One of the most reprehensible things which the C.I.A. ever did was use the sham of vaccinations which were used to gather DNA so as to locate people related to Osama Bin Laden.
If you made a list of the most evil things the CIA have done or will do it wouldn't even make the top 100. Still a world with the CIA is a world remarkably free of existential threats to the US. Al Qaeda is no USSR and the USSR was not a threat in the way the Axis was.
The US basically has a policy of picking a bête noir and then stomping it at all costs. And it's pretty obvious that doing so leads to a gradual weakening of bête noir n+1 compared to bête noir n.
You're saying this is morally dubious but you understate things - it is actually fundamentally amoral. But that doesn't matter because America's opponents in this game are amoral too. Now I don't mean the Europeans - they're not even playing. Americas opponents are the bête noirs - totalitarian powers that challenge US hegemony. The Europeans are mere spectators.
It's a good decade or so since I've had anything to do with SQL but how can that be true? Is it because people are locked into MySQL's SQL dialect and database format?
Isn't that an argument for MariaDB which sounds like it should have more or less the same dialect/db format?
I'm not American so far be it for me to tell you how to be American.
However there was a T shirt post 9/11 that said "I hope Allah has kevlar" that I feel summed up the sort of can do, batshit insane attitude we expect from Americans and from America.
You guys needs to be be Batman not Commissioner Gordon. We have loads of Commissioner Gordons that work within the rules with all the compromises that implies. Some problems need a rich psycho with an inflexible sense of morality and a load of gadgets.
And in any case the Jokers of this world are going to be blowing up shit no matter what America does. Look at the time line of AlQaeda attacks on the US.
"It does not stop at a mere single mutation. The form I have been promised is more beautiful than even that. They tell me I will float through the air and strike at the foes of our biomass with my mind! With our mind... my cup runneth over!"
It's even better with the voice change mid way through just before the change from "my mind" to "our mind".
In fact it would be interesting to test if bumper stickers expressing a minority opinion were more likely to be defaced than ones expressing a majority one - perhaps holders of minority opinions are more prone to defacement because they are minorities.
Also minority opinions may well be the majority in some areas. Maybe they want payback for mistreatment they suffered when they were in the minority.
You're best off without any stickers on your car, though. They're the most reliable indicator of road rage.
Agreed. If you tell complete strangers your political views you shouldn't be too surprised if some of them object in a crazy way.
It's a brilliant piece of marketing - convincing hipsters in Bumfucksville, USA that their footwear is so offensive to Joe Sixpack that the USPS deliberately loses them.
That's highly disingenuous though. Hitler hated Christianity if you read Hitler's Table Talk. Himmler wanted to revive paganism but Hitler was enough of a politician to see that portraying the Nazis as Christian was a good way to motivate people to fight the much more atheist Bolshevik hordes. Though he played with ideas like "Positive Christianity" complete with an Aryan and very anti Jewish Christ.
Actually Stalin co-opted religion too - the persecution of the Orthodox Church stopped in WWII
As for the Russian Orthodox Church, Soviet authorities sought to control it and, in times of national crisis, to exploit it for the regime's own purposes; but their ultimate goal was to eliminate it. During the first five years of Soviet power, the Bolsheviks executed 28 Russian Orthodox bishops and over 1,200 Russian Orthodox priests. Many others were imprisoned or exiled. Believers were harassed and persecuted. Most seminaries were closed, and the publication of most religious material was prohibited. By 1941 only 500 churches remained open out of about 54,000 in existence prior to World War I.
Such crackdowns related to many people's dissatisfaction with the church in pre-revolutionary Russia. The close ties between the church and the state led to the perception of the church as corrupt and greedy by many members of the intelligentsia. Many peasants, while highly religious, also viewed the church unfavorably. Respect for religion did not extend to the local priests. The church owned a significant portion of Russia's land, and this was a bone of contention â" land ownership was a big factor in the Russian Revolution of 1917.
The Nazi attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 forced Stalin to enlist the Russian Orthodox Church as an ally to arouse Russian patriotism against foreign aggression. Russian Orthodox religious life experienced a revival: thousands of churches were reopened; there were 22,000 by the time Nikita Khrushchev came to power. The regime permitted religious publications, and church membership grew.
Khrushchev reversed the regime's policy of cooperation with the Russian Orthodox Church. Although it remained officially sanctioned, in 1959 Khrushchev launched an antireligious campaign that was continued in a less stringent manner by his successor, Brezhnev. By 1975 the number of active Russian Orthodox churches was reduced to 7,000. Some of the most prominent members of the Russian Orthodox hierarchy and some activists were jailed or forced to leave the church. Their place was taken by docile clergy who were obedient to the state and who were sometimes infiltrated by KGB agents, making the Russian Orthodox Church useful to the regime. It espoused and propagated Soviet foreign policy and furthered the russification of non-Russian Christians, such as Orthodox Ukrainians and Belarusians.
Basically both National Socialism and Stalinist Communism were partly intolerant monotheistic religions and partly political movements that saw the need to keep the religious onside while they fought each other to the death. Still once the immediate threat of invasion receded both were very anti religion because they saw it as competition.
No one likes a hipster. Just the other day in my town someone - possibly God - put one component of a binary nerve agent in the Pabst Blue Ribbon and the other in various products that real white trash don't buy. Like The Mountain T shirts
They had to close down the Punk/Hard Core venue within a week because no one turned up. Not a single person with a blue collar job died, so the police decided to mislay the evidence.
Then have your JavaScript run a short test suite for the appropriate Date behavior when the page loads, and turn off client-side pre-validation if the test fails. Or by "crash and burn horribly" did you mean that a page using Date could cause IE to "perform an illegal operation and be shut down"?
IIRC once you had an error in some code that used Date objects IE3 stopped running any other Javascript code in event handlers.
How would you have distinguished a user of Lynx from a bot scraping your site? Visual and audio CAPTCHAs don't work in Lynx.
It was a site for booking hotel rooms. You needed to log in to access it. Also to book a hotel room you needed to enter a valid credit card number.
Excessive punishments do prevent crime. Vlad The Impaler used placed a golden cup on display in the central square of Tirgoviste. Because his legal code meant that every crime was punished by being brutally tortured to death - the only reason for any punishment not being "Impaling" was that it made the legal code sound a bit monotonous when read out - the golden cup was never stolen. So it proved that the crime rate was literally zero.
I'm sure liberals said some shit about how he should try to understand the thieves too. Maybe they said the thieves were Turks or Gypsies or some such shit and it was societal alienation and racial discrimination that made them do it. But guess what? The punishment for being a liberal was impaling too just like it was for being a thief, gypsy, Turk, jaywalker etc.
We found that code using Date objects would crash and burn horribly if we sent it to IE3 which didn't really support the DOM. So in the end we'd just remove great gobs of Javascript and do almost everything on the server in that case.
That's the only example I can remember but there were other very odd things with IE3 like not handling HTTP PUT or session variables correctly. Luckily the project was very server heavy anyway and I had functions on the server side VBScript to encapsulate variable access and pass them between pages - the deeper you got into the application the more variables you needed to keep track of. So on IE I just swapped the one that didn't work for the one that did - i.e. either HTTP PUT variables became session ones or vice versa depending on which one worked.
Like I say the only reason to use client side Javascript was to save a round trip to the server.
It's actually funny hearing people whine about having to support IE6+ now when you think people hacked together web applications that could run on IE3. In fact most of the stuff we did would probably have worked on Lynx too which has no CSS, no Javascript and no graphics.
Makes you wonder if they shouldn't have aggregated the minds of the excess telecommuting employees using the algorithm and turned their bodies into cup cakes.
So you'd be able to read a five line summary of Bud's thoughts- which was probably more than you got out of him when he was telecommuting - *and* you'd have tasty cupcakes to keep you in the office with his IM handle written in icing on top in the CEO's charmingly girly handwriting with little smilies and hearts instead of dots on the letters.
Plus some of the summaries would contain dark hints like "SOYLENT GREEN", "SLEEP AT YOUR DESK", "MM RUNS A GINGERBREAD HOUSE", "THE CUPCAKES ARE A LIE", "HELP IM STUCK IN AN OVEN" and so on.
Sounds like you have Attention Surplus Disorder. The cure is irregular sleeping hours and meal times.
Eat more junk food (try to get at least 50% of your calories from Red Bull, Mountain Dew and Cheetos)
Spend more time on the Internet. Try to avoid slashdot stories unless they the summary is by samzenpus. Don't read the articles, just the summaries. Try to replace your time spent reading books on reddit.
If you read this far you have a serious and possibly fatal case.
Here's an idea. Most mass shooters use body armour. The Constitution protects the right to bear arms, but not the right to wear armour. Banning body armour would give armed citizens a better chance to take down shooters.
If that's not possible how about giving armed citizens the ability to defeat body armour? A lipstick sized explosively formed penetrator weapon should do the trick.
I'd like to think I'm suggesting this for the greater good of society but to be honest the idea of Jane Q Public carrying one of those in her handbag fills me with fiendish, nihilistic glee.
The last time I did any HTML and Javascript was back in the IE3/IE4 days i.e. around 1997. We supported IE3 and up and Netscape and up. Netscape support was unofficial because the management didn't think it was necessary.
We had verification on the server. If the browser was recent - i.e. IE4 or later or Netscape we enabled verification on the client too. So using the app on a modern browser was faster and placed less load on the server. But the server was set up so that even a completely dumb client with no Javascript support was still supported. The server generated the pages using ASP - so it could simply not send Javascript to a downlevel browser.
Of course it was horrible primitive HTML - basically tables and 1 pixel gifs for layout - because CSS wasn't supported by the browsers people actually used. Still it looked OK on the browsers we supported. The actual UI was a bunch of HTML form elements - mostly combo boxes, input text fields and checkboxes.
The name is a contrast to the Divided Test Action Group, which collapsed because of internecine squabbling that led to layoffs, punch ups in the parking lot and eventually drive by shootings.
Brian Damage, their former CTO, is currently serving fourteen life sentences in a SuperMax prison for a flame thrower revenge attack on the Floor 6.
I don't think it's going to work. If you look at when they tried to kill Win32 on phones all the Windows Mobile ISVs gave up them and moved over to Android.
Given that most people could get by just fine on Android already I think you'll see something like this
1) Some people will stick with Win32 OSs - i.e. Windows 7 or Windows 8 probably with the Metro stuff disabled. All their legacy Win32 stuff will still work.
2) All the new users will go for Android or iOS tablets. All the new apps are already dual platform Android/iOS.
3) Linux will stay with around its current market share.
However if Microsoft decide to kill of Win32 the ISVs will move to Android or ChromeOS or iOS. I'd guess Google would have some sort of platform ready if this happened.
Maybe bring up a tutorial explaining that Metro works different and explain how you get stuff done.
Or a spring loaded flat plastic hand could pop out of the back of the screen, pivot around the right side and smack you on the face. Then a voice could say "NO USER! BAD USER!".
You realise that your "rMBP" is made by Foxconn in China, right?
Plus if you're not going to run OS-X on it, a Macbook Pro is not the best choice - you're better off getting an PC compatible laptop simply because you have a much wider choice of vendors and models so you'll make fewer compromises.
Slashdot Mirror
One of the most reprehensible things which the C.I.A. ever did was use the sham of vaccinations which were used to gather DNA so as to locate people related to Osama Bin Laden.
If you made a list of the most evil things the CIA have done or will do it wouldn't even make the top 100. Still a world with the CIA is a world remarkably free of existential threats to the US. Al Qaeda is no USSR and the USSR was not a threat in the way the Axis was.
The US basically has a policy of picking a bête noir and then stomping it at all costs. And it's pretty obvious that doing so leads to a gradual weakening of bête noir n+1 compared to bête noir n.
You're saying this is morally dubious but you understate things - it is actually fundamentally amoral. But that doesn't matter because America's opponents in this game are amoral too. Now I don't mean the Europeans - they're not even playing. Americas opponents are the bête noirs - totalitarian powers that challenge US hegemony. The Europeans are mere spectators.
It's a good decade or so since I've had anything to do with SQL but how can that be true? Is it because people are locked into MySQL's SQL dialect and database format?
Isn't that an argument for MariaDB which sounds like it should have more or less the same dialect/db format?
I'm not American so far be it for me to tell you how to be American.
However there was a T shirt post 9/11 that said "I hope Allah has kevlar" that I feel summed up the sort of can do, batshit insane attitude we expect from Americans and from America.
You guys needs to be be Batman not Commissioner Gordon. We have loads of Commissioner Gordons that work within the rules with all the compromises that implies. Some problems need a rich psycho with an inflexible sense of morality and a load of gadgets.
And in any case the Jokers of this world are going to be blowing up shit no matter what America does. Look at the time line of AlQaeda attacks on the US.
Wash your yoga pants, Shaniqua!
Yes, it is easy to hang out and collect a paycheck, but don't whine when your value wanes and people direct you around like a monkey boy.
On the other hand you'll have less stress if you don't worry and laugh-a while you can.
I always liked this
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/System_Shock#William_Bedford_Diego
"It does not stop at a mere single mutation. The form I have been promised is more beautiful than even that. They tell me I will float through the air and strike at the foes of our biomass with my mind! With our mind... my cup runneth over!"
It's even better with the voice change mid way through just before the change from "my mind" to "our mind".
You can thank me below
Mein name ist Von Below.
Probably in Levictus, alongside the bit about giving them bad haircuts if you're a barber.
You mean hipster kids didn't ask for those haircuts?
You can't prove that a Darwin fish is more likely to be stolen than a Palin-Huckabee 2016 sticker. Or, for that matter, a Mitt Romney one
http://twitchy.com/2012/09/29/got-a-romney-bumper-sticker-or-yard-sign-watch-out-for-these-unhinged-libs/
In fact it would be interesting to test if bumper stickers expressing a minority opinion were more likely to be defaced than ones expressing a majority one - perhaps holders of minority opinions are more prone to defacement because they are minorities.
Also minority opinions may well be the majority in some areas. Maybe they want payback for mistreatment they suffered when they were in the minority.
You're best off without any stickers on your car, though. They're the most reliable indicator of road rage.
Agreed. If you tell complete strangers your political views you shouldn't be too surprised if some of them object in a crazy way.
It's a brilliant piece of marketing - convincing hipsters in Bumfucksville, USA that their footwear is so offensive to Joe Sixpack that the USPS deliberately loses them.
That's highly disingenuous though. Hitler hated Christianity if you read Hitler's Table Talk. Himmler wanted to revive paganism but Hitler was enough of a politician to see that portraying the Nazis as Christian was a good way to motivate people to fight the much more atheist Bolshevik hordes. Though he played with ideas like "Positive Christianity" complete with an Aryan and very anti Jewish Christ.
Actually Stalin co-opted religion too - the persecution of the Orthodox Church stopped in WWII
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_the_Soviet_Union#Policy_towards_Orthodoxy
As for the Russian Orthodox Church, Soviet authorities sought to control it and, in times of national crisis, to exploit it for the regime's own purposes; but their ultimate goal was to eliminate it. During the first five years of Soviet power, the Bolsheviks executed 28 Russian Orthodox bishops and over 1,200 Russian Orthodox priests. Many others were imprisoned or exiled. Believers were harassed and persecuted. Most seminaries were closed, and the publication of most religious material was prohibited. By 1941 only 500 churches remained open out of about 54,000 in existence prior to World War I.
Such crackdowns related to many people's dissatisfaction with the church in pre-revolutionary Russia. The close ties between the church and the state led to the perception of the church as corrupt and greedy by many members of the intelligentsia. Many peasants, while highly religious, also viewed the church unfavorably. Respect for religion did not extend to the local priests. The church owned a significant portion of Russia's land, and this was a bone of contention â" land ownership was a big factor in the Russian Revolution of 1917.
The Nazi attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 forced Stalin to enlist the Russian Orthodox Church as an ally to arouse Russian patriotism against foreign aggression. Russian Orthodox religious life experienced a revival: thousands of churches were reopened; there were 22,000 by the time Nikita Khrushchev came to power. The regime permitted religious publications, and church membership grew.
Khrushchev reversed the regime's policy of cooperation with the Russian Orthodox Church. Although it remained officially sanctioned, in 1959 Khrushchev launched an antireligious campaign that was continued in a less stringent manner by his successor, Brezhnev. By 1975 the number of active Russian Orthodox churches was reduced to 7,000. Some of the most prominent members of the Russian Orthodox hierarchy and some activists were jailed or forced to leave the church. Their place was taken by docile clergy who were obedient to the state and who were sometimes infiltrated by KGB agents, making the Russian Orthodox Church useful to the regime. It espoused and propagated Soviet foreign policy and furthered the russification of non-Russian Christians, such as Orthodox Ukrainians and Belarusians.
Basically both National Socialism and Stalinist Communism were partly intolerant monotheistic religions and partly political movements that saw the need to keep the religious onside while they fought each other to the death. Still once the immediate threat of invasion receded both were very anti religion because they saw it as competition.
No one likes a hipster. Just the other day in my town someone - possibly God - put one component of a binary nerve agent in the Pabst Blue Ribbon and the other in various products that real white trash don't buy. Like The Mountain T shirts
http://www.complex.com/style/2013/02/15-brands-hipsters-love/the-mountain#galleryS
They had to close down the Punk/Hard Core venue within a week because no one turned up. Not a single person with a blue collar job died, so the police decided to mislay the evidence.
Then have your JavaScript run a short test suite for the appropriate Date behavior when the page loads, and turn off client-side pre-validation if the test fails. Or by "crash and burn horribly" did you mean that a page using Date could cause IE to "perform an illegal operation and be shut down"?
IIRC once you had an error in some code that used Date objects IE3 stopped running any other Javascript code in event handlers.
How would you have distinguished a user of Lynx from a bot scraping your site? Visual and audio CAPTCHAs don't work in Lynx.
It was a site for booking hotel rooms. You needed to log in to access it. Also to book a hotel room you needed to enter a valid credit card number.
Excessive punishments do prevent crime. Vlad The Impaler used placed a golden cup on display in the central square of Tirgoviste. Because his legal code meant that every crime was punished by being brutally tortured to death - the only reason for any punishment not being "Impaling" was that it made the legal code sound a bit monotonous when read out - the golden cup was never stolen. So it proved that the crime rate was literally zero.
I'm sure liberals said some shit about how he should try to understand the thieves too. Maybe they said the thieves were Turks or Gypsies or some such shit and it was societal alienation and racial discrimination that made them do it. But guess what? The punishment for being a liberal was impaling too just like it was for being a thief, gypsy, Turk, jaywalker etc.
We found that code using Date objects would crash and burn horribly if we sent it to IE3 which didn't really support the DOM. So in the end we'd just remove great gobs of Javascript and do almost everything on the server in that case.
That's the only example I can remember but there were other very odd things with IE3 like not handling HTTP PUT or session variables correctly. Luckily the project was very server heavy anyway and I had functions on the server side VBScript to encapsulate variable access and pass them between pages - the deeper you got into the application the more variables you needed to keep track of. So on IE I just swapped the one that didn't work for the one that did - i.e. either HTTP PUT variables became session ones or vice versa depending on which one worked.
Like I say the only reason to use client side Javascript was to save a round trip to the server.
It's actually funny hearing people whine about having to support IE6+ now when you think people hacked together web applications that could run on IE3. In fact most of the stuff we did would probably have worked on Lynx too which has no CSS, no Javascript and no graphics.
Makes you wonder if they shouldn't have aggregated the minds of the excess telecommuting employees using the algorithm and turned their bodies into cup cakes.
So you'd be able to read a five line summary of Bud's thoughts- which was probably more than you got out of him when he was telecommuting - *and* you'd have tasty cupcakes to keep you in the office with his IM handle written in icing on top in the CEO's charmingly girly handwriting with little smilies and hearts instead of dots on the letters.
Plus some of the summaries would contain dark hints like "SOYLENT GREEN", "SLEEP AT YOUR DESK", "MM RUNS A GINGERBREAD HOUSE", "THE CUPCAKES ARE A LIE", "HELP IM STUCK IN AN OVEN" and so on.
Sounds like you have Attention Surplus Disorder. The cure is irregular sleeping hours and meal times.
Eat more junk food (try to get at least 50% of your calories from Red Bull, Mountain Dew and Cheetos)
Spend more time on the Internet. Try to avoid slashdot stories unless they the summary is by samzenpus. Don't read the articles, just the summaries. Try to replace your time spent reading books on reddit.
If you read this far you have a serious and possibly fatal case.
Here's an idea. Most mass shooters use body armour. The Constitution protects the right to bear arms, but not the right to wear armour. Banning body armour would give armed citizens a better chance to take down shooters.
If that's not possible how about giving armed citizens the ability to defeat body armour? A lipstick sized explosively formed penetrator weapon should do the trick.
I'd like to think I'm suggesting this for the greater good of society but to be honest the idea of Jane Q Public carrying one of those in her handbag fills me with fiendish, nihilistic glee.
The last time I did any HTML and Javascript was back in the IE3/IE4 days i.e. around 1997. We supported IE3 and up and Netscape and up. Netscape support was unofficial because the management didn't think it was necessary.
We had verification on the server. If the browser was recent - i.e. IE4 or later or Netscape we enabled verification on the client too. So using the app on a modern browser was faster and placed less load on the server. But the server was set up so that even a completely dumb client with no Javascript support was still supported. The server generated the pages using ASP - so it could simply not send Javascript to a downlevel browser.
Of course it was horrible primitive HTML - basically tables and 1 pixel gifs for layout - because CSS wasn't supported by the browsers people actually used. Still it looked OK on the browsers we supported. The actual UI was a bunch of HTML form elements - mostly combo boxes, input text fields and checkboxes.
The name is a contrast to the Divided Test Action Group, which collapsed because of internecine squabbling that led to layoffs, punch ups in the parking lot and eventually drive by shootings.
Brian Damage, their former CTO, is currently serving fourteen life sentences in a SuperMax prison for a flame thrower revenge attack on the Floor 6.
Get back in the cattle truck, Apple apologist!
I don't think it's going to work. If you look at when they tried to kill Win32 on phones all the Windows Mobile ISVs gave up them and moved over to Android.
Given that most people could get by just fine on Android already I think you'll see something like this
1) Some people will stick with Win32 OSs - i.e. Windows 7 or Windows 8 probably with the Metro stuff disabled. All their legacy Win32 stuff will still work.
2) All the new users will go for Android or iOS tablets. All the new apps are already dual platform Android/iOS.
3) Linux will stay with around its current market share.
However if Microsoft decide to kill of Win32 the ISVs will move to Android or ChromeOS or iOS. I'd guess Google would have some sort of platform ready if this happened.
Maybe bring up a tutorial explaining that Metro works different and explain how you get stuff done.
Or a spring loaded flat plastic hand could pop out of the back of the screen, pivot around the right side and smack you on the face. Then a voice could say "NO USER! BAD USER!".
You realise that your "rMBP" is made by Foxconn in China, right?
Plus if you're not going to run OS-X on it, a Macbook Pro is not the best choice - you're better off getting an PC compatible laptop simply because you have a much wider choice of vendors and models so you'll make fewer compromises.
Retina Macbook Pro presumably.