There's nothing new about government agencies over using their rights to classify documents, it's done all the time. From a brief stint I had working with the government, I experienced this first hand.
While it's not necessarily a bad thing - the "just in case" factor is certainly important - it affects government efficiency a great deal at times and leads to conspiracy theories growing.
I'd say so. Did you happen to read this part of the sentence: "and only certain countries on the security council?"
Yes, I'm obviously arguing for US elitism and that only the world's wealthy countries should be heard when I'm complaining about the very exclusive security council. That must be what I'm saying.
You can't seriously suggest that the UN is doing a good job, can you? It's an undemocratic (every country, regardless of population, gets the same vote, and only certain countries on the security council?) monumental, expensive (how much does it cost and where are the benefits today?), indecisive (well, at least we're united in the fact that we hate Israel), grindingly slow moving organisation (ask the people of Rwanda - they'd agree).
Turn it around and take a closer look at what you're saying, that's all I'd argue.
This is certainly not on topic, but I thought I'd put this out and see if anyone else agreed:
I'll admit it - I'm no longer a true geek as I haven't coded in a long while. But I did take 4 years of computer programming in high school and did a fair amount of coding afterwards. While my meager coding skills have slowly withered away, I've used the same skills to manage people and workflows to optimize efficiency. It's helped me hone my logic and search for the exact flaw that holds the system up (debugging, looking for that one little problem in an otherwise great program that messes the whole thing up), it's helped me better understand interpersonal and interoffice communications (passing arguments between functions - data must be passed around in a usable format), understanding the order things should operate in, "black boxing" when necessary, and of course teaching me how to use a computer efficiently and helping me pass that knowledge along to others.
If my life depended on writing a simple C++ program right now, I'd probably meet my maker sooner rather than later, but a knowledge of programming helps in much more than D&D and coding itself - it can really make you a better manager in my humble opinion.
I'm sorry officer Dave, but it looks like you quickly picked up your movement right before you picked up your gun, and I'm not sure it's you any more. Please enter your 8 digit code into combination-lock device to unlock your gun so it will fire...
My iPod just died for good last night (my own fault, really... shouldn't bang around a device like that as much as I did), and now my wife just feels really sorry for me. If they release a new one today, I can capitalize on her sympathy and talk her into letting me get one!
Apple, please take note! If you don't release one today, my accountant... er... wife will never let me purchase one of your shiny white products! Her sympathy won't last forever, act today!
Take a quick look at the 5 members of the security council, arguably the most important decision making body of the UN, and consider that China is known for its rampant censorship of the internet and other materials and that Russia certainly isn't a bastion for free speech (take a long look at Putin's policies and who owns media in Russia). Not to mention Russia's problems with policing its networks.
The EU? What Kissinger (not the most popular name, I realize) said about Europe decades ago is still true - "Europe? What's the phone number?" The EU is a strong financial union, to be sure, but it lacks a great most of the rest.
As it is right now, the internet is governed from a country known for its fierce - though not necessarily perfect - defense of free speech. I'd rather keep it that way than hand it over to the UN and let China play with it, or share power with the EU and its poor ability to make effective decisions.
The point is to make such a bombing more difficult. Keep in mind that a group of terrorists involved in this sort of action is often small, acting hastily (to avoid detection), and can only trust so many people. Assuming a four man terrorist cell, you figure at least two are going to be involved in the construction of the bomb, and it's likely that others will be involved in acquiring the parts/materials.
You'll never create a perfect security system, like you'll never make a perfectly secure OS (yes, I'm a mac user, and even I'll admit it). The point isn't perfection - it's to make it more difficult so that even the slightest error will result in detection. And people operating quickly and striving for secrecy are more likely to make small errors. Take the case of the Lockerbie bombers - they may have gotten away with it if (and this is as memory serves... forgive me if I'm not 100% correct on this) they hadn't wrapped the bombs in sweaters purchased across the street from a Libyan embassy. Then there's Timothy McVeigh, who was busted (again, I believe...) for driving a get away car with an out of date tag. It's the small screw-ups that get these people.
Oops... accidentally posted that as HTML, my mistake. Here's a version with paragraph breaks:
The article specifically mentioned "deviant" pornography, so that's what I looked for to narrow the search. As you can tell from your search, there are a lot of child porn articles that I wasn't in the mood to search through, so I looked up "deviant", the term that made this unique in the Slashdot article. I'll accept the fact that it's occurred, no problem.
From your search:
Of course, it is pure malarkey for FBI agents to complain that policing porn takes valuable resources from the war on terrorism. In the FBI context, every agent who polices public corruption or civil-rights violation is an agent not working on terrorism. In a broader governmental context, the same could be said of welfare, health care and federal aid to the Katrina victims, to take some random examples. Every dollar spent by the federal government on causes other than terrorism takes a dollar away from fighting terrorism. Before we discuss cutting police power with regard to pornography, perhaps we should re-evaluate dedicating millions of federal dollars to building new bridges named after Robert Byrd.
I'd tend to agree. Agree or disagree with the actions of the FBI, to treat it all as some zero sum game where absolutely all other actions the FBI takes somehow prevent us from fighting terrorism is ridiculous.
It would also appear that I was wrong in my statement that the total number of personnel involved would be eight including support and supervisory staff. It's actually eight PLUS supervisory and support staff. My mistake.
The article specifically mentioned "deviant" pornography, so that's what I looked for to narrow the search. As you can tell from your search, there are a lot of child porn articles that I wasn't in the mood to search through, so I looked up "deviant", the term that made this unique in the Slashdot article. I'll accept the fact that it's occurred, no problem.
From your search:
Of course, it is pure malarkey for FBI agents to complain that policing porn takes valuable resources from the war on terrorism. In the FBI context, every agent who polices public corruption or civil-rights violation is an agent not working on terrorism. In a broader governmental context, the same could be said of welfare, health care and federal aid to the Katrina victims, to take some random examples. Every dollar spent by the federal government on causes other than terrorism takes a dollar away from fighting terrorism. Before we discuss cutting police power with regard to pornography, perhaps we should re-evaluate dedicating millions of federal dollars to building new bridges named after Robert Byrd.
http://worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ ID=46455
I'd tend to agree. Agree or disagree with the actions of the FBI, to treat it all as some zero sum game where absolutely all other actions the FBI takes somehow prevent us from fighting terrorism is ridiculous.
It would also appear that I was wrong in my statement that the total number of personnel involved would be eight including support and supervisory staff. It's actually eight PLUS supervisory and support staff. My mistake.
"I guess this means the war on terror is over, we've caught Osama bin Forgotten, and we are 100% disaster proof at this point."
Yes, because after all, the article states that the eight (count 'em, 8 - including support and supervisory staff) FBI employees involved are all Arabic translators, from counter-terrorism reaction units, and the FBI is of course the organization tasked to hunt for Bin Laden in Pakistan. Please.
Of more interest to me is that a google news search as of 7:24 EST September 24th does not show any similar stories. I'm not saying the story is false, but I'm going to take it with a grain of salt until other evidence is posted.
I heartily disagree. Gmail gives me the option to use any interface I want with my mail client. With Yahoo!, I'd have to pay for that privilege. Not to mention the privilege of not having to view banner ads with each message I want to see.
Because you're on slashdot. Read through any article about software piracy or "sharing" movies and music. Look for all of the responses that talk about a "dead business model" of paying people thousands or millions of dollars to create software or digital products and, if they're good, expecting to get a profit. Copyrights and patents are evil. Blah, blah, blah. I can agree to a certain degree on some of these matters, much of the Slashdot community's negative feelings about those that actually want to make money from a product is truly amazing.
The iPod Nano was not an open source linux based product with an underground publicity campaign. If it was, everyone would be happy.
Then again, it is an Apple product, which means there will be far less criticism than if, say, it was a Dell product.
I read lots of blogs, and as I read them I often think to myself:
1) Thank goodness my life is interesting and does not revolve around my cat (I like cats as much as the next man, but I don't replace the human beings in my life with fuzzballs).
2) Thank goodness I am no longer a hormone crazed teenager who is in love one moment and ready to commit suicide at the next (ah, those were the good old days...).
3) Thank goodness I have something better to do than cook up conspiracy theories all day long (if I read one more UFO blog or another blogger claiming to be a "Spook, I'll go balistic).
4) Thank goodness I have an occupation (while there are professional bloggers, those that post nothing more than rants about the bad employment market and whine about it all day long rather than look for work are not among them).
So... yeah. Blogs are theraputic. Often times, they can make me feel so much better about myself.
(the above is sarcasm and, obviously, doesn't refer to all blogs... so let's dispense with the flaming)
Thanks a lot for all of that advice. I'll take it to heart.
Much of what you mentioned is already in there, I just wasn't very thorough in listing everything I have in there.
My kit is from growing up in Florida and hurricanes were the main issue. Now I keep one here at school with me in Utah. I should really review it and make sure I've properly adapted it to the environment and potential issues (earthquakes among them).
1. Professors won't go for it. Cell phones are already enough of a problem in the classroom. The last thing most professors want to do is encourage people to bring them to class and more importantly, if they must be brought to class, they'd rather not have students leaving them on (as a college student who has had a lecture course of 300 students interrupted on multiple occassions by one or two idiots who leaves their phone with who-knows-what ringtone on, believe me, I know).
2. Students won't go for it. Contrary to popular belief, not all students have or want cell phones. I don't own one and plan on avoiding owning one as long as possible (hopefully until whoever I work for buys me one and pays for it). I'd rather not have to pay yet more money to go to school just so I can answer quizes - books cost enough, thank you very much.
Slashdot Mirror
There's nothing new about government agencies over using their rights to classify documents, it's done all the time. From a brief stint I had working with the government, I experienced this first hand.
While it's not necessarily a bad thing - the "just in case" factor is certainly important - it affects government efficiency a great deal at times and leads to conspiracy theories growing.
I'd say so. Did you happen to read this part of the sentence: "and only certain countries on the security council?"
Yes, I'm obviously arguing for US elitism and that only the world's wealthy countries should be heard when I'm complaining about the very exclusive security council. That must be what I'm saying.
You can't seriously suggest that the UN is doing a good job, can you? It's an undemocratic (every country, regardless of population, gets the same vote, and only certain countries on the security council?) monumental, expensive (how much does it cost and where are the benefits today?), indecisive (well, at least we're united in the fact that we hate Israel), grindingly slow moving organisation (ask the people of Rwanda - they'd agree).
Turn it around and take a closer look at what you're saying, that's all I'd argue.
This is certainly not on topic, but I thought I'd put this out and see if anyone else agreed:
I'll admit it - I'm no longer a true geek as I haven't coded in a long while. But I did take 4 years of computer programming in high school and did a fair amount of coding afterwards. While my meager coding skills have slowly withered away, I've used the same skills to manage people and workflows to optimize efficiency. It's helped me hone my logic and search for the exact flaw that holds the system up (debugging, looking for that one little problem in an otherwise great program that messes the whole thing up), it's helped me better understand interpersonal and interoffice communications (passing arguments between functions - data must be passed around in a usable format), understanding the order things should operate in, "black boxing" when necessary, and of course teaching me how to use a computer efficiently and helping me pass that knowledge along to others.
If my life depended on writing a simple C++ program right now, I'd probably meet my maker sooner rather than later, but a knowledge of programming helps in much more than D&D and coding itself - it can really make you a better manager in my humble opinion.
Google is good, good! See, they have the same three first letters! Goo!
And you're on Slashdot! How dare you disrespect the great Google! Take that talk to Redmond, mister. It's not welcome here!
(Yes, I'm kidding. No, seriously. I'm kidding. As in not flamebait).
Shh! It's an industry secret, but they've finally come up with a surefire iPod killer!
In-Q-Tel isn't exactly "pretending not to be part of the CIA". Check out their website
"Our mission is to deliver leading edge technologies to the CIA and the Intelligence Community"
It's right there on the front page. In-Q-Tel isn't exactly covert.
I'm sorry officer Dave, but it looks like you quickly picked up your movement right before you picked up your gun, and I'm not sure it's you any more. Please enter your 8 digit code into combination-lock device to unlock your gun so it will fire...
Dave? Dave? Are you there, Dave?
My iPod just died for good last night (my own fault, really... shouldn't bang around a device like that as much as I did), and now my wife just feels really sorry for me. If they release a new one today, I can capitalize on her sympathy and talk her into letting me get one!
Apple, please take note! If you don't release one today, my accountant... er... wife will never let me purchase one of your shiny white products! Her sympathy won't last forever, act today!
I agree, we could all use less of it.
Take a quick look at the 5 members of the security council, arguably the most important decision making body of the UN, and consider that China is known for its rampant censorship of the internet and other materials and that Russia certainly isn't a bastion for free speech (take a long look at Putin's policies and who owns media in Russia). Not to mention Russia's problems with policing its networks.
The EU? What Kissinger (not the most popular name, I realize) said about Europe decades ago is still true - "Europe? What's the phone number?" The EU is a strong financial union, to be sure, but it lacks a great most of the rest.
As it is right now, the internet is governed from a country known for its fierce - though not necessarily perfect - defense of free speech. I'd rather keep it that way than hand it over to the UN and let China play with it, or share power with the EU and its poor ability to make effective decisions.
The point is to make such a bombing more difficult. Keep in mind that a group of terrorists involved in this sort of action is often small, acting hastily (to avoid detection), and can only trust so many people. Assuming a four man terrorist cell, you figure at least two are going to be involved in the construction of the bomb, and it's likely that others will be involved in acquiring the parts/materials.
You'll never create a perfect security system, like you'll never make a perfectly secure OS (yes, I'm a mac user, and even I'll admit it). The point isn't perfection - it's to make it more difficult so that even the slightest error will result in detection. And people operating quickly and striving for secrecy are more likely to make small errors. Take the case of the Lockerbie bombers - they may have gotten away with it if (and this is as memory serves... forgive me if I'm not 100% correct on this) they hadn't wrapped the bombs in sweaters purchased across the street from a Libyan embassy. Then there's Timothy McVeigh, who was busted (again, I believe...) for driving a get away car with an out of date tag. It's the small screw-ups that get these people.
In Korea, only old people use those any more...
It was discovered by a scientist's wife, who demanded he come from the other side of the forest to squish it with his shoe...
(No, I'm not a sexit pig... just a married man with an aracnophobic wife...)
Oops... accidentally posted that as HTML, my mistake. Here's a version with paragraph breaks:
_ ID=46455
The article specifically mentioned "deviant" pornography, so that's what I looked for to narrow the search. As you can tell from your search, there are a lot of child porn articles that I wasn't in the mood to search through, so I looked up "deviant", the term that made this unique in the Slashdot article. I'll accept the fact that it's occurred, no problem.
From your search:
Of course, it is pure malarkey for FBI agents to complain that policing porn takes valuable resources from the war on terrorism. In the FBI context, every agent who polices public corruption or civil-rights violation is an agent not working on terrorism. In a broader governmental context, the same could be said of welfare, health care and federal aid to the Katrina victims, to take some random examples. Every dollar spent by the federal government on causes other than terrorism takes a dollar away from fighting terrorism. Before we discuss cutting police power with regard to pornography, perhaps we should re-evaluate dedicating millions of federal dollars to building new bridges named after Robert Byrd.
http://worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE
I'd tend to agree. Agree or disagree with the actions of the FBI, to treat it all as some zero sum game where absolutely all other actions the FBI takes somehow prevent us from fighting terrorism is ridiculous.
It would also appear that I was wrong in my statement that the total number of personnel involved would be eight including support and supervisory staff. It's actually eight PLUS supervisory and support staff. My mistake.
The article specifically mentioned "deviant" pornography, so that's what I looked for to narrow the search. As you can tell from your search, there are a lot of child porn articles that I wasn't in the mood to search through, so I looked up "deviant", the term that made this unique in the Slashdot article. I'll accept the fact that it's occurred, no problem. From your search: Of course, it is pure malarkey for FBI agents to complain that policing porn takes valuable resources from the war on terrorism. In the FBI context, every agent who polices public corruption or civil-rights violation is an agent not working on terrorism. In a broader governmental context, the same could be said of welfare, health care and federal aid to the Katrina victims, to take some random examples. Every dollar spent by the federal government on causes other than terrorism takes a dollar away from fighting terrorism. Before we discuss cutting police power with regard to pornography, perhaps we should re-evaluate dedicating millions of federal dollars to building new bridges named after Robert Byrd. http://worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ ID=46455
I'd tend to agree. Agree or disagree with the actions of the FBI, to treat it all as some zero sum game where absolutely all other actions the FBI takes somehow prevent us from fighting terrorism is ridiculous.
It would also appear that I was wrong in my statement that the total number of personnel involved would be eight including support and supervisory staff. It's actually eight PLUS supervisory and support staff. My mistake.
Yes, because after all, the article states that the eight (count 'em, 8 - including support and supervisory staff) FBI employees involved are all Arabic translators, from counter-terrorism reaction units, and the FBI is of course the organization tasked to hunt for Bin Laden in Pakistan. Please.
Of more interest to me is that a google news search as of 7:24 EST September 24th does not show any similar stories. I'm not saying the story is false, but I'm going to take it with a grain of salt until other evidence is posted.
I heartily disagree. Gmail gives me the option to use any interface I want with my mail client. With Yahoo!, I'd have to pay for that privilege. Not to mention the privilege of not having to view banner ads with each message I want to see.
Thanks for pointing out my blatant idiocy... really should read before I post, my mistake.
The ACLU (That's American Civil Liberties Union) probably isn't going to help this gentelman from London.
Because you're on slashdot. Read through any article about software piracy or "sharing" movies and music. Look for all of the responses that talk about a "dead business model" of paying people thousands or millions of dollars to create software or digital products and, if they're good, expecting to get a profit. Copyrights and patents are evil. Blah, blah, blah. I can agree to a certain degree on some of these matters, much of the Slashdot community's negative feelings about those that actually want to make money from a product is truly amazing.
The iPod Nano was not an open source linux based product with an underground publicity campaign. If it was, everyone would be happy.
Then again, it is an Apple product, which means there will be far less criticism than if, say, it was a Dell product.
I read lots of blogs, and as I read them I often think to myself:
1) Thank goodness my life is interesting and does not revolve around my cat (I like cats as much as the next man, but I don't replace the human beings in my life with fuzzballs).
2) Thank goodness I am no longer a hormone crazed teenager who is in love one moment and ready to commit suicide at the next (ah, those were the good old days...).
3) Thank goodness I have something better to do than cook up conspiracy theories all day long (if I read one more UFO blog or another blogger claiming to be a "Spook, I'll go balistic).
4) Thank goodness I have an occupation (while there are professional bloggers, those that post nothing more than rants about the bad employment market and whine about it all day long rather than look for work are not among them).
So... yeah. Blogs are theraputic. Often times, they can make me feel so much better about myself.
(the above is sarcasm and, obviously, doesn't refer to all blogs... so let's dispense with the flaming)
Thanks a lot for all of that advice. I'll take it to heart.
Much of what you mentioned is already in there, I just wasn't very thorough in listing everything I have in there.
My kit is from growing up in Florida and hurricanes were the main issue. Now I keep one here at school with me in Utah. I should really review it and make sure I've properly adapted it to the environment and potential issues (earthquakes among them).
Thanks!
1. Professors won't go for it. Cell phones are already enough of a problem in the classroom. The last thing most professors want to do is encourage people to bring them to class and more importantly, if they must be brought to class, they'd rather not have students leaving them on (as a college student who has had a lecture course of 300 students interrupted on multiple occassions by one or two idiots who leaves their phone with who-knows-what ringtone on, believe me, I know).
2. Students won't go for it. Contrary to popular belief, not all students have or want cell phones. I don't own one and plan on avoiding owning one as long as possible (hopefully until whoever I work for buys me one and pays for it). I'd rather not have to pay yet more money to go to school just so I can answer quizes - books cost enough, thank you very much.
and bedding supplies (old blanket, a sweater that can also be used as a pillow, etc.) I'm sure I missed a few other things as well.