I saw a presentation yesterday by some guys who do health care lab system automation. Pretty cool what they do these days. They were saying that, with some of the work that they are doing in imaging and processing images, Sony actually gave them a top secret next gen playstation prototype to use. So, the advances of the gaming industry, are... already helping research on next generation medicine.
I remember when worry about nuclear apocalypse was in vogue. It was often said that WWIII would be the last war.
However, it makes me think, if this is the new face of popular revolution, and it seems to work pretty well, quickly, and bloodlessly, well... maybe its time for WWIII. We could stand to reset the government here. Does anyone really think we wouldn't benefit from a total rewrite?
You know, sometimes you have to give up on version 1.112 and start working on a clean 2.0.
We have enough people out of work now to get it started here, I hope to see this trend catch on.
> Autism is an overused trendy diagnosis for children, especially as ADHD is so passe nowadays.
Though, just because it is over used and trendy, doesn't mean that any individual claiming to have it isn't a legitimate/severe case.
Similar issues with bipolar disorder, and as you say ADHD. However, that isn't to say that there are not people who legitimately have trouble functioning and for whom these diagnoses are, at least, the best description we have for what the problem is.
The problem is the intersection between having people with issues that need help and needing a language for talking about them and devising ways of helping them and the reality of how many different people there are out there, and how many are looking for some sort of help for themselves, or more often, their children.
Add to this that we often end up creating perverse incentives. Well you have a kid who is not doing well in school, despite engaged parents and seems to need some help, but, can't get into the schools special needs program without a diagnosis of some sort, so now you have parents taking their kid to a doctor trying to find something, so he is looking for something wrong with the kid, and well...
I mean, go read the DSM.... I have seen people read it as a party game. There is a definite need for it, there are definitely people who need help, but drawing the line between the serious cases and the otherwise normal people who just need a bit more help is actually a harder problem than it seems.
So while there are many more "add" and "autistic" kids than there probably should be.... I have met some who definitely deserved the diagnosis too, and its unlikely will ever be fully functioning and independent people too.
Really? because I have to say.... spam to my accounts has dropped off significantly. A larger percentage of the whole makes it past my spam filtering, which is kind of sad, but I also have an outdated copy of Spamassassin... so it could just be that (time to upgrade...)
That said, all of the spam, filtered and in the inbox, combined, looks to be maybe 1/4 of what used to just go into the spam filter folder.
Maybe it is just that my addresses have fallen off lists as I do filter, and tend to delete spam without even looking at it. I also used mutt, so they didn't get a lot of hits on images when I read it.
It wasn't long ago that I was looking at all the spam and thinking "email is still utterly useless" but, in the past month or two, I have actually started using it again.
Having secret friends who are public enemies is nothing new, or even all that rare. In fact some politicians who were in the habit of regularly denouncing the US got outed as collaborators with US diplomats in the Wikileaks cables. Politicians of many countries were found to have espoused ideas in private that run counter to the statements that they make to their own public.
What would we do to a politician who was found to be secretly in talks with the Chinese, praising the Chinese and their actions, while publicly denouncing those same actions, To the people who elected him?
I guarantee he would be, at the very least, asked to resign. It wouldn't just be Faux News who was dragging his name through the mud either.
Seems like a better question would be,.... is it EVER worth it to send troops to foreign soil? I don't see what any of these wars do for the people them, or rather, their children whose futures the wars are borrowed against.
Um... as a test, to see if it is feasible to use for spacecraft controls.
Now, whats so ludicrous? Anything being broadcast over radio waves is "on a major public network". Building a powerful radio, and hooking it up to a parabolic dish and/or whatever else may be involved is a bit beyond me, and possibly you, right this moment, however, it is hardly an intractable problem. It is, essentially a "public medium".
That said... what would be ludicrous is designing it without any sort of message authentication code.... or to use a weak/broken one. Honestly, from what little I know of crypto, I wouldn't even use something based on factoring large primes, but something that is, at least, not currently believed to be solvable via quantum computers. Afterall, we might be talking about something that might be in service for decades.
Doing authentication securely on a public network which can be eavesdropped and where packets can be injected by an attacker is hardly impossible.
> Sorry, it had been a while since your ealier post about secession, so I'd > forgotten about your "us vs. them" take on your fellow citizens.
My fellow citizens? You mean all the other peasants? I bear them no ill will.
If you mean the aristocrats who run most levels of government, the corporate execs who buy the laws they want? "Them" is really a pretty small group. Not that everyone agrees with me on this, but, I do wonder why most support this steaming pile of governance.... especially when nearly all of them are, in some way, a "criminal" who could have their life upended at any time.
I would have little to complain about from a government that called my friends and family criminals when they steal and murder, but, when they grow, sell, or smoke dried flowers? That is utterly unacceptable.
Perhaps if the driving related laws made sense and were not used for little more reason than to justify the jobs of police, then maybe I wouldn't have a problem. However, I have personally been abused by police enforcing speed limits on ridiculous stretches of road. 30 MPH zones where nearly every car, all the time, does almost 50 MPH. I have even been to "defensive driving school". Why? Because I had a 2 mph fender bender in heavy traffic, with an asshole who got all pissed off and wouldn't even talk to me until the police showed up and he insisted that they ticket me. Oh... that's only 2 violations. The other 3 were all paperwork when my license and registration expired... after the registry suddenly stopped sending renewal notices out.... yes... after a decade of renewing whenever the little form came in the mail, they got me good.
Frankly, I know a handful of people who have been in really serious car crashes. A handful who knew people who died in such crashes.... yet... nearly everyone I know has been abused to the tune of a few grand, first in taxes, then in fines, and finally by the insurance company... who are usually the ones who push for the enforcement. Why wouldn't they? They are the ones who get to sit back and blame the state safe driver program for the excessively high surcharges.
I am utterly unconvinced that the majority of traffic enforcement does ANYTHING to make the roads safer. As such, how can I call it anything but, the most prevalent road hazard on the roads? Whats worst, it is hard to even find a person who isn't familiar with ridiculously low speed limits, and all the other ridiculous enforcement practices. Less who know that insurance companies pushed for the utterly corrupt system of police compensation that has subjected us to ever more tickets.
Thats before we even get to the endless string of pointless wars that "we" seem to keep getting involved in. Yet we are never supposed to question whether signing up to fight in these wars is actually honorable or in service of anything that anybody should be proud of..... and of course, despite the despicable deeds, soldiers are a ridiculously protected class, who can't be denied jobs for their life choices (unlike the people who were smoking dried flowers... the ones who never murdered anyone for their misplaced sense of patriotism).
I don't expect to be able to convince everyone, more power to you if you feel differently, but I am perfectly happy to leave you and yours to yours, all I really ask, in ANY of this, is not to be forced to support "causes" which I find utterly repugnant, against my will.
Ill gladly pay for roads that I use, police and courts to go after REAL criminals (murders, rapists, thieves, fraudsters), but when it comes down to the use of threats of violent force to change peoples nonviolent life choices? Or to conduct military operations on foreign soil? Please count me out, and don't do it in my name.
I don't get your point. Because a bunch of thugs that other people have to put up with are worst than the thugs right here where I live (I believe that my statement in the original post about this being on the long list of reasons that I advocate my state leaving the union might be a tip as to where I live), means that, I shouldn't complain?
I know what the "laws" are, and thats precicely why I don't see these thugs as a legitimate government. Some of these laws go beyond the pale and turn them into an organization that I cannot, in good conscience, advocate supporting. I consider 100% of the taxes that I pay to be given under duress. Not because 100% of it is spent on things that I don't support, but, because any of it is....money is fungible after all.
I see the difference between the current regime and the Mullahs to be far smaller than the current regime and something that I could, in good conscience, support. Them being worst has little bearing on it.
No, I get all that. What I don't get, is all this use of "We". This organization, which you like to think of as your government, and apply the term "we" too, is welcome to have whatever policies it wants, about what it, and the people working for it, do.
I don't see why anyone else should need their 'approval', tacit or explicit, to do anything. If I want to deal with the government of Iran, as if it were some manner of legitimate entity (which given that I see the US government as an illegitimate regime, that is highly unlikely, for many of the reasons that you stated)... than that is my perogative. I don't see where "you" get off telling other people who they can do business with. That isn't foreign policy, thats domestic bullying.
Nah, you get a drone of your own, and have it fly... shadowing their drone and transmitting its own GPS coordinates.
Actually.... I have been thinking, and since I don't have the technical chops to implement, may as well tell others who might.
Police cars emit a lot more than radar. They have their own radio channels, they have laptops that presumably talk back to their main systems... they shouldn't be hard to detect electronically.... maybe not even to triangulate.
I would love to see trapster taken to the next level... and a blue dot put on my phone GPS for each detected car (marked or not) in my area. Of course, the idea really comes from playing too much GTA, but, it made driving to avoid the cops so much more easy in GTA.... I would bet it could work smashingly in the real world too!
Drones seem like a fine way to accomplish the goal, but, probably more effective with a distributed network of ground based sensors.
> The average household has a #2 Phillips, an old fashioned slotted screwdriver for stupid things like switchplates > that still use them, and a hammer
Actually, I find the slotted driver to be MORE useful than the Philips. Not so much for driving screws, but as a general purpose small pry bar and/or small chisel. Great for jamming into the seal of a jar lid that is too strong to be done with a butter knife.
Same purpose though. It is entertainment. Personally, I don't get it. Isn't it like saying "our show is so lame, all we have is what happens next, you wouldn't watch it twice".
I tend to think the twitter and spoilers etc can only help them. That is, unless they don't want more exposure, and potentially more people watching. A few spoilers (unless you call "it was horrible, don't waste your time" a spoiler) has never detracted from my enjoyment of a show, not convinced me not to watch it.
I think this is an example of "just because you can worry about it, doesn't mean that its a real problem".
I setup a good size RAID array of 4 250 GB disks a couple of years ago. Personally, I like spinning storage for archives. It is cheap enough that you can add some redundancy. Is it as rock solid as a multi month tape archive that is regularly restore tested (you do test restores right?)? But... in terms of cost, both labor and $$... well... its cheap.
I recently upgraded the array. I saw 2 TB disks on sale, and grabed 4. Best part? The new disks after just 2 years are big enough to back the whole physical array volume (using linux LVM2) to 1 disk, and then build the new array. Simple and safe.
Then I put a VM on there and set it up to take backups of everything else. It is big enough now.
I figure that, with a monitor setup to alert me when the array loses a disk, and that is about as robust a solution as I need.
I don't really give a shit what google decides to do with their web browser (which I have never used, and don't even plan to try, firefox works just fine and has noscript and requestpolicy, both of which I consider minimum requirements for browsing the web)
What irks me is that the people stealing my tax dollars have people on staff, being paid with my money, for little more than to enforce these symbolic points.
I make symbolic points all the time... like when I denounce allegiance to the flag, when I reach my arm out and give a police officer a thumbs down for driving around and being the single largest hazard on the road, etc. However, I don't expect other people to pay for me to make symbolic points.
The very idea that software export restrictions are anything but an absolute waste of time and resources, capable of accomplishing nothing but ruining the lives of people who don't follow them.
It stops being a symbolic gesture when someone goes to jail for not playing along with this silly game. It is unconscionable, and goes on the long list of reasons that I want to see my state leave the union.
Reflecting on this a bit, I think its more so even about open architecture than open source.
I have dealt with a few "closed" products that I was still, just from knowledge of the OS, and how the tools work, was able to get in, figure out what is going on, and solve problems... some which support told me could not be done.... like recovering files from backups that had been corrupted since the script that generated the dumps was "upgraded" by a patch 6 months prior. Sure it involved diving through 6 layers of shell script, dumping raw data off tape, and then writing a perl script to fix all the file names:)... but it worked.
I never would have gotten as far if it hadn't been for parts of the application bacup being written in shell, and a few commands the legato support person gave up while troubleshooting... I realized that one of the commands was dumping raw data off tape, so I saved the data instead of piping it to the process that he wanted me to pipe it to (which did jack since the filenames were corrupted.... duh)
Take monitoring. I have had the "opportunity" to directly deal with both Nagios and SCOM. SCOM has its nice polish, pretty charts, auto-discovery. Too bad the agent is crap, its just as hard as anything else to configure usefully. It doesn't have the granular configurability in the notification system, you can't as easily hack up a check in shell script and start monitoring.... overall.... out of the box, it beats nagios hands down, but, it is nowhere near a well configured nagios system, run by someone who put some time into setting it up....
and when the SCOM guy wanted to test the Linux agent. Not only was it obtuse and hard to get to install properly, it would only install if you changed the major/minor numbers on/dev/random to turn it into/dev/urandom. Nice... so now every system with scom installed has a fake/dev/random..... and no explanation as to what you are doing, why you are doing it, or what the implications of doing it are.... thanks guys.... never considered using/dev/urandom did you?
Not just that but, ask the question "what do you get for your money". In the open source world, it can take more time, and more effort to deploy a solution. I will readily admit that. However, the reason it takes longer, and costs more, is that deploying it actually involves.... understanding what you are doing.
In the MS world, it is point, shoot, hope, and call support when it breaks. In the open source world, usually the fact that multiple components work together is not hidden, and setup involves at least some knowledge of all of them. The upshot? When it breaks, you are not sitting around waiting for support to call you back, you are troubleshooting it yourself.
It may not be as polished, or as easy, and maybe, the initial setup costs more and takes longer. In the end though, I think you have more control and can get more done with less, in a more supportable manner.... because you get out of it what you put into it, rather than just paying for a canned product and hoping for the best.
Sounds about right to me. Actually, I don't see any evidence that all this, and the cost involved, really makes me, or anyone else, any safer. Perhaps they should focus more on fixing the roads themselves. NYS banned handheld phone use while driving... resulted in a 60% drop in observed use... and no change in accident rates.
They sure were quick to point out that this, somehow, magically doesn't mean that the law isn't effective. The last thing we might want to question is that the law does what its intended to do, harms people for no reason, or costs more than its even worth. I am sure all the drivers in NYS who got caught and paid fines and paid money to insurance companies for years later in enhanced premiums all feel that it is well worth it to.... not make the roads one bit safer!
1. They have tried these sorts of software export regulations before, and it failed miserably before.::cough::RSA::cough:: 2. The US government pretty much invented the damned internet, you would think that they would know how it works 3. The insanity of doing the same, ineffective things, over and over again, is generally lost on anyone in government.
Block all government IPs? Yes, because, as we all know, thats so useful. Clearly nobody in the Iranian Government can figure out how to use a proxy... or... get an IP that isn't registered as owned by their government. Yes... way to go. Very effective.
Seriously, must we be the guy who has a petty argument with his neighbor, and builds 12 foot high ugly fence in retaliation? (and yes, people do that)
So there... take that.... nya nya nya. You don't get to use this cool web browser, unless you jump through some minor hoops to make it work. That will really teach you!
All you have to do is never speed, never have a tail light out, never smoke pot, never drive after having more than one drink with dinner, always wear your seat belt, never look like another guy who did something bad, always have a record of where you where and who you were with, never let your driver's license expire, never have sex with an underage girl, even if she lies about her age, has fake id, and you met her in a bar, which checks everyones ID.
depending on the current political climate, you may also want to avoid being gay, drinking from the incorrectly labeled fountain, sitting at the wrong end of the bus, refusing to hire war criminals, conspiring, racketeering, possessing an animal (dead or alive) that was harvested or exported illegally from its country of origin, even if the particular animal would otherwise be legal here (that's a federal crime).
Good reason? Of course, whatever fascist fantasy our elected officials, and their cronies dream up is "good reason". I can think of a few examples of "no good reason" that have happened to people that I know. Talking about them will just piss me off though, so lets check out some more well known cases. Was it "good reason" that got Allen Turing sentenced to treatment for his homosexuality? Was it good reason that Tommy Chong was jailed, because his son was pressured into sending some glass pipes to the wrong state? How about when "Max Hardcore" was sentenced to jail under obscenities laws in another state, because of material that he published... on the internet?
I also use text secure on the droid. So far, I have been able to get most people that I know who use droids to install it...but even without them running it, it still stores your texts locally in an encrypted db. At least that makes casual snooping harder (of course, remember, they can also get your texts without a warrent.. the phone companies sell them to law enforcement!)
It can also be set to timeout your passphrase, combined with the phone lockout (in case you can't power it off), should be enough to keep them out of your texts.
This reminds me of the old Bill Hicks rant about how the idea of the All powerful godhead being the kind of "prankster god" who would go around burying dinosaur bones in the ground, just to.... fuck with us.
It's like you die, go to the pearly gates, and St Peter asks you "Do you believe in dinosaurs?" "Of course, there are fossils everywhere" "Ha you fell for gods oldest trick! Enjoy the lake of fire moron!"
I am no fan of the idea of omnipotent, Omniscient beings.... but the idea that such a being might exist... and ALSO be just fucking with the world for his own amusement (one could even postulate that he makes things like gravity work in a consistent and explainable way... just to lend credibility to science and fuck with us even more!)
Of course, they say that the Lord works in Mysterious ways. Maybe creating such a completely consistent world is easy for Him. Maybe He has a reason to do it that we just don't know?
Frankly, I am far more comfortable being an atheist than contemplating why such a being would be so cruel. Even worst, the idea that someone would preach that such a vile being "loves us".... perhaps in the same way that a kid with a magnifying glass "loves" ants?
Slashdot Mirror
I saw a presentation yesterday by some guys who do health care lab system automation. Pretty cool what they do these days. They were saying that, with some of the work that they are doing in imaging and processing images, Sony actually gave them a top secret next gen playstation prototype to use. So, the advances of the gaming industry, are... already helping research on next generation medicine.
How is that for some unexpected crossover?
I remember when worry about nuclear apocalypse was in vogue. It was often said that WWIII would be the last war.
However, it makes me think, if this is the new face of popular revolution, and it seems to work pretty well, quickly, and bloodlessly, well... maybe its time for WWIII. We could stand to reset the government here. Does anyone really think we wouldn't benefit from a total rewrite?
You know, sometimes you have to give up on version 1.112 and start working on a clean 2.0.
We have enough people out of work now to get it started here, I hope to see this trend catch on.
-Steve
> Autism is an overused trendy diagnosis for children, especially as ADHD is so passe nowadays.
Though, just because it is over used and trendy, doesn't mean that any individual claiming to have it isn't a legitimate/severe case.
Similar issues with bipolar disorder, and as you say ADHD. However, that isn't to say that there are not people who legitimately have trouble functioning and for whom these diagnoses are, at least, the best description we have for what the problem is.
The problem is the intersection between having people with issues that need help and needing a language for talking about them and devising ways of helping them and the reality of how many different people there are out there, and how many are looking for some sort of help for themselves, or more often, their children.
Add to this that we often end up creating perverse incentives. Well you have a kid who is not doing well in school, despite engaged parents and seems to need some help, but, can't get into the schools special needs program without a diagnosis of some sort, so now you have parents taking their kid to a doctor trying to find something, so he is looking for something wrong with the kid, and well...
I mean, go read the DSM.... I have seen people read it as a party game. There is a definite need for it, there are definitely people who need help, but drawing the line between the serious cases and the otherwise normal people who just need a bit more help is actually a harder problem than it seems.
So while there are many more "add" and "autistic" kids than there probably should be.... I have met some who definitely deserved the diagnosis too, and its unlikely will ever be fully functioning and independent people too.
-Steve
Really? because I have to say.... spam to my accounts has dropped off significantly. A larger percentage of the whole makes it past my spam filtering, which is kind of sad, but I also have an outdated copy of Spamassassin... so it could just be that (time to upgrade...)
That said, all of the spam, filtered and in the inbox, combined, looks to be maybe 1/4 of what used to just go into the spam filter folder.
Maybe it is just that my addresses have fallen off lists as I do filter, and tend to delete spam without even looking at it. I also used mutt, so they didn't get a lot of hits on images when I read it.
It wasn't long ago that I was looking at all the spam and thinking "email is still utterly useless" but, in the past month or two, I have actually started using it again.
Having secret friends who are public enemies is nothing new, or even all that rare. In fact some politicians who were in the habit of regularly denouncing the US got outed as collaborators with US diplomats in the Wikileaks cables. Politicians of many countries were found to have espoused ideas in private that run counter to the statements that they make to their own public.
What would we do to a politician who was found to be secretly in talks with the Chinese, praising the Chinese and their actions, while publicly denouncing those same actions, To the people who elected him?
I guarantee he would be, at the very least, asked to resign. It wouldn't just be Faux News who was dragging his name through the mud either.
Seems like a better question would be,.... is it EVER worth it to send troops to foreign soil? I don't see what any of these wars do for the people them, or rather, their children whose futures the wars are borrowed against.
Um... as a test, to see if it is feasible to use for spacecraft controls.
Now, whats so ludicrous? Anything being broadcast over radio waves is "on a major public network". Building a powerful radio, and hooking it up to a parabolic dish and/or whatever else may be involved is a bit beyond me, and possibly you, right this moment, however, it is hardly an intractable problem. It is, essentially a "public medium".
That said... what would be ludicrous is designing it without any sort of message authentication code.... or to use a weak/broken one. Honestly, from what little I know of crypto, I wouldn't even use something based on factoring large primes, but something that is, at least, not currently believed to be solvable via quantum computers. Afterall, we might be talking about something that might be in service for decades.
Doing authentication securely on a public network which can be eavesdropped and where packets can be injected by an attacker is hardly impossible.
> Sorry, it had been a while since your ealier post about secession, so I'd
> forgotten about your "us vs. them" take on your fellow citizens.
My fellow citizens? You mean all the other peasants? I bear them no ill will.
If you mean the aristocrats who run most levels of government, the corporate execs who buy the laws they want? "Them" is really a pretty small group. Not that everyone agrees with me on this, but, I do wonder why most support this steaming pile of governance.... especially when nearly all of them are, in some way, a "criminal" who could have their life upended at any time.
I would have little to complain about from a government that called my friends and family criminals when they steal and murder, but, when they grow, sell, or smoke dried flowers? That is utterly unacceptable.
Perhaps if the driving related laws made sense and were not used for little more reason than to justify the jobs of police, then maybe I wouldn't have a problem. However, I have personally been abused by police enforcing speed limits on ridiculous stretches of road. 30 MPH zones where nearly every car, all the time, does almost 50 MPH. I have even been to "defensive driving school". Why? Because I had a 2 mph fender bender in heavy traffic, with an asshole who got all pissed off and wouldn't even talk to me until the police showed up and he insisted that they ticket me. Oh... that's only 2 violations. The other 3 were all paperwork when my license and registration expired... after the registry suddenly stopped sending renewal notices out.... yes... after a decade of renewing whenever the little form came in the mail, they got me good.
Frankly, I know a handful of people who have been in really serious car crashes. A handful who knew people who died in such crashes.... yet... nearly everyone I know has been abused to the tune of a few grand, first in taxes, then in fines, and finally by the insurance company... who are usually the ones who push for the enforcement. Why wouldn't they? They are the ones who get to sit back and blame the state safe driver program for the excessively high surcharges.
I am utterly unconvinced that the majority of traffic enforcement does ANYTHING to make the roads safer. As such, how can I call it anything but, the most prevalent road hazard on the roads? Whats worst, it is hard to even find a person who isn't familiar with ridiculously low speed limits, and all the other ridiculous enforcement practices. Less who know that insurance companies pushed for the utterly corrupt system of police compensation that has subjected us to ever more tickets.
Thats before we even get to the endless string of pointless wars that "we" seem to keep getting involved in. Yet we are never supposed to question whether signing up to fight in these wars is actually honorable or in service of anything that anybody should be proud of..... and of course, despite the despicable deeds, soldiers are a ridiculously protected class, who can't be denied jobs for their life choices (unlike the people who were smoking dried flowers... the ones who never murdered anyone for their misplaced sense of patriotism).
I don't expect to be able to convince everyone, more power to you if you feel differently, but I am perfectly happy to leave you and yours to yours, all I really ask, in ANY of this, is not to be forced to support "causes" which I find utterly repugnant, against my will.
Ill gladly pay for roads that I use, police and courts to go after REAL criminals (murders, rapists, thieves, fraudsters), but when it comes down to the use of threats of violent force to change peoples nonviolent life choices? Or to conduct military operations on foreign soil? Please count me out, and don't do it in my name.
I don't get your point. Because a bunch of thugs that other people have to put up with are worst than the thugs right here where I live (I believe that my statement in the original post about this being on the long list of reasons that I advocate my state leaving the union might be a tip as to where I live), means that, I shouldn't complain?
I know what the "laws" are, and thats precicely why I don't see these thugs as a legitimate government. Some of these laws go beyond the pale and turn them into an organization that I cannot, in good conscience, advocate supporting. I consider 100% of the taxes that I pay to be given under duress. Not because 100% of it is spent on things that I don't support, but, because any of it is....money is fungible after all.
I see the difference between the current regime and the Mullahs to be far smaller than the current regime and something that I could, in good conscience, support. Them being worst has little bearing on it.
No, I get all that. What I don't get, is all this use of "We". This organization, which you like to think of as your government, and apply the term "we" too, is welcome to have whatever policies it wants, about what it, and the people working for it, do.
I don't see why anyone else should need their 'approval', tacit or explicit, to do anything. If I want to deal with the government of Iran, as if it were some manner of legitimate entity (which given that I see the US government as an illegitimate regime, that is highly unlikely, for many of the reasons that you stated)... than that is my perogative. I don't see where "you" get off telling other people who they can do business with. That isn't foreign policy, thats domestic bullying.
-Steve
Nah, you get a drone of your own, and have it fly... shadowing their drone and transmitting its own GPS coordinates.
Actually.... I have been thinking, and since I don't have the technical chops to implement, may as well tell others who might.
Police cars emit a lot more than radar. They have their own radio channels, they have laptops that presumably talk back to their main systems... they shouldn't be hard to detect electronically.... maybe not even to triangulate.
I would love to see trapster taken to the next level... and a blue dot put on my phone GPS for each detected car (marked or not) in my area. Of course, the idea really comes from playing too much GTA, but, it made driving to avoid the cops so much more easy in GTA.... I would bet it could work smashingly in the real world too!
Drones seem like a fine way to accomplish the goal, but, probably more effective with a distributed network of ground based sensors.
-Steve
> The average household has a #2 Phillips, an old fashioned slotted screwdriver for stupid things like switchplates
> that still use them, and a hammer
Actually, I find the slotted driver to be MORE useful than the Philips. Not so much for driving screws, but as a general purpose small pry bar and/or small chisel. Great for jamming into the seal of a jar lid that is too strong to be done with a butter knife.
The tautology club is the tautology club!
Same purpose though. It is entertainment. Personally, I don't get it. Isn't it like saying "our show is so lame, all we have is what happens next, you wouldn't watch it twice".
I tend to think the twitter and spoilers etc can only help them. That is, unless they don't want more exposure, and potentially more people watching. A few spoilers (unless you call "it was horrible, don't waste your time" a spoiler) has never detracted from my enjoyment of a show, not convinced me not to watch it.
I think this is an example of "just because you can worry about it, doesn't mean that its a real problem".
I setup a good size RAID array of 4 250 GB disks a couple of years ago. Personally, I like spinning storage for archives. It is cheap enough that you can add some redundancy. Is it as rock solid as a multi month tape archive that is regularly restore tested (you do test restores right?)? But... in terms of cost, both labor and $$... well... its cheap.
I recently upgraded the array. I saw 2 TB disks on sale, and grabed 4. Best part? The new disks after just 2 years are big enough to back the whole physical array volume (using linux LVM2) to 1 disk, and then build the new array. Simple and safe.
Then I put a VM on there and set it up to take backups of everything else. It is big enough now.
I figure that, with a monitor setup to alert me when the array loses a disk, and that is about as robust a solution as I need.
I don't really give a shit what google decides to do with their web browser (which I have never used, and don't even plan to try, firefox works just fine and has noscript and requestpolicy, both of which I consider minimum requirements for browsing the web)
What irks me is that the people stealing my tax dollars have people on staff, being paid with my money, for little more than to enforce these symbolic points.
I make symbolic points all the time... like when I denounce allegiance to the flag, when I reach my arm out and give a police officer a thumbs down for driving around and being the single largest hazard on the road, etc. However, I don't expect other people to pay for me to make symbolic points.
The very idea that software export restrictions are anything but an absolute waste of time and resources, capable of accomplishing nothing but ruining the lives of people who don't follow them.
It stops being a symbolic gesture when someone goes to jail for not playing along with this silly game. It is unconscionable, and goes on the long list of reasons that I want to see my state leave the union.
Reflecting on this a bit, I think its more so even about open architecture than open source.
I have dealt with a few "closed" products that I was still, just from knowledge of the OS, and how the tools work, was able to get in, figure out what is going on, and solve problems... some which support told me could not be done.... like recovering files from backups that had been corrupted since the script that generated the dumps was "upgraded" by a patch 6 months prior. Sure it involved diving through 6 layers of shell script, dumping raw data off tape, and then writing a perl script to fix all the file names :)... but it worked.
I never would have gotten as far if it hadn't been for parts of the application bacup being written in shell, and a few commands the legato support person gave up while troubleshooting... I realized that one of the commands was dumping raw data off tape, so I saved the data instead of piping it to the process that he wanted me to pipe it to (which did jack since the filenames were corrupted.... duh)
Take monitoring. I have had the "opportunity" to directly deal with both Nagios and SCOM. SCOM has its nice polish, pretty charts, auto-discovery. Too bad the agent is crap, its just as hard as anything else to configure usefully. It doesn't have the granular configurability in the notification system, you can't as easily hack up a check in shell script and start monitoring.... overall.... out of the box, it beats nagios hands down, but, it is nowhere near a well configured nagios system, run by someone who put some time into setting it up....
and when the SCOM guy wanted to test the Linux agent. Not only was it obtuse and hard to get to install properly, it would only install if you changed the major/minor numbers on /dev/random to turn it into /dev/urandom. Nice... so now every system with scom installed has a fake /dev/random..... and no explanation as to what you are doing, why you are doing it, or what the implications of doing it are.... thanks guys.... never considered using /dev/urandom did you?
Not just that but, ask the question "what do you get for your money". In the open source world, it can take more time, and more effort to deploy a solution. I will readily admit that. However, the reason it takes longer, and costs more, is that deploying it actually involves.... understanding what you are doing.
In the MS world, it is point, shoot, hope, and call support when it breaks. In the open source world, usually the fact that multiple components work together is not hidden, and setup involves at least some knowledge of all of them. The upshot? When it breaks, you are not sitting around waiting for support to call you back, you are troubleshooting it yourself.
It may not be as polished, or as easy, and maybe, the initial setup costs more and takes longer. In the end though, I think you have more control and can get more done with less, in a more supportable manner.... because you get out of it what you put into it, rather than just paying for a canned product and hoping for the best.
Sounds about right to me. Actually, I don't see any evidence that all this, and the cost involved, really makes me, or anyone else, any safer. Perhaps they should focus more on fixing the roads themselves. NYS banned handheld phone use while driving... resulted in a 60% drop in observed use... and no change in accident rates.
They sure were quick to point out that this, somehow, magically doesn't mean that the law isn't effective. The last thing we might want to question is that the law does what its intended to do, harms people for no reason, or costs more than its even worth. I am sure all the drivers in NYS who got caught and paid fines and paid money to insurance companies for years later in enhanced premiums all feel that it is well worth it to.... not make the roads one bit safer!
I have to point out a few of things:
1. They have tried these sorts of software export regulations before, and it failed miserably before. ::cough::RSA::cough::
2. The US government pretty much invented the damned internet, you would think that they would know how it works
3. The insanity of doing the same, ineffective things, over and over again, is generally lost on anyone in government.
Anybody with an ounce of technical knowhow already used a proxy to download it...the day it came out.
The phrase "a day late and a dollar short" comes to mind. As does the Catholic Church's forgiveness of Galileo.
Maybe these sanctions are someone's personal attempt to be nominated to the dipshit hall of fame?
-Steve
Block all government IPs? Yes, because, as we all know, thats so useful. Clearly nobody in the Iranian Government can figure out how to use a proxy... or... get an IP that isn't registered as owned by their government. Yes... way to go. Very effective.
Seriously, must we be the guy who has a petty argument with his neighbor, and builds 12 foot high ugly fence in retaliation? (and yes, people do that)
So there... take that.... nya nya nya. You don't get to use this cool web browser, unless you jump through some minor hoops to make it work. That will really teach you!
All you have to do is never speed, never have a tail light out, never smoke pot, never drive after having more than one drink with dinner, always wear your seat belt, never look like another guy who did something bad, always have a record of where you where and who you were with, never let your driver's license expire, never have sex with an underage girl, even if she lies about her age, has fake id, and you met her in a bar, which checks everyones ID.
depending on the current political climate, you may also want to avoid being gay, drinking from the incorrectly labeled fountain, sitting at the wrong end of the bus, refusing to hire war criminals, conspiring, racketeering, possessing an animal (dead or alive) that was harvested or exported illegally from its country of origin, even if the particular animal would otherwise be legal here (that's a federal crime).
Sounds easy enough. right?
Good reason? Of course, whatever fascist fantasy our elected officials, and their cronies dream up is "good reason". I can think of a few examples of "no good reason" that have happened to people that I know. Talking about them will just piss me off though, so lets check out some more well known cases. Was it "good reason" that got Allen Turing sentenced to treatment for his homosexuality? Was it good reason that Tommy Chong was jailed, because his son was pressured into sending some glass pipes to the wrong state? How about when "Max Hardcore" was sentenced to jail under obscenities laws in another state, because of material that he published... on the internet?
I also use text secure on the droid. So far, I have been able to get most people that I know who use droids to install it...but even without them running it, it still stores your texts locally in an encrypted db. At least that makes casual snooping harder (of course, remember, they can also get your texts without a warrent.. the phone companies sell them to law enforcement!)
It can also be set to timeout your passphrase, combined with the phone lockout (in case you can't power it off), should be enough to keep them out of your texts.
This reminds me of the old Bill Hicks rant about how the idea of the All powerful godhead being the kind of "prankster god" who would go around burying dinosaur bones in the ground, just to.... fuck with us.
It's like you die, go to the pearly gates, and St Peter asks you "Do you believe in dinosaurs?"
"Of course, there are fossils everywhere"
"Ha you fell for gods oldest trick! Enjoy the lake of fire moron!"
I am no fan of the idea of omnipotent, Omniscient beings.... but the idea that such a being might exist... and ALSO be just fucking with the world for his own amusement (one could even postulate that he makes things like gravity work in a consistent and explainable way... just to lend credibility to science and fuck with us even more!)
Of course, they say that the Lord works in Mysterious ways. Maybe creating such a completely consistent world is easy for Him. Maybe He has a reason to do it that we just don't know?
Frankly, I am far more comfortable being an atheist than contemplating why such a being would be so cruel. Even worst, the idea that someone would preach that such a vile being "loves us".... perhaps in the same way that a kid with a magnifying glass "loves" ants?
-Steve