Well, the DHS head was all in favor of speed cameras and tickets-by-mail in Arizona. Those cameras are largely turned off now, as it was apparent that not only was there no due process, but anyone with any pull at all could escape the system entirely. Oh, and if you ignored the tickets, enforcement was at best spotty, and at worst arbitrary. Pathetic. It could have worked, but apparently there wasn't enough profit in it.
"The DHS is reaching for new ways to achieve visible results without doing the hard work of battling for the budget needed"
Oh, did you mean DHS is trying deperately to justify their existence?
Like every other agency should do. We could hope that performance would be clear evidence of need, but in DHS' case, this is not at all that simple. No successful incidents seems to indicate DHS is doing the job, but reality shows that travelers have so far stopped all attempts, and on the plane at that.
Sadly, knowing the head of the department's history, we will get the sad song-and-dance about how they can't really tell us of their successful intercepts of attempted attacks. Nice work if you can get it, I think.
Various actual corn production subsidies seem to total about $3 Billion this year, down from $3.7 Billion last year, and an extraordinary high of $10.1 Billion in 2005. Corn ethanol subsidies this year will amount to about $5 Billion. Maybe more.
I'm not at all in favor of subsidizing corn for fuel. This makes no sense. Stablizing food prices is attractive, consider the dairy industry in particular as a fairly good example. Ethanol? Nope.
Subsidizing telephone service made sense when the telephone was the only useful means of instant communications. Farms surely used them to call the doctor, fire department, and even to check on commodity pricing.
Today, though, landline service could be replaced with broadband data. Skype etc. could replace landline voice, and decent Internet service provides all sorts of opportunities for rural residents, from schooling to commodity pricing data and sales for farmers. They do this now where it's available.
The real questions to me are:
- Will subsidized service also be relatively unrestricted? Will the FCC enforce rural service that is unfiltered, uncapped, and unthrottled? Will users be able to make use of any Internet service or protocol as they wish?
- Will subsidized service that replaces landline voice be permitted without penalty or punitive cost hikes for both rural and urban landline service?
- Will the FCC extend protection for free Internet usage to urban users also?
While the USF was a good idea, it resulted in the minimum service being delivered in many cases, and at very high cost. The school/library component was just a direct redistribution to local government in most cases. Moving to broadband might largely result in shifting the subsidy to school/library data services, and not so much to rural residential service. And much of the same infrastructure that was paid for with USF over the years will probably be declared useless for broadband, spurring another round of upgrading the rural telecom plant. that shoudl take a few years, and give the industry time to figure out how to make money from both ends of this candle. Nice.
Good idea. Wasteful, and inevitably so. Worth it if done right.
Would some of you clever (and snarky) types consider the security issues that persistent RAM brings?
Powering off such a machine leaves it entirely ready to be used, true, but also entirely ready to be examined by whoever lifts it out of your bag at the airport or Starbucks. Freezing and bumping DRAM now is considered a genuine, if rare, security concern. No one talks much about hiberfil security. All of my RAM still loaded, ready to be dissected by whoever cares to physically take it away?
How long before someone works out a system to mount this RAM elsewhere and peruse it at their leasure?
Every once in a while, under the guise of pointless maintenance, I defrag the hiberfil. Old habit. When I move over to Linux, that will become impossible, and so they tell me even MORE pointless. But then Hibernate will become an adventure.
Then encrypt the data, nimrod. These people actually get paid? Since when do they store HIPAA-related data and NOT encrypt it in the tables or wherever.
Exporting data to a nonencrypted anything is wrong. And backup tapes need not have raw data on them. Probably they shouldn't.
This is my idea for a novel. In a future world, not too distant, everything you buy is known by multiple corporations, immediately. If you buy a new shirt and slacks, well, you get an offer on your deck for a deal on a new belt and shoes. If you buy cereal, you get a prompt directing you to where the new fortified milk is.
As they fully develop your profile, they start sending you specific advertisments, everywhere, so that inevitably you only see stuff that you *should* be interested in buying. If you decide out of the blue to buy a new hat, for instance, well, before you can complete the sale there are offers on your deck to consider. Looking for a new piece of furniture? You not only get search results for all kinds of related or similar stuff, but you get offers based on your price flexibility. Or to put it less kindly, you get offers for stuff priced as they think you ought be be paying. Discounts from higher-priced stuff. If all you wanted was a cheap, cute watch, well, you'll have to go to a cheap, cute watch store, cause when you walk into a regular watch store the clerks already know what price strata you should be looking at, and they direct you to those display cases. And the price tags? Magic - they are all electronic, linked to the master, so (kinda like Kohl's) the prices change depending on who's in front of the case. Or go blank if there is too much diversity among the buyers. This is not even fantasy.
Oh, and if you're short of funds? Some stores won't even open the door for you.
Imagine the fun when your account is hijacked, and you seem broke. You can't even approach a bank to check your balance. You're outcast. A few bits here or there, an enterprising individual that skimmed your ID, and you're not just broke, you're locked out of your own apartment, since you can't afford it any more. Your employer can't pay you since your account is dead, so you're fired.
The point is, once this marketing data is shared enough, it becomes YOU. My objection is to the sharing. They should disclose where the data goes. I don't believe for a moment that my history with Borders stayed with Borders, and I don't for a moment believe that BN will keep it to itself. Once the publishers also get the data, it's out of the bag. I have no hope of every controlling it.
I first ran Linux as Slackware 0.9 on a 486DX2-66 with 12MB RAM. Took a weekend to get the x config working. I think it was fvwm or something like that for X. My partner in crime got his Textronix X term running remotely after a week of off-hours work and many, many firewall configs tried and failed. I lost all interest in dealing with SCO and System V after that.
My first LAMP server was catually a NAMP server - NetWare 5.1, same machine. Tomcat was a mess, but it worked.
"any time you try to run the assumptions of most religions through the filter of reality you end up with either an indifferent or malicious God"
This is common mistake.
If you take a moment and contemplate the possibility of God, and then consider His nature, you may realize that God could not possibly be anyhthing like us, neither in form, substance, or nature. To presume you could understand even the least thing about God without Him explaining it to you is preposterous.
Running God through the filter of Reality is the wrong way to go about it. Run Reality through the filter of God. Then you realize that just as your dog has no concept of out of order execution when it stares at your iPad displaying a picture of a bone, so we have no concept of an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent Triune God when we look at our Universe and are not just staring, but are regularly struck with awe at the magnificence of it.
Trying to understand God is nearly pointless. But if your complaint is that evil and suffering exist, there are many, many treatises that explain that better than I ever could on my own. Those questions, why evil and suffering, predate Science. Have you studied this much?
Your claim that the media turned their eyes away? Ludicrous. GW Bush endured 8 years of relentless media attack on EVERY subject and area of interest. Unending, continuous, and intense condemnation.
Whether or not he deserved it. To claim the media missed any opportunity to condemn, ridicule, or excoriate him is to deny the obvious.
Hydro electric power uses stored energy (impounded water) to provide electricity when needed. Very reliable. It does, of course, have consequences, for instance the destruction of river habitat and such, but changing river to lake seems to please a lot of people. Not so much the fish, which population changes as these new lakes are repopulated with different species.
Wind/Solar require different forms of storage to be effective. I'm thinking that we may see decentralized batteries in the future if something safe and affordable comes up, but more to the point, even a national 'smart grid' will still have the problem of wanting power when it's needed. For instance, when the East Coast finally goes to bed, the West Coast is 3 hours away from that, so it could potentially receive power from East Coast generators. When the East Coast wakes up the next morning, West Coast generators can get a head start. But for much of the day, there is no off-peak source of power. Regional grids make more sense to me.
And then there's the whole SCADA problem. Whatever controls this national grid is vulnerable, if for no ther reason than it's an attractive target.
If you don't design security in, you lose. We live in a dangrous world, my friends.
In other words, they destroyed copies because they could always get the original data.
I was not thinking of ONE specific instance. But you seem to refer to the UEA incident in 2009. From the Sunday Times article of 11/29/09:
"The data were gathered from weather stations around the world and then adjusted to take account of variables in the way they were collected. The revised figures were kept, but the originals â" stored on paper and magnetic tape â" were dumped to save space when the CRU moved to a new building."
I'm still confused, did they dump the original data? Well, their comment was, from the NYT of 10/14/09:
"According to CRU's Web site, "Data storage availability in the 1980s meant that we were not able to keep the multiple sources for some sites, only the station series after adjustment for homogeneity issues. We, therefore, do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (i.e. quality controlled and homogenized) data."
I've read this snippet a few times. I still don't understand it. It just seems they stated 'we manipulate the data to make sense of it, scrub the anomalies, and then we delete the original data since we don't use it anyways, it's too noisy to be useful.
My dear cousin, the doctoral statistician working in the pharmaceutical industry, sometimes regaled me with stories of the lengths that researchers would to to to make data out of noise, or make favorable data out of unfavorable, or just make it up. Her job was to identify these attempts so her bosses knew to trust the data or make them do it over. We last talked about this in 2007, and she was not impressed with the manipulations she saw in these climate models. But she wouldn't come right out and say they were gaming the data, just that they were looking for the evidence they expected to see. And that doesn't always mean they are wrong. And some data, she kept warning me, just needs to be massaged.
Yeah, in other words it's too complicated. Trust them. With everything.
To be honest, I stopped looking in 2009. I had a very hard time finding anything raw.
Many of the links at realclimate are processed data, but they have some gaps, caused by the sources.
And yes, it takes a while to paw through it to figure out what is and isn't available, how it seemed to be collected, and what gaps, if any, there are and what they might mean.
Slashdot Mirror
"Innocence is measured in fiscal wealth these days, I'm afraid."
Or celebrity.
Well, the DHS head was all in favor of speed cameras and tickets-by-mail in Arizona. Those cameras are largely turned off now, as it was apparent that not only was there no due process, but anyone with any pull at all could escape the system entirely. Oh, and if you ignored the tickets, enforcement was at best spotty, and at worst arbitrary. Pathetic. It could have worked, but apparently there wasn't enough profit in it.
"The DHS is reaching for new ways to achieve visible results without doing the hard work of battling for the budget needed"
Oh, did you mean DHS is trying deperately to justify their existence?
Like every other agency should do. We could hope that performance would be clear evidence of need, but in DHS' case, this is not at all that simple. No successful incidents seems to indicate DHS is doing the job, but reality shows that travelers have so far stopped all attempts, and on the plane at that.
Sadly, knowing the head of the department's history, we will get the sad song-and-dance about how they can't really tell us of their successful intercepts of attempted attacks. Nice work if you can get it, I think.
Various actual corn production subsidies seem to total about $3 Billion this year, down from $3.7 Billion last year, and an extraordinary high of $10.1 Billion in 2005. Corn ethanol subsidies this year will amount to about $5 Billion. Maybe more.
I'm not at all in favor of subsidizing corn for fuel. This makes no sense. Stablizing food prices is attractive, consider the dairy industry in particular as a fairly good example. Ethanol? Nope.
Subsidizing telephone service made sense when the telephone was the only useful means of instant communications. Farms surely used them to call the doctor, fire department, and even to check on commodity pricing.
Today, though, landline service could be replaced with broadband data. Skype etc. could replace landline voice, and decent Internet service provides all sorts of opportunities for rural residents, from schooling to commodity pricing data and sales for farmers. They do this now where it's available.
The real questions to me are:
- Will subsidized service also be relatively unrestricted? Will the FCC enforce rural service that is unfiltered, uncapped, and unthrottled? Will users be able to make use of any Internet service or protocol as they wish?
- Will subsidized service that replaces landline voice be permitted without penalty or punitive cost hikes for both rural and urban landline service?
- Will the FCC extend protection for free Internet usage to urban users also?
While the USF was a good idea, it resulted in the minimum service being delivered in many cases, and at very high cost. The school/library component was just a direct redistribution to local government in most cases. Moving to broadband might largely result in shifting the subsidy to school/library data services, and not so much to rural residential service. And much of the same infrastructure that was paid for with USF over the years will probably be declared useless for broadband, spurring another round of upgrading the rural telecom plant. that shoudl take a few years, and give the industry time to figure out how to make money from both ends of this candle. Nice.
Good idea. Wasteful, and inevitably so. Worth it if done right.
Would some of you clever (and snarky) types consider the security issues that persistent RAM brings?
Powering off such a machine leaves it entirely ready to be used, true, but also entirely ready to be examined by whoever lifts it out of your bag at the airport or Starbucks. Freezing and bumping DRAM now is considered a genuine, if rare, security concern. No one talks much about hiberfil security. All of my RAM still loaded, ready to be dissected by whoever cares to physically take it away?
How long before someone works out a system to mount this RAM elsewhere and peruse it at their leasure?
Mine only has 4GB of ram.
Every once in a while, under the guise of pointless maintenance, I defrag the hiberfil. Old habit. When I move over to Linux, that will become impossible, and so they tell me even MORE pointless. But then Hibernate will become an adventure.
I close the lid, and it hibernates then. No waiting an hour and wasting the power.
And it pops back up in 25 seconds when I ask it to. I can live with that.
"It's very hard to encrypt a backup tape."'
Then encrypt the data, nimrod. These people actually get paid? Since when do they store HIPAA-related data and NOT encrypt it in the tables or wherever.
Exporting data to a nonencrypted anything is wrong. And backup tapes need not have raw data on them. Probably they shouldn't.
It's the previous and ongoing sharing.
This is my idea for a novel. In a future world, not too distant, everything you buy is known by multiple corporations, immediately. If you buy a new shirt and slacks, well, you get an offer on your deck for a deal on a new belt and shoes. If you buy cereal, you get a prompt directing you to where the new fortified milk is.
As they fully develop your profile, they start sending you specific advertisments, everywhere, so that inevitably you only see stuff that you *should* be interested in buying. If you decide out of the blue to buy a new hat, for instance, well, before you can complete the sale there are offers on your deck to consider. Looking for a new piece of furniture? You not only get search results for all kinds of related or similar stuff, but you get offers based on your price flexibility. Or to put it less kindly, you get offers for stuff priced as they think you ought be be paying. Discounts from higher-priced stuff. If all you wanted was a cheap, cute watch, well, you'll have to go to a cheap, cute watch store, cause when you walk into a regular watch store the clerks already know what price strata you should be looking at, and they direct you to those display cases. And the price tags? Magic - they are all electronic, linked to the master, so (kinda like Kohl's) the prices change depending on who's in front of the case. Or go blank if there is too much diversity among the buyers. This is not even fantasy.
Oh, and if you're short of funds? Some stores won't even open the door for you.
Imagine the fun when your account is hijacked, and you seem broke. You can't even approach a bank to check your balance. You're outcast. A few bits here or there, an enterprising individual that skimmed your ID, and you're not just broke, you're locked out of your own apartment, since you can't afford it any more. Your employer can't pay you since your account is dead, so you're fired.
The point is, once this marketing data is shared enough, it becomes YOU. My objection is to the sharing. They should disclose where the data goes. I don't believe for a moment that my history with Borders stayed with Borders, and I don't for a moment believe that BN will keep it to itself. Once the publishers also get the data, it's out of the bag. I have no hope of every controlling it.
And I never did.
They can't even make a point without proffering the most offensive slurs against Christianity. You want polite? Go to Trees and Things.
To be fair, they are mostly ACs. What do you expect, since they are ashamed of themselves and largely spew so they can respond back and forth.
Some time in the early 90s. AMPS phones were not known to have SMS. My first OKI didn't, but it was a bag phone, and used the same battery as my VCR.
I first ran Linux as Slackware 0.9 on a 486DX2-66 with 12MB RAM. Took a weekend to get the x config working. I think it was fvwm or something like that for X. My partner in crime got his Textronix X term running remotely after a week of off-hours work and many, many firewall configs tried and failed. I lost all interest in dealing with SCO and System V after that.
My first LAMP server was catually a NAMP server - NetWare 5.1, same machine. Tomcat was a mess, but it worked.
"but as the differences among the top teams and their cars are very, very small it's impossible to say in advance"
So *that's* why they run the race?
Huh.
"now they get to make you pay for their calls to you"
Well, even in the days of landlines, we always paid. Yes, we PAID for our service.
But it was flat-rate for incoming calls.
I've got an unlimited voice plan now, so I can take time to waste these calls and eventually get dropped from the list. But not everyone does I know.
Just remember, landlines always were paying for incoming calls, just not by the minute. Apparently towers are more precious than cables.
I've gotten political robocalls for several years, maybe more than 5.
I gert regular calls for deadbeats that just make up a number. I've had this number for 5 1/2 years, never assigned elsewhere.
Feh. Loser deadbeats. Fortunately, I don't sound female, nor Hispanic, and the collectors figure it out quickly.
"any time you try to run the assumptions of most religions through the filter of reality you end up with either an indifferent or malicious God"
This is common mistake.
If you take a moment and contemplate the possibility of God, and then consider His nature, you may realize that God could not possibly be anyhthing like us, neither in form, substance, or nature. To presume you could understand even the least thing about God without Him explaining it to you is preposterous.
Running God through the filter of Reality is the wrong way to go about it. Run Reality through the filter of God. Then you realize that just as your dog has no concept of out of order execution when it stares at your iPad displaying a picture of a bone, so we have no concept of an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent Triune God when we look at our Universe and are not just staring, but are regularly struck with awe at the magnificence of it.
Trying to understand God is nearly pointless. But if your complaint is that evil and suffering exist, there are many, many treatises that explain that better than I ever could on my own. Those questions, why evil and suffering, predate Science. Have you studied this much?
You presume I believe without evidence. You are in error.
Your claim that the media turned their eyes away? Ludicrous. GW Bush endured 8 years of relentless media attack on EVERY subject and area of interest. Unending, continuous, and intense condemnation.
Whether or not he deserved it. To claim the media missed any opportunity to condemn, ridicule, or excoriate him is to deny the obvious.
At first I thought you were delusional. but no, you're just trolling.
"Facebook obligation would make sign-up easier."
To market you. And to you.
Hydro electric power uses stored energy (impounded water) to provide electricity when needed. Very reliable. It does, of course, have consequences, for instance the destruction of river habitat and such, but changing river to lake seems to please a lot of people. Not so much the fish, which population changes as these new lakes are repopulated with different species.
Wind/Solar require different forms of storage to be effective. I'm thinking that we may see decentralized batteries in the future if something safe and affordable comes up, but more to the point, even a national 'smart grid' will still have the problem of wanting power when it's needed. For instance, when the East Coast finally goes to bed, the West Coast is 3 hours away from that, so it could potentially receive power from East Coast generators. When the East Coast wakes up the next morning, West Coast generators can get a head start. But for much of the day, there is no off-peak source of power. Regional grids make more sense to me.
And then there's the whole SCADA problem. Whatever controls this national grid is vulnerable, if for no ther reason than it's an attractive target.
If you don't design security in, you lose. We live in a dangrous world, my friends.
Is it high school again in here? Damn those neutrinos...
In other words, they destroyed copies because they could always get the original data.
I was not thinking of ONE specific instance. But you seem to refer to the UEA incident in 2009. From the Sunday Times article of 11/29/09:
"The data were gathered from weather stations around the world and then adjusted to take account of variables in the way they were collected. The revised figures were kept, but the originals â" stored on paper and magnetic tape â" were dumped to save space when the CRU moved to a new building."
I'm still confused, did they dump the original data? Well, their comment was, from the NYT of 10/14/09:
"According to CRU's Web site, "Data storage availability in the 1980s meant that we were not able to keep the multiple sources for some sites, only the station series after adjustment for homogeneity issues. We, therefore, do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (i.e. quality controlled and homogenized) data."
I've read this snippet a few times. I still don't understand it. It just seems they stated 'we manipulate the data to make sense of it, scrub the anomalies, and then we delete the original data since we don't use it anyways, it's too noisy to be useful.
My dear cousin, the doctoral statistician working in the pharmaceutical industry, sometimes regaled me with stories of the lengths that researchers would to to to make data out of noise, or make favorable data out of unfavorable, or just make it up. Her job was to identify these attempts so her bosses knew to trust the data or make them do it over. We last talked about this in 2007, and she was not impressed with the manipulations she saw in these climate models. But she wouldn't come right out and say they were gaming the data, just that they were looking for the evidence they expected to see. And that doesn't always mean they are wrong. And some data, she kept warning me, just needs to be massaged.
Yeah, in other words it's too complicated. Trust them. With everything.
To be honest, I stopped looking in 2009. I had a very hard time finding anything raw.
Many of the links at realclimate are processed data, but they have some gaps, caused by the sources.
And yes, it takes a while to paw through it to figure out what is and isn't available, how it seemed to be collected, and what gaps, if any, there are and what they might mean.