They appear to be self appointed arbiters of freedom of speech. This is what happened early on during the Wiemar Republic as Hitler's Brown Shirts stated govern the public discourse with violence and coercion.
More recently in the US I remember the censorship of pornography. The standard was, "I'll recognize it when I see it." It took us a long time to get rid of that censorship. And now we have Google and Pro Publica starting to do the same thing themselves in the name of hate speech, which they refuse to define. "I'll recognize it when I see it." The basic problem is the designated hate speech can be and often is carefully documented taken from primary sources available to everybody. We have somebody going around collecting information, documenting it, and presenting it accurately being censored because the resulting document somehow is this undefined thing called "hate speech."
This action of censorship is purely a symptom of their participating in what they claim they are trying to stop, Fascism in all its odious putrid excrescence.. You can see this if you read William Shirer's "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich." This is a heavy read. It is a scary read. It reveals how "movements" such as Antifa are doing exactly what the Germans did leading up to the collapse of the Wiemar Republic and WW-II.
Please, Google, go back to your roots, "Do no wrong."
Let's see now. We have an employee who was fired for exercising his first amendment rights. He's been shamed and maligned, perhaps slandered, libeled, or both.
We have an organization which claims it's sole reason for existing is to enforce the human rights recognized by the US Constitution.
Whyin'ell has the ACLU not put their foot into this situation? Are they REALLY supporting the Constitutional rights of citizens or are they the feckless left wing liberals many of us see in them? I'm just wondering. But taking James Damore's obvious first amendment case might do their reputation some good.
So you wanted big government, Bunky. What makes you think it comes for free? Where do you think most of the taxable resources exist? Visit IRS.GOV and hunt around. The answer will annoy you no end, especially with the highly artificial definition of "poor" that we live with. (Where else in the world do officially poor people have AC, a car, a cell phone, and big screen TVs as a matter of course?)
Given that you and I are the income targets for modest tax increases that can greatly increase the tax revenues maybe it is time to rethink this overwhelming drive we seem to have for ever bigger government - especially since we are paying for so much government and the most expensive portions of it cannot do their jobs. ObamaCare is a failing farce. The Department of Energy, charged with making the US independent of foreign oil, has not managed to do this in its entire time in existence. And so forth.
If you do not want to pay as much in taxes then get down and dirty working to make our government smaller. Maybe create a bounty program for our legislators. They personally get checks for 10% of every cut in the size of government in lieu of their salaries. Think out of the box. Think small government.
In the late 50s and early 60s I was exposed to the automobile trunk filling technology of the mobile telephone. When I think of the timing requirements for trunking radios let along cell phone radios rendered in empty state electronics (large, hot, and nifty-drifty) I get an extreme case of the giggles. The Jolly Green Giant's limo MIGHT have had room for the electronics if the giant himself rode in the trunk.
It's time to put away the tin-foil conspiracy hat and come back to reality. There is a difference between "the theory is known" and "we can do it today." Often that difference is an unbridgeable gap until necessary enabling technology is developed, such as GPS, semi-conductors, high power computers the size of largish watches, and so forth.
(Gad those old mobile telephones were HUGE by modern standards.)
I have a severe problem with the fact that the people who are screaming about the Russian interference in the US and kept silent about Obama's interference with the Israeli election process. They are whiny babies who whine about other people maybe doing what they do in abundance and are proud of the fact. Disgusting.
Join SMPTE. Get articles from back issues of their "Motion Imaging Journal" that deal with IT in the production workplace. MOS, Media Object Server, is one of the key acronyms. SDI, Serial Digital Interface, is the specification for the video pipeline hardware in many installations.
MOS leads you to ENPS. Follow that down the rabbit hole to as much knowledge as most people would want if the motivation is only curiosity. The whole system is quite flexible and complex. (MOS is a relatively modest part of the generic "Electronic News Production System". It all fits together and it all works surprisingly well.
(I worked on some of this sort of software in the 2000-2010 time frame.)
There seems to be a massive hang-up over courts, sentencing, and punishment. People see the sentence as a punishment when it more importantly should serve a different purpose. When we have a person proven, in court, to be guilty of various crimes perhaps we should concentrate on the other P-word, protection.
Sentencing should serve society as well as issue any required chastisement to the criminal deemed necessary. Punishment is issued in anger. This person is so bad that something nasty must be done to that person to expiate his sins. But anger is almost always a counter-productive emotion. What really needs to be done is protect society from a known flawed component. Since fellow humans are involved as miscreants, prosecution, and juries simply discarding the bad component is highly improper. Mistakes happen and we owe it to ourselves to allow an out.
However, simply turning the flawed person back into society is wrong as well. It places you and me into the danger that the flawed person will fail again. So we put the person away for a period of time designed to perhaps give the person time to heal and protect society from the flawed person. For this an algorithm for sentencing guidance is probably a good thing. AIs learn patterns nicely. What traits would a flawed person display that would indicate a high chance that defects would be healed in a short time or would take a long time to be neutralized? Let an AI figure this out from the huge volumes of existing data and tracking modern results.
I am human and experience the urge to punish the particularly odious criminals with unspeakable punishments. Then I sit back and ask, more seriously, "What level of danger is this person to society for what period of time in confinement sequestered away from society for society's own protection." That should define duration. Best case the confinement should be fairly benign. Worst case some form of spanking is required and the conditions of the confinement are adjusted as the chastisement determined to be appropriate,
Protect society first, then if you must and it matters, punish the criminal.
Please explain to me in simple terms what is illegal about this alleged activity? Regardless of whether we can prove it or not there is nothing that makes this activity illegal at the "treason" level so many people are screaming about.
And if it is illegal, perhaps Barack H. Obama should be tried for messing with Israeli election politics and Thai politics among others. If WE do it to others, what right do we have to complain when others do it to us?
One good EMP will take down the copper connections quite nicely. But, then, the power to make the controls driven by the copper connections work will be as gone as that for the FIOS or other connections.
Um, yes, it gives the concept of viral data a whole new meaning. Be careful with your data patterns so that none of them generate a killer disease in the Microsoft cloud in 2072.
Basically I find PayPal's estimation of my intelligence and that of all their other customers rather depressing. I rather doubt we're a collection of dunces that we'd mistake the two. On the other hand the similarity could lead to a misapprehension regarding the (lack of) relationship between the two. On the gripping hand, resorting to lawfare generally precedes the decline of all the other company products and services. I hope PayPal is an exception to this.
The real question should be why did the auto companies take so blinding long to start going public with their solutions. I know for a fact that the big three in the US have been working this problem for over 50 years. Classmates I had at Univ of Mich in the mid 60s were working on driverless cars with several proposed technologies. I suspect they were working on it from the WW-II days once radio controlled bombs and bombers were invented. What took them so long to get up off their asterisks and do something?
Jack, we're talking about screaming thumbsucking whiny liberals here. It is ALWAYS somebody ELSE's fault. They have forgotten how to accept responsibility for their own errors. But, that's all right. They don't know what the word "responsibility" means.
The home I live in is literally surrounded by people with cable TV as close as 100' away in some places and 200' in others. But because the wire to feed our house is too long Charter Cable is too darned cheap to serve us. They screwed up laying out their network. I'm stuck with Frontier DSL at a whole 7 Mbps. Getting Fiber in here, despite over a decade of ads implying availability, I can't get that either.
Which liberal goon gets to make the call on what is fake news and what is not? Do you set the criterion? Do *I* get to set the criterion? I consider MSNBC, for a prime example, and CNN, for a second prime example, to be fake news sites where political coverage is involved. So I'd block the sites completely, or should I only block political news on the sites? Oh, wait, do I get to call what is political or not?
The perception is that Google is DEEP in bed with the progressive Democrat leadership. So will they declare FoxNews is a fake news site? Is Project Veritas a fake news site? Does truth and accuracy count or is it "truthiness" and "says what I want it to say" the criterion? This move on Google's part leaves me really considering that the perception matches reality in this case.
I'm trying to think back over history. Two interesting concepts that are currently in favor with different factions are Communism and Democracy. Neither works. The former cannot even be started without a despot involved. The latter leads to failures such as Greece, Thailand's "Democrazy", and other dramatic mistakes.
The US Constitutionally speaking is a Republic rather than a pure Democracy. I'd rather not go with a pure democracy. But, if I must then I'd demand that the election is not settled until one candidate has over 50% of the vote. So a runoff election between, in this case, Hillary and Trump with no third, fourth, or fifth party candidates involved is mandatory. I suspect the results might not be what the pure Democracy advocates are expecting. The third party candidates allowed people who just could not stomach voting for Hillary or Donald an outlet. For some reason they refused to vote for Hillary. For another reason they refused to vote for Donald. But, they did vote creating a higher vote count needed for a pure majority. If forced into the binary decision they might swallow bile and vote for the turd in the punch bowl rather than the as yet unindicted criminal who played fast and loose with US secrets, killed an ambassador for her convenience, and so forth.
But that's all a silly argument. It would require a Constitutional Amendment to make the change. And that's not gonna happen any time soon. The barriers an prospective amendment faces are very high compared to mere electoral college hurdles.
So far I've not been convinced it is broken the way it is except in some abstract aesthetic sense. The old saw generally makes sense, "If it ain't broke; don't fix it." I feel this is one of those instances.
This judge has just declared that you and I and everybody else has a requirement to pay for somebody else's political soapbox, sit there, and listen to it. This is NOT what the first amendment says if you exercise a few brain cells a few minutes. If it did then there is no right to privacy in your own home. A saner interpretation is that a person may pay for and erect his soapbox any place that is legal without invading other people's privacy and speak his piece. Then he must clean up any mess and leave. He may not force you to listen. He may no force me to listen. He may not force anybody else to listen.
Given the way robocalls and telemarketers invade your privacy at their whim if this judge's verdict is allowed to stand I feel sorry for the poor sods reduced to taking telemarketing jobs. Their lives won't be worth 2 lousy cents when the vigilante squads find them.
Meanwhile, it is sort of fun to listen to the reactions when I declare, "If you call me again I will climb through this telephone cord and rip your g., d,,, throat out." A sweet little girl accent works best.
I suspect the Asian nations will be pleased with brexit simply because they get access to the British market and goods without the EU getting in the way. Maybe this will be the end of expensive DSLR cameras that are limited to 29'59" of recording because the EU arbitrarily defined 30 minutes or more as a video camera and slapped much higher tariffs on them.
Maybe the next couple years will be time to invest in Britain rather than try to escape. Look at both sides of the possible effects before you jump.
If one drone means one accident in 187 million years of continuous operation what happens when we have 187 million drones out there up in the air at any given time? It's like 640k. People will perceive a need for more leading to hundreds of millions of drones some of which will be operating at any given time. Somehow one accident a year does not sound appetizing to me even if that's a world wide accident rate.
About 20 years ago my partner took me into his workplace at UniSys in Mission Viejo. He showed me a nice modular computer system, video module, disk drive module, CPU module, memory module, etc. It was designed some 30+ years ago now by Convergent Technologies. Burroughs bought then and sold the computers for a few years. And there was still a working example at the UniSys labs in Mission Viejo. (Burroughs plus Sperry became UniSys rather than Spurroughs.)
I suppose 30 years is long enough for the reinvention to be seen as something brand new and unique and patentable. However, in a real world I suspect this prior art, documented on Wikipedia (the model number to look for is Burroughs B25) should not be patentable by any stretch of the imagination.
We call them audiopheelies when we joke about them in the trade.
Really, I suppose spending $25,000 on special non-resonant wooden knobs for the vacuum tube preamp is in some way better than blowing it all on coke or meth.
I wonder if I can "fix" my RAID 5 system with a one disk at a time approach. Pull a drive. Use Linux to zero the drive. Use Windows to build the requisite NTFS partition to prevent complaints. Run the update. Rezero the partition information. And finally reinstall the drive in the RAID and let the RAID rebuild. Lather, rinse, repeat three more times for the other disks.
Of course, methinks I'll take a complete disk image backup of the RAID just in case.
Any thoughts regarding this approach? Is there anything simpler that can be done?
I remember from the early 80s hearing about somebody able to decode a Selectric typewriter by its emissions, either electrical or acoustic. All your data are belong to us.
Slashdot Mirror
They appear to be self appointed arbiters of freedom of speech. This is what happened early on during the Wiemar Republic as Hitler's Brown Shirts stated govern the public discourse with violence and coercion.
More recently in the US I remember the censorship of pornography. The standard was, "I'll recognize it when I see it." It took us a long time to get rid of that censorship. And now we have Google and Pro Publica starting to do the same thing themselves in the name of hate speech, which they refuse to define. "I'll recognize it when I see it." The basic problem is the designated hate speech can be and often is carefully documented taken from primary sources available to everybody. We have somebody going around collecting information, documenting it, and presenting it accurately being censored because the resulting document somehow is this undefined thing called "hate speech."
This action of censorship is purely a symptom of their participating in what they claim they are trying to stop, Fascism in all its odious putrid excrescence.. You can see this if you read William Shirer's "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich." This is a heavy read. It is a scary read. It reveals how "movements" such as Antifa are doing exactly what the Germans did leading up to the collapse of the Wiemar Republic and WW-II.
Please, Google, go back to your roots, "Do no wrong."
{^_^}
Let's see now. We have an employee who was fired for exercising his first amendment rights. He's been shamed and maligned, perhaps slandered, libeled, or both.
We have an organization which claims it's sole reason for existing is to enforce the human rights recognized by the US Constitution.
Whyin'ell has the ACLU not put their foot into this situation? Are they REALLY supporting the Constitutional rights of citizens or are they the feckless left wing liberals many of us see in them? I'm just wondering. But taking James Damore's obvious first amendment case might do their reputation some good.
{o.o}
So you wanted big government, Bunky. What makes you think it comes for free? Where do you think most of the taxable resources exist? Visit IRS.GOV and hunt around. The answer will annoy you no end, especially with the highly artificial definition of "poor" that we live with. (Where else in the world do officially poor people have AC, a car, a cell phone, and big screen TVs as a matter of course?)
Given that you and I are the income targets for modest tax increases that can greatly increase the tax revenues maybe it is time to rethink this overwhelming drive we seem to have for ever bigger government - especially since we are paying for so much government and the most expensive portions of it cannot do their jobs. ObamaCare is a failing farce. The Department of Energy, charged with making the US independent of foreign oil, has not managed to do this in its entire time in existence. And so forth.
If you do not want to pay as much in taxes then get down and dirty working to make our government smaller. Maybe create a bounty program for our legislators. They personally get checks for 10% of every cut in the size of government in lieu of their salaries. Think out of the box. Think small government.
{^_^}
In the late 50s and early 60s I was exposed to the automobile trunk filling technology of the mobile telephone. When I think of the timing requirements for trunking radios let along cell phone radios rendered in empty state electronics (large, hot, and nifty-drifty) I get an extreme case of the giggles. The Jolly Green Giant's limo MIGHT have had room for the electronics if the giant himself rode in the trunk.
It's time to put away the tin-foil conspiracy hat and come back to reality. There is a difference between "the theory is known" and "we can do it today." Often that difference is an unbridgeable gap until necessary enabling technology is developed, such as GPS, semi-conductors, high power computers the size of largish watches, and so forth.
(Gad those old mobile telephones were HUGE by modern standards.)
{^_^}
I have a severe problem with the fact that the people who are screaming about the Russian interference in the US and kept silent about Obama's interference with the Israeli election process. They are whiny babies who whine about other people maybe doing what they do in abundance and are proud of the fact. Disgusting.
{^_^}
Join SMPTE. Get articles from back issues of their "Motion Imaging Journal" that deal with IT in the production workplace. MOS, Media Object Server, is one of the key acronyms. SDI, Serial Digital Interface, is the specification for the video pipeline hardware in many installations.
MOS leads you to ENPS. Follow that down the rabbit hole to as much knowledge as most people would want if the motivation is only curiosity. The whole system is quite flexible and complex. (MOS is a relatively modest part of the generic "Electronic News Production System". It all fits together and it all works surprisingly well.
(I worked on some of this sort of software in the 2000-2010 time frame.)
{^_^}
There seems to be a massive hang-up over courts, sentencing, and punishment. People see the sentence as a punishment when it more importantly should serve a different purpose. When we have a person proven, in court, to be guilty of various crimes perhaps we should concentrate on the other P-word, protection.
Sentencing should serve society as well as issue any required chastisement to the criminal deemed necessary. Punishment is issued in anger. This person is so bad that something nasty must be done to that person to expiate his sins. But anger is almost always a counter-productive emotion. What really needs to be done is protect society from a known flawed component. Since fellow humans are involved as miscreants, prosecution, and juries simply discarding the bad component is highly improper. Mistakes happen and we owe it to ourselves to allow an out.
However, simply turning the flawed person back into society is wrong as well. It places you and me into the danger that the flawed person will fail again. So we put the person away for a period of time designed to perhaps give the person time to heal and protect society from the flawed person. For this an algorithm for sentencing guidance is probably a good thing. AIs learn patterns nicely. What traits would a flawed person display that would indicate a high chance that defects would be healed in a short time or would take a long time to be neutralized? Let an AI figure this out from the huge volumes of existing data and tracking modern results.
I am human and experience the urge to punish the particularly odious criminals with unspeakable punishments. Then I sit back and ask, more seriously, "What level of danger is this person to society for what period of time in confinement sequestered away from society for society's own protection." That should define duration. Best case the confinement should be fairly benign. Worst case some form of spanking is required and the conditions of the confinement are adjusted as the chastisement determined to be appropriate,
Protect society first, then if you must and it matters, punish the criminal.
{^_^}
Please explain to me in simple terms what is illegal about this alleged activity? Regardless of whether we can prove it or not there is nothing that makes this activity illegal at the "treason" level so many people are screaming about.
And if it is illegal, perhaps Barack H. Obama should be tried for messing with Israeli election politics and Thai politics among others. If WE do it to others, what right do we have to complain when others do it to us?
This "thing" is a huge nothing-burger.
{o.o}
One good EMP will take down the copper connections quite nicely. But, then, the power to make the controls driven by the copper connections work will be as gone as that for the FIOS or other connections.
{^_^}
Um, yes, it gives the concept of viral data a whole new meaning. Be careful with your data patterns so that none of them generate a killer disease in the Microsoft cloud in 2072.
{^_-}
Basically I find PayPal's estimation of my intelligence and that of all their other customers rather depressing. I rather doubt we're a collection of dunces that we'd mistake the two. On the other hand the similarity could lead to a misapprehension regarding the (lack of) relationship between the two. On the gripping hand, resorting to lawfare generally precedes the decline of all the other company products and services. I hope PayPal is an exception to this.
{^_^}
The real question should be why did the auto companies take so blinding long to start going public with their solutions. I know for a fact that the big three in the US have been working this problem for over 50 years. Classmates I had at Univ of Mich in the mid 60s were working on driverless cars with several proposed technologies. I suspect they were working on it from the WW-II days once radio controlled bombs and bombers were invented. What took them so long to get up off their asterisks and do something?
{^_^}
Jack, we're talking about screaming thumbsucking whiny liberals here. It is ALWAYS somebody ELSE's fault. They have forgotten how to accept responsibility for their own errors. But, that's all right. They don't know what the word "responsibility" means.
{^_-} (But only half in jest.)
The home I live in is literally surrounded by people with cable TV as close as 100' away in some places and 200' in others. But because the wire to feed our house is too long Charter Cable is too darned cheap to serve us. They screwed up laying out their network. I'm stuck with Frontier DSL at a whole 7 Mbps. Getting Fiber in here, despite over a decade of ads implying availability, I can't get that either.
{^_^}
Which liberal goon gets to make the call on what is fake news and what is not? Do you set the criterion? Do *I* get to set the criterion? I consider MSNBC, for a prime example, and CNN, for a second prime example, to be fake news sites where political coverage is involved. So I'd block the sites completely, or should I only block political news on the sites? Oh, wait, do I get to call what is political or not?
The perception is that Google is DEEP in bed with the progressive Democrat leadership. So will they declare FoxNews is a fake news site? Is Project Veritas a fake news site? Does truth and accuracy count or is it "truthiness" and "says what I want it to say" the criterion? This move on Google's part leaves me really considering that the perception matches reality in this case.
{^_^}
I'm trying to think back over history. Two interesting concepts that are currently in favor with different factions are Communism and Democracy. Neither works. The former cannot even be started without a despot involved. The latter leads to failures such as Greece, Thailand's "Democrazy", and other dramatic mistakes.
The US Constitutionally speaking is a Republic rather than a pure Democracy. I'd rather not go with a pure democracy. But, if I must then I'd demand that the election is not settled until one candidate has over 50% of the vote. So a runoff election between, in this case, Hillary and Trump with no third, fourth, or fifth party candidates involved is mandatory. I suspect the results might not be what the pure Democracy advocates are expecting. The third party candidates allowed people who just could not stomach voting for Hillary or Donald an outlet. For some reason they refused to vote for Hillary. For another reason they refused to vote for Donald. But, they did vote creating a higher vote count needed for a pure majority. If forced into the binary decision they might swallow bile and vote for the turd in the punch bowl rather than the as yet unindicted criminal who played fast and loose with US secrets, killed an ambassador for her convenience, and so forth.
But that's all a silly argument. It would require a Constitutional Amendment to make the change. And that's not gonna happen any time soon. The barriers an prospective amendment faces are very high compared to mere electoral college hurdles.
{^_^}
So far I've not been convinced it is broken the way it is except in some abstract aesthetic sense. The old saw generally makes sense, "If it ain't broke; don't fix it." I feel this is one of those instances.
{^_^}
This judge has just declared that you and I and everybody else has a requirement to pay for somebody else's political soapbox, sit there, and listen to it. This is NOT what the first amendment says if you exercise a few brain cells a few minutes. If it did then there is no right to privacy in your own home. A saner interpretation is that a person may pay for and erect his soapbox any place that is legal without invading other people's privacy and speak his piece. Then he must clean up any mess and leave. He may not force you to listen. He may no force me to listen. He may not force anybody else to listen.
Given the way robocalls and telemarketers invade your privacy at their whim if this judge's verdict is allowed to stand I feel sorry for the poor sods reduced to taking telemarketing jobs. Their lives won't be worth 2 lousy cents when the vigilante squads find them.
Meanwhile, it is sort of fun to listen to the reactions when I declare, "If you call me again I will climb through this telephone cord and rip your g., d,,, throat out." A sweet little girl accent works best.
{^_^}
I suspect the Asian nations will be pleased with brexit simply because they get access to the British market and goods without the EU getting in the way. Maybe this will be the end of expensive DSLR cameras that are limited to 29'59" of recording because the EU arbitrarily defined 30 minutes or more as a video camera and slapped much higher tariffs on them.
Maybe the next couple years will be time to invest in Britain rather than try to escape. Look at both sides of the possible effects before you jump.
{^_^}
If one drone means one accident in 187 million years of continuous operation what happens when we have 187 million drones out there up in the air at any given time? It's like 640k. People will perceive a need for more leading to hundreds of millions of drones some of which will be operating at any given time. Somehow one accident a year does not sound appetizing to me even if that's a world wide accident rate.
{^_^}
About 20 years ago my partner took me into his workplace at UniSys in Mission Viejo. He showed me a nice modular computer system, video module, disk drive module, CPU module, memory module, etc. It was designed some 30+ years ago now by Convergent Technologies. Burroughs bought then and sold the computers for a few years. And there was still a working example at the UniSys labs in Mission Viejo. (Burroughs plus Sperry became UniSys rather than Spurroughs.)
I suppose 30 years is long enough for the reinvention to be seen as something brand new and unique and patentable. However, in a real world I suspect this prior art, documented on Wikipedia (the model number to look for is Burroughs B25) should not be patentable by any stretch of the imagination.
{^_^}
I can hear her now, "What difference – at this point, what difference does it make?"
{o.o}
We call them audiopheelies when we joke about them in the trade.
Really, I suppose spending $25,000 on special non-resonant wooden knobs for the vacuum tube preamp is in some way better than blowing it all on coke or meth.
{o.o}
I wonder if I can "fix" my RAID 5 system with a one disk at a time approach. Pull a drive. Use Linux to zero the drive. Use Windows to build the requisite NTFS partition to prevent complaints. Run the update. Rezero the partition information. And finally reinstall the drive in the RAID and let the RAID rebuild. Lather, rinse, repeat three more times for the other disks.
Of course, methinks I'll take a complete disk image backup of the RAID just in case.
Any thoughts regarding this approach? Is there anything simpler that can be done?
{^_^}
I remember from the early 80s hearing about somebody able to decode a Selectric typewriter by its emissions, either electrical or acoustic. All your data are belong to us.
{O.O}