Um, didn't they say that there would be NO ICE on the north pole in 2008? It's 2009 and there is still ice on the North Pole.
Actually, no. They didn't. It was people like you who said that they said that. And congratulations on completely misrepresenting the current conclusion by the scientists, as well as the actual facts behind the conclusion. It's stupidity, ignorance and lies like this that demonstrate to me that a) global climate change is happening (otherwise there'd be better counter arguments floating around) and b) we're all doomed (you. duh.)
Be that as it may, I'd like to put the problem at the point where someone decided to sell separate text and audio contracts in an age where speech synthesis is common place. In other words, the contract is wrong to begin with.
A better comparison is public toilets. Reasonable amount of privacy, and occupation can be one down to one. They've been pretty much removed from all places, including Paris, because they essentially became cheap brothels and drug stations. With enough glass on the car, privacy could be removed, but it's still more of an issue than generalized public transportation - and people work very hard to keep those clean.
Note that nothing in your quote says anything about government mandated poor lending standards. The problem with Fannie and Freddy Mac was that they were seen as implicitly guaranteed by the government, which meant that people were taking risks that they shouldn't have on loans that these two entities were buying from other lenders. Turns out that that implicit guarantee had to be made explicit, much to the consternation of everybody who thought that people would behave rationally.
In other words, you're taking two arbitrary positions and proclaiming the arithmetic middle to be the "right" position. Sorry, life ain't that simple.
If you want an answer to your question, I'm a proud member of the do-the-right-thing-at-the-right-time party. I'd argue that anything else is mistaking classification for problem-solving.
Completely, utterly wrong. The problem is that God is often depicted as a really powerful alien with advanced technology. But that's not the definition - the definition is all-powerful and all-knowing. At that point, anything is possible, including a universe with a discoverable set of rules.
Separating religion and science is merely the product of a lot of people spending time on the issue, and figuring out that by definition, science cannot say anything about religion. Conversely, religion does not work as a process for discovery.
Those who argue that it's either religion or science all the way down haven't figured out what all-powerful actually means.
I have to say, I had a vastly different experience. - I didn't experience the NPC character resetting its health. Mind you, I didn't kill major bosses, but I did kill a few minor ones. None of them had that problem. - Areas were huge - covering them on foot was often a chore. I'm an avid explorer, and I found some of the early areas to be too big. - Can't say anything about crafting, as I didn't try it - Quests were quite often kill or collect quests. Same thing as wow, which only recently introduced anything other than those.
I suggest you try version 1.0 of WoW for kicks one day. It was abysmal compared to today's version.
Warhammer's problem is that it has to compete with today's WoW without ever having had the revenue that comes from 10million people paying about 10 bucks a month.
I believe the foil sleeve is actually built into the binding. My girlfriend got a new passport, and the cover and back are a lot thicker than the old passports. It seems that there is some extra layer in there.
I haven't tested the efficiency of the new passport design, but I'll be getting a passport carrier that is lined with foil.
And, just to provide the proper counter-point, people should be able to realize that things weren't the same millenia ago as they are now. Which means that trotting out "but it was hot long ago!" is idiotic - not to mention it misses the point that the last couple of times it was this hot for this long, humans weren't around.
I'm all for debate, but I'm coming to the conclusion that every time someone says this, what they actually mean is "listen to me even if I don't have anything new to say!"
Do you know Russian? Or are you guessing that the translation is more accurate? As far as I'm concerned, their translation is about as accurate as Blagojevich's story on what really happened on those tapes.
I trust russiatoday as far as I can throw Putin - not at all. They're the official mouthpiece of the Kremlin, with stories and coverage singularly designed to promote Russian image abroad.
If you read some books on complexity and chaos theory you will find that chaotic systems have a high degree of unpredictability.
That's incorrect. What's difficult to predict is the evolution of the chaotic system over specific time periods. However, all chaotic systems (note that they're not random) exhibit inflexion points, attractors and other super structures that make it possible to predict future behavior patterns within a certain boundary.
That's where the difference is between weather and climate: weather is the path that a chaotic system takes over a specific time period. Climate is the general trend that a chaotic system exhibits - and those can very easily be modeled, analyzed and used to make predictions.
If it doesn't balance, it shouldn't be on the market.
Complete nonsense. A company can put out any product it wants. If it wants to lose money on it, there's nothing preventing it.
Seekret seekret. Lots of things are in name only.
Seriously? That's your only reply? Not even a link? And you want me to take you seriously?
Just because a few were bad doesn't mean you have permission to be 3-4 times worse (PS2 failure rate = 9%, 360 = ~33%).
I have yet to see any real data on xbox failures. Care to link one? Or is this more forum drivel perpetuated as truth?
PC gamers, with the exception of MMORPG players, don't pay fees. Neither do playstation players. Neither do Nintendo players. Neither did dreamcast players.
And yet, the only people complaining about the Xbox fees are playstation fanboys. Weird, uh?
Good, because both will go bankrupt and by that time there will be a new startup to challenge Nintendo with a slightly less crappy business model.
I can only hope so. In the meantime, I'll enjoy my Xbox until something better comes along.
We, people from more peaceful parts of the world, generally assume that more democracy is always good. We fail to realize that at times, the majority is wrong.
Bingo. Not to mention that a number of the organizations classified as terrorists (Hamas and Muslim Brotherhood specifically) get elected because they're the only ones who provide the local services and benefits that the voting population cares about: schools, health care, security and food. Yes, they prefer that you support them and make it clear who is sponsoring these efforts. But when the time comes to vote, who do you think will win? The people who might kill some foreigners but who also provide services locally, or the apparatchiks from a far flung place who do nothing but talk?
The only thing shocking about the democratic victory of Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood is that people were not prepared for it.
1) Sunk cost. No one cares right now. 2) First I heard of this. A quick search turns up nothing outside of general managers moving from the Mac unit to the XBox unit 3) You've never dealt with the Atari 7200, or the PS2. 4) The only people who care are PS fanboys who don't pay the fee. Strange, really. 5) You're probably still talking about the XBox.
Finally, your point that if you take away profitable parts of the E&D division, you end up with a loss.... uh, really? I would have never thought that.
Get out of your basement and smell the coffee. MS doesn't care what the XBox used to be like; only that it represents MS (and Sony's) wet dream: a fully locked down and controlled hardware in the center of your living room. Both Sony and MS will stand behind the XBox and the PS until either one goes bankrupt.
I'll tell you something interesting: No stranger can hurt you as much as mom/dad can. Strangers are easy to single out, but no one wants to think about what goes on behind closed doors. You can get over occasional molestation a lot easier then being shut in a room for every day after coming home from school and being convinced that you're worthless.
I don't see this said nearly often enough. While molestation is very hard to get over - even occasional - being made to feel worthless on a daily basis is something that warps your worldview to the point where you don't even understand that there could be something else.
No need to apologize. I looked at the screenshots, and some were definitely titled for business use. Unless staffing and budget somehow are not official business. Your parent poster is imagining things.
Looks like you have a short term memory. A few emails were clearly titled with business related stuff such as budget and staffing issues.
I find it interesting that people complaining about slashkos have issues with historical accuracy, and seem to be in the rightwing loony bin. I might have a new filtering mechanism for what posts are worthwhile reading.
I guess my comment that the NSA would "collect everything" was imprecise. What I meant to say was that they would have to intercept everything. From there, everything is analyzed via machines (where I count discarding stuff based on internal algorithms as analyzing), while some interesting stuff gets sent to human analysts. As for storing everything - indeed, that can't be right. But whatever is flagged as interesting can be stored. As for how much that is..... if they use some FIFO type rules on theirdatabases, with some slow decay in how long some stuff is kept - several gigabytes per hour in distributed databases is downright trivial.
If it's innocuous, it goes on the whitelist never to be heard from again...
Here's where I think the difference between intelligence and security is: internet security does not care who sits at the computer, just what the traffic does. Intelligence works the other way around: it's all about who sits at the computer and what is sent, but not what the communication does.
Security folks for the largest part didn't care one whit whether I had to send a white paper, receive email or allow for customers to access their information. What mattered was whether the modifications they had to make would allow malicious traffic to go through. Securing this can be accomplished via whitelists. There really isn't an equivalent whitelist that says "this traffic pattern is never going to be interesting", especially when you start to be concerned about sleeper cells. You have to know what the content is to be able to make that assertion.
A discussion. I'm a bit surprised. Well, let's take advantage of this, shall we?
Paragraphs one and two are both valid and good points. They're abstract points, but they're pretty much how things ought to be. Your final question is... well, easily answered. It is, of course, a yes to oversight and checks and balances. However, the problem was that I had to assume a number of things for the first two paragraphs and the question to work: that it is a binary true or false, that the dichotomy is true and that there exists a technological solution that implements all the ideas laid out in the law.
I'll leave the discussion of whether your question is the only way to look at running sigint to another post. Instead, I'll focus on the implementation of the oversight and collection.
#1 Rule in sigint: in order to analyze a signal, you have to intercept it. That includes content, context and meta-data. This means that for sigint to be useful as the primary means of intelligence gathering, it has to intercept signals that are not known to yield hits. In other words, it has to cast as wide a net as possible. This is before judicial oversight, before checks and balances can come into play. I'll repeat if for emphasis: for sigint to perform as expected, it HAS to tap everybody, and it HAS to store as much data as possible on the taps.
This is the part that I, and a lot of other people, have a problem with. Why? As always, abuse. It could be something as simple as looking up the new boyfriend of your niece in the spiffy new database. Or it could be to look up your ex-girlfriend's new address after she ran from you. Or it could be to look up who leaked that embarrassing photo of you with that underage page. Or it could be sold to the highest bidder.
Since I know that this is a point that escapes your authoritarian leanings, I'll make it clear: I don't care whether the particular procedures have been approved by the Supreme Court. It bothers me that there is a dragnet out there that monitors all traffic from all people - including citizens - regardless of what these people have done. Furthermore, because the data collected and the means of collection are top secret, there is no way for the average citizen to figure out whether the laws in place are appropriate to prevent a blanket monitoring of everyone. And since it is the citizens that are being monitored, they ought to have a right to know what kind of data is being collected about them.
In short, there are two issues here: #1 The way that sigint is being used right now requires blanket monitoring, regardless of what the law says. #2 This is a discussion of what is legitimate, not what is legal. And US citizens have no legal means to ascertain whether the monitoring being done on them is either.
I know that for you, these are irrelevant things. However, this is a judgment call on your part, based on what you value. You value rule of law and control. I, on the other hand, value my ability to control what is being done to me. The two are diametrically opposed. For your sake, I hope you don't find out first-hand why.
Slashdot Mirror
Um, didn't they say that there would be NO ICE on the north pole in 2008? It's 2009 and there is still ice on the North Pole.
Actually, no. They didn't. It was people like you who said that they said that.
And congratulations on completely misrepresenting the current conclusion by the scientists, as well as the actual facts behind the conclusion. It's stupidity, ignorance and lies like this that demonstrate to me that a) global climate change is happening (otherwise there'd be better counter arguments floating around) and b) we're all doomed (you. duh.)
Be that as it may, I'd like to put the problem at the point where someone decided to sell separate text and audio contracts in an age where speech synthesis is common place. In other words, the contract is wrong to begin with.
And I'm sure you have some data to back that up, right?
For what it's worth - anyone who goes by anything other than NPD data is a fool. But then again, that wasn't your point, was it?
A better comparison is public toilets. Reasonable amount of privacy, and occupation can be one down to one. They've been pretty much removed from all places, including Paris, because they essentially became cheap brothels and drug stations. With enough glass on the car, privacy could be removed, but it's still more of an issue than generalized public transportation - and people work very hard to keep those clean.
Note that nothing in your quote says anything about government mandated poor lending standards. The problem with Fannie and Freddy Mac was that they were seen as implicitly guaranteed by the government, which meant that people were taking risks that they shouldn't have on loans that these two entities were buying from other lenders. Turns out that that implicit guarantee had to be made explicit, much to the consternation of everybody who thought that people would behave rationally.
In other words, you're taking two arbitrary positions and proclaiming the arithmetic middle to be the "right" position. Sorry, life ain't that simple.
If you want an answer to your question, I'm a proud member of the do-the-right-thing-at-the-right-time party. I'd argue that anything else is mistaking classification for problem-solving.
Completely, utterly wrong. The problem is that God is often depicted as a really powerful alien with advanced technology. But that's not the definition - the definition is all-powerful and all-knowing. At that point, anything is possible, including a universe with a discoverable set of rules.
Separating religion and science is merely the product of a lot of people spending time on the issue, and figuring out that by definition, science cannot say anything about religion. Conversely, religion does not work as a process for discovery.
Those who argue that it's either religion or science all the way down haven't figured out what all-powerful actually means.
Just as an FYI - AC ripped his comment straight from the transcript of a youtube video. Youtube transcript (and commentary) here:
http://talkingtotheists.blogspot.com/2008/05/story-thus-far-noted-youtube.html
I have to say, I had a vastly different experience.
- I didn't experience the NPC character resetting its health. Mind you, I didn't kill major bosses, but I did kill a few minor ones. None of them had that problem.
- Areas were huge - covering them on foot was often a chore. I'm an avid explorer, and I found some of the early areas to be too big.
- Can't say anything about crafting, as I didn't try it
- Quests were quite often kill or collect quests. Same thing as wow, which only recently introduced anything other than those.
I suggest you try version 1.0 of WoW for kicks one day. It was abysmal compared to today's version.
Warhammer's problem is that it has to compete with today's WoW without ever having had the revenue that comes from 10million people paying about 10 bucks a month.
I believe the foil sleeve is actually built into the binding. My girlfriend got a new passport, and the cover and back are a lot thicker than the old passports. It seems that there is some extra layer in there.
I haven't tested the efficiency of the new passport design, but I'll be getting a passport carrier that is lined with foil.
And, just to provide the proper counter-point, people should be able to realize that things weren't the same millenia ago as they are now. Which means that trotting out "but it was hot long ago!" is idiotic - not to mention it misses the point that the last couple of times it was this hot for this long, humans weren't around.
I'm all for debate, but I'm coming to the conclusion that every time someone says this, what they actually mean is "listen to me even if I don't have anything new to say!"
Do you know Russian? Or are you guessing that the translation is more accurate? As far as I'm concerned, their translation is about as accurate as Blagojevich's story on what really happened on those tapes.
I trust russiatoday as far as I can throw Putin - not at all. They're the official mouthpiece of the Kremlin, with stories and coverage singularly designed to promote Russian image abroad.
If you read some books on complexity and chaos theory you will find that chaotic systems have a high degree of unpredictability.
That's incorrect. What's difficult to predict is the evolution of the chaotic system over specific time periods. However, all chaotic systems (note that they're not random) exhibit inflexion points, attractors and other super structures that make it possible to predict future behavior patterns within a certain boundary.
That's where the difference is between weather and climate: weather is the path that a chaotic system takes over a specific time period. Climate is the general trend that a chaotic system exhibits - and those can very easily be modeled, analyzed and used to make predictions.
If it doesn't balance, it shouldn't be on the market.
Complete nonsense. A company can put out any product it wants. If it wants to lose money on it, there's nothing preventing it.
Seekret seekret. Lots of things are in name only.
Seriously? That's your only reply? Not even a link? And you want me to take you seriously?
Just because a few were bad doesn't mean you have permission to be 3-4 times worse (PS2 failure rate = 9%, 360 = ~33%).
I have yet to see any real data on xbox failures. Care to link one? Or is this more forum drivel perpetuated as truth?
PC gamers, with the exception of MMORPG players, don't pay fees. Neither do playstation players. Neither do Nintendo players. Neither did dreamcast players.
And yet, the only people complaining about the Xbox fees are playstation fanboys. Weird, uh?
Good, because both will go bankrupt and by that time there will be a new startup to challenge Nintendo with a slightly less crappy business model.
I can only hope so. In the meantime, I'll enjoy my Xbox until something better comes along.
We, people from more peaceful parts of the world, generally assume that more democracy is always good. We fail to realize that at times, the majority is wrong.
Bingo. Not to mention that a number of the organizations classified as terrorists (Hamas and Muslim Brotherhood specifically) get elected because they're the only ones who provide the local services and benefits that the voting population cares about: schools, health care, security and food. Yes, they prefer that you support them and make it clear who is sponsoring these efforts. But when the time comes to vote, who do you think will win? The people who might kill some foreigners but who also provide services locally, or the apparatchiks from a far flung place who do nothing but talk?
The only thing shocking about the democratic victory of Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood is that people were not prepared for it.
Crap - accidentally modded you overrated. Posting to undo bad modding. For the record, the post was hilarious. :D
1) Sunk cost. No one cares right now.
2) First I heard of this. A quick search turns up nothing outside of general managers moving from the Mac unit to the XBox unit
3) You've never dealt with the Atari 7200, or the PS2.
4) The only people who care are PS fanboys who don't pay the fee. Strange, really.
5) You're probably still talking about the XBox.
Finally, your point that if you take away profitable parts of the E&D division, you end up with a loss.... uh, really? I would have never thought that.
Get out of your basement and smell the coffee. MS doesn't care what the XBox used to be like; only that it represents MS (and Sony's) wet dream: a fully locked down and controlled hardware in the center of your living room. Both Sony and MS will stand behind the XBox and the PS until either one goes bankrupt.
And yet, he has already been responsible for more positive developments than Bush in his entire 8 years. I'd say that's quite the win.
I'll tell you something interesting: No stranger can hurt you as much as mom/dad can. Strangers are easy to single out, but no one wants to think about what goes on behind closed doors. You can get over occasional molestation a lot easier then being shut in a room for every day after coming home from school and being convinced that you're worthless.
I don't see this said nearly often enough. While molestation is very hard to get over - even occasional - being made to feel worthless on a daily basis is something that warps your worldview to the point where you don't even understand that there could be something else.
No need to apologize. I looked at the screenshots, and some were definitely titled for business use. Unless staffing and budget somehow are not official business. Your parent poster is imagining things.
Looks like you have a short term memory. A few emails were clearly titled with business related stuff such as budget and staffing issues.
I find it interesting that people complaining about slashkos have issues with historical accuracy, and seem to be in the rightwing loony bin. I might have a new filtering mechanism for what posts are worthwhile reading.
I guess my comment that the NSA would "collect everything" was imprecise. What I meant to say was that they would have to intercept everything. From there, everything is analyzed via machines (where I count discarding stuff based on internal algorithms as analyzing), while some interesting stuff gets sent to human analysts. As for storing everything - indeed, that can't be right. But whatever is flagged as interesting can be stored. As for how much that is..... if they use some FIFO type rules on theirdatabases, with some slow decay in how long some stuff is kept - several gigabytes per hour in distributed databases is downright trivial.
If it's innocuous, it goes on the whitelist never to be heard from again...
Here's where I think the difference between intelligence and security is: internet security does not care who sits at the computer, just what the traffic does. Intelligence works the other way around: it's all about who sits at the computer and what is sent, but not what the communication does.
Security folks for the largest part didn't care one whit whether I had to send a white paper, receive email or allow for customers to access their information. What mattered was whether the modifications they had to make would allow malicious traffic to go through. Securing this can be accomplished via whitelists. There really isn't an equivalent whitelist that says "this traffic pattern is never going to be interesting", especially when you start to be concerned about sleeper cells. You have to know what the content is to be able to make that assertion.
A discussion. I'm a bit surprised. Well, let's take advantage of this, shall we?
Paragraphs one and two are both valid and good points. They're abstract points, but they're pretty much how things ought to be. Your final question is... well, easily answered. It is, of course, a yes to oversight and checks and balances. However, the problem was that I had to assume a number of things for the first two paragraphs and the question to work: that it is a binary true or false, that the dichotomy is true and that there exists a technological solution that implements all the ideas laid out in the law.
I'll leave the discussion of whether your question is the only way to look at running sigint to another post. Instead, I'll focus on the implementation of the oversight and collection.
#1 Rule in sigint: in order to analyze a signal, you have to intercept it. That includes content, context and meta-data. This means that for sigint to be useful as the primary means of intelligence gathering, it has to intercept signals that are not known to yield hits. In other words, it has to cast as wide a net as possible. This is before judicial oversight, before checks and balances can come into play. I'll repeat if for emphasis: for sigint to perform as expected, it HAS to tap everybody, and it HAS to store as much data as possible on the taps.
This is the part that I, and a lot of other people, have a problem with. Why? As always, abuse. It could be something as simple as looking up the new boyfriend of your niece in the spiffy new database. Or it could be to look up your ex-girlfriend's new address after she ran from you. Or it could be to look up who leaked that embarrassing photo of you with that underage page. Or it could be sold to the highest bidder.
Since I know that this is a point that escapes your authoritarian leanings, I'll make it clear: I don't care whether the particular procedures have been approved by the Supreme Court. It bothers me that there is a dragnet out there that monitors all traffic from all people - including citizens - regardless of what these people have done. Furthermore, because the data collected and the means of collection are top secret, there is no way for the average citizen to figure out whether the laws in place are appropriate to prevent a blanket monitoring of everyone. And since it is the citizens that are being monitored, they ought to have a right to know what kind of data is being collected about them.
In short, there are two issues here:
#1 The way that sigint is being used right now requires blanket monitoring, regardless of what the law says.
#2 This is a discussion of what is legitimate, not what is legal. And US citizens have no legal means to ascertain whether the monitoring being done on them is either.
I know that for you, these are irrelevant things. However, this is a judgment call on your part, based on what you value. You value rule of law and control. I, on the other hand, value my ability to control what is being done to me. The two are diametrically opposed. For your sake, I hope you don't find out first-hand why.