I like my iPhone well enough, but I find the way it stores data, sandboxed into each app, absolutely painful, and having to use that hideous iTunes app is an even greater agony. I love my Nexus 7. I have Dropbox, Google Docs or a USB cable and can move files back and forth with ease. So while there are aspects of iOS I like (I like the calendar/scheduling app in iOS, just feels more complete), when I give my old iPhone to my kid, I'm looking at getting an unlocked Android phone.
I'm going to be blunt. I have yet to meet a text replacement/massaging problem that couldn't be solved with ask. Years ago I wrote an ask script to translate a gawdawful mainframe export of a stationary supplier's catalog. W're talking tens of thousands of records, all space delimited with variable field sizes for different kinds of inventory records and some records that were even multi line.
I wrote the script on my Linux machine at home, grabbed the script and a compile of gawk for DOS and took it to the customer, wrote a quick batch wrapper and we took the whole bloody file and imported it into his POS system.
I'm sure powershell is a wonder, but those who make grand declarations about the limited utility of *nix userland utilities are either ignorant or for dubious reasons sweeping away decades of *nix scripting. I'm sure
My experience with Powershell is sufficient to state that Windows users can keep it. Bash is a far far more mature shell with a helluva more lineage and experience behind it.
IIS is an absolute fucking nightmare when you have to deal with a buggered up config. Actually that applies to most MS point and click services. Apache can be a bastard, but at least I can back up the configs with a quick "cp".
Worst experience I ever had was with IIS and Exchange and something going wonky with IIS's settings, and OMA completely screwing up. In the end I literally had to uninstall IIS. Only MS would build things with such fragility and such insanely dangerous solutions.
As long as BB holds on, Microsoft has competition for the third place. In effect, unless BB completely disappears, it's balkanizing RT sales. By buying BB, if nothing else, it consolidates third place. From there, well, maybe it can take on Apple. I doubt it will ever really dent Android, which is too vast and on just about every price point for mobile devices.
It could do other things, like embed BES into Exchange, which has interesting possibilities. As awful as BES is to deal with, it has advantages over Activesync.
I'm not attempting to argue with you. The point is not what the NSA should or should not be doing, but rather about the practical considerations. On US soil, the claim is all they can gather is metadata (the SMTP envelop). Start using a foreign mail service, and it's very likely that everything after the DATA command is being stored as well.
Besides, the way I understand it, whatever privacy protections remain apply to US citizens on US soil. Use a foreign email serviced, and it sounds like all bets are off.
I'm sorry. Could you lean a little closer to your computer and say that again? Yes, much better. Oh by the way, you've got mustard on your shirt... no, not there, just below the collar. Yeah, perfect.
Now what was that you were saying about taxpayers? I need to get the transcript right before I email it to the IRS. You should get a letter within 4 to 6 weeks scheduling your surprise audit and anal probing.
Actually what amazed me about the President's statement is that there currently is no adversary in FISA court hearing. Little fucking wonder it so rarely rejects requests. It sounds like a judge, a few DoJ lawyers and someone from the NSA (or whoever) have a nice little chat at the end of which the judge brings out the rubber stamp and away they go to spy on whomever they like.
It just stuns me that a FISA court can even rationally be called a court. It's sort of like calling a block of wood with no wheels a car.
I didn't mean to say they were identical, but still, at least in the Indo-European languages (and I'm sure it can be found in other language families) there are some pretty highly conserved cognates, like pHtér (father). In most cases throughout the various Indo-European families one can trace pretty predictable sound changes to explain why pHtér became pater in the Italic languages. pitár in Sanskrit and father/fadar in the Germanic languages. Yes, there's a good deal more horizontal transfer in languages, and indeed in some cases words will disappear from some members of the family, but in general, the core vocabulary of the proto-language is pretty highly conserved in its descendants. Even in English, with its vast importation from the Norman invasion onward of Romance and Greek words, the core vocabularly remains Germanic, and the sound shifts from the Proto-Germanic thru West Germanic thru to Modern English tend to follow regular rules. It's actually kind of cool, because even where you have a word that was adopted from another language, you can usually determine when roughly it happened by the way in which it was or was not effected by the sound changes going at the time.
I can't sort out why. The statistical tools they used seem little different from how the proto-languages of major language families are reconstructed. In both cases you look at the genomic unit (in molecular biology that is genes and the proteins they encode, in comparative linguistics it's words, or more specifically cognates). In either case you cannot state with absolute certainty that the proposed progenitor unit (gene or cognate) has been reconstructed absolutely, but you can say with a reasonably high probability that you're pretty close.
If they didn't expect the three branches of government might prove excessive in their use of powers, they wouldn't have built checks and balances into the Constitution. The Constitution isn't a document that says "We sure hope the Executive doesn't abuse its power", it's a document that says "Here is how the other two branches can take the Executive to task and mitigate any abuses if and when they occur." The Constitution may have been an idealistic document, but it wasn't written by naive men. They knew very well that endowing any particular branch of the governemnt with great power would invite substantial abuses.
Indeed. Nixon was crucified for the crime of spying on his (perceived) political opponents. The last two presidents have one-upped Nixon by basically asserting pretty much anyone anywhere in the world with an Internet or phone connection is an enemy. So degraded has the political scene in Washington become that the only time anyone wants to oust a President is if he lied about getting a blowjob from an intern.
And deciding to not probe too deeply is pretty much tacit agreement. Congress has tacitly agreed with both GWB and Obama to basically sit on its hands and give only the most meaningless of nods towards holding the Executive to account for the powers that were granted to it after 9/11. Either the entirety of the House Intelligence Committee are sub-80 IQ cretins or they knew damned well that the Administration had adopted on obscenely liberal interpretation of the laws in question. While the former might be appealing to those who have general dim views of their Congresscritters, I think the latter is the case. Whether it's an outright case of being "on the take" in some way to industries related to intelligence or simply being browbeaten and not wanting to be seen as aiding the terrorists, they sat on their useless asses and didn't do their jobs.
As I wrote elsewhere, it's always been the case that the Executive, whether it be Emperor, King or President, will always grab as much power as it can by virtually any means possible. In a system like the United States, that usually means having the DoJ go through the laws with a fine tooth comb scouting out every turn of phrase and every punctuation mark to create legal interpretations to justify whatever it is the Administration plans on doing. Such legal interpretations, it is clear, do not even have to be very good, they simply have to exist. And apparently the interpretations don't even have to be made available.
The fact is that the Founding Fathers expected the Executive to push the envelope, and understood that is the nature of power. While I can certainly fault GWB and Obama (and indeed many Presidents who have judiciously interpreted laws in their favor to act in any way they pleased), the real fault here lies with Congress, which has, on the national security front, by and large let two consecutive Administrations do whatever they want. Yes, lies were to told to Congress, but it's not just Congress's right, but its duty under the Constitution to not simply take the Administration's word for things.
Congress may express surprise and exasperation at what the Administration has actually been up to, but I think it strains credibility to imagine that they were truly that taken aback. Essentially no one since 9/11 has wanted to be seen to be opposed to the "War on Terror", and so they have completely abrogated that most fundamental of obligations; which is to act as a check on the power of the President. Even now, as they decry the abuse of the authority granted to the Executive through legislation, they still want to flay Snowden for the crime of showing just how fucking useless they are.
He should be receiving a Congressional Medal of Honor and a Nobel Peace Prize for having shown the world not just what the US government, but numerous allied governments have been up to, and finally stirring the pot sufficiently that Congress is actually suggesting, however belatedly, that they never intended that legislation be interpreted so liberally,
Meesa most upset that my mooie mooie Gungan network engineering certification not gonna be good enough for a job in America. Meesa be thinking that I be back to working in Gungan call center taking orders for cheap shit coming soon.
The issue here is in part interpretation of the 4th amendment, in part the fact that "meta-data", whatever form it takes, has long been viewed as not being considered "personal papers" and in part it's irrelevant to the large mass of humanity on the Internet. Even if you win the battle in the US and meta-data is either constitutionally protected, it doesn't help much if a US ally doesn't have such stringent protections. A major aspect of what Snowden's leak revealed is that the US and its allies shop the data around, so that if the US can't read an email because it is nominally obeying the 4th Amendment, no problem, the UK will happily do it.
These are *services* on the Internet, not the Internet itself. Yes, individual services like SMTP are vulnerable, but no one says you have to use it, or Facebook or whatever hipster doofus smocial smetworking site is the be-all and end-all this week. There are ways to use the Internet that make you far less vulnerable. Nothing, of course, is 100%, and if They (whoever They are) can take advantage of vulnerabilities on your hardware, well that is a problem, but it is a different kind of problem.
Not even China can afford to cut the tubes between here and the West, and not even the West, despite its governments' singular desire to know every utterance its citizens make over said tubes, can afford to so damage the Internet in a quest for that kind of total knowledge. They will all push the boundaries of technology, but at the end of the day, too much of the global economy has become reliant on the Internet to allow it to be too balkanized.
That is not to say there aren't problems here. Whether it's trying to censor what citizens see (as China and Iran have done, and what the UK is trying to do) or ubiquitous spying (as probably all governments now do) these are threats to the free exchange of information, but at least so far as the letter is concerned, that can be fixed by using alternative protocols and encryption. Just because it's no longer secure to post shit on Facebook or use SMTP to send confidential emails (when was it ever really secure to use SMTP) doesn't mean the Internet is doomed.
Slashdot Mirror
I like my iPhone well enough, but I find the way it stores data, sandboxed into each app, absolutely painful, and having to use that hideous iTunes app is an even greater agony. I love my Nexus 7. I have Dropbox, Google Docs or a USB cable and can move files back and forth with ease. So while there are aspects of iOS I like (I like the calendar/scheduling app in iOS, just feels more complete), when I give my old iPhone to my kid, I'm looking at getting an unlocked Android phone.
I agree with Bill Hicks. Marketers are evil.
I can't imagine a sane or competent sysadmin, whatever OS he is running, allowing automatic updates on his production servers.
I've had a few MS patches royally buttfuck servers.
I'm going to be blunt. I have yet to meet a text replacement/massaging problem that couldn't be solved with ask. Years ago I wrote an ask script to translate a gawdawful mainframe export of a stationary supplier's catalog. W're talking tens of thousands of records, all space delimited with variable field sizes for different kinds of inventory records and some records that were even multi line.
I wrote the script on my Linux machine at home, grabbed the script and a compile of gawk for DOS and took it to the customer, wrote a quick batch wrapper and we took the whole bloody file and imported it into his POS system.
I'm sure powershell is a wonder, but those who make grand declarations about the limited utility of *nix userland utilities are either ignorant or for dubious reasons sweeping away decades of *nix scripting.
I'm sure
My experience with Powershell is sufficient to state that Windows users can keep it. Bash is a far far more mature shell with a helluva more lineage and experience behind it.
IIS is an absolute fucking nightmare when you have to deal with a buggered up config. Actually that applies to most MS point and click services. Apache can be a bastard, but at least I can back up the configs with a quick "cp".
Worst experience I ever had was with IIS and Exchange and something going wonky with IIS's settings, and OMA completely screwing up. In the end I literally had to uninstall IIS. Only MS would build things with such fragility and such insanely dangerous solutions.
As long as BB holds on, Microsoft has competition for the third place. In effect, unless BB completely disappears, it's balkanizing RT sales. By buying BB, if nothing else, it consolidates third place. From there, well, maybe it can take on Apple. I doubt it will ever really dent Android, which is too vast and on just about every price point for mobile devices.
It could do other things, like embed BES into Exchange, which has interesting possibilities. As awful as BES is to deal with, it has advantages over Activesync.
I'm not attempting to argue with you. The point is not what the NSA should or should not be doing, but rather about the practical considerations. On US soil, the claim is all they can gather is metadata (the SMTP envelop). Start using a foreign mail service, and it's very likely that everything after the DATA command is being stored as well.
Besides, the way I understand it, whatever privacy protections remain apply to US citizens on US soil. Use a foreign email serviced, and it sounds like all bets are off.
Does it matter? They're both large bags of explosive gas.
I'm sorry. Could you lean a little closer to your computer and say that again? Yes, much better. Oh by the way, you've got mustard on your shirt... no, not there, just below the collar. Yeah, perfect.
Now what was that you were saying about taxpayers? I need to get the transcript right before I email it to the IRS. You should get a letter within 4 to 6 weeks scheduling your surprise audit and anal probing.
Actually what amazed me about the President's statement is that there currently is no adversary in FISA court hearing. Little fucking wonder it so rarely rejects requests. It sounds like a judge, a few DoJ lawyers and someone from the NSA (or whoever) have a nice little chat at the end of which the judge brings out the rubber stamp and away they go to spy on whomever they like.
It just stuns me that a FISA court can even rationally be called a court. It's sort of like calling a block of wood with no wheels a car.
Oh the humanity!
I didn't mean to say they were identical, but still, at least in the Indo-European languages (and I'm sure it can be found in other language families) there are some pretty highly conserved cognates, like pHtér (father). In most cases throughout the various Indo-European families one can trace pretty predictable sound changes to explain why pHtér became pater in the Italic languages. pitár in Sanskrit and father/fadar in the Germanic languages. Yes, there's a good deal more horizontal transfer in languages, and indeed in some cases words will disappear from some members of the family, but in general, the core vocabulary of the proto-language is pretty highly conserved in its descendants. Even in English, with its vast importation from the Norman invasion onward of Romance and Greek words, the core vocabularly remains Germanic, and the sound shifts from the Proto-Germanic thru West Germanic thru to Modern English tend to follow regular rules. It's actually kind of cool, because even where you have a word that was adopted from another language, you can usually determine when roughly it happened by the way in which it was or was not effected by the sound changes going at the time.
I can't sort out why. The statistical tools they used seem little different from how the proto-languages of major language families are reconstructed. In both cases you look at the genomic unit (in molecular biology that is genes and the proteins they encode, in comparative linguistics it's words, or more specifically cognates). In either case you cannot state with absolute certainty that the proposed progenitor unit (gene or cognate) has been reconstructed absolutely, but you can say with a reasonably high probability that you're pretty close.
Exactly. But my larger point is that for the checks to work properly, the branches of government have to actually do their job.
If they didn't expect the three branches of government might prove excessive in their use of powers, they wouldn't have built checks and balances into the Constitution. The Constitution isn't a document that says "We sure hope the Executive doesn't abuse its power", it's a document that says "Here is how the other two branches can take the Executive to task and mitigate any abuses if and when they occur." The Constitution may have been an idealistic document, but it wasn't written by naive men. They knew very well that endowing any particular branch of the governemnt with great power would invite substantial abuses.
Indeed. Nixon was crucified for the crime of spying on his (perceived) political opponents. The last two presidents have one-upped Nixon by basically asserting pretty much anyone anywhere in the world with an Internet or phone connection is an enemy. So degraded has the political scene in Washington become that the only time anyone wants to oust a President is if he lied about getting a blowjob from an intern.
And deciding to not probe too deeply is pretty much tacit agreement. Congress has tacitly agreed with both GWB and Obama to basically sit on its hands and give only the most meaningless of nods towards holding the Executive to account for the powers that were granted to it after 9/11. Either the entirety of the House Intelligence Committee are sub-80 IQ cretins or they knew damned well that the Administration had adopted on obscenely liberal interpretation of the laws in question. While the former might be appealing to those who have general dim views of their Congresscritters, I think the latter is the case. Whether it's an outright case of being "on the take" in some way to industries related to intelligence or simply being browbeaten and not wanting to be seen as aiding the terrorists, they sat on their useless asses and didn't do their jobs.
As I wrote elsewhere, it's always been the case that the Executive, whether it be Emperor, King or President, will always grab as much power as it can by virtually any means possible. In a system like the United States, that usually means having the DoJ go through the laws with a fine tooth comb scouting out every turn of phrase and every punctuation mark to create legal interpretations to justify whatever it is the Administration plans on doing. Such legal interpretations, it is clear, do not even have to be very good, they simply have to exist. And apparently the interpretations don't even have to be made available.
The fact is that the Founding Fathers expected the Executive to push the envelope, and understood that is the nature of power. While I can certainly fault GWB and Obama (and indeed many Presidents who have judiciously interpreted laws in their favor to act in any way they pleased), the real fault here lies with Congress, which has, on the national security front, by and large let two consecutive Administrations do whatever they want. Yes, lies were to told to Congress, but it's not just Congress's right, but its duty under the Constitution to not simply take the Administration's word for things.
Congress may express surprise and exasperation at what the Administration has actually been up to, but I think it strains credibility to imagine that they were truly that taken aback. Essentially no one since 9/11 has wanted to be seen to be opposed to the "War on Terror", and so they have completely abrogated that most fundamental of obligations; which is to act as a check on the power of the President. Even now, as they decry the abuse of the authority granted to the Executive through legislation, they still want to flay Snowden for the crime of showing just how fucking useless they are.
He should be receiving a Congressional Medal of Honor and a Nobel Peace Prize for having shown the world not just what the US government, but numerous allied governments have been up to, and finally stirring the pot sufficiently that Congress is actually suggesting, however belatedly, that they never intended that legislation be interpreted so liberally,
I dunno. This sort of nonsense started pretty early on.
Alien and Sedition Acts
Meesa most upset that my mooie mooie Gungan network engineering certification not gonna be good enough for a job in America. Meesa be thinking that I be back to working in Gungan call center taking orders for cheap shit coming soon.
The issue here is in part interpretation of the 4th amendment, in part the fact that "meta-data", whatever form it takes, has long been viewed as not being considered "personal papers" and in part it's irrelevant to the large mass of humanity on the Internet. Even if you win the battle in the US and meta-data is either constitutionally protected, it doesn't help much if a US ally doesn't have such stringent protections. A major aspect of what Snowden's leak revealed is that the US and its allies shop the data around, so that if the US can't read an email because it is nominally obeying the 4th Amendment, no problem, the UK will happily do it.
These are *services* on the Internet, not the Internet itself. Yes, individual services like SMTP are vulnerable, but no one says you have to use it, or Facebook or whatever hipster doofus smocial smetworking site is the be-all and end-all this week. There are ways to use the Internet that make you far less vulnerable. Nothing, of course, is 100%, and if They (whoever They are) can take advantage of vulnerabilities on your hardware, well that is a problem, but it is a different kind of problem.
Not even China can afford to cut the tubes between here and the West, and not even the West, despite its governments' singular desire to know every utterance its citizens make over said tubes, can afford to so damage the Internet in a quest for that kind of total knowledge. They will all push the boundaries of technology, but at the end of the day, too much of the global economy has become reliant on the Internet to allow it to be too balkanized.
That is not to say there aren't problems here. Whether it's trying to censor what citizens see (as China and Iran have done, and what the UK is trying to do) or ubiquitous spying (as probably all governments now do) these are threats to the free exchange of information, but at least so far as the letter is concerned, that can be fixed by using alternative protocols and encryption. Just because it's no longer secure to post shit on Facebook or use SMTP to send confidential emails (when was it ever really secure to use SMTP) doesn't mean the Internet is doomed.
Yup. I'm cheering for the orcas here. Kill 'em all, Tilikum' kill 'em all,