And they know nothing at all about technology. There was a thing two (?) years ago where some mother's apartment dwelling otaku freak was cancelling Kurko's Basketball (a popular manga/anime) events left and right for over a year and they couldn't do a damn thing about it. Eventually the freak got so cocky he got careless and did things like using messenger cats. My memory's a little hazy, but it went on seemingly forever and the cops were completely helpless. And they're terrible with corporate crime like this (the handling of the Olympus affair was a disgrace) since usually it's all a matter of what Japanese politicians you have in your pocket - but apparently Mt. Gox didn't have any. Whoops.
I was intrigued by this, so I did a little research. It's a shame you really did not do a very good job here with explaining what happened as your post was interesting and on topic, but yeah, this paragraph could have been a lot better. The "otaku freak" as you call him did not personally cancel anything as your writing seems to claim. What he did was send threatening letters, sometimes with suspicious liquids or powders, to various places that were associated with the anime or its writer in some way and those places canceled many events related to Kuroko's Basketball. As to why he apparently had it in for this particular anime, it gets into sub-genres of anime that I'm not really qualified to talk about it and it seems that maybe he had a problem with the people who were interested in it and focused his rage at the creators and supporters. Apparently popular anime series have "events" of some kind in various places, but I have no idea what goes on there.
Anyway, Japan sounds better to me than some countries I could name where not only is it impossible to lock up anybody for the rest of their life no matter how many people they kill, they actually start to feel sorry for the criminal because he's been locked up.
Some years ago we had a post from a lawyer who had experience with employment related law suits. He told us that his advice to clients was to give up and not file a lawsuit. He said that the reality was that the deck was stacked in favor of the employer and he estimated that maybe 10% of lawsuits against employers were won by the employee. I know that it's the Slashdot way to just assume her case was groundless simply because a jury ruled that way. All I can tell you is that while that may be true, we can't make that assumption. Juries are staffed with stupid people a lot of times who aren't fit to be judges on anything. I know because unlike many of you, I've actually served on juries twice. I hope I never get picked again because the whole process has made me permanently cynical about the law and so-called justice in the USA. My brother got fired more than 20 years ago from a low paying job and his employer lied about the reason he was fired in a hearing about whether my brother should get paid unemployment money or not. Whoever heard the case ruled against my brother because it was just his word against theirs and neither could prove their side. Ellen was facing long odds and I wasn't there to hear testimony so I can't judge the merits of her case, but it's idiotic to just assume the jury got it right. If you actually believe that juries almost always get it right you better pray you don't ever have to go to court and have your important case decided by 12 idiots. The last jury I served on had 3 guys in the jury room prior to the day's testimony trying to out argue the other 2 that they were stupider with technology than the other 2 were. These are the kinds of people who decide cases - morons who try to argue that they're the stupidest person in the room and take pride in winning that argument.
OK, yes I get that Canada is trying to change the law to extend copyright, but at least Canada, the EU, Japan and others actually have public domain music. I've mentioned this before and it's worth mentioning again I think. Did you know that thanks to the decision in Capitol Records vs. Naxos that in the USA it appears that nothing ever recorded is in the public domain in the USA right now? I'm not talking about song writing or music publishing, where older songs are indeed in the US public domain. I'm saying that every performance recorded from Edison on to the present age is still under copyright thanks to this court decision. Basically what happened is that Naxos tried to sneak a late 1930s classic music recording into the US market via their historical reissue CD label. The only problem was that in the US the performance was not only clearly still under copyright, the performance in question was owned in the US by Capitol Records and they had a CD on the market of it. Naxos got caught doing something they shouldn't have and rather than give in and admit their error, they tried to justify by arguing that an unclear US law actually made pre-1972 sound recordings already in the public domain, therefore they did nothing wrong. Not only the appeals court that got the case rule against Naxos, they basically made up the law and held that due to common law, every recording ever made was still under US copyright, no matter how old it was. Naxos couldn't really appeal this terrible and overreaching decision because they clearly broke US law, so it remains on the books and now there is no public domain currently in the US for musical performances. Please note that publishing and movies operate under different rules and things are actually in US public domain in those fields.
Not that surprising for anyone that follows Turkish politics. Erdogan isn't as bad as ISIS but he inch-by-inch is taking Turkey down the theocratic road of countries like Afghanistan. He practically had to be coerced into fighting ISIS. Very plausible he would have joined forces with ISIS to fight Kurds if it hadn't been for foreign pressure)
Most Turks you meet are super nice in person but for some unfathomable reason this crpto-fascist jerk keeps winning elections. If he keeps winning elections, Turkey is going to devolve into a theocracy like most of the rest of the middle east. Secular Atatürk was rational (especially for his era). Erdogan things he's an Ottoman sultan. Populist moron.
Good post. Actually the word I keep hearing is that Turkey isn't fighting ISIS at all but is using it as a pretext to only attack various Kurdish groups they don't like.
As an American who has traveled quite a bit to Europe and consider myself somewhat pro-Europe, I have given up on Turkey. (Disclaimer - I've never visited Turkey.) If you could talk to me in the late 1990s or very early 2000s, I was all for Turkey joining the EU. I have completely reversed myself and now while I have no say as I'm not an EU citizen, it is my strong belief that Turkey should not ever be allowed to joint the EU. I've learned over the past decade that if given a free choice, Muslims will willingly choose to enslave themselves. This has happened in Turkey and everywhere in the so called Arab Spring except Egypt. It sure got started in Egypt and then most of the people reversed themselves after realizing the full extent of what putting the Muslim Brotherhood in power really meant.
I blame the situation in Turkey on George W. Bush mostly. Bush started the ball rolling by making sure that the Turkish military understood that they weren't supposed to prevent Erdogan or his party (which was at one time illegal) from taking power. Now enough time has passed that I'm not sure if the Turkish military has any more people in power who might actually be opposed to Erdogan. Since Bush's presidency the US has had an irrational belief that more democracy in countries that have never had it can only lead to favorable outcomes for the USA without realizing that when you let people freely vote, they may just choose to elect someone you don't like. Turkey is a terrible "friend" to the USA and they're not going to provide much useful help against ISIS as long as Erdogan is in charge.
1) You don't want the legal ramifications of publishing this, especially if you live in the USA. I am American, so I know what I warn of.
2) Black lists are so old as an anti-spam approach I don't know that anybody takes them seriously any more.
3) Related to #1, do you really want the responsibility for situations where someone on your list was there due to ignorance and they fixed the open relay problem that led to the spam, they are no longer spamming at all, and yet there they are on your list? I thought about going into details, but on my previous job I know of cases where this actually happened and it's one of the reasons that many of us stopped taking Spamhaus and similar services seriously. It was almost impossible to get off the black list, even if you fixed the problem that got you there or were put there by mistake.
With 60 hosts and 1500 VMs I would certainly expect separate roles for enterprise architecture and system provision/admin..
This statement is quite right. Apparently the OP doesn't deal with auditors at all in his job. Lucky him. I do in mine and I have something like a Linux system admin job. For the product I work on, and I work for a Fortune 500 company that sells a lot of software products and services, I am the main contact person every year for auditors. Since the OP works for a publicly traded company, he should know that audits are required by US law. Every year I have to answer the same questions from the auditors about separation of responsibilities on the product I support. Honestly, I don't know how the OP doesn't know that getting that kind of access for an architect is going to raise all kinds of red flags in an audit that have to be explained. If I remember correctly, we have exactly 4 people who have root access to our servers who don't work on my team. They're software developers who've worked on the product for years and need that access in an emergency if we have a software related disaster that impacts customers. We have to jump through a lot of hoops to justify this on the audit. In fact, we've actually had our access restricted from some activities we used to do that fall outside of traditional system admin tasks just because it's easier for auditing purposes for us to not be able to do it anymore. In my job my group also doesn't have access to the storage, network or virtualization layers except as users/clients and all changes have to be done by others. Sometimes it's a pain, but at auditing time it makes my life easier as I can tell the auditors "We don't have the ability to change that, so you have to talk to group X on that one".
Being able to reassemble it is not the point, it's that you can re-wind time and get the information back out. With the normal idea of a blackhole, even if you could rewind time, you couldn't get the information back out.
No, you miss the point. He said basically "Having the information 'available' isn't really helpful because we have no way to get it." You simply proposed a theoretical way to get it that can't be done either at this time, possibly ever, so his assertion that we can't get it is still right. Unless you are a Q, telling us to "rewind time" as about as helpful as suggesting we simply change the gravitational constant of the universe.
It's usually spread through the air. And it's not a big deal for a young healthy person to get it...
While that is generally true, specifically the 1918 flu pandemic killed a large number of people in the age range of 25-34. It's believed that they died due to the effects of a cytokine storm whereas middle aged people did much better at surviving that flu. You had to get up to about age 75 and above to start seeing the kind of mortality rates that hit the sweet spot of 25-34 for this flu. This doesn't invalidate the fact that your post is good as is your advice for people to get their flu shots.
I really hope that the majority of the agents laughed at this stupidity.
This was before my time so I can't say so with any authority, but the impression I get is that most agents probably believed it. Keep in mind that this was a time when the greatest fear of many American parents was "juvenile delinquency" and they honestly blamed comic books for it. The Senate even had hearings about comic books and juvenile delinquency. William M. Gaines, who would go on to publish Mad Magazine, was forced to testify in front of a Senate panel on the subject. How seriously the US government took the "Communist threat" is why I can't accept that Lee Harvey Oswald was allowed to return to the USA after supposedly defecting and was never punished for defecting. Something was going on there and I will believe forever that Oswald had a CIA connection that the government still doesn't want to talk about.
I bought an Epson printer once maybe 5-6 years ago. It refused to recognize the ink cartridges that came with the printer from the factory. There were official Epson ink cartridges. Know what the fix for this is? Get another printer. No joke. There is no fix. You have to replace the printer. So I returned it for a refund and went with Canon. The Canon has its own issues, mostly being vvvvvveeerrrrryyyy ssssssllllloooooowwwww to warm up, but I've never had it refuse to recognize an official Canon ink cartridge.
NEVER confess to anything! All they've done is to hang themselves.
This is Europe, not the USA. They're likely to get pretty light sentences at most if not just probation and a fine. If Hitler were miraculously still alive and arrested today in Europe, he wouldn't get the death penalty and any sentence more than a few years might be viewed as excessive given his age.
So let me get this straight these people are so dangerous that they can't fly yet aren't dangerous enough to be brought in for questioning, gotten off the streets for the safety of the general public, and are likely not under direct surveillance? I am a bit confused here.
It's actually not all that difficult to consider situations where the above is true. For example, imagine that the NSA is monitoring the email and social media activity of Joe Blow, an American born recent convert to Islam who has expressed the opinion that ISIS is pretty cool and should be supported. Is expressing such an opinion really a crime? Nope. But showing such sympathies might just be enough to get him put on the no fly list even though he's committed no crime. And bringing him in for questioning might cause him to go underground with his statements of support and any work he might do to follow up on it. Some of the recent arrests of Americans accused of supporting terrorists have happened because the Americans felt safe enough to openly talk about supporting ISIS. and to act on those statements of support by buying weapons and other things.
Now if somebody here wants to argue that words alone are not enough to do anything about, that is a different argument. I am simply providing a plausible scenario for your questions.
I've wondered if at the top levels of the US government if they may not really have a desire to get Assange extradited to the USA to face charges that a good lawyer will at the minimum will argue aren't a violation of US law because he's not a US citizen and he was working in another country at the time. I'm not saying such a defense would definitely work but I'm also not saying it has no chance either. Consider the case of former World Chess Champion Bobby Fischer. Fischer, who apparently had a really tenuous grip on sanity apart from being a genius at playing chess, violated US law by agreeing to a 20th anniversary rematch with Boris Spassky in Yugoslavia in 1992. The violated a Bush executive order on economic activities in Yugoslavia. In July 2004 Fischer was arrested in Japan before boarding a plane at a US request and was imprisoned for about 6 months while Japan offered various excuses for continuing to hold him. In the end he was deported to Iceland and basically the US, Japan and Iceland agreed to let Fischer renounce his US citizenship and become a citizen of Iceland. The US had little desire to bring him to the USA and was quite content to have him stay in jail in Japan to send a message. Similarly, it may well be that the US doesn't really want to go to the trouble of bringing Assange here and is content to have him confined to the Ecuadorian embassy for a few more years to come, at which point it may quietly back away or even announce that he's not the subject of any possible US extradition request. Even if the US said that, I have a feeling that Assange would still refuse to leave. He may well stay there for the rest of his life.
Going to a foreign country to visit and having a drone flying over your head... Really? Always finding new ways to display an astonishing lack of class.
As an American, I am in agreement. And note that as is always the case, the ones who bitch the most about this and completely lose their minds over it will never, ever, visit New Zealand or any place with such laws. I had a friend some years ago (we're not friends any more because he's basically nuts and I had enough) who last flew in an airplane around in 1998 or maybe 1999. Definitely well before Sept. 11, 2001. You couldn't say anything at all to him about traveling anywhere by air without him going into a tirade about TSA. He has no reason to ever fly again in his life and likely never will and he has never personally experienced TSA checks, but it sure didn't stop him from ranting and raving about it. Same thing here for the drones and those who complain.
The gun thing is also important. I'm not a gun nut... but I believe I have a right to be dangerous in my own country and in my home. Not for hunting... not even for self defense... to be DANGEROUS. I feel that is an important check on anyone that would try to intimidate the people. If they understand that the people can and will turn on them with an instant militia of millions. That forces the elites to be careful.
No, it actually doesn't. You're an idiot and I can easily prove it. The "elites", which seems to be your code word for the US government, has nuclear bombs and drone missiles. Let me know how your army of people with pea shooters does against them. There seems to be an endless number of people here in America who actually believe that the "people" with their handguns can actually overthrow an "evil" US government. Ha ha ha. Again, let me know how your army of peasants does against nuclear bombs. If the supposedly "evil" government decided that killing you and your pals was in its best interests, you'll be dead.
My best friend for many years now is a college buddy who is a lawyer. He has taught me a lot about how the law really works in the USA and I can assure you that what people who aren't lawyers say is true about the law and how it really works are not the same at all. I'm pretty sure that people can't just open accounts in your wife's name in another state where it's easy to prove you don't live and without her social security number somehow make you responsible for it, but again, you probably really need to talk to a lawyer. I know it sucks to pay one, but lawyers can do a lot for you like send legal threats on your behalf to the cable company to, ahem, "encourage" them to get a lot more interested in your problem before it grows into a much worse problem for them . If they do actually have her social security number then that is a completely different situation and her identity is already compromised. You need a lawyer for that too. I have to ask - are you definitely sure that the cable company really has her email and name on file and that this isn't some really good phishing email trying to get you to click on a suspicious link and doing identity theft that way?
My last two girlfriends were both born and raised in China ladies and neither understood very much about how financial markets work. The most recent was quite a bit interested in the stock market in the USA and China. The first one wasn't interested in the subject. My most recent ex-girlfriend, even though she had lived in America for a few years by the time we started dating, seemed to have this belief that you simply couldn't lose money in the stock market. On some level surely she had to know that losses were possible, but I think she just wrote those off as the exception to the rule. She would ask me questions about the market and it seemed to me that she believed that the stock market was free money for the taking, almost everybody got wildly rich, and the fact that I wasn't making tons of money off it (no thought at all was given to exactly how much I even had to invest) meant that I was stupid, lazy, or both. I can't prove it, but I suspect that a lot of Chinese people are like my most recent ex-girlfriend where they think that they can't possibly lose in the stock market. This kind of thinking explains why so much of the Chinese stock market was done on margin trading. Given the high amount of government control over the economy there I really can't explain how the people running the show believed that repeating the mistakes that led to the US market crash of 1929 would turn out differently. Maybe it's due to Chinese exceptionalism run wild (""We're China, so the rules don't apply to us because we're better than everybody else").
With all that talk about not being able to do other projects being debunked by the show's producers as soon as it first came out, I thought that maybe Shearer just wanted out of the job and he was afraid to admit it and have the fans nut out over it. In that scenario, claiming to not have time for other projects would be a good cover story as it can't be disproven and it would get him off the show. I really didn't think it was over money because it seemed illogical to me that he could realistically expect the entire cast to sign for the same deal and him get something better. He's 71 now, so I just figured he'd had enough and wanted to do something else at this point in his life. Now that I read that he re-signed I really have no idea what this was all about unless maybe it really was an attempt to get more money that failed.
"How frequently have people run into companies sending sensitive information (like passwords) in cleartext via e-mail?"
I see this and people sending both public and private PGP keys to outsiders more than I should from other companies. I assume it's because in general American businesses have devalued IT for so long that they're getting exactly what little they pay for now with barely trained and barely competent people who don't know anything about security.
This.
I've also always wondered why the U.S. put all its money on the Arab countries instead of Iran. Iran at least has basic level of Democracy with presidential elections. Irans youth is, in general, more progressive and open minded that in most other islamic countries.
The U.S. big ally and arch-enemy of Iran, Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, is a practically an absolutist monarchy practicing extremely conservative interpretation of Sharia law. It's also interesting to point out that many high-profile terrorists, such as Osama bin Ladin, were Saudi Arabians. I wouldn't be surprised if elements in Saudi Arabia's government secretly support or at the very least condone IS in Syria and Iraq. They seem pretty single-minded about supporting Sunni Islam against everything Shia.
Basically significant segments of the Iranian government and a good number of the population (not necessarily a majority, but enough to have influence) have anti-Americanism as their raison d'être. Khomeini hated America for supporting the Shah and he passed that hatred down to his disciples. His disciples continue to be the true powers in Iran. These people have merged religion with anti-Americanism so to them, not being anti-American is like rejecting Islam. It will probably be decades before enough time has passed for mullahs to come into power in Iran who have no personal animosity towards America. Consider too that among people old enough to remember the Iran hostage situation that there is some severe hatred towards Iran so that makes it difficult for the US to make friends with Iran as portions of US power (some people in Congress and various government agencies) will never trust them because of that.
To be honest, the US would probably like to be friends with Iran, but the mullahs can't and won't allow it. The US really would be better off backing the Shiites like Iran as they are somewhat less troublesome to deal with than the Sunnis, but they can't publicly say that because the Sunnis have the numbers. Numbers of followers alone make it in the US's best interests to try to deal with Sunni governments, many of which hate the US and do things that support terrorists indirectly if not directly. The Saudi government has been pretty good friends with the USA, but unfortunately they support a version of Islam that over time has become more and more intolerant of non-Muslims and is directly or indirectly responsible for groups like ISIS and Al Queda. The Saudi rulers need US support to stay in power and the US needs them lest Saudi Arabi turn into an even bigger headache for the US than Iran.
The US governments under George W. Bush and Barack Obama have had unrealistic expectations of Middle Eastern democracy. The idea was that if given the opportunity to freely elect their leaders that they would be so grateful to the USA that they'd become our best friends. Instead it has become apparent to me that if given a free choice, the majority of Muslim voters will willingly vote to take away their own rights under oppressive religious governments and those that hate the US will come out of the shadows and work to attack the US. The only country that went through the Arab Spring and maybe came out on the better end was Egypt and they had to beg the military to overthrow the legally elected government.
Just 2 years ago the legal retirement age in Greece was 57. I think it's been changed to 61 now and there was talk of moving it to 63, but generations of Greeks have been coddled and given so many handouts by the government that they are going to riot if they have to face reality. As you point out, bit coin can't solve the problem of an entire nation so addicted to entitlements that it can't accept any way out of the crisis that doesn't involve no changes or hardships at all.
Congress is free to amend or write a new law - but if they weren't spoiled, selfish children, they would have done that already. They could have easily clarified this, but didn't because Republicans would have used the opportunity to destroy the ACA rather than helping to make it even a little better -- especially important in light of the *fact* that the Republicans have no alternative to the ACA, except to get rid of it. Don't know why they don't want to keep the poor and middle class from getting health insurance...
As someone who lives in a red state and has a lot of Republican friends, I can tell you exactly why Republicans (including supporters and not just elected officials) want to take away health insurance from the poor. I think in Clinton's first term he signed a law that changed welfare and basically stopped most able bodied people from staying on it forever. Amongst the people I know, many of them believe that perhaps as high as 20% of the US population is permanently on welfare and has no desire at all to get off of it because they are lazy. The idea persists that those who are poor are that way simply because they want to be poor since they are willfully lazy. And there's an undercurrent of subtle racism at play as it's always "blacks" or "Mexicans" who they always blame for being on welfare forever. So since these people believe that everybody in the USA could have a good job if they only wanted to, they see the poor as being unwilling to better themselves and helping them get anything like health insurance is basically enabling behavior encouraging them to stay the same. All of the people I know who hate the ACA have jobs that give them insurance, so again, they view even middle class people who need help as being lazy or stupid because if they weren't lazy or stupid, they would get themselves jobs that had health insurance. They view all people without health insurance as having deliberately made the choice to be that way. The worst thing Ronald Reagan ever said was "Government is the problem" which 30+ years later has become a mantra for the Republican Party. So people think that the government can't do anything right, ever, and thus the ACA can't ever be good because an evil, incompetent government with a lifetime 100% failure rate is in charge of it.
Repeal the 17th amendment. At least you would have one house that isn't campaigning all the type.
IMO, the 17th broke a fundamental safeguard of our republic.
No, it didn't. You need to spend more time understanding why this amendment got passed rather than let idiots like Hannity and Rick Perry and others lie to you about it. The reason that the amendment got passed is that the process of picking senators was completely corrupt. Back room favors and under the cover payments and all sorts of illegal things got done to get people appointed as senators. The situation couldn't be salvaged so the only way to fix it was to make people run for office. And you do realize that you are actually arguing for less democracy and more corruption by begging to return to those "good old days", right? No of course you don't because you just repeat what the right wing talking heads told you to think.
While I give you props for at least finding somebody new to quote instead of the usual American Slashdotter practice of finding some 200+ year old quote Jefferson or some other founding father said and applying it to your situation, I'd like to point out that just because you found a quote in the past from same famous person, that alone does not mean he or you are right. How I wish I could find some really completely off the charts offensive racist quote from some founding father so I could throw it up there as a retort the next time somebody offers up a quote from the past as the justification for something. I don't care what Martin Luther King said. Human beings are not perfect and the fact that he apparently (I'm not going to fact check this, so you get "apparently") said something you like in no way justifies your point.
Slashdot Mirror
And they know nothing at all about technology. There was a thing two (?) years ago where some mother's apartment dwelling otaku freak was cancelling Kurko's Basketball (a popular manga/anime) events left and right for over a year and they couldn't do a damn thing about it. Eventually the freak got so cocky he got careless and did things like using messenger cats. My memory's a little hazy, but it went on seemingly forever and the cops were completely helpless. And they're terrible with corporate crime like this (the handling of the Olympus affair was a disgrace) since usually it's all a matter of what Japanese politicians you have in your pocket - but apparently Mt. Gox didn't have any. Whoops.
I was intrigued by this, so I did a little research. It's a shame you really did not do a very good job here with explaining what happened as your post was interesting and on topic, but yeah, this paragraph could have been a lot better. The "otaku freak" as you call him did not personally cancel anything as your writing seems to claim. What he did was send threatening letters, sometimes with suspicious liquids or powders, to various places that were associated with the anime or its writer in some way and those places canceled many events related to Kuroko's Basketball. As to why he apparently had it in for this particular anime, it gets into sub-genres of anime that I'm not really qualified to talk about it and it seems that maybe he had a problem with the people who were interested in it and focused his rage at the creators and supporters. Apparently popular anime series have "events" of some kind in various places, but I have no idea what goes on there.
Anyway, Japan sounds better to me than some countries I could name where not only is it impossible to lock up anybody for the rest of their life no matter how many people they kill, they actually start to feel sorry for the criminal because he's been locked up.
Some years ago we had a post from a lawyer who had experience with employment related law suits. He told us that his advice to clients was to give up and not file a lawsuit. He said that the reality was that the deck was stacked in favor of the employer and he estimated that maybe 10% of lawsuits against employers were won by the employee. I know that it's the Slashdot way to just assume her case was groundless simply because a jury ruled that way. All I can tell you is that while that may be true, we can't make that assumption. Juries are staffed with stupid people a lot of times who aren't fit to be judges on anything. I know because unlike many of you, I've actually served on juries twice. I hope I never get picked again because the whole process has made me permanently cynical about the law and so-called justice in the USA. My brother got fired more than 20 years ago from a low paying job and his employer lied about the reason he was fired in a hearing about whether my brother should get paid unemployment money or not. Whoever heard the case ruled against my brother because it was just his word against theirs and neither could prove their side. Ellen was facing long odds and I wasn't there to hear testimony so I can't judge the merits of her case, but it's idiotic to just assume the jury got it right. If you actually believe that juries almost always get it right you better pray you don't ever have to go to court and have your important case decided by 12 idiots. The last jury I served on had 3 guys in the jury room prior to the day's testimony trying to out argue the other 2 that they were stupider with technology than the other 2 were. These are the kinds of people who decide cases - morons who try to argue that they're the stupidest person in the room and take pride in winning that argument.
OK, yes I get that Canada is trying to change the law to extend copyright, but at least Canada, the EU, Japan and others actually have public domain music. I've mentioned this before and it's worth mentioning again I think. Did you know that thanks to the decision in Capitol Records vs. Naxos that in the USA it appears that nothing ever recorded is in the public domain in the USA right now? I'm not talking about song writing or music publishing, where older songs are indeed in the US public domain. I'm saying that every performance recorded from Edison on to the present age is still under copyright thanks to this court decision. Basically what happened is that Naxos tried to sneak a late 1930s classic music recording into the US market via their historical reissue CD label. The only problem was that in the US the performance was not only clearly still under copyright, the performance in question was owned in the US by Capitol Records and they had a CD on the market of it. Naxos got caught doing something they shouldn't have and rather than give in and admit their error, they tried to justify by arguing that an unclear US law actually made pre-1972 sound recordings already in the public domain, therefore they did nothing wrong. Not only the appeals court that got the case rule against Naxos, they basically made up the law and held that due to common law, every recording ever made was still under US copyright, no matter how old it was. Naxos couldn't really appeal this terrible and overreaching decision because they clearly broke US law, so it remains on the books and now there is no public domain currently in the US for musical performances. Please note that publishing and movies operate under different rules and things are actually in US public domain in those fields.
Not that surprising for anyone that follows Turkish politics. Erdogan isn't as bad as ISIS but he inch-by-inch is taking Turkey down the theocratic road of countries like Afghanistan. He practically had to be coerced into fighting ISIS. Very plausible he would have joined forces with ISIS to fight Kurds if it hadn't been for foreign pressure)
Most Turks you meet are super nice in person but for some unfathomable reason this crpto-fascist jerk keeps winning elections. If he keeps winning elections, Turkey is going to devolve into a theocracy like most of the rest of the middle east. Secular Atatürk was rational (especially for his era). Erdogan things he's an Ottoman sultan. Populist moron.
Good post. Actually the word I keep hearing is that Turkey isn't fighting ISIS at all but is using it as a pretext to only attack various Kurdish groups they don't like.
As an American who has traveled quite a bit to Europe and consider myself somewhat pro-Europe, I have given up on Turkey. (Disclaimer - I've never visited Turkey.) If you could talk to me in the late 1990s or very early 2000s, I was all for Turkey joining the EU. I have completely reversed myself and now while I have no say as I'm not an EU citizen, it is my strong belief that Turkey should not ever be allowed to joint the EU. I've learned over the past decade that if given a free choice, Muslims will willingly choose to enslave themselves. This has happened in Turkey and everywhere in the so called Arab Spring except Egypt. It sure got started in Egypt and then most of the people reversed themselves after realizing the full extent of what putting the Muslim Brotherhood in power really meant.
I blame the situation in Turkey on George W. Bush mostly. Bush started the ball rolling by making sure that the Turkish military understood that they weren't supposed to prevent Erdogan or his party (which was at one time illegal) from taking power. Now enough time has passed that I'm not sure if the Turkish military has any more people in power who might actually be opposed to Erdogan. Since Bush's presidency the US has had an irrational belief that more democracy in countries that have never had it can only lead to favorable outcomes for the USA without realizing that when you let people freely vote, they may just choose to elect someone you don't like. Turkey is a terrible "friend" to the USA and they're not going to provide much useful help against ISIS as long as Erdogan is in charge.
1) You don't want the legal ramifications of publishing this, especially if you live in the USA. I am American, so I know what I warn of.
2) Black lists are so old as an anti-spam approach I don't know that anybody takes them seriously any more.
3) Related to #1, do you really want the responsibility for situations where someone on your list was there due to ignorance and they fixed the open relay problem that led to the spam, they are no longer spamming at all, and yet there they are on your list? I thought about going into details, but on my previous job I know of cases where this actually happened and it's one of the reasons that many of us stopped taking Spamhaus and similar services seriously. It was almost impossible to get off the black list, even if you fixed the problem that got you there or were put there by mistake.
With 60 hosts and 1500 VMs I would certainly expect separate roles for enterprise architecture and system provision/admin..
This statement is quite right. Apparently the OP doesn't deal with auditors at all in his job. Lucky him. I do in mine and I have something like a Linux system admin job. For the product I work on, and I work for a Fortune 500 company that sells a lot of software products and services, I am the main contact person every year for auditors. Since the OP works for a publicly traded company, he should know that audits are required by US law. Every year I have to answer the same questions from the auditors about separation of responsibilities on the product I support. Honestly, I don't know how the OP doesn't know that getting that kind of access for an architect is going to raise all kinds of red flags in an audit that have to be explained. If I remember correctly, we have exactly 4 people who have root access to our servers who don't work on my team. They're software developers who've worked on the product for years and need that access in an emergency if we have a software related disaster that impacts customers. We have to jump through a lot of hoops to justify this on the audit. In fact, we've actually had our access restricted from some activities we used to do that fall outside of traditional system admin tasks just because it's easier for auditing purposes for us to not be able to do it anymore. In my job my group also doesn't have access to the storage, network or virtualization layers except as users/clients and all changes have to be done by others. Sometimes it's a pain, but at auditing time it makes my life easier as I can tell the auditors "We don't have the ability to change that, so you have to talk to group X on that one".
Being able to reassemble it is not the point, it's that you can re-wind time and get the information back out. With the normal idea of a blackhole, even if you could rewind time, you couldn't get the information back out.
No, you miss the point. He said basically "Having the information 'available' isn't really helpful because we have no way to get it." You simply proposed a theoretical way to get it that can't be done either at this time, possibly ever, so his assertion that we can't get it is still right. Unless you are a Q, telling us to "rewind time" as about as helpful as suggesting we simply change the gravitational constant of the universe.
Backed by IBM, the P-TECH program aims to prepare mainly minority kids from low-income backgrounds for careers in technology,
I think they meant to say:
Backed by IBM, the P-TECH program aims to prepare mainly minority kids for low-income careers in technology,
Given IBM's lack of interest in hiring or retaining American workers, that must surely be what they meant.
It's usually spread through the air. And it's not a big deal for a young healthy person to get it...
While that is generally true, specifically the 1918 flu pandemic killed a large number of people in the age range of 25-34. It's believed that they died due to the effects of a cytokine storm whereas middle aged people did much better at surviving that flu. You had to get up to about age 75 and above to start seeing the kind of mortality rates that hit the sweet spot of 25-34 for this flu. This doesn't invalidate the fact that your post is good as is your advice for people to get their flu shots.
I really hope that the majority of the agents laughed at this stupidity.
This was before my time so I can't say so with any authority, but the impression I get is that most agents probably believed it. Keep in mind that this was a time when the greatest fear of many American parents was "juvenile delinquency" and they honestly blamed comic books for it. The Senate even had hearings about comic books and juvenile delinquency. William M. Gaines, who would go on to publish Mad Magazine, was forced to testify in front of a Senate panel on the subject. How seriously the US government took the "Communist threat" is why I can't accept that Lee Harvey Oswald was allowed to return to the USA after supposedly defecting and was never punished for defecting. Something was going on there and I will believe forever that Oswald had a CIA connection that the government still doesn't want to talk about.
Epson seems to be inching into the right direction: http://hardware.slashdot.org/s...
I bought an Epson printer once maybe 5-6 years ago. It refused to recognize the ink cartridges that came with the printer from the factory. There were official Epson ink cartridges. Know what the fix for this is? Get another printer. No joke. There is no fix. You have to replace the printer. So I returned it for a refund and went with Canon. The Canon has its own issues, mostly being vvvvvveeerrrrryyyy ssssssllllloooooowwwww to warm up, but I've never had it refuse to recognize an official Canon ink cartridge.
NEVER confess to anything! All they've done is to hang themselves.
This is Europe, not the USA. They're likely to get pretty light sentences at most if not just probation and a fine. If Hitler were miraculously still alive and arrested today in Europe, he wouldn't get the death penalty and any sentence more than a few years might be viewed as excessive given his age.
So let me get this straight these people are so dangerous that they can't fly yet aren't dangerous enough to be brought in for questioning, gotten off the streets for the safety of the general public, and are likely not under direct surveillance? I am a bit confused here.
It's actually not all that difficult to consider situations where the above is true. For example, imagine that the NSA is monitoring the email and social media activity of Joe Blow, an American born recent convert to Islam who has expressed the opinion that ISIS is pretty cool and should be supported. Is expressing such an opinion really a crime? Nope. But showing such sympathies might just be enough to get him put on the no fly list even though he's committed no crime. And bringing him in for questioning might cause him to go underground with his statements of support and any work he might do to follow up on it. Some of the recent arrests of Americans accused of supporting terrorists have happened because the Americans felt safe enough to openly talk about supporting ISIS. and to act on those statements of support by buying weapons and other things.
Now if somebody here wants to argue that words alone are not enough to do anything about, that is a different argument. I am simply providing a plausible scenario for your questions.
I've wondered if at the top levels of the US government if they may not really have a desire to get Assange extradited to the USA to face charges that a good lawyer will at the minimum will argue aren't a violation of US law because he's not a US citizen and he was working in another country at the time. I'm not saying such a defense would definitely work but I'm also not saying it has no chance either. Consider the case of former World Chess Champion Bobby Fischer. Fischer, who apparently had a really tenuous grip on sanity apart from being a genius at playing chess, violated US law by agreeing to a 20th anniversary rematch with Boris Spassky in Yugoslavia in 1992. The violated a Bush executive order on economic activities in Yugoslavia. In July 2004 Fischer was arrested in Japan before boarding a plane at a US request and was imprisoned for about 6 months while Japan offered various excuses for continuing to hold him. In the end he was deported to Iceland and basically the US, Japan and Iceland agreed to let Fischer renounce his US citizenship and become a citizen of Iceland. The US had little desire to bring him to the USA and was quite content to have him stay in jail in Japan to send a message. Similarly, it may well be that the US doesn't really want to go to the trouble of bringing Assange here and is content to have him confined to the Ecuadorian embassy for a few more years to come, at which point it may quietly back away or even announce that he's not the subject of any possible US extradition request. Even if the US said that, I have a feeling that Assange would still refuse to leave. He may well stay there for the rest of his life.
Going to a foreign country to visit and having a drone flying over your head... Really? Always finding new ways to display an astonishing lack of class.
As an American, I am in agreement. And note that as is always the case, the ones who bitch the most about this and completely lose their minds over it will never, ever, visit New Zealand or any place with such laws. I had a friend some years ago (we're not friends any more because he's basically nuts and I had enough) who last flew in an airplane around in 1998 or maybe 1999. Definitely well before Sept. 11, 2001. You couldn't say anything at all to him about traveling anywhere by air without him going into a tirade about TSA. He has no reason to ever fly again in his life and likely never will and he has never personally experienced TSA checks, but it sure didn't stop him from ranting and raving about it. Same thing here for the drones and those who complain.
The gun thing is also important. I'm not a gun nut... but I believe I have a right to be dangerous in my own country and in my home. Not for hunting... not even for self defense... to be DANGEROUS. I feel that is an important check on anyone that would try to intimidate the people. If they understand that the people can and will turn on them with an instant militia of millions. That forces the elites to be careful.
No, it actually doesn't. You're an idiot and I can easily prove it. The "elites", which seems to be your code word for the US government, has nuclear bombs and drone missiles. Let me know how your army of people with pea shooters does against them. There seems to be an endless number of people here in America who actually believe that the "people" with their handguns can actually overthrow an "evil" US government. Ha ha ha. Again, let me know how your army of peasants does against nuclear bombs. If the supposedly "evil" government decided that killing you and your pals was in its best interests, you'll be dead.
My best friend for many years now is a college buddy who is a lawyer. He has taught me a lot about how the law really works in the USA and I can assure you that what people who aren't lawyers say is true about the law and how it really works are not the same at all. I'm pretty sure that people can't just open accounts in your wife's name in another state where it's easy to prove you don't live and without her social security number somehow make you responsible for it, but again, you probably really need to talk to a lawyer. I know it sucks to pay one, but lawyers can do a lot for you like send legal threats on your behalf to the cable company to, ahem, "encourage" them to get a lot more interested in your problem before it grows into a much worse problem for them . If they do actually have her social security number then that is a completely different situation and her identity is already compromised. You need a lawyer for that too. I have to ask - are you definitely sure that the cable company really has her email and name on file and that this isn't some really good phishing email trying to get you to click on a suspicious link and doing identity theft that way?
My last two girlfriends were both born and raised in China ladies and neither understood very much about how financial markets work. The most recent was quite a bit interested in the stock market in the USA and China. The first one wasn't interested in the subject. My most recent ex-girlfriend, even though she had lived in America for a few years by the time we started dating, seemed to have this belief that you simply couldn't lose money in the stock market. On some level surely she had to know that losses were possible, but I think she just wrote those off as the exception to the rule. She would ask me questions about the market and it seemed to me that she believed that the stock market was free money for the taking, almost everybody got wildly rich, and the fact that I wasn't making tons of money off it (no thought at all was given to exactly how much I even had to invest) meant that I was stupid, lazy, or both. I can't prove it, but I suspect that a lot of Chinese people are like my most recent ex-girlfriend where they think that they can't possibly lose in the stock market. This kind of thinking explains why so much of the Chinese stock market was done on margin trading. Given the high amount of government control over the economy there I really can't explain how the people running the show believed that repeating the mistakes that led to the US market crash of 1929 would turn out differently. Maybe it's due to Chinese exceptionalism run wild (""We're China, so the rules don't apply to us because we're better than everybody else").
With all that talk about not being able to do other projects being debunked by the show's producers as soon as it first came out, I thought that maybe Shearer just wanted out of the job and he was afraid to admit it and have the fans nut out over it. In that scenario, claiming to not have time for other projects would be a good cover story as it can't be disproven and it would get him off the show. I really didn't think it was over money because it seemed illogical to me that he could realistically expect the entire cast to sign for the same deal and him get something better. He's 71 now, so I just figured he'd had enough and wanted to do something else at this point in his life. Now that I read that he re-signed I really have no idea what this was all about unless maybe it really was an attempt to get more money that failed.
"How frequently have people run into companies sending sensitive information (like passwords) in cleartext via e-mail?"
I see this and people sending both public and private PGP keys to outsiders more than I should from other companies. I assume it's because in general American businesses have devalued IT for so long that they're getting exactly what little they pay for now with barely trained and barely competent people who don't know anything about security.
This. I've also always wondered why the U.S. put all its money on the Arab countries instead of Iran. Iran at least has basic level of Democracy with presidential elections. Irans youth is, in general, more progressive and open minded that in most other islamic countries. The U.S. big ally and arch-enemy of Iran, Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, is a practically an absolutist monarchy practicing extremely conservative interpretation of Sharia law. It's also interesting to point out that many high-profile terrorists, such as Osama bin Ladin, were Saudi Arabians. I wouldn't be surprised if elements in Saudi Arabia's government secretly support or at the very least condone IS in Syria and Iraq. They seem pretty single-minded about supporting Sunni Islam against everything Shia.
Basically significant segments of the Iranian government and a good number of the population (not necessarily a majority, but enough to have influence) have anti-Americanism as their raison d'être. Khomeini hated America for supporting the Shah and he passed that hatred down to his disciples. His disciples continue to be the true powers in Iran. These people have merged religion with anti-Americanism so to them, not being anti-American is like rejecting Islam. It will probably be decades before enough time has passed for mullahs to come into power in Iran who have no personal animosity towards America. Consider too that among people old enough to remember the Iran hostage situation that there is some severe hatred towards Iran so that makes it difficult for the US to make friends with Iran as portions of US power (some people in Congress and various government agencies) will never trust them because of that.
To be honest, the US would probably like to be friends with Iran, but the mullahs can't and won't allow it. The US really would be better off backing the Shiites like Iran as they are somewhat less troublesome to deal with than the Sunnis, but they can't publicly say that because the Sunnis have the numbers. Numbers of followers alone make it in the US's best interests to try to deal with Sunni governments, many of which hate the US and do things that support terrorists indirectly if not directly. The Saudi government has been pretty good friends with the USA, but unfortunately they support a version of Islam that over time has become more and more intolerant of non-Muslims and is directly or indirectly responsible for groups like ISIS and Al Queda. The Saudi rulers need US support to stay in power and the US needs them lest Saudi Arabi turn into an even bigger headache for the US than Iran.
The US governments under George W. Bush and Barack Obama have had unrealistic expectations of Middle Eastern democracy. The idea was that if given the opportunity to freely elect their leaders that they would be so grateful to the USA that they'd become our best friends. Instead it has become apparent to me that if given a free choice, the majority of Muslim voters will willingly vote to take away their own rights under oppressive religious governments and those that hate the US will come out of the shadows and work to attack the US. The only country that went through the Arab Spring and maybe came out on the better end was Egypt and they had to beg the military to overthrow the legally elected government.
Just 2 years ago the legal retirement age in Greece was 57. I think it's been changed to 61 now and there was talk of moving it to 63, but generations of Greeks have been coddled and given so many handouts by the government that they are going to riot if they have to face reality. As you point out, bit coin can't solve the problem of an entire nation so addicted to entitlements that it can't accept any way out of the crisis that doesn't involve no changes or hardships at all.
Congress is free to amend or write a new law - but if they weren't spoiled, selfish children, they would have done that already. They could have easily clarified this, but didn't because Republicans would have used the opportunity to destroy the ACA rather than helping to make it even a little better -- especially important in light of the *fact* that the Republicans have no alternative to the ACA, except to get rid of it. Don't know why they don't want to keep the poor and middle class from getting health insurance...
As someone who lives in a red state and has a lot of Republican friends, I can tell you exactly why Republicans (including supporters and not just elected officials) want to take away health insurance from the poor. I think in Clinton's first term he signed a law that changed welfare and basically stopped most able bodied people from staying on it forever. Amongst the people I know, many of them believe that perhaps as high as 20% of the US population is permanently on welfare and has no desire at all to get off of it because they are lazy. The idea persists that those who are poor are that way simply because they want to be poor since they are willfully lazy. And there's an undercurrent of subtle racism at play as it's always "blacks" or "Mexicans" who they always blame for being on welfare forever. So since these people believe that everybody in the USA could have a good job if they only wanted to, they see the poor as being unwilling to better themselves and helping them get anything like health insurance is basically enabling behavior encouraging them to stay the same. All of the people I know who hate the ACA have jobs that give them insurance, so again, they view even middle class people who need help as being lazy or stupid because if they weren't lazy or stupid, they would get themselves jobs that had health insurance. They view all people without health insurance as having deliberately made the choice to be that way. The worst thing Ronald Reagan ever said was "Government is the problem" which 30+ years later has become a mantra for the Republican Party. So people think that the government can't do anything right, ever, and thus the ACA can't ever be good because an evil, incompetent government with a lifetime 100% failure rate is in charge of it.
Repeal the 17th amendment. At least you would have one house that isn't campaigning all the type.
IMO, the 17th broke a fundamental safeguard of our republic.
No, it didn't. You need to spend more time understanding why this amendment got passed rather than let idiots like Hannity and Rick Perry and others lie to you about it. The reason that the amendment got passed is that the process of picking senators was completely corrupt. Back room favors and under the cover payments and all sorts of illegal things got done to get people appointed as senators. The situation couldn't be salvaged so the only way to fix it was to make people run for office. And you do realize that you are actually arguing for less democracy and more corruption by begging to return to those "good old days", right? No of course you don't because you just repeat what the right wing talking heads told you to think.
Martin Luther King:
While I give you props for at least finding somebody new to quote instead of the usual American Slashdotter practice of finding some 200+ year old quote Jefferson or some other founding father said and applying it to your situation, I'd like to point out that just because you found a quote in the past from same famous person, that alone does not mean he or you are right. How I wish I could find some really completely off the charts offensive racist quote from some founding father so I could throw it up there as a retort the next time somebody offers up a quote from the past as the justification for something. I don't care what Martin Luther King said. Human beings are not perfect and the fact that he apparently (I'm not going to fact check this, so you get "apparently") said something you like in no way justifies your point.