So, it's always, "Yes sir, Yes ma'am." This works out great considering a LOT of the folks I work with, who are my seniors, are ex-military.
I picked up the "yes sir" etc stuff just paying attention to how easily it manipulated people. I found that talking that way to anyone with enough authority to abuse was an excellent way of keeping on their good side. I feel evil doing it because it is not a sign of respect, it is a sign that I think the person has a good chance of being an asshole and I don't want to actually find out for sure.
Of course now whenever someone addresses *me* that way, I immediately wonder if that is how they see me. Really puts me off.
First thing that jumps out is the 4,000 re-investigations. According wikipedia it is estimated that the NSA has over 30,000 employees. I am going to pull some numbers out of my ass here: Let's say 25% have secret clearances and another 50% have top-secret(TS) clearances and the remaining 25% are support staff that don't need clearances. Secret clearances get re-investigated every 10 years, TS gets re-investigated every 5 years. It does not matter what TLA you work for that is standard. So (30K * 0.25 / 10) + (30K * 0.50 / 5) = 4500 re-investigations per year.
That makes 4,000 re-investigations per year on the low side of completely unremarkable.
Second thing is the wording quoted from the unnamed official:
"Over the last several years, a small subset of CIA's total job applicants were flagged due to various problems or issues," one official said in response to questions. "During this period, one in five of that small subset were found to have significant connections to hostile intelligence services and or terrorist groups."
Get that? 1 out of 5 of some unknown small subset. So we have absolutely no idea of the scale at all. It could be just 1 guy. Plus he lumped in "terrorist groups" with "hostile intelligence services" (which is basically all of them). So for all we know there were ZERO terrorists trying to infiltrate the NSA.
Given the 'facts' in the article there is no story here.
Thanks for the info, but I don't want paywalled sites to get my eyeballs.
If your goal is not to give any traffic to paywalled sites then that's not enough. You'll have to get a plugin that blocks access to a list of websites and then add the paywalls to that list.
That is because most big name paywalls are deliberately porous, so you will never know if you are reading an article at a paywall site that just happened to let you through this time. Those plugins I mentioned are mainly for increasing privacy while browsing, they just have the side-effect of making paywalls think you are a first-time visitor each time you visit so they let you through.
There's a difference between just giving every call ever to the government for the fun of it, and having an agent show up with papers in order, asking for the calls to/from a certain number and getting only that.
The NSA has a warrant for everything they do to. The problem is not the warrants, the problem is the existence of the database. It is begging for abuse, perhaps by the government, perhaps by AT&T, perhaps by criminals that have infiltrated either.
Does Jah-Wren Ryel work for the Times and is trying to increase subscription numbers? A link to a paywall is no citation whatever.
I use a combination of plugins that have the side-effect of making most paywalls disappear, I don't even know it is there. I recommend you do it too:
CookieSaver Lite - Set to block the NYTimes cookies RefControl - Set to spoof the referrer when reading all NYTimes pages as "http://google.com/" NoScript - The NY Times does not need javascript for most pages. This may be optional for the NY Times but there are some paywalls like foreignpolicy.com that do rely on javascript.
FYI - the NY Times article is the definitive citation as they are the ones who broke the story.
His point is that everybody knows truecrypt does hidden partitions so if you don't hand over the key for a hidden partition they are going to make your life hard - even if you don't have a hidden partition.
When you start off with an insult and then go riffing off into your own personal tangent, nobody is going to take you seriously. If you actually care about making a point rather than scoring points, you need to seriously improve your rhetoric.
It doesn't have to work to be useful. But it's only useful so long as people believe it works.
Yep, just look at the NSA. Their internal auditing caught few, if any, of their employees doing LOVEINT it was only because the suckers believed in the lie detector's abilities that they confessed.
And I bet you cheered when Janet Reno identified "ex-military" and "tea party member" as belonging to the category of "possible domestic terror threats," too.
Yeah, that's exactly what I did! Wow you are so smart.
Your ideas are intriguing and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
I must be missing something here because I do not see the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protests achieving anything other then turning some parks into a camp ground for a while and irritating the locals to the point they sent the police in to remove them.
It wasn't the locals. It was a nation-wide crack-down coordinated by the FBI and DHS all with the banks at the lead.
Maybe the reason Occupy didn't really cause any immediate change is because they were the first social movement in the US to face wide-scale, modern techniques of repression backed by essentially unlimited funding.
If yes, you are begging the question that a degree from these two schools would not be up to standard because the entrance exam is, like degree mills, is not meaningful.
If no, your argument that this particular test as written is necessarily meaningful as to what a degree four years later means falls apart.
> Since you didn't reply to my other points can I assume we agree on those?
Nope, just that your begging the question is so bald-faced obvious and I really onlly care enough to go after the low-hanging fruit.
Tell them you are willing to pay $5K for a fully-licensed copy shipped to your business address. Somebody at the project burns you a DVD or loads a $5 usb flash drive with the latest release and ships it. That way you get something tangible and they get the money with a postal receipt in case the project needs to prove they held up their end.
I am not a corporate auditor but I don't think that would scenario would create any problems.
It's unlikely that nobody in Liberia is smart enough and motivated enough to eventually pass the test.
But it is likely that out of 24,000 students nobody was smart enough and motivated enough to pass it this time? That none of them studied the tests from previous years and realized that they were already deficient?
If someone isn't able to get a degree in statistics comparable to the degrees in statistics throughout the world,
That's begging the question, the quality of degrees varies significantly throughout the world. Besides the article suggests that the problem was only with the english mechanics portion of the test, so not particularly relevant to math degrees.
1 - There are people in the other courses even if no one gets in this year.
If the problem is not with the test then unless the problem is fixed you are going to run out of people in "other courses" in just a few years.
2 - The objective is not to select the least incompetent but to select people who posses the knowledge required to adequately receive the teachings given in the first year.
The objective is to further the education of the next generation. If they have to "dumb down" the university to achieve that, then that's what they need to do. The alternative is a lot worse.
If nobody passes the test, then it seems to me that the problem is with the test, not the people. What are they going to do? Close the university? The test isn't the goal, selecting students for admission is the goal.
This is just another story that should not even have been posted here.
If you have a history of keeping your loans in good standing then you can sell your "friendship" on facebook. Charge something like $15/month to be friends with people who are applying for a loan.
Slashdot Mirror
So, it's always, "Yes sir, Yes ma'am." This works out great considering a LOT of the folks I work with, who are my seniors, are ex-military.
I picked up the "yes sir" etc stuff just paying attention to how easily it manipulated people. I found that talking that way to anyone with enough authority to abuse was an excellent way of keeping on their good side. I feel evil doing it because it is not a sign of respect, it is a sign that I think the person has a good chance of being an asshole and I don't want to actually find out for sure.
Of course now whenever someone addresses *me* that way, I immediately wonder if that is how they see me. Really puts me off.
Paranoia... or actual infiltration?
Or maybe just a bunch of hype.
First thing that jumps out is the 4,000 re-investigations. According wikipedia it is estimated that the NSA has over 30,000 employees. I am going to pull some numbers out of my ass here: Let's say 25% have secret clearances and another 50% have top-secret(TS) clearances and the remaining 25% are support staff that don't need clearances. Secret clearances get re-investigated every 10 years, TS gets re-investigated every 5 years. It does not matter what TLA you work for that is standard. So (30K * 0.25 / 10) + (30K * 0.50 / 5) = 4500 re-investigations per year.
That makes 4,000 re-investigations per year on the low side of completely unremarkable.
Second thing is the wording quoted from the unnamed official:
"Over the last several years, a small subset of CIA's total job applicants were flagged due to various problems or issues," one official said in response to questions. "During this period, one in five of that small subset were found to have significant connections to hostile intelligence services and or terrorist groups."
Get that? 1 out of 5 of some unknown small subset. So we have absolutely no idea of the scale at all. It could be just 1 guy. Plus he lumped in "terrorist groups" with "hostile intelligence services" (which is basically all of them). So for all we know there were ZERO terrorists trying to infiltrate the NSA.
Given the 'facts' in the article there is no story here.
Pay me $100 for reading this sentence. If you don't you are an unimpressive thief and a hypocrite.
Thanks for the info, but I don't want paywalled sites to get my eyeballs.
If your goal is not to give any traffic to paywalled sites then that's not enough. You'll have to get a plugin that blocks access to a list of websites and then add the paywalls to that list.
That is because most big name paywalls are deliberately porous, so you will never know if you are reading an article at a paywall site that just happened to let you through this time. Those plugins I mentioned are mainly for increasing privacy while browsing, they just have the side-effect of making paywalls think you are a first-time visitor each time you visit so they let you through.
and only when they had sufficient probable cause to get a subpoena.
If by sufficient you mean none at all.
"Probable cause is not a prerequisite to the issuance of a subpoena."
There's a difference between just giving every call ever to the government for the fun of it, and having an agent show up with papers in order, asking for the calls to/from a certain number and getting only that.
The NSA has a warrant for everything they do to. The problem is not the warrants, the problem is the existence of the database. It is begging for abuse, perhaps by the government, perhaps by AT&T, perhaps by criminals that have infiltrated either.
The cali cartel set up their own version of this database in Colombia and used it to sniff out any of their people who were talking to law enforcement.
Does Jah-Wren Ryel work for the Times and is trying to increase subscription numbers? A link to a paywall is no citation whatever.
I use a combination of plugins that have the side-effect of making most paywalls disappear, I don't even know it is there.
I recommend you do it too:
CookieSaver Lite - Set to block the NYTimes cookies
RefControl - Set to spoof the referrer when reading all NYTimes pages as "http://google.com/"
NoScript - The NY Times does not need javascript for most pages. This may be optional for the NY Times but there are some paywalls like foreignpolicy.com that do rely on javascript.
FYI - the NY Times article is the definitive citation as they are the ones who broke the story.
His point is that everybody knows truecrypt does hidden partitions so if you don't hand over the key for a hidden partition they are going to make your life hard - even if you don't have a hidden partition.
> Vulgar display of power.
These programs are secret. That makes them, by definition, not a display of anything.
When you start off with an insult and then go riffing off into your own personal tangent, nobody is going to take you seriously. If you actually care about making a point rather than scoring points, you need to seriously improve your rhetoric.
It doesn't have to work to be useful. But it's only useful so long as people believe it works.
Yep, just look at the NSA. Their internal auditing caught few, if any, of their employees doing LOVEINT it was only because the suckers believed in the lie detector's abilities that they confessed.
Maybe it's because they were dangerous radicals with no plan for what they were going to do after they overthrew the government?
Lol.
And I bet you cheered when Janet Reno identified "ex-military" and "tea party member" as belonging to the category of "possible domestic terror threats," too.
Yeah, that's exactly what I did! Wow you are so smart.
Your ideas are intriguing and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
I must be missing something here because I do not see the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protests achieving anything other then turning some parks into a camp ground for a while and irritating the locals to the point they sent the police in to remove them.
It wasn't the locals. It was a nation-wide crack-down coordinated by the FBI and DHS all with the banks at the lead.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/dec/29/fbi-coordinated-crackdown-occupy
Maybe the reason Occupy didn't really cause any immediate change is because they were the first social movement in the US to face wide-scale, modern techniques of repression backed by essentially unlimited funding.
> Woooosh!
Doubt it, the "sucking up time" hypothesis is well known. My issue is with there being such a narrowly defined example of it in action.
When "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas" was released, there was a noticeable drop in real world crime for several weeks.
A quick google finds no mention of this theory. I'd like to see what you are basing that statement on.
Are all non-mill degrees equal, yes or no?
If yes, you are begging the question that a degree from these two schools would not be up to standard because the entrance exam is, like degree mills, is not meaningful.
If no, your argument that this particular test as written is necessarily meaningful as to what a degree four years later means falls apart.
> Since you didn't reply to my other points can I assume we agree on those?
Nope, just that your begging the question is so bald-faced obvious and I really onlly care enough to go after the low-hanging fruit.
No I'm not considering the degrees that are worthless. Those places are degree mills
Again, begging the question. The quality scale is not binary.
Tell them you are willing to pay $5K for a fully-licensed copy shipped to your business address. Somebody at the project burns you a DVD or loads a $5 usb flash drive with the latest release and ships it. That way you get something tangible and they get the money with a postal receipt in case the project needs to prove they held up their end.
I am not a corporate auditor but I don't think that would scenario would create any problems.
Ideas are a dime a dozen ... what matters is execution. That's not just for games but pretty much everything in life.
It's unlikely that nobody in Liberia is smart enough and motivated enough to eventually pass the test.
But it is likely that out of 24,000 students nobody was smart enough and motivated enough to pass it this time? That none of them studied the tests from previous years and realized that they were already deficient?
If someone isn't able to get a degree in statistics comparable to the degrees in statistics throughout the world,
That's begging the question, the quality of degrees varies significantly throughout the world. Besides the article suggests that the problem was only with the english mechanics portion of the test, so not particularly relevant to math degrees.
1 - There are people in the other courses even if no one gets in this year.
If the problem is not with the test then unless the problem is fixed you are going to run out of people in "other courses" in just a few years.
2 - The objective is not to select the least incompetent but to select people who posses the knowledge required to adequately receive the teachings given in the first year.
The objective is to further the education of the next generation. If they have to "dumb down" the university to achieve that, then that's what they need to do. The alternative is a lot worse.
If nobody passes the test, then it seems to me that the problem is with the test, not the people. What are they going to do? Close the university? The test isn't the goal, selecting students for admission is the goal.
This is just another story that should not even have been posted here.
If you have a history of keeping your loans in good standing then you can sell your "friendship" on facebook. Charge something like $15/month to be friends with people who are applying for a loan.
I downvoted it as slownewsday, I can't believe it made it through either.
I wonder if the submitter being Hugh Pickens had anything to do with it, isn't he a prolific submitter with a ton of accepted stories?