conservative right-winger.
(I'm going to have to deviate from my usual position on Cheney here, which is to grudgingly admit that the man almost certainly doesn't actually eat live puppies for breakfast, but not to say anything more positive than that about him... And I'm a Libertarian, not a leftist or progressive.)
Cheney's not, as far as I know, a racist. He's not a theocrat. He was against gay marriage until his gay daughter forced him to reconsider his position, but he's not one of those people who are hung up about gays or who use homophobia as a way to drum up business with other right-wingers. (He'll happily use Fear of Foreign Terrorists to do that, but the business he's trying to drum up is military business, not Republicans-vs-Democrats; he'd prefer a Republican-controlled big army and intrusive spying system, but a Democrat-controlled one will do, and Feinstein was his type of Democrat.) He's not been part of the Republican War on Women. He was fine with the right-wingers' desires to militarize the border, but that was because he likes militarizing things, not because he wants to stop having cheap immigrant labor available for US businesses.
Cheney's not one of those right-wingers who say that "Government doesn't work" because they want to cut social programs and annoy progressives. He's the type of conservative who likes lots of very big, very intrusive government. The kind the right-wingers pretend they dislike, even as they help elect guys like Cheney.
The Feds really did have to raid Steve Jackson Games, because otherwise dangerous computer hackers might use their site to learn dangerous hacking techniques, like "Roll 3d6. If you get better than 15, your probe breaks through the firewall undetected!".
Alan Grayson's a loudmouth Democrat from Florida, and if either the Obama or Bush administrations had anything on him, they'd have used it long ago. I think he's wrong about a lot of things, but it's sure fun to watch him.
Grayson was the Congresscritter who proposed a "War Makes You Poor" Act, which would have required the Bush Administration to do an actual accounting of the costs for the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, and pay for them either by raising taxes or naming specific programs they were going to cut, not just silently running up debt while pretending to be fiscally responsible. Yeah, sure, it got about as far as you'd expect (:-), but it was entirely appropriate. I'm surprised he's been able to stay in Congress, since part of his mission there has been to piss off people who richly deserve it.
It could be Mr. Tesla who's having problems charging in the cold, probably because he's dead.
It could be Tesla the company which is having problems charging in the cold. (Tesla's an American company, and American English treats a company name as a singular noun, unlike British English which treats it as a plural noun.)
It could be that the author meant that Tesla Cars are having issues charging in the cold, and mistakenly pluralized them as "Tesla's" instead of "Teslas".
It could be that the author meant that the Tesla S is having issues charging in the cold, or that Tesla S Cars are, and really mistakenly punctuated it.
That's an especially good time to deploy some old router that it can connect to so you can use it at home, on a different channel than your main wifi, though for roaming use you might need a USB hub.
My HP Laser Printer is running just fine after a decade. It doesn't have wifi, just ethernet and USB, though I think there was a wifi printer of the same generation. It usually sits in the same room as the wifi router. But Wifi uses channels, so if you've got an old 802.11b-only printer and want to keep it on the air instead of hanging it on an ethernet, you've probably got an old wifi router sitting around by now, so put it and the printer on one channel and your fast gear on another channel (or on 5 GHz, where fast stuff belongs.) If you can get your printer and router to use Channel 14, that's probably best, because it's not officially supported in the US so there's usually nothing else on it.
And there's nothing wrong with 802.11g, though yeah, any 802.11b is worth retiring.
I can see a dozen or so of my neighbors' wifi networks. About 2/3 are running N, 1/3 running G, no B. I have a couple of 802.11b devices in my "old electronic junk" bin, but it's not like they're powered up. And unless you're somewhere that has smart-meters running 802.11b, or some other antique or retro gear, you probably won't have 802.11b running either.
But all of the devices know how to fall back to that protocol, and maybe some of them will, at least with weak signals over long distances.
I can typically see a dozen or so neighbors' wifi networks at 2.4GHz. Probably 2/3 are 802.11n, the rest g, no b. I used to run on g, and it worked ok except for the far edges of my house, but when my neighbors started upgrading from g to n (or maybe b to n:-), the airwaves were getting too crowded and I kept getting knocked off the network when I was in the room I usually used my laptop in. Eventually I bit the bullet and got an 802.11n router to get a bit more power and range, as well as switching channels, though there were almost as many people on 6 and 11 as on 1. Now my connections are pretty reliable, except for one tablet that has a wimpy radio.
The one other thing that's changed is that almost all the nearby wifi want authentication (even if it's only WEP.) Almost none of the b access points used it, many of the g versions did, and all of the n access points have authentication enabled on them. It's kind of frustrating, because every couple of years my DSL has a problem, and in the past I could borrow a neighbor's wifi until I got it fixed.
If the school's going to make a commitment to Linux, Open Office is usually compatible enough. Yes, you can probably build a spreadsheet or word doc that doesn't render correctly on OpenOffice, but you don't need to do that if you have people doing most of their new documents in open software.
Yes, I'm only using 3 Mbps at home. It's slightly better than 1.5 Mbps, and for video it's way better than 384 kbps. I've got a T3 at work (45Mbps), shared with a couple of coworkers, and for downloading large software images it rocks, but I don't download a lot of Linux ISOs at home. (And most of the video I watch at work is training or equivalent, with talking heads and slides; 384kbps was plenty for that back in the day.)
As it is, when I'm doing Ubuntu updates, it usually takes longer to install them than to download on the 1.5Mbps T1, for the virtual machines that live over in the testing side.
Yes, Feinstein likes a big-spending government, and prefers more of that spending to go to social programs than Bush did, but that doesn't make her a "leftist" any more than it made him one. She's pretty consistent in her opposition to most of the Bill of Rights - doesn't like free speech on the Internet, doesn't like search warrants, didn't stop torture at Gitmo. Yeah, she's occasionally come out to support the liberal side of issues like gay marriage or abortion, but it's not like she really broke through a lot of boundaries on those in the Senate.
Basically, the only thing leftist about her is that she counts as +1 in the "D" column instead of the "R" column when you're counting the Senate majority party, which does make a huge difference. But she's got enough seniority that California's Democrats haven't run a serious primary challenger against her in years, and California's Republicans know they're going to lose so they've only run token candidates who are doing their "take one for the team" job in return for future party favors. It's too bad Carly Fiorina decided to run against Barbara Boxer instead of DiFi - I dislike her immensely, but it would have been a fun race to watch.
Are you serious? The rich do write most of the regulations, so it's not like that's going to keep them in check. Look how well it worked for the 2008 banking collapse, or the persistence of the military-industrial complex.
No, it doesn't affect the Senate races. The latest rounds of assembly-district gerrymandering have been fun to watch - the Republicans put together a plan for a bipartisan citizens commission to run the gerrymander, figuring that it would work better than letting the majority-Democrat legislature do it, and then botched the followthrough that they needed to stack the commission with Republicans; they ended up with a group that was less Republican than the legislature, and didn't have the commitment to preserving current members' seats that a legislative version would have had. So they lost a few more seats than they needed to, but fundamentally this is California, where we've got a majority of Democrats, the Republicans are mostly nasty right-wingers with no more care about fiscal responsibility than the Democrats have, and pretty much everybody viewed Schwarzenegger's attempts at fixing the budget to be half-hearted and the Republicans to be Not Helping, so they got stomped.
California's legislature has fairly short term limits, which means they're much more influenced by current events and nobody sticks around long enough for the programs they pass to actually get implemented, so the penalty for failure is low, there's no institutional memory, and lobbyists write most of the legislation and get assembly members to pass it.
Nothing against Elizabeth Emken, who as far as I can tell is a fine person, except for her involvement in an evil criminal conspiracy called "The Republican Party". Yes, there are some good Republicans, and California seriously needs to upgrade our local Republican Party, who tend to be nasty right-wingers who don't have any more clue about fiscal responsibility than our Democrats do, interspersed with occasional rich folks showing off. (The 2006 token Republican, Dick Mountjoy, was a pro-war right-winger, and California didn't have their "top-two primary", so I was able to vote Libertarian, since there was no risk of him beating Feinstein. I don't remember if I voted for Emken or abstained, since there are no longer third-party candidates in the general election here.)
But it won't be safe to vote for any Republicans for anything until the national party cleans up the corruption of the Bush/Rove/Cheney/Norquist/Koch era. Senate majorities matter even if our senior senator is consistently on the side of Evil. House majorities matter, and Congressmembers occasionally get promoted to Senator. State legislators run for Congressional seats, city council members run for state legislature, school board members run for city council.
It used to be that the US was the largest target/market for malware, but the malware itself was often running in China or Korea, and if it was running in the US it was on compromised home PCs. Now it's moved to the cloud. The Amazon part is more interesting, because it's general-purpose cloud service, as opposed to GoDaddy which specializes in hosting domain parking pages and similar malware-usable services.
Amazon cloud instances are a perfectly plausible place to send spam from, if you can get away with it and if it's cheaper than botnet service (and of course botnet services are just as happy to sell you compromised Amazon cloud instances instead of compromised home PCs if they have them.)
But he didn't say he tried to spam from his Amazon server and got questioned - he said he tried to send mail, and Amazon questioned them. Most virtual machines don't send mail directly, just as most residential PCs don't, so it's reasonable for them to check that he's sending mail on purpose and wasn't just pwned.
It used to be that malware ran on cracked residential PCs, because there were lots of them around and they were much easier targets. But these days the place to be is renting cloud servers with stolen credit cards, and if they're good enough to pass initial validation you're probably golden for a month, or at least until your malware site gets caught. That's plenty long enough to steal some more credit cards, if you're a professional malware practitioner. And it's harder to get caught if you can fire up a server, fire off an attack, and shut down before it's traced. Launder-rinse-repeat.
Eventually Joe StolenCreditCard or his bank will catch on and invalidate the card, and maybe Amazon has to eat some chargeback as well as banning that credit card in the future, but there's another stolen credit card waiting to abuse.
The blocking system is a menu of categories you can check or uncheck. Unless they're really stupid, the Sex Education category is there so you can block the Porn category but still leave the Sex Education option unblocked so your teenagers can find that (either because you care about their education or because you want to avoid uncomfortable conversations with your kids, take your pick:-) Even if they ARE irresponsible prudes, the Sex Education category is at least there so they can SAY they're giving you the option of leaving it on.
And yeah, there ought to be an option for blocking crazy right-wing political parties, like the Tories and Labour and on some days also the LibDems.
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I'm writing this after the game. EA's Madden thought Denver was the winner. Wolfram Alpha thought a free account didn't have enough free CPU time to get the result. So in my experience, EA was wrong, and Wolfram was correct but not helpful.
Friends of mine do a party where we do record it, watch the commercials, and fast-forward over the game, occasionally stopping if the football's interesting.
Since I'm writing this afterwards, it's not a spoiler, but while this year's commercials were below average, they were a lot better than the game.
There were some really good points to it - putting the story into coherent form requires somebody reading through immense piles of documentation to find the interesting individual parts and the interesting trends from the big pile of other data, and releasing it at a pace that's going to keep the public's attention rather than either not getting noticed or having their eyes glaze over (how much of the public actually read through the whole Pentagon Papers - or needed to do so to get the general idea of what their government was doing?)
And yes, there are parts that it's important NOT to release without redaction - the EFF's slide about "Why Metadata Matters" also means that there might be documents in the Snowden collection that are metadata about "people who are not targets and we're, like, totally not 'collecting' data on" that the government shouldn't have collected, like "AIDS Clinic A called Person X, who called Dr. D and Insurance Company I", or "Hey, Agent Smith, here's the data we've got on Ahmed A, is it enough to put him on the no-fly list?" "No, not really".
But except for any personal data that ought to be redacted, I think it makes sense to have the whole pile available to the public. The NSA's argument that it might reveal "sources and methods" just says "Hey, dude, not fair releasing metadata on us!"
If by that, you mean that the right wing uses DiFi for posters recruiting for their side, maybe so, but those are cartoon versions of her used for their own side's purposes, and the two aren't really equivalent or parallel. Darth Cheney's evil, and the left wing hates him, but he's a military-industrial-complex radical, not a social-conservative right-winger.
(I'm going to have to deviate from my usual position on Cheney here, which is to grudgingly admit that the man almost certainly doesn't actually eat live puppies for breakfast, but not to say anything more positive than that about him... And I'm a Libertarian, not a leftist or progressive.)
Cheney's not, as far as I know, a racist. He's not a theocrat. He was against gay marriage until his gay daughter forced him to reconsider his position, but he's not one of those people who are hung up about gays or who use homophobia as a way to drum up business with other right-wingers. (He'll happily use Fear of Foreign Terrorists to do that, but the business he's trying to drum up is military business, not Republicans-vs-Democrats; he'd prefer a Republican-controlled big army and intrusive spying system, but a Democrat-controlled one will do, and Feinstein was his type of Democrat.) He's not been part of the Republican War on Women. He was fine with the right-wingers' desires to militarize the border, but that was because he likes militarizing things, not because he wants to stop having cheap immigrant labor available for US businesses.
Cheney's not one of those right-wingers who say that "Government doesn't work" because they want to cut social programs and annoy progressives. He's the type of conservative who likes lots of very big, very intrusive government. The kind the right-wingers pretend they dislike, even as they help elect guys like Cheney.
The Feds really did have to raid Steve Jackson Games, because otherwise dangerous computer hackers might use their site to learn dangerous hacking techniques, like "Roll 3d6. If you get better than 15, your probe breaks through the firewall undetected!".
Donald Regan was Treasury Secretary and later Chief of Staff for Ronald Reagan, an actor who played the President of the United States.
The /g isn't strictly correct, because sometimes somebody might actually want to refer to Regan, but it's probably 99% correct.
Alan Grayson's a loudmouth Democrat from Florida, and if either the Obama or Bush administrations had anything on him, they'd have used it long ago. I think he's wrong about a lot of things, but it's sure fun to watch him.
Grayson was the Congresscritter who proposed a "War Makes You Poor" Act, which would have required the Bush Administration to do an actual accounting of the costs for the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, and pay for them either by raising taxes or naming specific programs they were going to cut, not just silently running up debt while pretending to be fiscally responsible. Yeah, sure, it got about as far as you'd expect (:-), but it was entirely appropriate. I'm surprised he's been able to stay in Congress, since part of his mission there has been to piss off people who richly deserve it.
It could be Mr. Tesla who's having problems charging in the cold, probably because he's dead.
It could be Tesla the company which is having problems charging in the cold. (Tesla's an American company, and American English treats a company name as a singular noun, unlike British English which treats it as a plural noun.)
It could be that the author meant that Tesla Cars are having issues charging in the cold, and mistakenly pluralized them as "Tesla's" instead of "Teslas".
It could be that the author meant that the Tesla S is having issues charging in the cold, or that Tesla S Cars are, and really mistakenly punctuated it.
I'm guessing the third was most likely.
That's an especially good time to deploy some old router that it can connect to so you can use it at home, on a different channel than your main wifi, though for roaming use you might need a USB hub.
My HP Laser Printer is running just fine after a decade. It doesn't have wifi, just ethernet and USB, though I think there was a wifi printer of the same generation. It usually sits in the same room as the wifi router. But Wifi uses channels, so if you've got an old 802.11b-only printer and want to keep it on the air instead of hanging it on an ethernet, you've probably got an old wifi router sitting around by now, so put it and the printer on one channel and your fast gear on another channel (or on 5 GHz, where fast stuff belongs.) If you can get your printer and router to use Channel 14, that's probably best, because it's not officially supported in the US so there's usually nothing else on it.
And there's nothing wrong with 802.11g, though yeah, any 802.11b is worth retiring.
I can see a dozen or so of my neighbors' wifi networks. About 2/3 are running N, 1/3 running G, no B. I have a couple of 802.11b devices in my "old electronic junk" bin, but it's not like they're powered up. And unless you're somewhere that has smart-meters running 802.11b, or some other antique or retro gear, you probably won't have 802.11b running either.
But all of the devices know how to fall back to that protocol, and maybe some of them will, at least with weak signals over long distances.
I can typically see a dozen or so neighbors' wifi networks at 2.4GHz. Probably 2/3 are 802.11n, the rest g, no b. I used to run on g, and it worked ok except for the far edges of my house, but when my neighbors started upgrading from g to n (or maybe b to n:-), the airwaves were getting too crowded and I kept getting knocked off the network when I was in the room I usually used my laptop in. Eventually I bit the bullet and got an 802.11n router to get a bit more power and range, as well as switching channels, though there were almost as many people on 6 and 11 as on 1. Now my connections are pretty reliable, except for one tablet that has a wimpy radio.
The one other thing that's changed is that almost all the nearby wifi want authentication (even if it's only WEP.) Almost none of the b access points used it, many of the g versions did, and all of the n access points have authentication enabled on them. It's kind of frustrating, because every couple of years my DSL has a problem, and in the past I could borrow a neighbor's wifi until I got it fixed.
Matter of fact, it's all dark......
Matter of fact, it's all dark...
If the school's going to make a commitment to Linux, Open Office is usually compatible enough. Yes, you can probably build a spreadsheet or word doc that doesn't render correctly on OpenOffice, but you don't need to do that if you have people doing most of their new documents in open software.
Yes, I'm only using 3 Mbps at home. It's slightly better than 1.5 Mbps, and for video it's way better than 384 kbps. I've got a T3 at work (45Mbps), shared with a couple of coworkers, and for downloading large software images it rocks, but I don't download a lot of Linux ISOs at home. (And most of the video I watch at work is training or equivalent, with talking heads and slides; 384kbps was plenty for that back in the day.)
As it is, when I'm doing Ubuntu updates, it usually takes longer to install them than to download on the 1.5Mbps T1, for the virtual machines that live over in the testing side.
Yes, Feinstein likes a big-spending government, and prefers more of that spending to go to social programs than Bush did, but that doesn't make her a "leftist" any more than it made him one. She's pretty consistent in her opposition to most of the Bill of Rights - doesn't like free speech on the Internet, doesn't like search warrants, didn't stop torture at Gitmo. Yeah, she's occasionally come out to support the liberal side of issues like gay marriage or abortion, but it's not like she really broke through a lot of boundaries on those in the Senate.
Basically, the only thing leftist about her is that she counts as +1 in the "D" column instead of the "R" column when you're counting the Senate majority party, which does make a huge difference. But she's got enough seniority that California's Democrats haven't run a serious primary challenger against her in years, and California's Republicans know they're going to lose so they've only run token candidates who are doing their "take one for the team" job in return for future party favors. It's too bad Carly Fiorina decided to run against Barbara Boxer instead of DiFi - I dislike her immensely, but it would have been a fun race to watch.
Are you serious? The rich do write most of the regulations, so it's not like that's going to keep them in check. Look how well it worked for the 2008 banking collapse, or the persistence of the military-industrial complex.
No, it doesn't affect the Senate races. The latest rounds of assembly-district gerrymandering have been fun to watch - the Republicans put together a plan for a bipartisan citizens commission to run the gerrymander, figuring that it would work better than letting the majority-Democrat legislature do it, and then botched the followthrough that they needed to stack the commission with Republicans; they ended up with a group that was less Republican than the legislature, and didn't have the commitment to preserving current members' seats that a legislative version would have had. So they lost a few more seats than they needed to, but fundamentally this is California, where we've got a majority of Democrats, the Republicans are mostly nasty right-wingers with no more care about fiscal responsibility than the Democrats have, and pretty much everybody viewed Schwarzenegger's attempts at fixing the budget to be half-hearted and the Republicans to be Not Helping, so they got stomped.
California's legislature has fairly short term limits, which means they're much more influenced by current events and nobody sticks around long enough for the programs they pass to actually get implemented, so the penalty for failure is low, there's no institutional memory, and lobbyists write most of the legislation and get assembly members to pass it.
Nothing against Elizabeth Emken, who as far as I can tell is a fine person, except for her involvement in an evil criminal conspiracy called "The Republican Party". Yes, there are some good Republicans, and California seriously needs to upgrade our local Republican Party, who tend to be nasty right-wingers who don't have any more clue about fiscal responsibility than our Democrats do, interspersed with occasional rich folks showing off. (The 2006 token Republican, Dick Mountjoy, was a pro-war right-winger, and California didn't have their "top-two primary", so I was able to vote Libertarian, since there was no risk of him beating Feinstein. I don't remember if I voted for Emken or abstained, since there are no longer third-party candidates in the general election here.)
But it won't be safe to vote for any Republicans for anything until the national party cleans up the corruption of the Bush/Rove/Cheney/Norquist/Koch era. Senate majorities matter even if our senior senator is consistently on the side of Evil. House majorities matter, and Congressmembers occasionally get promoted to Senator. State legislators run for Congressional seats, city council members run for state legislature, school board members run for city council.
It used to be that the US was the largest target/market for malware, but the malware itself was often running in China or Korea, and if it was running in the US it was on compromised home PCs. Now it's moved to the cloud. The Amazon part is more interesting, because it's general-purpose cloud service, as opposed to GoDaddy which specializes in hosting domain parking pages and similar malware-usable services.
Amazon cloud instances are a perfectly plausible place to send spam from, if you can get away with it and if it's cheaper than botnet service (and of course botnet services are just as happy to sell you compromised Amazon cloud instances instead of compromised home PCs if they have them.)
But he didn't say he tried to spam from his Amazon server and got questioned - he said he tried to send mail, and Amazon questioned them. Most virtual machines don't send mail directly, just as most residential PCs don't, so it's reasonable for them to check that he's sending mail on purpose and wasn't just pwned.
It used to be that malware ran on cracked residential PCs, because there were lots of them around and they were much easier targets. But these days the place to be is renting cloud servers with stolen credit cards, and if they're good enough to pass initial validation you're probably golden for a month, or at least until your malware site gets caught. That's plenty long enough to steal some more credit cards, if you're a professional malware practitioner. And it's harder to get caught if you can fire up a server, fire off an attack, and shut down before it's traced. Launder-rinse-repeat.
Eventually Joe StolenCreditCard or his bank will catch on and invalidate the card, and maybe Amazon has to eat some chargeback as well as banning that credit card in the future, but there's another stolen credit card waiting to abuse.
Catchy tune - we used to square dance to it :-)
The blocking system is a menu of categories you can check or uncheck. Unless they're really stupid, the Sex Education category is there so you can block the Porn category but still leave the Sex Education option unblocked so your teenagers can find that (either because you care about their education or because you want to avoid uncomfortable conversations with your kids, take your pick :-) Even if they ARE irresponsible prudes, the Sex Education category is at least there so they can SAY they're giving you the option of leaving it on.
And yeah, there ought to be an option for blocking crazy right-wing political parties, like the Tories and Labour and on some days also the LibDems.