After the San Bernadino shooting that killed 14 people, we have shut down more than 900 public schools in the second largest city in america. terrorism isnt about killing people, or maiming them, or destroying property.
terrorism is about undermining the authority of a target nations government. Its about making its populus too frightened to send their children to school, too worried to board a plane without massive security theatre, and too scared to accept immigrants into a nation that was founded and championed by immigrants. Today is a dark day not because of lives lost, but because we have effectively agreed to the premise of terrorism.
it could cherry pick a few hundred thousand University condos and housing developments per year and be wrapping up this not-so-epic fiber deployment by 2040 or so.
If this is the first time you've stopped to consider ma bell as a conglomerate that does not operate in the greater common good, then i suppose 2016 is going to be a rough year. its not just AT&T thats at fault, but the schizophrenic common carrier response by internet providers in general. Fibre is all well and good, but the last mile into everyones home is still going to have to be a cable connection for higher-than-dsl speed, and cable companies aren't just going to give it to you. The other alternative, to spread out into existing markets, means asking homeowners and landlords to undertake expensive retrofits for cat6 and fibre drops.
"Our official position on encryption is either in your handshake protocol as an intentionally watered down cipher, or alongside a trusted and suepr friendly NIST ephemeral prime."
translation: as an agency thats evolved from a knee-jerk response to a terrorist event, we're now doing goddamn near everything. border protection? yep. those flunkies at the airport that touch you? we still technically handle that. but did you know? we handle such cyber security events as:
1. whenever sudo reports an unauthorized root user? it gets emailed to us. cathy specifically. unless its friday then she takes a long lunch so its kennith in the guard shack when he takes breaks from marmaduke
2. connection tracking in iptables? jack handles most of that with a spreadsheet he keeps in his desk drawer. i swear. hes got a spreadsheet for darn near everything.
3. Deep packet inspection. Most of your packets get dumped into an abandoned rural swimming pool and we have a few folks down there sift through with their 'smellin hounds' for any terrorism.
4. we're in charge of adding the word cyber. Cyberterrorism? yep. cybercrime? another one we coined. Cyberwatermelon and cybertoilet arent really catching on though but we've got others. janice is brutal at boggle so we put her on it.
For years we've waited with bated breath for such a revelation. Now that happy birthday is truly free, armies of Applebees servers, waitresses, and line cooks can rejoice as through their dead posture and vacant saccharine manufactured glee theyre paraded out in front of yet one more table of midwestern suburbanites to sing the true call of happy birthday to a fourty-something housewife checking her phone.
If you think about microsofts strategy, namely copying things from other companies, it starts making sense. Who has microsoft tried to beat for so long? apple. The ipad begat the surface, the iphone the zune, its all so obvious. Microsoft believes Linux is a cancer, and the only way to cure that cancer is to duplicate Steve Jobs homeopathic natural medicine cure. So expect in about 3 weeks microsoft to have finally vanquished linux, or the entire company to be reported as completely bankrupt and gone.
As a scientist working with quantum computing I can explain exactly why we dont talk about security and quantum computing. Last month we executed a security benchmark against it, and unfortunely the act of measuring the system security managed to accidentally change the entire quantum computer into a loaf of artisinal bread. We worked hard to change it back, by attempting to measure how inseucure the device was, but in turn only managed to collapse the waveform and ended up with a loaf of bread that was also a quantum computer. Weve not been entirely truthful with the public about this in the past but we can assure you that once we assemble what our team is tentatively referring to as a wheel of quantum swiss and a quantum superposition of 3 kinds of smoked meat, this hamiltonian evolution of delicious cold cut should get us back to a regular quantum computer. security concerns so far are centered around penetration attacks, and keith on the second floor trying to use the quantum artisinal loaf for a peanut butter and banana (regular, not quantum) sandwich.
the thing that made antivirus --and still makes it -- such a pain in the ass is the fact that PC vendors include some crippled demoware trial version that, once monthly, becomes self aware and marks the entire vendor bloatware suite as some kind of second coming of hitler. its also worth noting that once this version expires it floats atop the OS as a bloated corpse sucking resources and occassionally bitching about the cash it needs to continue its reign of bitchery. Its nearly impossible to remove it without 3 passwords and your firstborn, and if you ever accidentally install another antivirus alongside it well then buckle up for the ride because your PC is about to heat up like a hot pocket as shitware 2.2 brawls to the death with whatever 6 gigabyte flaming turd mcafee or norton have squeezed out this year.
and antivirus isnt just antivirus, heavens no. its full system shield defense chevron carbunkle 5.5 with the privacy protection cup suite. every bit of data going in or out will be funneled through this application and like some multi-lane closure on the 405 most traffic will grind to a glorious halt while its inspected, detected, and ultimately forgotten.
Open Live Writer is an open source application enabling users to author, edit, and publish blog posts.
which would mean something if the world hadn't been using wordpress for 12 years. Microsoft had the opportunity to open source things like IIS, frontpage, and a wealth of other web-centric tools and technologies to compete with Apache and Nginx. But instead they paid off hosting providers to put parked websites on IIS to goose their numbers in Netcraft. open-sourcing an editor is boggling, unless for some reason that editor happened to use already open-source code.
and perhaps the best one is atop Mauna Kea on Hawaii.
Im certain that opinion holds some validity in Hawaii, but here in Branson my 30 meter telescope has been praised with such critical acclaim as "do you really need that thing? it blocks out the sun" and "for christ sake its 3 in the morning turn that crap off." the residents here are far more keen to my telescope than some rinky dink hawaiian sensation, thats for sure. In fact, the astronomers community that operates my telescope has released a finding in what scientists are calling "a goddamn fact" that research has concluded I'll be in the cold cold ground before it ever gets taken down, Jessica.
1. Does your restless child dress in parachute pants and mumble about "the gibson" as he glides past on his skateboard
2. Has your child been exposed to, or attempted COBOL or worse, obfuscated C?
3. Have you noticed a startling uptick in mid-nineties electronic music? does your child own more than 3 trenchcoats and a virtually endless supply of wrap-around ray-ban sunglasses?
4. and finally, the worst sign, does your child publically question the need for an asinine laundry list of reasons to convict a minor of thoughtcrime?
for those unwilling to shuffle through two links and random popups, heres the situation:
Cooley doesnt seem to be an IT guy at all, just a liaison for an IT outsource firm that handles the data for Georgia. his department got a request from the revenue department for the data. Cooley then got approval from his departments lawyers and requested the new datafile with sensitive info.
The vendor however didnt understand the request and put the sensitive data on a public network share. Cooley quickly removed it from the share, but --and this is key-- an entirely separate group of people copied the file, burned it to CD, and released it to a far broader audience. Cooley did his job, but is being blamed for something hes entirely not a part of. Namely, some other agencies cock-up.
instead of "coming clean" to a newspaper, he should have filed a wrongful termination suit. I'd wager Cooley doesnt care about that, and is just glad to get out from an underpaying cube-slave job with low oversight and piss poor accountability and management.
Another good reason to ditch providers like google and yahoo. mailboxes that can have content remotely deleted by the sender should be more than enough indication that the spirit of free and open discussion fostered by email is slowly being crushed. This feature shows that Yahoo is more concerned about providing a happy and positive experience for users than an independent and standardized experience with all the liberty the internet was originally imbued with. in other words, back in my day when you clicked send, you goddamn well meant it. you were held to defend your position and challenged based on your logic and comprehension as exhibited in the message.
so go ahead and click unsend, or recall, or whatever the options called. But dont be surprised if for all your good intentions and every respectful plea, your words are found to be quite indelible. It is, after all, being delivered to my server.
1. the majority of americans outside a handful of cities still consider public transportation to be a mark of poverty and avoid it at all costs. others cant be bothered to even consider a greyhound to the next state, let alone a train, and once they arrive the local public transit infrastructure based on their destination is either so poor as to be unusable or nonexistent through legislative fiat.
2. We cant keep up. our bridges, roads, highways and railroads are crumbling further into the dirt each year, and neither body of legislation seems capable of passing meaningful funding. the hyperloop would surely face the same fate as a majority invested government project that eventually turned into public private, then abandoned once the payout wasnt suitable for corporations, and finally maintained at about a quarter of its original capacity.
3. the initial projection for this works project (and, it would be a works project) is six billion dollars. America cant manage to keep its government running for more than 2 years at a time in this foul year of our lord 2015. It wont fund education, its states wont fund healthcare, and its been cutting federal public transit funding for 35 years. the only way a hyperloop is getting built is if it somehow includes a rider to invade a neighbouring country.
the only real reason companies even thought of doing work with the hyperloop is to do what companies do: suckle at the taxpayer teat. You start by investing in a renewable effort, secure grants and loans, develop a few proof of concept ideas, sell out to a capital management firm, and then declare bankruptcy.
successive iterations of economic inflation, joblessness, and market crash have forced retailers constrained by 21st century economic mandate of 15% quarterly and yearly posted gains to in turn usher in a thousand years of sales regardless of whether they want to or not. In return customers have become so desensitized and indifferent to a sale that its only awkward when a local business or retailer somehow misses the memo and tries to open a shop to sell a product for the greater common good. if the toilet paper isnt on sale, there must be something wrong.
conversely these same boom-bust model economics of american capitalism have turned once savvy and spendthrift shoppers into deadpan holiday drones whos only real interaction with $holiday is to log predictably onto amazon, select an item from a prepopulated list of gifts for a known interest or loved one, and click buy. brick-and-mortar macys and nordstrom have been reduced to nothing more than an over-illuminated street corner inconvenience with mandatory christmas tree furiously blocking a pedestrian courtyard or an army of bell-bangers demanding what little spare change the average american hasnt carried for 20 years. yet still is the awkward post-christmas sales rush, an event thats gained momentum consistently for the last decade due to an increasing number of americans who are made to work holidays or multiple jobs in a service sector with no concept of regular time off.
raining grinch upon glad tidings still is a growing minority of americans who just wont. They hold contempt for christmas in october, the same five christmas songs played fifteen times a day for 3 months, the mind numbing tie-ins and product placement in even the most mundane entertainment medium, and the lack of diversity or meaning in a mandatory shopping experience spun from the backs of so many chinese cargo ship containers.
For me, I dont do black and cyber anything. When thanksgiving rolls around I buy something tasteful and local from my state to ship to relatives.
as a jaded sysadmin im in the wrong business. Ive learned perl and python and bash and even picked up a case of php along the way but if all it takes for hipsters to belch a half a million dollars at me is a language? then this is where it begins, slashdot.
My language is called twerk-cankle. It was named after a dance that comes from a small island in the osowhatwhocares islands and is ritually performed with great efficiency. my classes are called palpatisms and you instantiate them by using the pelvic_thrust operator. all code is terminated with yoskrilldropit(hard) which calls a completely gender neutral subroutine to issue enlightenments to my interpreter. The interpreter which you can download under the BSD, MIT, PCP, GPL, and my own personal DERP license uses spare CPU cycles to search the ram heap for Kony. Ive also released a debugger called shitlord which runs as an elevated user once after checking its privilege and enrolling a small orphinage of women and nuns into the girls who code program. Processes when threaded are done so in a way that recognizes france's tragedy and assert a macklemore call to find 99 cent urine scented clothing on the memory bus.
Until reading this article Id been a chipper young admin, fast at the keyboard with a gentle hand to users but once I'd gazed upon this fact, this indelible pockmark upon our society in this foul year of our lord 2015, My hair burst a radiant white and a shock of that same hue flew throught the beard I never before had. Hair filled my nostrils and a pocket protector flew furiously into my button up homage to the cartesian plane. small stuffed tux's and beasties fell from the heavens unto my cubicle and a smattering of old userfriendly comics printed upon delicate tractor paper adhered themselves to the walls. my mundane gaze turned slowly into a furious scowl and I knew what must be done. I furiously cranked out a script to sync microsoft ldap parameters to my desktop for my user, configured NIS, and reverted every account in the organization to csh. I then forwarded my phone to the switchboad and the switchboard to a cream cheese factory in wisconsin. Gathering my briefcase now filled with LISA digests and a calculator from the cold war I made my way to the pub for the day and silently muttered
If you're a developer working in a shop writing code for bethesda or valve or EA, chances are your windows site license for desktops and servers is already heavily discounted thanks to your generous interest in a visual studio license despite eclipse being right there. Chances are even better that in order to keep this generous discount your manager has started shoehorning C# into your project requirements to 'maximize the investment value' of what basically amounts to a protection racket for good customers.
if you're a web developer chances are vim with a few extensions is working well, or there are already a myriad of alternatives that dont require purchasing an expensive license for your startup. Eclipse has always been an option for you. if you're writing games for Android and dont work on the Candy Crush team then youre almost certainly an eclipse user. If youre writing iOS apps you must have done something truly evil in a past life.
3 years in and No one outside redmond is writing shit for the windows app store. unless you run excel on your phablet, and that comes from the same team that writes excel for your laptop. maybe redmond thinks the reason for this to be a lack of competent IDE for windows? If its looking to gain traction in the 'hot' web languages its about 10 years too late. PHP, python, ruby, and a bunch more shops for these languages made money because they exclusively refused to participate in microsofts cash cow scheme. They already had their desktop and laptop licenses, assuming the devs didnt opt for a macbook, and by the time microsoft dropped the license fees to a few hundred dollars for a group no one was left interested. Maybe microsoft sees this as an opportunity to get a foot in the door at small startups?
Originally we'd set out for a liquid cooled laser that could be affixed to a large mobile rigging and dynamically targeted while immersed in a saline coolant. this proved difficult due to budgetary and logistics constraints (our director was none too pleased.) However we found a similar biomedical project had succeeded in mounting a laser to a subspecies of the Dicentrarchus labrax with only mild side effect of distemperment.
step up to the adult table and get real. Ive long since given up my old terminal emulator for a much more purist representation of interaction with the kernel. using two 45lb electromagnets, one strapped to each hand, I pedal a small generator with my feet and vary the field strength between the two accordingly to properly submit cpu bytecode to the ALU. to check uptime I measure and record the number of rotations of the cpu fan using an inductive loop wound around my tongue. mainstream users will balk at the lack of a "gui" or "mouse interface" but I assure you its well worth it to get the best performance on slashdot over curl.
As an engineer ive been against seeing this kind of increase in frequency since DAY ONE. from 450 to 520 nanometer was appalling enough but 600 nanometer?! seriously? you kids messing around with those diodes are playing with fire.
Treefinder has been dead for about a decade. If youre still using im surprised you have enough data from it to continue a grant proposal, but i hope you'll consider other more functional applications like
PHYLIP
PAUP
MEGA
Phylo_win
ARB or
DAMBE
hybridization or recombination events got you down? concaterpillar to the rescue. http://rogerlab.biochemistryan...
distance matrix analyses on nucleotide or protein sequences? seriously, get a copy of ODIN. while i couldnt get funding for a beefier desktop, i DID get compute time on our university supercomputer and ODIN absolutely screams on linux.
people who are incarcerated can appeal to the sitting governor of most states for reinstatement of their voting rights. Its typically accompanied by a processing fee and requires the use of an attorney. if youre unlucky enough to do this in an election year, the likelyhood a sitting governor will do anything but deny this request is poor.
ex convicts can be legally discriminated against in housing, education, and employment. In more than 20 states ex convicts cannot receive local section 8 housing benefits, food stamps, or public assistance. Credit tracking companies like experian will also kindly obliterate your credit rating once its been known you've spent time in prison. you cant get a loan for everything from a house to a car or even a small business.
and it gets worse. Felons released for time served arent released, they are typically put on 2-5 years mandatory probation. that means they have a curfew, they cant go to bars, they cant own a gun, and they have to abide by whatever arbitrary soothsay a judge imposes. any screwup sends you back to jail for committing a non-crime after punishment. Did you commit a cybercrime? then that means you cant use everything from an ATM to the sytem that lets you check in to your parol officer and schedule meetings/hearings.
your visas and passports? those are also now invalid and reinstatement after a felony conviction takes twice as long and requires an extra processing fee to pull your criminal records during incarceration. Police that stop you for anything from jay walking to speeding are legally allowed to profile you based on your criminal record, so what started out as a 10 minute inconvenience on the way to work is now a 40 minute ordeal in handcuffs on the side of the road. And lets talk about reparation. Remember that stay in prison? turns out you now owe in most states close to $60,000 in restitution for everything from shelter to food and even civil penalties for the original criminal conviction. cant pay? more than 40 states will send you right back to jail for being too poor.
The problem isnt the fact that we've destroyed the economy and rendered every student a walking debt calculator. Its certainly not the fact that we've turned every job into minimum wage, outsourced even the most remotely skilled work, and turned the modern housing market into a golden calf the likes of which no one can afford. No, child, the problem is, because I dont have grandchildren, you are in fact very lonely. you need to live in a tickytacky mansion of refurbished section 8 high-rise alongside your peers! people you love to 'face book' with would be just the cure for your lazy do-nothing attitude and inability to buy 3 televisions and a luxury sedan. Take it from me-- a housing developer from a generation of people who graduated highschool during the era of segregated drinking fountains -- Living "la vidah locah" in cramped squalor with shared showers, rampant athletes foot, unreachable building maintenance, single pane windows, cots made by prison labour, and unavoidable domestic violence around every hall is the way to go!
and whatever you do, dont pay attention to the housing surplus. profiteering speculators who pedaled the worlds financial institutions to the precipice of ruination know best. In short: keep that social security money and medicaid flowing.
Slashdot Mirror
After the San Bernadino shooting that killed 14 people, we have shut down more than 900 public schools in the second largest city in america. terrorism isnt about killing people, or maiming them, or destroying property. terrorism is about undermining the authority of a target nations government. Its about making its populus too frightened to send their children to school, too worried to board a plane without massive security theatre, and too scared to accept immigrants into a nation that was founded and championed by immigrants. Today is a dark day not because of lives lost, but because we have effectively agreed to the premise of terrorism.
it could cherry pick a few hundred thousand University condos and housing developments per year and be wrapping up this not-so-epic fiber deployment by 2040 or so.
If this is the first time you've stopped to consider ma bell as a conglomerate that does not operate in the greater common good, then i suppose 2016 is going to be a rough year. its not just AT&T thats at fault, but the schizophrenic common carrier response by internet providers in general. Fibre is all well and good, but the last mile into everyones home is still going to have to be a cable connection for higher-than-dsl speed, and cable companies aren't just going to give it to you. The other alternative, to spread out into existing markets, means asking homeowners and landlords to undertake expensive retrofits for cat6 and fibre drops.
"Our official position on encryption is either in your handshake protocol as an intentionally watered down cipher, or alongside a trusted and suepr friendly NIST ephemeral prime."
translation: as an agency thats evolved from a knee-jerk response to a terrorist event, we're now doing goddamn near everything. border protection? yep. those flunkies at the airport that touch you? we still technically handle that. but did you know? we handle such cyber security events as:
1. whenever sudo reports an unauthorized root user? it gets emailed to us. cathy specifically. unless its friday then she takes a long lunch so its kennith in the guard shack when he takes breaks from marmaduke
2. connection tracking in iptables? jack handles most of that with a spreadsheet he keeps in his desk drawer. i swear. hes got a spreadsheet for darn near everything.
3. Deep packet inspection. Most of your packets get dumped into an abandoned rural swimming pool and we have a few folks down there sift through with their 'smellin hounds' for any terrorism.
4. we're in charge of adding the word cyber. Cyberterrorism? yep. cybercrime? another one we coined. Cyberwatermelon and cybertoilet arent really catching on though but we've got others. janice is brutal at boggle so we put her on it.
Call me a party pooper or an underachiever, but I just dont think theres a market for a one billion dollar electric car.
For years we've waited with bated breath for such a revelation. Now that happy birthday is truly free, armies of Applebees servers, waitresses, and line cooks can rejoice as through their dead posture and vacant saccharine manufactured glee theyre paraded out in front of yet one more table of midwestern suburbanites to sing the true call of happy birthday to a fourty-something housewife checking her phone.
If you think about microsofts strategy, namely copying things from other companies, it starts making sense. Who has microsoft tried to beat for so long? apple. The ipad begat the surface, the iphone the zune, its all so obvious. Microsoft believes Linux is a cancer, and the only way to cure that cancer is to duplicate Steve Jobs homeopathic natural medicine cure. So expect in about 3 weeks microsoft to have finally vanquished linux, or the entire company to be reported as completely bankrupt and gone.
As a scientist working with quantum computing I can explain exactly why we dont talk about security and quantum computing. Last month we executed a security benchmark against it, and unfortunely the act of measuring the system security managed to accidentally change the entire quantum computer into a loaf of artisinal bread. We worked hard to change it back, by attempting to measure how inseucure the device was, but in turn only managed to collapse the waveform and ended up with a loaf of bread that was also a quantum computer. Weve not been entirely truthful with the public about this in the past but we can assure you that once we assemble what our team is tentatively referring to as a wheel of quantum swiss and a quantum superposition of 3 kinds of smoked meat, this hamiltonian evolution of delicious cold cut should get us back to a regular quantum computer. security concerns so far are centered around penetration attacks, and keith on the second floor trying to use the quantum artisinal loaf for a peanut butter and banana (regular, not quantum) sandwich.
the thing that made antivirus --and still makes it -- such a pain in the ass is the fact that PC vendors include some crippled demoware trial version that, once monthly, becomes self aware and marks the entire vendor bloatware suite as some kind of second coming of hitler. its also worth noting that once this version expires it floats atop the OS as a bloated corpse sucking resources and occassionally bitching about the cash it needs to continue its reign of bitchery. Its nearly impossible to remove it without 3 passwords and your firstborn, and if you ever accidentally install another antivirus alongside it well then buckle up for the ride because your PC is about to heat up like a hot pocket as shitware 2.2 brawls to the death with whatever 6 gigabyte flaming turd mcafee or norton have squeezed out this year.
and antivirus isnt just antivirus, heavens no. its full system shield defense chevron carbunkle 5.5 with the privacy protection cup suite. every bit of data going in or out will be funneled through this application and like some multi-lane closure on the 405 most traffic will grind to a glorious halt while its inspected, detected, and ultimately forgotten.
Open Live Writer is an open source application enabling users to author, edit, and publish blog posts.
which would mean something if the world hadn't been using wordpress for 12 years. Microsoft had the opportunity to open source things like IIS, frontpage, and a wealth of other web-centric tools and technologies to compete with Apache and Nginx. But instead they paid off hosting providers to put parked websites on IIS to goose their numbers in Netcraft. open-sourcing an editor is boggling, unless for some reason that editor happened to use already open-source code.
and perhaps the best one is atop Mauna Kea on Hawaii.
Im certain that opinion holds some validity in Hawaii, but here in Branson my 30 meter telescope has been praised with such critical acclaim as "do you really need that thing? it blocks out the sun" and "for christ sake its 3 in the morning turn that crap off." the residents here are far more keen to my telescope than some rinky dink hawaiian sensation, thats for sure. In fact, the astronomers community that operates my telescope has released a finding in what scientists are calling "a goddamn fact" that research has concluded I'll be in the cold cold ground before it ever gets taken down, Jessica.
1. Does your restless child dress in parachute pants and mumble about "the gibson" as he glides past on his skateboard
2. Has your child been exposed to, or attempted COBOL or worse, obfuscated C?
3. Have you noticed a startling uptick in mid-nineties electronic music? does your child own more than 3 trenchcoats and a virtually endless supply of wrap-around ray-ban sunglasses?
4. and finally, the worst sign, does your child publically question the need for an asinine laundry list of reasons to convict a minor of thoughtcrime?
for those unwilling to shuffle through two links and random popups, heres the situation:
Cooley doesnt seem to be an IT guy at all, just a liaison for an IT outsource firm that handles the data for Georgia. his department got a request from the revenue department for the data. Cooley then got approval from his departments lawyers and requested the new datafile with sensitive info. The vendor however didnt understand the request and put the sensitive data on a public network share. Cooley quickly removed it from the share, but --and this is key-- an entirely separate group of people copied the file, burned it to CD, and released it to a far broader audience. Cooley did his job, but is being blamed for something hes entirely not a part of. Namely, some other agencies cock-up.
instead of "coming clean" to a newspaper, he should have filed a wrongful termination suit. I'd wager Cooley doesnt care about that, and is just glad to get out from an underpaying cube-slave job with low oversight and piss poor accountability and management.
Another good reason to ditch providers like google and yahoo. mailboxes that can have content remotely deleted by the sender should be more than enough indication that the spirit of free and open discussion fostered by email is slowly being crushed. This feature shows that Yahoo is more concerned about providing a happy and positive experience for users than an independent and standardized experience with all the liberty the internet was originally imbued with. in other words, back in my day when you clicked send, you goddamn well meant it. you were held to defend your position and challenged based on your logic and comprehension as exhibited in the message.
so go ahead and click unsend, or recall, or whatever the options called. But dont be surprised if for all your good intentions and every respectful plea, your words are found to be quite indelible. It is, after all, being delivered to my server.
1. the majority of americans outside a handful of cities still consider public transportation to be a mark of poverty and avoid it at all costs. others cant be bothered to even consider a greyhound to the next state, let alone a train, and once they arrive the local public transit infrastructure based on their destination is either so poor as to be unusable or nonexistent through legislative fiat.
2. We cant keep up. our bridges, roads, highways and railroads are crumbling further into the dirt each year, and neither body of legislation seems capable of passing meaningful funding. the hyperloop would surely face the same fate as a majority invested government project that eventually turned into public private, then abandoned once the payout wasnt suitable for corporations, and finally maintained at about a quarter of its original capacity.
3. the initial projection for this works project (and, it would be a works project) is six billion dollars. America cant manage to keep its government running for more than 2 years at a time in this foul year of our lord 2015. It wont fund education, its states wont fund healthcare, and its been cutting federal public transit funding for 35 years. the only way a hyperloop is getting built is if it somehow includes a rider to invade a neighbouring country.
the only real reason companies even thought of doing work with the hyperloop is to do what companies do: suckle at the taxpayer teat. You start by investing in a renewable effort, secure grants and loans, develop a few proof of concept ideas, sell out to a capital management firm, and then declare bankruptcy.
successive iterations of economic inflation, joblessness, and market crash have forced retailers constrained by 21st century economic mandate of 15% quarterly and yearly posted gains to in turn usher in a thousand years of sales regardless of whether they want to or not. In return customers have become so desensitized and indifferent to a sale that its only awkward when a local business or retailer somehow misses the memo and tries to open a shop to sell a product for the greater common good. if the toilet paper isnt on sale, there must be something wrong.
conversely these same boom-bust model economics of american capitalism have turned once savvy and spendthrift shoppers into deadpan holiday drones whos only real interaction with $holiday is to log predictably onto amazon, select an item from a prepopulated list of gifts for a known interest or loved one, and click buy. brick-and-mortar macys and nordstrom have been reduced to nothing more than an over-illuminated street corner inconvenience with mandatory christmas tree furiously blocking a pedestrian courtyard or an army of bell-bangers demanding what little spare change the average american hasnt carried for 20 years. yet still is the awkward post-christmas sales rush, an event thats gained momentum consistently for the last decade due to an increasing number of americans who are made to work holidays or multiple jobs in a service sector with no concept of regular time off.
raining grinch upon glad tidings still is a growing minority of americans who just wont. They hold contempt for christmas in october, the same five christmas songs played fifteen times a day for 3 months, the mind numbing tie-ins and product placement in even the most mundane entertainment medium, and the lack of diversity or meaning in a mandatory shopping experience spun from the backs of so many chinese cargo ship containers.
For me, I dont do black and cyber anything. When thanksgiving rolls around I buy something tasteful and local from my state to ship to relatives.
as a jaded sysadmin im in the wrong business. Ive learned perl and python and bash and even picked up a case of php along the way but if all it takes for hipsters to belch a half a million dollars at me is a language? then this is where it begins, slashdot.
My language is called twerk-cankle. It was named after a dance that comes from a small island in the osowhatwhocares islands and is ritually performed with great efficiency. my classes are called palpatisms and you instantiate them by using the pelvic_thrust operator. all code is terminated with yoskrilldropit(hard) which calls a completely gender neutral subroutine to issue enlightenments to my interpreter. The interpreter which you can download under the BSD, MIT, PCP, GPL, and my own personal DERP license uses spare CPU cycles to search the ram heap for Kony. Ive also released a debugger called shitlord which runs as an elevated user once after checking its privilege and enrolling a small orphinage of women and nuns into the girls who code program. Processes when threaded are done so in a way that recognizes france's tragedy and assert a macklemore call to find 99 cent urine scented clothing on the memory bus.
Until reading this article Id been a chipper young admin, fast at the keyboard with a gentle hand to users but once I'd gazed upon this fact, this indelible pockmark upon our society in this foul year of our lord 2015, My hair burst a radiant white and a shock of that same hue flew throught the beard I never before had. Hair filled my nostrils and a pocket protector flew furiously into my button up homage to the cartesian plane. small stuffed tux's and beasties fell from the heavens unto my cubicle and a smattering of old userfriendly comics printed upon delicate tractor paper adhered themselves to the walls. my mundane gaze turned slowly into a furious scowl and I knew what must be done. I furiously cranked out a script to sync microsoft ldap parameters to my desktop for my user, configured NIS, and reverted every account in the organization to csh. I then forwarded my phone to the switchboad and the switchboard to a cream cheese factory in wisconsin. Gathering my briefcase now filled with LISA digests and a calculator from the cold war I made my way to the pub for the day and silently muttered
"Kids....Kids on my lawn..."
If you're a developer working in a shop writing code for bethesda or valve or EA, chances are your windows site license for desktops and servers is already heavily discounted thanks to your generous interest in a visual studio license despite eclipse being right there. Chances are even better that in order to keep this generous discount your manager has started shoehorning C# into your project requirements to 'maximize the investment value' of what basically amounts to a protection racket for good customers.
if you're a web developer chances are vim with a few extensions is working well, or there are already a myriad of alternatives that dont require purchasing an expensive license for your startup. Eclipse has always been an option for you. if you're writing games for Android and dont work on the Candy Crush team then youre almost certainly an eclipse user. If youre writing iOS apps you must have done something truly evil in a past life.
3 years in and No one outside redmond is writing shit for the windows app store. unless you run excel on your phablet, and that comes from the same team that writes excel for your laptop. maybe redmond thinks the reason for this to be a lack of competent IDE for windows? If its looking to gain traction in the 'hot' web languages its about 10 years too late. PHP, python, ruby, and a bunch more shops for these languages made money because they exclusively refused to participate in microsofts cash cow scheme. They already had their desktop and laptop licenses, assuming the devs didnt opt for a macbook, and by the time microsoft dropped the license fees to a few hundred dollars for a group no one was left interested. Maybe microsoft sees this as an opportunity to get a foot in the door at small startups?
Originally we'd set out for a liquid cooled laser that could be affixed to a large mobile rigging and dynamically targeted while immersed in a saline coolant. this proved difficult due to budgetary and logistics constraints (our director was none too pleased.) However we found a similar biomedical project had succeeded in mounting a laser to a subspecies of the Dicentrarchus labrax with only mild side effect of distemperment.
step up to the adult table and get real. Ive long since given up my old terminal emulator for a much more purist representation of interaction with the kernel. using two 45lb electromagnets, one strapped to each hand, I pedal a small generator with my feet and vary the field strength between the two accordingly to properly submit cpu bytecode to the ALU. to check uptime I measure and record the number of rotations of the cpu fan using an inductive loop wound around my tongue. mainstream users will balk at the lack of a "gui" or "mouse interface" but I assure you its well worth it to get the best performance on slashdot over curl.
As an engineer ive been against seeing this kind of increase in frequency since DAY ONE. from 450 to 520 nanometer was appalling enough but 600 nanometer?! seriously? you kids messing around with those diodes are playing with fire.
Treefinder has been dead for about a decade. If youre still using im surprised you have enough data from it to continue a grant proposal, but i hope you'll consider other more functional applications like PHYLIP PAUP MEGA Phylo_win ARB or DAMBE
hybridization or recombination events got you down? concaterpillar to the rescue. http://rogerlab.biochemistryan...
distance matrix analyses on nucleotide or protein sequences? seriously, get a copy of ODIN. while i couldnt get funding for a beefier desktop, i DID get compute time on our university supercomputer and ODIN absolutely screams on linux.
people who are incarcerated can appeal to the sitting governor of most states for reinstatement of their voting rights. Its typically accompanied by a processing fee and requires the use of an attorney. if youre unlucky enough to do this in an election year, the likelyhood a sitting governor will do anything but deny this request is poor. ex convicts can be legally discriminated against in housing, education, and employment. In more than 20 states ex convicts cannot receive local section 8 housing benefits, food stamps, or public assistance. Credit tracking companies like experian will also kindly obliterate your credit rating once its been known you've spent time in prison. you cant get a loan for everything from a house to a car or even a small business. and it gets worse. Felons released for time served arent released, they are typically put on 2-5 years mandatory probation. that means they have a curfew, they cant go to bars, they cant own a gun, and they have to abide by whatever arbitrary soothsay a judge imposes. any screwup sends you back to jail for committing a non-crime after punishment. Did you commit a cybercrime? then that means you cant use everything from an ATM to the sytem that lets you check in to your parol officer and schedule meetings/hearings.
your visas and passports? those are also now invalid and reinstatement after a felony conviction takes twice as long and requires an extra processing fee to pull your criminal records during incarceration. Police that stop you for anything from jay walking to speeding are legally allowed to profile you based on your criminal record, so what started out as a 10 minute inconvenience on the way to work is now a 40 minute ordeal in handcuffs on the side of the road. And lets talk about reparation. Remember that stay in prison? turns out you now owe in most states close to $60,000 in restitution for everything from shelter to food and even civil penalties for the original criminal conviction. cant pay? more than 40 states will send you right back to jail for being too poor.
The problem isnt the fact that we've destroyed the economy and rendered every student a walking debt calculator. Its certainly not the fact that we've turned every job into minimum wage, outsourced even the most remotely skilled work, and turned the modern housing market into a golden calf the likes of which no one can afford. No, child, the problem is, because I dont have grandchildren, you are in fact very lonely. you need to live in a tickytacky mansion of refurbished section 8 high-rise alongside your peers! people you love to 'face book' with would be just the cure for your lazy do-nothing attitude and inability to buy 3 televisions and a luxury sedan. Take it from me-- a housing developer from a generation of people who graduated highschool during the era of segregated drinking fountains -- Living "la vidah locah" in cramped squalor with shared showers, rampant athletes foot, unreachable building maintenance, single pane windows, cots made by prison labour, and unavoidable domestic violence around every hall is the way to go!
and whatever you do, dont pay attention to the housing surplus. profiteering speculators who pedaled the worlds financial institutions to the precipice of ruination know best. In short: keep that social security money and medicaid flowing.