'Knowledge equals safety. They know where you and your family are...now it's time to turn the tables so that you know where they live and can make better decisions about where to allow your kids to play.'
Oh really? The US DoJ's Inspector General had some withering criticism of the utility of the information sources this guy is relying on.
"We found that the registries that make up the national sex offender registration system - the FBI's National Sex Offender Registry (NSOR) and the state public sex offender registries accessed through OJP's National Sex Offender Public Registry Website (NSOPR) - are inaccurate and incomplete. As a result, neither law enforcement officials nor the public can rely on the registries for identifying registered sex offenders, particularly those who are fugitives."
On antitrust, the Obama Administration seems to be just looking for something to do. They're looking at going after Google over... precisely what? The fact that they produce a lot of free apps which any small, dedicated team of developers could reasonably reproduce and integrate? Some are clamoring for action against Apple because they are the only player with an integrated consumer content sales and delivery system that the public really wants? Now they're going after wireless providers when there are still several major players on the market all because of text messaging fees?
Here's a thought, take the phone away from your tween daughters if they're racking up 800-900 texts a month. Or better yet, get an unlimited plan and just deal with it. Are we so damn poor that we'll mess with the market because theoretically someone could be paying $35/month instead of $50/month for an unlimited texting plan for an entire family?
But it shouldn't be too surprising that there might be so many million dollar products today compared to 1979 since the dollar has been decimated in value since in the last 30 years by inflation. A million dollar app in 2009 dollars would be worth nearly $3M.
Which it is almost a foregone conclusion that he won't be, he'd take the story line of Warcraft 2 or maybe Warcraft 3 and adapt it under a different title.
I've seen it where the government will bring in "contractors" who will write a custom web application with tons of horrible, unaudited code and they won't blink an eye at the cost or the quality.
Most agencies have their own security standards. If they can't meet the bare minimum, then they won't allow those projects to be deployed. When they look at other products their question is simply "is it any good at all?" because they are starting from a position of pure ignorance.
Now if Microsoft were actually politically smart, they would put federal systems development centers in the northeast. Washington state just isn't well, important enough politically for government work...
Microsoft has a conspicuous office in Reston, VA. They probably have more in the metro DC area. The problem for them is that, as crazy as it may sound, they are just a lemur fighting the 800lb gorillas like Lockheed IT, Northrop Grumman IT, Boeing IT, BAE Systems IS and General Dynamics IT who have significantly larger services groups, clout and connections.
The federal government has no bias against using open source software. There are two major factors that affect it:
1) Someone has to pay to get FOSS put through an evaluation process to be verified for suitability and safety (commercial vendors often pay this or coordinate with a contracting firm). This fee can be hundreds of thousands of dollars, and it applies to every component that has not been previously approved. If you bring in 5 Java FOSS libraries that haven't been used before, you could be looking at as much as a $3M cost to get them certified.
2) Versions have to be done more carefully. To most federal agencies, KDE 3.0, 3.5, 4.0 and 4.1 would be distinct versions each requiring evaluation. Microsoft has an advantage over desktop Linux in that respect since it releases Windows updates every few years, and service packs can be evaluated at everyone's convenience.
They need DRM because a lot of their potential customers **won't** pay for the music, but then, if they do put it in there, a lot of their other customers will be pissed off at being restricted when they are willing to pay up for a fair claim to the music. If anything, this proves the basic libertarian point about most morality and the state: society relies on voluntary compliance by the vast majority of people. Any law, even murder, would not be able to work without draconian penalties if a large percentage won't obey it.
How robust is Canada's analog to the 4th amendment? Does it even have one?..
A lot of the privacy debate in the West is completely ass backwards to the point of being Orwellian. Britain is, right now, the best example of that for the entire West. They have data retention mandates that cover all communications, can force you to divulge encryption keys, no written constitution (and thus no lasting written constitutional limitations like the 4th amendment) and yet they fret about what a fucking supermarket or Facebook might do to your privacy.
It's a total farce. The only people who can enable the destruction of your life or directly cause it are the government. Even identity theft is an issue created by the law because the government won't make lenders and merchants responsible for ascertaining the identity of the buyer first. So really, when you scratch beneath the surface, on basically all privacy issues that affect your life, liberty and property, the government is at least an active conspirator if not the culprit. Sometimes that's through negligence like with identity theft, but others it's willful like watering down restrictions on the issuing of warrants and wiretaps.
Why normal people support laws like this. I completely understand why statist politicians, apparatchiks and lobbyists do, but not ordinary people. It's so incredibly obvious that if you know that a site focuses on this trash, just coordinate with the country where the servers are based. If the country is poor, it would be easy for New Zealand police to offer their police a modest "finder's fee" for allowing NZ police to tag along on a raid to take over the server, get the logs and go after the distributors. Hell, if we started offering bounties for people like this and the Nigerian scammers, third world governments would be falling all over themselves to help the first world countries fight internet crime.
It will absolutely fail in Apple's user base. The only two groups that will shell out for it are the people who don't have iPhones and the fanbois who would buy a service plan with every single mobile provider if Apple released an exclusive product through each one.
Many countries, even in the English-speaking world, still have official censorship bodies which won't let you publish content without state approval. That's general content, not particular content niches like pornography. Games have been effectively banned in Europe or Australia from being sold for being too violent or "mature." By comparison, the United States has no effective apparatus of censorship. The most that can happen is that a prosecutor brings you up on charges of violating local obscenities laws, but then the prosecutor has to show that your sexual content is gratuitous and has no independent (artistic, literary, etc.) merit. If you had a map where a character walks through a realistic strip club, and gets into a shoot out, that content is likely to be protected under the same precedents that protect R-rated movies with similar content.
Now, if you create a sex simulator, even one like Hot Coffee, well, you're up shit creek. That aside, our system is significantly freer and more in line with "let adults be adults and let parents be responsible" than the majority of the industrial world on content in general.
Take your meals and snacks with you, and make sure that they are rich in fiber, not in simple carbohydrates. Fiber is very filling and takes a lot of energy to burn. My wife recently started making tex-mex soup/stew out of chili powder, beans, corn and ground beef. My stomach isn't bothered by it, and it generally gets me through the day on a serving size that is about 450-550 calories. If you take snack bars, it's important to make sure that you buy the more expensive onces that are mainly complex carbs and protein, and not just simple carbs and candy coating.
The US no longer has to worry about nuclear war or even conventional war because we have the means of "winning" a nuclear war and can easily crush any country in a conventional war except, perhaps, the PRC. Even the European Union would not likely hold out against us in a conventional war. Our military knows that, and the majority of the world knows that. We are in a period of relative peace and stability, a Pax Americana. Thus we have to manufacture existential threats to keep the momentum going.
Going back to that post about government IT spending, I'd like to point out something about the military industrial complex that many don't realize. Just keeping the US military ready to go as a kick ass self-defense force with modest offensive capabilities is expensive. There is plenty of money to go around, and you're much more likely to see the agencies that now have to justify their existence like DHS getting in on this bandwagon than the DoD. For the traditional apparatus, it's always business as usual keeping the basic defense of US sovereignty going. For the rest, like DHS which has to find a new enemy under every bush, they have a lot of good reasons to be afraid.
Make a federal job board where independent contractors can easily submit quick bids where they will work directly under a government boss. The big IT contractors would hate that, but there is no reason why most IT projects need to have a huge contractor support apparatus, instead of having a highly paid government program manager directly control the contractors. 1099s are also a lot cheaper when the government can hire them directly. Even if they have to pay say... $150/hr for a senior developer, that's usually a lot less than a big contractor firm with all of its overhead costs would charge the government.
Everyone's afraid of "fraud, waste and abuse" if the bid process isn't some hyper-complicated kabuki, but the federal government actually wastes more money going through this process. It loses it by losing an opportunity to directly negotiate with smaller companies and independent contractors, and it loses it based on having to have more employees to ensure compliance. The truth is, if the federal government had the flexibility to easily hire 1099s without much oversight, as long as they're reasonably competent, it'll save money no matter what over hiring companies like Lockheed, Boeing and Northrop.
trust a story about outsourcing to get the racist bastards to come crawling about the woodwork.
It shows how biased Slashdot is that your comment was modded as Insightful. Racist implies racial hatred, not prejudiced. If you are one of those people who cannot grok the difference between prejudice and hatred, or who engages in linguist chicanery by saying that they are functionally indistinguishable, then I cannot help you.
'To the contrary, the IRS is attempting to simplify the rules and eliminate uncertainty for businesses and individuals.'
If that were the case, then the IRS would be lobbying Congress for a flat corporate tax, and either a flat income tax for individuals that applies to all income or replacing the income tax with excise taxes. The income tax is now useful to the feds mainly as a form of social control. If you become too much of a thorn in the President's side, he can just have the IRS audit you and those associated with you. The IRS doesn't even fully understand the income tax laws because they are so convoluted, which makes them a perfect mechanism for railroading someone.
If you want to lightly tax the working and middle classes, while "soaking the rich," here is how you do it. You establish a 2.5% flat income tax. Everyone pays, even if it's $0.025 on a dollar bill because everyone benefits from the system. Even the poorest Americans should pay at least $1 that they'll never get back to support the military. After that, you impose a luxury tax of some sort. It can be stand alone or a "progressive sales tax" where you would charge 2% on a car that costs $100k or less, but then jump to 10%. The feds could also levy a 20% luxury tax on any house that costs more than $1.5M.
If someone download a movie, game or song doesn't mean they would have paid for it if they couldn't. So those loss calculations are wrong
You're absolutely right that it doesn't mean they would have paid for it. A lot of pirates might not even be able to pay for it. However, the availability of piracy as an option skews the whole thing wildly. We don't know what people would do if piracy weren't an option. It very well might be possible that the sales of games and movies might be significantly higher. Again, we won't know because people can just copy anything they don't feel like buying or budgeting for.
Speaking of science, I've noticed for a while now that it's certainly true that many, probably most, religious non-scientists get their facts wrong about scientific theories, but it's equally true that most atheists have at best a shallow understanding of theology. In fact, I'm being charitable on that point, as most atheists I've met are either laughably ignorant of even the most basic theology or will refuse to discuss theology on a level more complex than one dumbed down for a small child or a person with Down's Syndrome.
At the same time, however, we need to be careful of high falutin arguments in a lot of fields. Occam's razor often becomes "Occam's chainsaw" in Philosophy, Political Science and Sociology. The real sciences are necessarily complex because they are dealing with an inherently complex subject that is only specialized because that is convenient for humans. In most fields, when you get into equal levels of complexity, you often find that that complexity is man-made, not inherent to the issue(s).
It warms my heart whenever I see a hollywood or big music employee or executive complaining about the socialistic view of property that is increasingly common with their goods. For decades, they've promoted left-wing politics through music and not-so-subtle bias in many movies, not to mention giving huge campaign contributions to left-wing democrats.
Guess what? The chickens are coming home to roost. The kids now believe your shit about The Man(tm) and you don't like it. Tough cookies.
To work on these systems you'd need to hold a security clearance. It is not prima facie absurd to say that some restrictions could be lifted for Secret-classified networks, but you'd never get them to do Top Secret and Top Secret/SCI because of how incredibly sensitive the data is on those networks.
I really don't think they care, nor do I think that they bought Sun for MySQL. I wouldn't be surprised in the least if they kick it to the curb here and either create a lighter low end Oracle DB for MySQL's users or if they revamp Sun's support for PostgreSQL by making it the preferred entry-level compliment to Oracle DB. Oracle already has a huge service wing, and using PostgreSQL wouldn't hurt them in that capacity as a vehicle for selling Oracle DB where it makes sense to those customers.
While I agree about not helping them install Linux for similar reasons, I don't think it has anything to do with your friend calling you up at 1AM. Only a total jackass would call you at 1AM for something that trivial unless they know you're awake.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh really? The US DoJ's Inspector General had some withering criticism of the utility of the information sources this guy is relying on.
On antitrust, the Obama Administration seems to be just looking for something to do. They're looking at going after Google over... precisely what? The fact that they produce a lot of free apps which any small, dedicated team of developers could reasonably reproduce and integrate? Some are clamoring for action against Apple because they are the only player with an integrated consumer content sales and delivery system that the public really wants? Now they're going after wireless providers when there are still several major players on the market all because of text messaging fees?
Here's a thought, take the phone away from your tween daughters if they're racking up 800-900 texts a month. Or better yet, get an unlimited plan and just deal with it. Are we so damn poor that we'll mess with the market because theoretically someone could be paying $35/month instead of $50/month for an unlimited texting plan for an entire family?
But it shouldn't be too surprising that there might be so many million dollar products today compared to 1979 since the dollar has been decimated in value since in the last 30 years by inflation. A million dollar app in 2009 dollars would be worth nearly $3M.
Which it is almost a foregone conclusion that he won't be, he'd take the story line of Warcraft 2 or maybe Warcraft 3 and adapt it under a different title.
Most agencies have their own security standards. If they can't meet the bare minimum, then they won't allow those projects to be deployed. When they look at other products their question is simply "is it any good at all?" because they are starting from a position of pure ignorance.
Microsoft has a conspicuous office in Reston, VA. They probably have more in the metro DC area. The problem for them is that, as crazy as it may sound, they are just a lemur fighting the 800lb gorillas like Lockheed IT, Northrop Grumman IT, Boeing IT, BAE Systems IS and General Dynamics IT who have significantly larger services groups, clout and connections.
The federal government has no bias against using open source software. There are two major factors that affect it:
1) Someone has to pay to get FOSS put through an evaluation process to be verified for suitability and safety (commercial vendors often pay this or coordinate with a contracting firm). This fee can be hundreds of thousands of dollars, and it applies to every component that has not been previously approved. If you bring in 5 Java FOSS libraries that haven't been used before, you could be looking at as much as a $3M cost to get them certified.
2) Versions have to be done more carefully. To most federal agencies, KDE 3.0, 3.5, 4.0 and 4.1 would be distinct versions each requiring evaluation. Microsoft has an advantage over desktop Linux in that respect since it releases Windows updates every few years, and service packs can be evaluated at everyone's convenience.
They need DRM because a lot of their potential customers **won't** pay for the music, but then, if they do put it in there, a lot of their other customers will be pissed off at being restricted when they are willing to pay up for a fair claim to the music. If anything, this proves the basic libertarian point about most morality and the state: society relies on voluntary compliance by the vast majority of people. Any law, even murder, would not be able to work without draconian penalties if a large percentage won't obey it.
How robust is Canada's analog to the 4th amendment? Does it even have one?..
A lot of the privacy debate in the West is completely ass backwards to the point of being Orwellian. Britain is, right now, the best example of that for the entire West. They have data retention mandates that cover all communications, can force you to divulge encryption keys, no written constitution (and thus no lasting written constitutional limitations like the 4th amendment) and yet they fret about what a fucking supermarket or Facebook might do to your privacy.
It's a total farce. The only people who can enable the destruction of your life or directly cause it are the government. Even identity theft is an issue created by the law because the government won't make lenders and merchants responsible for ascertaining the identity of the buyer first. So really, when you scratch beneath the surface, on basically all privacy issues that affect your life, liberty and property, the government is at least an active conspirator if not the culprit. Sometimes that's through negligence like with identity theft, but others it's willful like watering down restrictions on the issuing of warrants and wiretaps.
Why normal people support laws like this. I completely understand why statist politicians, apparatchiks and lobbyists do, but not ordinary people. It's so incredibly obvious that if you know that a site focuses on this trash, just coordinate with the country where the servers are based. If the country is poor, it would be easy for New Zealand police to offer their police a modest "finder's fee" for allowing NZ police to tag along on a raid to take over the server, get the logs and go after the distributors. Hell, if we started offering bounties for people like this and the Nigerian scammers, third world governments would be falling all over themselves to help the first world countries fight internet crime.
It will absolutely fail in Apple's user base. The only two groups that will shell out for it are the people who don't have iPhones and the fanbois who would buy a service plan with every single mobile provider if Apple released an exclusive product through each one.
Many countries, even in the English-speaking world, still have official censorship bodies which won't let you publish content without state approval. That's general content, not particular content niches like pornography. Games have been effectively banned in Europe or Australia from being sold for being too violent or "mature." By comparison, the United States has no effective apparatus of censorship. The most that can happen is that a prosecutor brings you up on charges of violating local obscenities laws, but then the prosecutor has to show that your sexual content is gratuitous and has no independent (artistic, literary, etc.) merit. If you had a map where a character walks through a realistic strip club, and gets into a shoot out, that content is likely to be protected under the same precedents that protect R-rated movies with similar content.
Now, if you create a sex simulator, even one like Hot Coffee, well, you're up shit creek. That aside, our system is significantly freer and more in line with "let adults be adults and let parents be responsible" than the majority of the industrial world on content in general.
Fuggedaboutit! Never in a million years would Gates have had made peace with such a potentially damaging open source group.
Take your meals and snacks with you, and make sure that they are rich in fiber, not in simple carbohydrates. Fiber is very filling and takes a lot of energy to burn. My wife recently started making tex-mex soup/stew out of chili powder, beans, corn and ground beef. My stomach isn't bothered by it, and it generally gets me through the day on a serving size that is about 450-550 calories. If you take snack bars, it's important to make sure that you buy the more expensive onces that are mainly complex carbs and protein, and not just simple carbs and candy coating.
The US no longer has to worry about nuclear war or even conventional war because we have the means of "winning" a nuclear war and can easily crush any country in a conventional war except, perhaps, the PRC. Even the European Union would not likely hold out against us in a conventional war. Our military knows that, and the majority of the world knows that. We are in a period of relative peace and stability, a Pax Americana. Thus we have to manufacture existential threats to keep the momentum going.
Going back to that post about government IT spending, I'd like to point out something about the military industrial complex that many don't realize. Just keeping the US military ready to go as a kick ass self-defense force with modest offensive capabilities is expensive. There is plenty of money to go around, and you're much more likely to see the agencies that now have to justify their existence like DHS getting in on this bandwagon than the DoD. For the traditional apparatus, it's always business as usual keeping the basic defense of US sovereignty going. For the rest, like DHS which has to find a new enemy under every bush, they have a lot of good reasons to be afraid.
Hey smart guy... when were those considered "IT spending?"
Make a federal job board where independent contractors can easily submit quick bids where they will work directly under a government boss. The big IT contractors would hate that, but there is no reason why most IT projects need to have a huge contractor support apparatus, instead of having a highly paid government program manager directly control the contractors. 1099s are also a lot cheaper when the government can hire them directly. Even if they have to pay say... $150/hr for a senior developer, that's usually a lot less than a big contractor firm with all of its overhead costs would charge the government.
Everyone's afraid of "fraud, waste and abuse" if the bid process isn't some hyper-complicated kabuki, but the federal government actually wastes more money going through this process. It loses it by losing an opportunity to directly negotiate with smaller companies and independent contractors, and it loses it based on having to have more employees to ensure compliance. The truth is, if the federal government had the flexibility to easily hire 1099s without much oversight, as long as they're reasonably competent, it'll save money no matter what over hiring companies like Lockheed, Boeing and Northrop.
It shows how biased Slashdot is that your comment was modded as Insightful. Racist implies racial hatred, not prejudiced. If you are one of those people who cannot grok the difference between prejudice and hatred, or who engages in linguist chicanery by saying that they are functionally indistinguishable, then I cannot help you.
If that were the case, then the IRS would be lobbying Congress for a flat corporate tax, and either a flat income tax for individuals that applies to all income or replacing the income tax with excise taxes. The income tax is now useful to the feds mainly as a form of social control. If you become too much of a thorn in the President's side, he can just have the IRS audit you and those associated with you. The IRS doesn't even fully understand the income tax laws because they are so convoluted, which makes them a perfect mechanism for railroading someone.
If you want to lightly tax the working and middle classes, while "soaking the rich," here is how you do it. You establish a 2.5% flat income tax. Everyone pays, even if it's $0.025 on a dollar bill because everyone benefits from the system. Even the poorest Americans should pay at least $1 that they'll never get back to support the military. After that, you impose a luxury tax of some sort. It can be stand alone or a "progressive sales tax" where you would charge 2% on a car that costs $100k or less, but then jump to 10%. The feds could also levy a 20% luxury tax on any house that costs more than $1.5M.
You're absolutely right that it doesn't mean they would have paid for it. A lot of pirates might not even be able to pay for it. However, the availability of piracy as an option skews the whole thing wildly. We don't know what people would do if piracy weren't an option. It very well might be possible that the sales of games and movies might be significantly higher. Again, we won't know because people can just copy anything they don't feel like buying or budgeting for.
than does knowledge.
Speaking of science, I've noticed for a while now that it's certainly true that many, probably most, religious non-scientists get their facts wrong about scientific theories, but it's equally true that most atheists have at best a shallow understanding of theology. In fact, I'm being charitable on that point, as most atheists I've met are either laughably ignorant of even the most basic theology or will refuse to discuss theology on a level more complex than one dumbed down for a small child or a person with Down's Syndrome.
At the same time, however, we need to be careful of high falutin arguments in a lot of fields. Occam's razor often becomes "Occam's chainsaw" in Philosophy, Political Science and Sociology. The real sciences are necessarily complex because they are dealing with an inherently complex subject that is only specialized because that is convenient for humans. In most fields, when you get into equal levels of complexity, you often find that that complexity is man-made, not inherent to the issue(s).
It warms my heart whenever I see a hollywood or big music employee or executive complaining about the socialistic view of property that is increasingly common with their goods. For decades, they've promoted left-wing politics through music and not-so-subtle bias in many movies, not to mention giving huge campaign contributions to left-wing democrats.
Guess what? The chickens are coming home to roost. The kids now believe your shit about The Man(tm) and you don't like it. Tough cookies.
To work on these systems you'd need to hold a security clearance. It is not prima facie absurd to say that some restrictions could be lifted for Secret-classified networks, but you'd never get them to do Top Secret and Top Secret/SCI because of how incredibly sensitive the data is on those networks.
I really don't think they care, nor do I think that they bought Sun for MySQL. I wouldn't be surprised in the least if they kick it to the curb here and either create a lighter low end Oracle DB for MySQL's users or if they revamp Sun's support for PostgreSQL by making it the preferred entry-level compliment to Oracle DB. Oracle already has a huge service wing, and using PostgreSQL wouldn't hurt them in that capacity as a vehicle for selling Oracle DB where it makes sense to those customers.
While I agree about not helping them install Linux for similar reasons, I don't think it has anything to do with your friend calling you up at 1AM. Only a total jackass would call you at 1AM for something that trivial unless they know you're awake.