Once someone pointed out to me (here I think) that fully funding retirement funds is....what every other organization (outside of the gov) is made to do, it makes sense to force them to fully fund, and I would even say...they should ALL be doing it.
It is also kind of bullshit that what triggered these changes was a Postal Service budget surplus.
However.... that the money would get funneled into the general fund like that? Thats just corrupt to allow congress to pull tricks to turn a quasi-independent system into their own revenue source.... based on the dubious argument that an IOU direct from the treasury is "fully funded" when the same by the postal service isn't.
Does it? And who determines when you have done that, and who is an "opposing army"?
This is the whole problem with these arguments, when you remove due process, you remove oversigh If they can kill anyone who "Joins an opposing army" but there is no process by which to question whether a person has really done this or not, then that means it can be applied to anyone or any group at whim.
Also, due process is not just given to US citizens. Frankly, I don't care about that distinction one bit. Active declared war, in theater, is one thing. Everywhere else, due process should applied without question, regardless of citizenship status.... because the constitution is the rules for how the government acts, and it says that this is a limit on their power.... regardless of who they exercise it on.
If it is left to their whim as to when it applies and when it doesn't, then it doesn't exist anymore.
> We're also familiar with the tricky questions some interviewers > like to throw at people to test their thinking skills, and the > questionable merits of gauging somebody's skillset through a > pointlessly obtuse math problem.
I mostly agree that this is questionable but, depending on how and why its done, I do think there is some merrit. Not so much as a test of thinking skills, but just to see how a person deals with an obtuse problem.
I used to give people a quick, but obtuse code test, asking them to read something devious I had come up with late one night.
Only two people ever "Solved it", and did so in rather fantastic fashion, giving me example inputs and outputs. Thing is, we were not interviewing for programer jobs, we were interviewing for sysadmin, and so we were not specifically looking for high skill coders, but.... some middling ones who can jump in and debug an issue are useful... and people who can admit when they don't know things are even more so.
The entire test was, in my mind, looking for 2 things:
1. Do they actually understand the mechanics of the language that they claimed? Its not the most common thing to see, but I have definitely handed the test to a couple of people who had no business advertising that they knew PERL (I had more than the PERL test, but it was the most common and my favorite).
2. How do they approach a hard problem? I always considered asking questions and trying to talk through it a plus. That is questions that don't make me question #1... a question like "What does split do?" would be bad....
Whereas "I don't see what this split is doing, it only has one argument and isn't being assigned to anything?"* , is good. I am not trying to test your knowledge of the minor gotchas of perl syntax, knowing enough to know thats strange tells me alot. Knowing that you have no issue admitting you are not a guru and being able to ask pertenant questions is every bit as important as technical knowledge and problem solving skills.
* Yes the PERL test contained the line "split//;". I once was given a candidates resume on the way into the interview, leading everyone to break down laughing as I handed my perl test to one of the well known O'Rielly Perl book authors.... he was one of the 2 to solve it commenting "Interesting use of split, we will talk about that later."
Then they have declared they can do whatever they want. If the standard is they just "determine" who is a member of al queda and whether there is some vague emminant danger, the big question is, who, either before or after the fact, has standing to question these determinations?
If there is nobody who can bring this to court, and no way to have oversight, then this is nothing more than a declaration that Due Process is optional in their eyes and they can suspend it whenever they determine they have the need.... because assasination is de facto denial of due process.
These standards should be considered criminally negligent.
Did you have a point? You may say its trite or time wasting, and I agree it is. However, individuals are not prohibited from being trite or time wasters. However, policing their activities, is even worst, because it means crafting policy, training workers, and dealing with whatever issues come up.... all over something "trite".
Individuals and tax payer funded organizations do not, and should not, be held to the same standards of behaviour. This isn't a case of some random org insituting a random policy, this is government run.
They should not have the power to have an opinion as to what is "offensive"...which is entirely in contrast to individuals, who are welcome to have whatever opinions they want.
Where did I say that? Nope. That happens and would happen without the drug war, they would just have less people to easily abuse and less excuses to use to destroy the credibility of people that they do abuse....this much is true.
That said, I don't need to invoke dirty cops to show why the drug war is so bad.
Ahh but putting the bright people who just want the freedom to do what they feel is right for them....
They bring out the worst because they have removed from them their ability to seek help when they are wronged. So the worst.... violent criminals... come to prey on them.
There is nothing like creating a vulnerabile underclass out of an otherwise random swath of society, leaving them to be fodder for the absolute most pathological personalities.
I reported a spate of them a while back. When every single one of them came back with one of those responses, I just cursed the FCC and trashed the whole issue. I didn't even realize I could appeal!
They likely don't know that chance gives the same result, or more to the point, their experience tells them that chance doesn't give the same result. To find that out you have to not only test, but do it right...and do it many many times over.
I could see an informal dowser being challenged offering to pick 3 spots and let a random process pick 3, then declaring victory when he gets 3 out of 3 and the random process gets 2 out of 3. So many things can influence such a test (how far down are you digging? is depth being adjusted for ground height? etc) and runs of results from random events often show patterns in small enough samples.
If you think you can dowse, and you live in a place where water is within a few feet of the ground everywhere, then, your belief is confirmed every time.
I am more interested in deterance and getting on with making people productive members of society who are not harming others than I am with coming up with some sort of calculous to appease some arbitrary sense of fairness to his victims.
He can't give them back what he took from them, no amount of time in jail makes that right, so coming up with some formula for it seems navel gazing at best.
Honestly, I am not fine with that. Even denying the license plate "FUCK" shows far too much attention to the content of the plates. They shouldn't care...its numbers and letters to them....its a database key. Fuck that. These people are wasting my money, they shouldn't be doing petty shit with it.
Ahhh I didn't realize the video in question was dosing related, I was speaking more generally. I can believe that dowsers, specifically, tend to be more of the self deluded bunch than conscious decievers. Don't forget the confirmation bias aspect that I mentioned.... in addition to the ideomotor effect.... you also have the fact that, in many places.... they are absolutely correct, there is water if you dig far enough down, so, in such places they will always find water (reinforcing their belief)
The people I was thinking of were not dowsers (actually, now that I think about it, i think I know a group with one or two) but not cold readers either, more people who experienced some very strong coincidental experiences, or well... the people who watch those ghost hunter shows and think they see evidence (to the shows credit, I don't believe they ever faked their evidence, because I never saw any evidence, just a bunch of adults sitting around convincing themselves they heard a voice in the static... always sounded like static to me)
You know the "I was thinking of my mother all morning, then I found out she was in the hospital!" types.
I don't care about the hard time aspect, I am not really convinced that hard time actually brings about reform or is a good deterent. That said, even probation is a pain in the balls, never mind having such a bad background check come back.
Frankly, I think the obsession with "Hard time" mostly serves the prison industry more than anyone else. Mostly people just don't seem to be as motivated by the magnitude of the punishment, and I really do think you will get just as much, if not more benefit, by skipping prison for the most part and just sticking to probation and community service aspects.
That said.... it seems clear to me that you hit the nail on the head with what the issue is, and it saddens me that I have to assume that most of those 100 years are going to be for the technical aspects and not the more important offences, like the blackmail etc.
Where did people get the idea that 1 year was a light sentance?
I consider a year in prison to be pretty harsh. It means a felony conviction which means not being able to vote again or own a firearm in most places. It usually comes with many years of probation, which is not freedom.
The record alone will make getting jobs harder, especially anything related to computers that would involve him being trusted. Just a conviction with no jail time will easily affect him for decades to come in terms of lower lifetime wages, hits on background checks, public noteriety....
I think too many people are drinking the hard ass prosecutor cool-aide.
Well really all he can answer is whether he thinks they believed it.
I have known a few people who were genuinely convinced that they had some low level of "psychic power" who I genuinely believe believed it. I can see how it happens though compounding confirmation bias over time etc.
On the other hand, I lived briefly with a sociopath who spun a truely amazing web of lies, far beyond anything I could believe that he believed, and which, even when faced with people who had seen evidence of some of his most eggregious lies, denied every single thing till the moment he walked out the door. (I mean we are talking about a guy who could claim to go to law school and tell you the courses he should be taking at the school he claimed to go to, even though they had never heard of him)
So, I could see this going either way, from case to case, and I am not convinced that such a determination can always be made easily, I knew this guy for a few months and lived with him for a month before it was obvious what he was.
actually, this is a serious issue, and I am not sure the cause, likely its morre than one.
I can think of a couple of apps recently where I had serious issues. The first was "virt-manager" which is, biog shock, a gui virtual machine manager. I don't usually use it myself, but i was building a VM Host for a friend with a small web design firm who was passing files around the office on USB sticks! I found I could run it fine locally, or over the LAN, but, over an SSH connection? Slow to the point of unusable.
Second one was....filezilla of all things. I was at work and needed to test an external service. So I ssh into my home box, and fire up filezilla from there. I ended up packing up and driving home to do the test, it was THAT slow.
All that said, I think there is something pathalogical about those cases (and the second one was, itself pretty convoluted... ssh to one host, with a ProxyCommand using nc to connect to another.... don't judge me....:) )
Another issue with X11 is sudo with Xauth can be tricky if you need to run as another user. Turns out its not hard, you just have to set $HOME to the effective user's home directory (most sudo configs preserve $HOME so your dotfiles work) and then run xauth add and pass it the output of xauth list (as the original user).
Agreed. Sure this is EAs sandbox, if they don't want to respect people who are playing/testing/etc their games and run their forums like a petty fiefdom, then more power to them.
And....more power to myself and everyone else who judges them accordingly for how they use their power when they have it....and again how they react when its pointed out how stupid they are being.
There is being within your rights, and there is acting right. The latter is a subset of the former, not the other way around.
I think you are missing the point of "glory days". People don't die after their Glory days.... they are their glory days precisely because they spend the rest of their lives talking about them (four touchdowns in a single game!).
Its the end of being newsworthy and interesting, not the end of productive work.
Its like casinos and poker dealers. Could a morally bankrupt poker room have mechanic dealers working with professional players to cheat people? Sure they could... but they are making so much money playing it straight that it doesn't make sense. If you can pay the dealers an hourly rate and let them keep tips, and make money hand over fist, why risk that in a scheme that requires you to pay them, and some other people, a lot more?
I think this analogy is apt because it shows the real problem isn't the casino, who is getting paid, its the dealers on their own. Your cloud provider likely is not spying on you, but, his employees or people who have broken into his internals might be. Just like the casino probably isn't running a ring of mechanic dealers....but that doesn't mean there isn't one operating under their nose.
That is always what seems to be missing in these talks. Yes, your cloud provider, be it drop box, google, or whoever probably doens't give a flying fuck about spying on data.... but,.... they are a great target themselves for people who do want to snoop on sombodies data, or troll for people to snoop on.
> This is a significant distinction that very few people seem to have understood in the discussions on this topic I've > seen over the past week.
IANAL, but I don't have to be one to know that a significant portion of commenters on/. barely read the summary of posts before commenting. We are generally lucky that people even read the title or post they are responding to.
> Aside from the ugly business of working around all the annoying interlocks that inkjets have for atypical paper > feed/consumables condition/problems that exist only in their own imagination/etc. which generally stop the > printer dead, regardless of how mechanically healthy it is; a problem that is annoying, but solvable with sufficient > electronics hackery skill
Loading the page pops up a picture of a print head mounted on some custom built stand, with wires connecting it to what looks like an arduino prototyping board with two stacked sheilds. I think its safe to say that those interlocks are effectively bypassed.
As for thermal vs piezo, the title here specifically mentions it is an old printer. I haven't read any of it yet but one of the pictures shows a printed pattern, which appears to be glowing. I am just going to assume those are the printed cells and they are bioluminecent. I would call that a pretty slam dunk test right there.
Perhaps, these thousands of printers (thousands? thats it?) are out there on purpose because people WANT others to be able to send them printouts? Perhaps, they just want something like email, but that they can read offline?
Perhaps its a way of collecting reading material? I think the smart thing to do is to go with that assumption and send them something to read.
wow, I never would have guessed something that big was a phone, every video I have ever seen that featured them showed some woman straddling it and enjoying its strong vibrate function.... not sure how you talk on it though, must be a bluetooth headset.
We all know Paleontology has a major problem in that its techniques for dating the organisms it studies regularly, as the dates are clearly so much further back than Biblical evidence clearly points. How much research now is going into reconciling your fields farcial dates with realistic ones based on the evidence?
Slashdot Mirror
Its the combination that burns me.
Once someone pointed out to me (here I think) that fully funding retirement funds is....what every other organization (outside of the gov) is made to do, it makes sense to force them to fully fund, and I would even say...they should ALL be doing it.
It is also kind of bullshit that what triggered these changes was a Postal Service budget surplus.
However.... that the money would get funneled into the general fund like that? Thats just corrupt to allow congress to pull tricks to turn a quasi-independent system into their own revenue source.... based on the dubious argument that an IOU direct from the treasury is "fully funded" when the same by the postal service isn't.
Does it? And who determines when you have done that, and who is an "opposing army"?
This is the whole problem with these arguments, when you remove due process, you remove oversigh If they can kill anyone who "Joins an opposing army" but there is no process by which to question whether a person has really done this or not, then that means it can be applied to anyone or any group at whim.
Also, due process is not just given to US citizens. Frankly, I don't care about that distinction one bit. Active declared war, in theater, is one thing. Everywhere else, due process should applied without question, regardless of citizenship status.... because the constitution is the rules for how the government acts, and it says that this is a limit on their power.... regardless of who they exercise it on.
If it is left to their whim as to when it applies and when it doesn't, then it doesn't exist anymore.
^^^ FTFY
> We're also familiar with the tricky questions some interviewers
> like to throw at people to test their thinking skills, and the
> questionable merits of gauging somebody's skillset through a
> pointlessly obtuse math problem.
I mostly agree that this is questionable but, depending on how and why its done, I do think there is some merrit. Not so much as a test of thinking skills, but just to see how a person deals with an obtuse problem.
I used to give people a quick, but obtuse code test, asking them to read something devious I had come up with late one night.
Only two people ever "Solved it", and did so in rather fantastic fashion, giving me example inputs and outputs. Thing is, we were not interviewing for programer jobs, we were interviewing for sysadmin, and so we were not specifically looking for high skill coders, but.... some middling ones who can jump in and debug an issue are useful... and people who can admit when they don't know things are even more so.
The entire test was, in my mind, looking for 2 things:
1. Do they actually understand the mechanics of the language that they claimed? Its not the most common thing to see, but I have definitely handed the test to a couple of people who had no business advertising that they knew PERL (I had more than the PERL test, but it was the most common and my favorite).
2. How do they approach a hard problem? I always considered asking questions and trying to talk through it a plus. That is questions that don't make me question #1... a question like "What does split do?" would be bad....
Whereas "I don't see what this split is doing, it only has one argument and isn't being assigned to anything?"* , is good. I am not trying to test your knowledge of the minor gotchas of perl syntax, knowing enough to know thats strange tells me alot. Knowing that you have no issue admitting you are not a guru and being able to ask pertenant questions is every bit as important as technical knowledge and problem solving skills.
* Yes the PERL test contained the line "split //;". I once was given a candidates resume on the way into the interview, leading everyone to break down laughing as I handed my perl test to one of the well known O'Rielly Perl book authors.... he was one of the 2 to solve it commenting "Interesting use of split, we will talk about that later."
Then they have declared they can do whatever they want. If the standard is they just "determine" who is a member of al queda and whether there is some vague emminant danger, the big question is, who, either before or after the fact, has standing to question these determinations?
If there is nobody who can bring this to court, and no way to have oversight, then this is nothing more than a declaration that Due Process is optional in their eyes and they can suspend it whenever they determine they have the need.... because assasination is de facto denial of due process.
These standards should be considered criminally negligent.
Did you have a point? You may say its trite or time wasting, and I agree it is. However, individuals are not prohibited from being trite or time wasters. However, policing their activities, is even worst, because it means crafting policy, training workers, and dealing with whatever issues come up.... all over something "trite".
Individuals and tax payer funded organizations do not, and should not, be held to the same standards of behaviour. This isn't a case of some random org insituting a random policy, this is government run.
They should not have the power to have an opinion as to what is "offensive"...which is entirely in contrast to individuals, who are welcome to have whatever opinions they want.
Where did I say that? Nope. That happens and would happen without the drug war, they would just have less people to easily abuse and less excuses to use to destroy the credibility of people that they do abuse....this much is true.
That said, I don't need to invoke dirty cops to show why the drug war is so bad.
Ahh but putting the bright people who just want the freedom to do what they feel is right for them....
They bring out the worst because they have removed from them their ability to seek help when they are wronged. So the worst.... violent criminals... come to prey on them.
There is nothing like creating a vulnerabile underclass out of an otherwise random swath of society, leaving them to be fodder for the absolute most pathological personalities.
Motherfucker! You tell me this now?
I reported a spate of them a while back. When every single one of them came back with one of those responses, I just cursed the FCC and trashed the whole issue. I didn't even realize I could appeal!
You don't play poker do you?
They likely don't know that chance gives the same result, or more to the point, their experience tells them that chance doesn't give the same result. To find that out you have to not only test, but do it right...and do it many many times over.
I could see an informal dowser being challenged offering to pick 3 spots and let a random process pick 3, then declaring victory when he gets 3 out of 3 and the random process gets 2 out of 3. So many things can influence such a test (how far down are you digging? is depth being adjusted for ground height? etc) and runs of results from random events often show patterns in small enough samples.
If you think you can dowse, and you live in a place where water is within a few feet of the ground everywhere, then, your belief is confirmed every time.
I am more interested in deterance and getting on with making people productive members of society who are not harming others than I am with coming up with some sort of calculous to appease some arbitrary sense of fairness to his victims.
He can't give them back what he took from them, no amount of time in jail makes that right, so coming up with some formula for it seems navel gazing at best.
Honestly, I am not fine with that. Even denying the license plate "FUCK" shows far too much attention to the content of the plates. They shouldn't care...its numbers and letters to them....its a database key. Fuck that. These people are wasting my money, they shouldn't be doing petty shit with it.
Ahhh I didn't realize the video in question was dosing related, I was speaking more generally. I can believe that dowsers, specifically, tend to be more of the self deluded bunch than conscious decievers. Don't forget the confirmation bias aspect that I mentioned.... in addition to the ideomotor effect.... you also have the fact that, in many places.... they are absolutely correct, there is water if you dig far enough down, so, in such places they will always find water (reinforcing their belief)
The people I was thinking of were not dowsers (actually, now that I think about it, i think I know a group with one or two) but not cold readers either, more people who experienced some very strong coincidental experiences, or well... the people who watch those ghost hunter shows and think they see evidence (to the shows credit, I don't believe they ever faked their evidence, because I never saw any evidence, just a bunch of adults sitting around convincing themselves they heard a voice in the static... always sounded like static to me)
You know the "I was thinking of my mother all morning, then I found out she was in the hospital!" types.
I don't care about the hard time aspect, I am not really convinced that hard time actually brings about reform or is a good deterent. That said, even probation is a pain in the balls, never mind having such a bad background check come back.
Frankly, I think the obsession with "Hard time" mostly serves the prison industry more than anyone else. Mostly people just don't seem to be as motivated by the magnitude of the punishment, and I really do think you will get just as much, if not more benefit, by skipping prison for the most part and just sticking to probation and community service aspects.
That said.... it seems clear to me that you hit the nail on the head with what the issue is, and it saddens me that I have to assume that most of those 100 years are going to be for the technical aspects and not the more important offences, like the blackmail etc.
Where did people get the idea that 1 year was a light sentance?
I consider a year in prison to be pretty harsh. It means a felony conviction which means not being able to vote again or own a firearm in most places. It usually comes with many years of probation, which is not freedom.
The record alone will make getting jobs harder, especially anything related to computers that would involve him being trusted. Just a conviction with no jail time will easily affect him for decades to come in terms of lower lifetime wages, hits on background checks, public noteriety....
I think too many people are drinking the hard ass prosecutor cool-aide.
Well really all he can answer is whether he thinks they believed it.
I have known a few people who were genuinely convinced that they had some low level of "psychic power" who I genuinely believe believed it. I can see how it happens though compounding confirmation bias over time etc.
On the other hand, I lived briefly with a sociopath who spun a truely amazing web of lies, far beyond anything I could believe that he believed, and which, even when faced with people who had seen evidence of some of his most eggregious lies, denied every single thing till the moment he walked out the door.
(I mean we are talking about a guy who could claim to go to law school and tell you the courses he should be taking at the school he claimed to go to, even though they had never heard of him)
So, I could see this going either way, from case to case, and I am not convinced that such a determination can always be made easily, I knew this guy for a few months and lived with him for a month before it was obvious what he was.
actually, this is a serious issue, and I am not sure the cause, likely its morre than one.
I can think of a couple of apps recently where I had serious issues. The first was "virt-manager" which is, biog shock, a gui virtual machine manager. I don't usually use it myself, but i was building a VM Host for a friend with a small web design firm who was passing files around the office on USB sticks! I found I could run it fine locally, or over the LAN, but, over an SSH connection? Slow to the point of unusable.
Second one was....filezilla of all things. I was at work and needed to test an external service. So I ssh into my home box, and fire up filezilla from there. I ended up packing up and driving home to do the test, it was THAT slow.
All that said, I think there is something pathalogical about those cases (and the second one was, itself pretty convoluted... ssh to one host, with a ProxyCommand using nc to connect to another.... don't judge me.... :) )
Another issue with X11 is sudo with Xauth can be tricky if you need to run as another user. Turns out its not hard, you just have to set $HOME to the effective user's home directory (most sudo configs preserve $HOME so your dotfiles work) and then run xauth add and pass it the output of xauth list (as the original user).
Agreed. Sure this is EAs sandbox, if they don't want to respect people who are playing/testing/etc their games and run their forums like a petty fiefdom, then more power to them.
And....more power to myself and everyone else who judges them accordingly for how they use their power when they have it....and again how they react when its pointed out how stupid they are being.
There is being within your rights, and there is acting right. The latter is a subset of the former, not the other way around.
I think you are missing the point of "glory days". People don't die after their Glory days.... they are their glory days precisely because they spend the rest of their lives talking about them (four touchdowns in a single game!).
Its the end of being newsworthy and interesting, not the end of productive work.
Its like casinos and poker dealers. Could a morally bankrupt poker room have mechanic dealers working with professional players to cheat people? Sure they could... but they are making so much money playing it straight that it doesn't make sense. If you can pay the dealers an hourly rate and let them keep tips, and make money hand over fist, why risk that in a scheme that requires you to pay them, and some other people, a lot more?
I think this analogy is apt because it shows the real problem isn't the casino, who is getting paid, its the dealers on their own. Your cloud provider likely is not spying on you, but, his employees or people who have broken into his internals might be. Just like the casino probably isn't running a ring of mechanic dealers....but that doesn't mean there isn't one operating under their nose.
That is always what seems to be missing in these talks. Yes, your cloud provider, be it drop box, google, or whoever probably doens't give a flying fuck about spying on data.... but,.... they are a great target themselves for people who do want to snoop on sombodies data, or troll for people to snoop on.
> This is a significant distinction that very few people seem to have understood in the discussions on this topic I've
> seen over the past week.
IANAL, but I don't have to be one to know that a significant portion of commenters on /. barely read the summary of posts before commenting. We are generally lucky that people even read the title or post they are responding to.
> Aside from the ugly business of working around all the annoying interlocks that inkjets have for atypical paper
> feed/consumables condition/problems that exist only in their own imagination/etc. which generally stop the
> printer dead, regardless of how mechanically healthy it is; a problem that is annoying, but solvable with sufficient
> electronics hackery skill
Loading the page pops up a picture of a print head mounted on some custom built stand, with wires connecting it to what looks like an arduino prototyping board with two stacked sheilds. I think its safe to say that those interlocks are effectively bypassed.
As for thermal vs piezo, the title here specifically mentions it is an old printer. I haven't read any of it yet but one of the pictures shows a printed pattern, which appears to be glowing. I am just going to assume those are the printed cells and they are bioluminecent. I would call that a pretty slam dunk test right there.
Perhaps, these thousands of printers (thousands? thats it?) are out there on purpose because people WANT others to be able to send them printouts? Perhaps, they just want something like email, but that they can read offline?
Perhaps its a way of collecting reading material? I think the smart thing to do is to go with that assumption and send them something to read.
wow, I never would have guessed something that big was a phone, every video I have ever seen that featured them showed some woman straddling it and enjoying its strong vibrate function.... not sure how you talk on it though, must be a bluetooth headset.
We all know Paleontology has a major problem in that its techniques for dating the organisms it studies regularly, as the dates are clearly so much further back than Biblical evidence clearly points. How much research now is going into reconciling your fields farcial dates with realistic ones based on the evidence?