this is consumer capitalism at its finest. No longer do we care about making a particularly good or useful product anymore. the focus is determining who is looking at the product, and custom tailoring a set of deceptive or manipulative advertising based on gender and age. Its desparation.
Ive worked at a grocery store, so i can tell you this kind of crap is pervasive.. ultimately most people are so sick and tired of consumer capitalisms model of tricking us into buying garbage, that its all they can do to enter $Grocery_store and purchase the goods they need with a minimum of hassle. Grocery chains use different kinds of music and even sizes of floor tiles throughout the building to control shoppers walking speeds, they run vanilla airfresheners in the bakery department to ensure you always think something fresh is cooking, and they only fire up the 40 bird rotisserie during dinner hours. yearly, or more frequently, they also decide to completely revamp the store and put all the goods in different locations. if you make it past this insanity and find the toilet paper you originally wanted, you'll have to fight a kind of mathematic jigsaw puzzle more sinister than reaganomics that largely just ends up making you buy what grocers want you to. the asinine barking video adverts on some shelves already exist. theyre triggered by motion and they drive shoppers, in my observation, into a bath-salts rage most of the time. whats worse is all this stuff in a grocery store comes together as a 'perfect storm' during food-based holidays. the music, the smells, the colors, and everything designed to get normal shoppers to spend a few bucks more, sends people into sectarian violence during thanksgiving. I've seen customers literally beat eachother in the aisles for the last tin of pumpkin pie filling without so much as considering the 3 pallets of generic brand we keep in the far hinterlands near the milk. targeting things to customers wont work as well as you think.
Stockers. stockers drive huge wooden pallets of cereal and such up and down aisles for restock. most of the boxes have smiling faces on them, so expect 200 or so encounters from the same middle aged man who never touches the product as he rolls down aisle 6 to be broken up, and placed on a shelf. these pallets are pretty big too, so dont expect third shift stockers to care that much if your camera gets nailed by 2000lbs of slow-moving watermelon on its way to produce. these guys routinely rip off coupon dispensers and colored banners hanging out of the aisles, and whatever ends up on the floor after 3rd shift usually gets thrown in the trash by first 1st shift clean crews.
those loyalty cards. dont think for a minute your information isnt getting added from the advert to the card, or isnt somehow related, because it absolutely is. The card seriously knows more about who you are as a person than your closest loved ones, and is used to routinely provide a pavlovian treat to bad customers in order to get them to become good ones. the popularity of an item drives inversely its sale price, so expect the AI from the advert system to factor into this as well as restock levels and future pricing.
Once the structure falls apart, once the cognitive dissonance between what we say and what we do becomes so indefensible, then we have no choice but to persecute dissent and stifle protest.
the government surveillance, crackdown on leaks, and persecution of journalists just shows how desparate america is to maintain the illusion of the land of the free and home of the brave. in reality we kill our own citizens, run torture camps, kidnap people we consider enemies, and maintain the highest incarceration rate in the world. we topple foreign governments, install dictators, sabotage existing governments attempts at independence and autonomy, and detain indefinitely without trial anyone we see fit. We had an entire slew of protests across the country called Occupy that ended with nothing but arrests and more surveillance. Nothing changed and nothing will.
the fastest way to stop the leaks and the leakers is to stop pandering to a minority constituency of plutocrats while paying lipservice to real americans, and get on with some real change. Arrest corrupt wall street bankers, shut down guantanamo, and for fuck sake stop sticking your dick in the middle east every six months for a boost in the opinion polls leading up to an election.
the W3c is comprised of these guys http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Member/List
theyre major corporations like Microsoft, Sony BT, Cox, Square Enix Comcast and at&t. these guys either have direct pressure to, or direct interest in pushing DRM whether you like it or not. they outnumber individual members and can basically determine the course as they see fit by lobbying and intimidating other members into concensus. in short, asking the W3C is functionally incapable of representing the interests of anything more than a collection of large corporations. Sort of like the US Government.
for example say you have an unfavorable opinion of the government. perhaps that unfavorable opinion has been discovered and lets say the G20 or G8 is coming to your neighborhood. You've printed off a few dozen peaceful protest signs and plan to head to the streets, when Mr Doe and Mr Cardholder show up at your door with a few questions and you're 'detained' for them. I guess we missed the protest now, didnt we? now what if all your friends enjoyed the same fate?
or say someone in your apartment is pirating movies, and the RIAA decides they want to work with ICE and the FBI to extract royalties and blow through a round of biblical punishment 101. sure, you might not have done anything wrong but im sure your browsing history and the sheer number of video clips you've watched on youtube for a similar artist could be used to prove intent.
finally, what if you're running as the fabled third party? all is going well until you mention reigning in the surveillance state and shuttering the war machine. Suddenly the public starts seeing leaks about your browsing habits, or your ties to a friend who once wrote a scathing email to the israeli embassy.
I use it on mission critical applications at work and it does a very efficient job of testing all the functionality of Nagios to page me at 3:00 AM. I have other java applications that are designed to explore the limits of slab allocation and heap return in memory. Theres even a java application I wrote that calculates financial reports. I know what you're thinking, and yes, it performs well as it stress-tests VoIP bandwidth and the helpdesk ticket system.
there are still so many uses for java. one of my earliest and oldest projects I still use to this day! its an application to help post Slashdot comme!####)))!%[NO CARRIER]
Facebook as a privately held corporation for its first six years can cherrypick the cost of its infrastructure as it sees fit. cheap and powerful infrastructure is always a very warm prospect for a market that may be keen to see returns from a soon-to-be public company.
Facebook doesnt take into account the fact that its final cost is spread across the backs of millions of FLOSS developers its never known, whereas the US government is literally developing a system, an open market, that has never existed outside of a single state in its union. The government also doesnt attract facebook-level talent and as such is forced to contend with best practices as it outsources development to well-established industry players. the government began much larger and more fiscally sound than Facebook in its first year, so the purse strings are of course looser.
you're comparing a private company with independent autonomy in the software lifecycle to a government agency beset with lobbyists and average, but not astounding talent. in some cases edicts instituted by governing bodies of the program which may mandate outsourcing to specific vendors regardless of cost; this is how politics works in both private and public sectors. im also certain the signup rate for facebook in its first six years is dwarfed by the healthcare site in its first six hours, which may help explain some of the cost of the program overall. keep in mind the estimate of ~90 million may have been an intentional underestimate as the reform had to be sold to a congress that would rather see the president dead than re-elected.
Its worth mentioning that heart disease, obesity, cancer, famine, smoking, natural disasters, car accidents, and domestic violence each individually kill more people yearly than "Terrorism." Bruce Schneier said it best when he noted we only deploy countermeasures against what terrorists have done, not what they will do. To imply global surveillance of every man woman and child somehow reduces what is already a very rare event is to call attention to the reason we combat terrorism at all. Namely, because Terrorism undermines very controversial foreign policies of certain governments and flies against the interests of their controlling parties. Terrorism may not stop these policies, or even slow them down. However the more terrorist activity occurs, the more the target nation begins to question everything from their elected leadership to the motivation behind the policies that trigger the events. And the events cannot be simply explained away. The best george bush could muster in defining terrorist activity was to say terrorists 'hate our freedom.' If freedom were the real concern, then 180 other nations with varying degrees of equal freedom around the world would certainly be able to confirm this.
What presidents dont say is, "terrorists hate our intrusive foreign policy that installs dictatorships, topples governments, crushes dissent, exploits and degrades the region, and prevents autonomous governance."
the snowden leaks are terrorism in that they empower citizens to actively question and criticize government. Without Snowdens facts, the government absolves itself of a slew of very important questions it would rather not have to answer as it pursues goals strategic to a small minority of its citizens at the expense of the greater good.
here we get to vote for one of two parties, but both are controlled by the same group of billionaires so they dont really represent normal people. its at least refreshing to see a government say, "well, yeah your vote is meaningless" as opposed to the United States, where people become upset if you dont believe voting is important. even if it were, and even if we all pitched in to vote for some third or fourth party, theyd get bought off just as quickly. it wouldnt change.
ive never cared for the Pi for a few reasons, call me a hater but ive reasons..
1. power: this thing is emaciated by any standard. its got plenty of connectors but driving a media center like XBMC is a chore. with 15 watts of power i can trounce this thing with an Atom.
2. its encumbered, so enjoy one more $45 product that kicks FLOSS to the curb.. Beaglebone isnt encumbered...but beagleboard isnt the word for god on the lips and hearts of every blogosphere hipster.
3. it has no practical use. wireless access point? for 5 watts more you get better antenna gain, a better transciever, and PoE in a $35 tplink package. media center? enjoy the one skin for XBMC you can actually run, and the analog audio for icecast streaming will grind it to a halt.
i like low-power embedded stuff, you should too, but there comes a point at which it needs to do something otherwise its just more electric garbage. if you want to run a kegerator with it, or a home automation server, then i still suggest beaglebone http://beagleboard.org/Products/BeagleBone
TLDR: hipster blogcred articles make my shit itch.
this is a normal part of a functional modern consumer capitalism. planned obsolescence, crippled interoperability and limited features are all things corporations adopt in order to drive profit and increase sales yearly. its why your cellphone doesnt have expandable RAM anymore and your game consoles and processors routinely change size, shape, and pin count. The problem is not AMD, its the notion that any economic system constructed on a finite level of resources can questionlessly and consistently achieve percentages of growth regardless of demand. well built, creative and useful products serve no purpose, but are sometimes accidents of fortune in the creation of a product. once its established, each iteration becomes a steady descent into nothing more than a means to achieve what you had, and define yourself based on unrealistic expectations set by advertising and product research teams.
this problem cannot be fixed, because we would have to stop purchasing the product. we cant stop, because the product is the standard by which we esablish our likes and dislikes, as well as our perception of everything from uniqueness to wealth and success. Put your TV on the curb, download a copy of adblock plus, and in six months this entire article will seem the very definition of the hedonistic treadmill.
A Russian defense expert said that the code found by the UN investigators on the M-14 munition showed it had been produced in 1967 by a factory in Novosibirsk for a BM-14-17 multiple rocket launcher. He said that these weapons had been taken out of service by Syria some time ago, and replaced with BM-21s, and suggested that "the insurgents could have found this ancient junk after capturing some military storage depot.".[141] Journalist Robert Fisk said that it was rumoured in Damascus that the unpublished Russian evidence included export papers for these missiles showing that they had been sold to South Yemen, Egypt, and Libya. Fisk noted that since the fall of Ghaddafi in 2011 Libyan weapons have been found in Mali, Algeria and the Sinai, and that the Syrian government had long alleged that Qatar, which supported the rebels against Ghaddafi, had helped ship weapons from Libya to Syria.[142] The OPCW said in September 2011 that Libya's chemical weapons stockpiles had remained secure since February 2011, when its inspectors had to leave due to the Libyan civil war.[143] Libya's declaration to the OPCW of chemical weapons to be destroyed did not include sarin, although it did include sarin precursors.
this is despite the many cynical posts ive seen so far excellent progress. the civil war in Syria is complex, with numerous parties standing to profit from the downfall of the government (including the United States.)
not going to war was good. Once again America had no credible, publically audited evidence to support its war. that the government used chemical weapons at all was suspicious at best, and unresearched in the UN report. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-24130181
the analysis includes relevant information about rebel captured syrian weapons depots as well, which would in fact arm rebels with nerve agent.
Instead of putting the brakes on the war machine, the california senator Barbara Boxer simply insisted she'd seen the evidence and declared it very very bad. Russia presented its evidence to the UN.
but perhaps the most damning hypocrisy is that the united states routinely uses chemical weapons in its warfare. in vietnam, and both iraq wars, white phosphorous was used liberally and without regard for the Hague conventions.
From TFA:
The recent Congressional action refers to a broader law passed in July which prohibits Nasa funds from being used to participate or collaborate with China in any way. The law has raised fears among some Nasa-funded scientists that they will have to sever ties with their Chinese collaborators, and no longer take on Chinese students.
weve embraced this schitzophrenic notion that theyre both an ally as well as an enemy. our Frienemy manufacture entire lifestyles for americans, from phones to computers and even the next great bridge to replace the golden gate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_span_replacement_of_the_San_Francisco%E2%80%93Oakland_Bay_Bridge
To insist your second largest trading partner is so prone to espionage as to warrant eviction from, historically, a great font of collaborative international scientific research of the modern era, misses the point entirely. to insist somehow they might glean some kernel of knowledge from NASA that they would not otherwise discover as a nation that manufactures supercomputers, high speed maglev transportation, and the worlds largest power plant ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Gorges_Dam ) is laughable.
this legislation was concocted by the republican party. Any woman or man of science should remember this as "the party that cant." In the past we hosted 7 astronauts aboard the russian space station MIR. Yet somehow today, the country that hasnt moved missiles into cuba, hasnt started proxy wars, and hasnt ginned up anti-american rhetoric is now so dangerous as to be inadmissable in the eyes of a party that as far as i can tell, stopped researching China after the cold war.
1. perfect the payment card identification solutions you currently have.
2. deprecate the solutions that are blatantly flawed. junk marketing flair such as RFID was a terrible idea.
3. take a more proactive approach in identity theft, dont just triage it with a new card. target and eliminate payment card processors with a consistent history of exploit or breech. refuse to reinstate service until an independent third party audit is conducted.
4. use when ready a new standard with a proven track record and a history of functional security. Stop inventing nonsense piecework systems that hackers swarm like flies on sugar.
there are several reasons why i outsource my wireless to a dedicated piece of off-the-shelf hardware that connects to a linux router. pci and USB cards have poor support and arent really suited for the task. for example:
open source ralink 802.11g chipsets in TPLink and other wireless cards have a sleep mode bug that causes the access point to disappear when using hostapd in the 3.10 kernel..its been a bug for quite a while. the AP cannot be recovered until the cards module is reloaded. in some cases, this cannot be recovered from until the machine is rebooted. the card isnt stable after suspend from ram either.
one more issue is Windows clients. if you have Vista users, they can usually connect to your pci/usb hostapd card. if you have windows 7/8 users the chances of them being able to connect and acquire a DHCP address is going to be spotty. they will randomly lose association as well. Ive never fully determined why some netlink USB adapters in windows 7 require multiple attempts to get on a hostapd network.
next up: antenna gain. the little antennas shipped with PCI cards in my experience are miserable. you'll want a dedicated 9db antenna of at least 6" in length, just like your linksys routers have. Even then checking the signal strength you'll notice a pretty decent lack of power. expect the problem to be worse with USB based solutions as voltage is pretty restricted. so is USB bandwidth:if you have more than 1-2 users on the wireless at a time, you can expect performance to be wretched.
This all having been said, I cant speak for newer wireless pci cards... id be curious to see how newer wireless N cards perform. are multiple SSID's supported? is there a chipset requirement that virtual SSID's be specially constructed to match virtual mac addresses in a specific means? for example again, Realtek and Broadcom chips do require, among firmware requirements in the latter, that virtual SSIDs are mapped to hexidecimally sequential MAC's and even then, Realtek will often times simply ignore other SSIDs its supposed to advertise.
My suggestion, and what as a network engineer ive used at home: linux router with a dedicated TPLink access point(s). I know, the point is wireless but here we really only want it for the excellent transciever(s) that maintain affinity with clients across a broad range of guest operating systems and provide uniform signal coverage in a predictable radiation pattern from the dipole antennas. you also open up the possibility of 48v PoE, so running access points looks cleaner if you're putting them across the house and in the yard. Finally, vlan capability and multiple SSID are affordable and quite functional should you need it.
speaking as a hosting engineer, the sites youre seeing are in 'static maintenance' meaning the original content is replaced with a banner. since each site has a banner page for a shutdown, for example usda.gov, its feasible to presume the shutdown sites were created ahead of time and are all hosted on one or two machines at government facilities that have not been shut down.
static maintenance pages arent saving cash in the form of hosting costs or electricity but they do mean your normal 'staff' of engineers and content creators for the sites can be sent home safely. you dont need to worry about content expiring, which if your the USDA or the FCC thats a good thing because you dont end up misleading people inadvertantly about advisories or notices because no one was around to remove expired content.
now, once the crisis ends and everyone goes back to work, im certain lifting the 'shutdown' banners and playing catchup with a few weeks of missed content and data is going to cost money. congressional staff are likely to begin filing their helpdesk tickets in a 'zerg rush' fashion, so anticipate their cost centers to accrue more charges than usual ( as a government IT worker, you often assign every minute of time to a department.) any unforseen outages or problems caused by say, two weeks of database updates or transactions, might be problematic and require more engineering time than had we not shut down the government. also for the static maintenance team (those guys in charge of the banner only) you'll need to start sending them backpay for their ongoing work and overtime for their miserable on-call rotations.
TL;DR: shutting down the government does not save money in the long term or short term in any appreciable amount.
nuclear and other power plants should not be allowed construction without adequate consideration of cleanup cost. as it stands, superfund is a joke considering an insolvent or nonexistant subsidiary deprecated after the working lifespan of a reactor just lets the government foot the cleanup bill under the guise that its insolvent or nonexistent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfund
in TFA the James A. FitzPatrick Nuclear Power Plant is arguably at the end of its useable lifespan (30-40 years.) Coincidentally so is the Ginna plant. for those keeping track of the joke that is Nuclear Regulation in america, both have been given a 30 year extension despite having gone from megawatt to gigawatt in their installed versus actual capacity. the reactor cleanup cost would likely go to Entergy...who would either declare bankruptcy or drag the government and mohawk energy (a prior owner) into court over potentially responsible party definition as that would determine who has to clean things up. if Mohawk were to declare themselves insolvent, or the PRP could not be identified in court, the entire site would become an orphan share. that means no one has to clean it up but the taxpayer out of the congressional general fund. its lemon socialism.
Entergy likely understands the cost to litigate its way out of a superfund cleanup is way cheaper than actually cleaning a nuclear site and once its absolved of cleanup, it can focus on investing in the gas fracturing movement, which is likely vastly more lucrative than maintaining 40 year old nuclear sites.
the analog version of the chemistry E-Book has also been hacked. an enormous toothbrush mustache has been rendered in analog on Marie Curie making her look exactly like hitler...a clear violation of our zero tolerance policy.
who still uses gnome? Certainly Ubuntu and Fedora thrust it into the user experience for all of us but how long does it stay around until the average slashdotter can get XFCE, Fluxbox or Awesome installed?
3 has devolved into a screaming race to the bottom alongside KDE, mod points be damned. Gnome started out as a sly wink to Mac, an environment the users of the once famed #2 OS could find themselves at ease just as KDE was a sly wink to windows. These days either environment is the equivalent of a bathsalt trip down pick-and-choose lane. should an icon slide? or click? in Gnome 3 it can do both in some applications... which is an infuriating experience for mouse users but screw the base. the user needs yet another input-driven excuse for wild cirque du soleil gesticulations in the pursuit of his tablet experience. Hotspots? lets put them everywhere. the Dock? lets make it meaningless icons you'll either wait to metriculate from the edge of the screen or bungle into trying to get to a different menu entirely, which incidentally is now totally obscured by the dock. Reverse course captain stubing, the mouse has run aground. how do we power the machine off? click the tiny gear in the upper right hand corner but full stop captain! the mouse! she's moored in another hotspot which has pulled up an entire screen of random unlabeled icons. If you've the latest graphics card this screen will snap to attention like a seasoned warrior, but for anyone a few years dated the experience is beguiling as the screen slowly dims and icons like so many phantoms gradually condense into existence.
releasing the knowledge that the middle-click paste is being deprecated in gnome is like learning the news that your senile aunt who once enjoyed pudding cups, now only eats pudding on a stick. its different for auntie but expected behavior in the context of the other nursing home residents.
Texting and driving is way, way too prevalent. In ohio its an artform. People merge into the far right lane, press the phone against their steering wheel, and dont look up until the glow of the tail lights from the car ahead has completely illuminated their vehicle cabin. It renders the lane a horrendous mess of jerky start-stop traffic that wastes gas and infuriates anyone trying to merge from an on-ramp only to be met with a person whos completely divorced from operating a few thousand pounds of car or truck. It kills quite a number of people as well.
but as a police officer, fixating on one traffic infraction is a complete waste of my tax dollars. Try branching out and engaging in the two years of criminal law enforcement my tax dollars sent you to academy for. issue citations for the beamer roaring down the fast lane, or the pick up truck with a teetering unsecured mass of various brick-a-brack in the bed. I cant begin to list off how many people ive seen with a complete absence of functional tail lights, turn signals or competent lane change.
1. uncontrollable sobbing in the mens room may be attributable to the creation of a monster that no longer seems to respond to any economic theory past or present.
2. exhausted yawns and dosing are considered a sign that regulation is being proposed.
3. flatulence indicates carmimes deli has started using that half-mayo half-mustard topping on its deli subs again...
We here at the NSA would like to thank slashdot for its interest in this position.
Due to overwhelming traffic, our website may become inaccessible from time to time. should you find yourself unable to connect or submit your CV, please try these steps:
1. calmly speak your resume into any cellphone, preceded by one or more of the words: "Terror, Obama, Occupy, Syria"
2. Purchase one Quran, Disposable mobile phone, and one tank of propane to speak with a member of our team about the job opening.
3. open a copy of your CV in any Microsoft Operating System.
regards,
oscar nascar pickle marmalade1234
NSA Human Resources
when faced with the option of complying with federal law or challenging it, im willing to guess most major corporations that butter their bread with federal dollars would be reluctant to question so much as the color of the stamp on the envelope in which the request was delivered.
Slashdot Mirror
this is consumer capitalism at its finest. No longer do we care about making a particularly good or useful product anymore. the focus is determining who is looking at the product, and custom tailoring a set of deceptive or manipulative advertising based on gender and age. Its desparation.
Ive worked at a grocery store, so i can tell you this kind of crap is pervasive.. ultimately most people are so sick and tired of consumer capitalisms model of tricking us into buying garbage, that its all they can do to enter $Grocery_store and purchase the goods they need with a minimum of hassle. Grocery chains use different kinds of music and even sizes of floor tiles throughout the building to control shoppers walking speeds, they run vanilla airfresheners in the bakery department to ensure you always think something fresh is cooking, and they only fire up the 40 bird rotisserie during dinner hours. yearly, or more frequently, they also decide to completely revamp the store and put all the goods in different locations. if you make it past this insanity and find the toilet paper you originally wanted, you'll have to fight a kind of mathematic jigsaw puzzle more sinister than reaganomics that largely just ends up making you buy what grocers want you to. the asinine barking video adverts on some shelves already exist. theyre triggered by motion and they drive shoppers, in my observation, into a bath-salts rage most of the time. whats worse is all this stuff in a grocery store comes together as a 'perfect storm' during food-based holidays. the music, the smells, the colors, and everything designed to get normal shoppers to spend a few bucks more, sends people into sectarian violence during thanksgiving. I've seen customers literally beat eachother in the aisles for the last tin of pumpkin pie filling without so much as considering the 3 pallets of generic brand we keep in the far hinterlands near the milk. targeting things to customers wont work as well as you think.
Stockers. stockers drive huge wooden pallets of cereal and such up and down aisles for restock. most of the boxes have smiling faces on them, so expect 200 or so encounters from the same middle aged man who never touches the product as he rolls down aisle 6 to be broken up, and placed on a shelf. these pallets are pretty big too, so dont expect third shift stockers to care that much if your camera gets nailed by 2000lbs of slow-moving watermelon on its way to produce. these guys routinely rip off coupon dispensers and colored banners hanging out of the aisles, and whatever ends up on the floor after 3rd shift usually gets thrown in the trash by first 1st shift clean crews.
those loyalty cards. dont think for a minute your information isnt getting added from the advert to the card, or isnt somehow related, because it absolutely is. The card seriously knows more about who you are as a person than your closest loved ones, and is used to routinely provide a pavlovian treat to bad customers in order to get them to become good ones. the popularity of an item drives inversely its sale price, so expect the AI from the advert system to factor into this as well as restock levels and future pricing.
and america arrests journalists who report on whistleblowers. potato po-tah-to.
Once the structure falls apart, once the cognitive dissonance between what we say and what we do becomes so indefensible, then we have no choice but to persecute dissent and stifle protest.
the government surveillance, crackdown on leaks, and persecution of journalists just shows how desparate america is to maintain the illusion of the land of the free and home of the brave. in reality we kill our own citizens, run torture camps, kidnap people we consider enemies, and maintain the highest incarceration rate in the world. we topple foreign governments, install dictators, sabotage existing governments attempts at independence and autonomy, and detain indefinitely without trial anyone we see fit. We had an entire slew of protests across the country called Occupy that ended with nothing but arrests and more surveillance. Nothing changed and nothing will.
the fastest way to stop the leaks and the leakers is to stop pandering to a minority constituency of plutocrats while paying lipservice to real americans, and get on with some real change. Arrest corrupt wall street bankers, shut down guantanamo, and for fuck sake stop sticking your dick in the middle east every six months for a boost in the opinion polls leading up to an election.
the W3c is comprised of these guys
http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Member/List
theyre major corporations like Microsoft, Sony BT, Cox, Square Enix Comcast and at&t. these guys either have direct pressure to, or direct interest in pushing DRM whether you like it or not. they outnumber individual members and can basically determine the course as they see fit by lobbying and intimidating other members into concensus. in short, asking the W3C is functionally incapable of representing the interests of anything more than a collection of large corporations. Sort of like the US Government.
for example say you have an unfavorable opinion of the government. perhaps that unfavorable opinion has been discovered and lets say the G20 or G8 is coming to your neighborhood. You've printed off a few dozen peaceful protest signs and plan to head to the streets, when Mr Doe and Mr Cardholder show up at your door with a few questions and you're 'detained' for them. I guess we missed the protest now, didnt we? now what if all your friends enjoyed the same fate?
or say someone in your apartment is pirating movies, and the RIAA decides they want to work with ICE and the FBI to extract royalties and blow through a round of biblical punishment 101. sure, you might not have done anything wrong but im sure your browsing history and the sheer number of video clips you've watched on youtube for a similar artist could be used to prove intent.
finally, what if you're running as the fabled third party? all is going well until you mention reigning in the surveillance state and shuttering the war machine. Suddenly the public starts seeing leaks about your browsing habits, or your ties to a friend who once wrote a scathing email to the israeli embassy.
I use it on mission critical applications at work and it does a very efficient job of testing all the functionality of Nagios to page me at 3:00 AM. I have other java applications that are designed to explore the limits of slab allocation and heap return in memory. Theres even a java application I wrote that calculates financial reports. I know what you're thinking, and yes, it performs well as it stress-tests VoIP bandwidth and the helpdesk ticket system.
there are still so many uses for java. one of my earliest and oldest projects I still use to this day! its an application to help post Slashdot comme!####)))!%[NO CARRIER]
Facebook as a privately held corporation for its first six years can cherrypick the cost of its infrastructure as it sees fit. cheap and powerful infrastructure is always a very warm prospect for a market that may be keen to see returns from a soon-to-be public company.
Facebook doesnt take into account the fact that its final cost is spread across the backs of millions of FLOSS developers its never known, whereas the US government is literally developing a system, an open market, that has never existed outside of a single state in its union. The government also doesnt attract facebook-level talent and as such is forced to contend with best practices as it outsources development to well-established industry players. the government began much larger and more fiscally sound than Facebook in its first year, so the purse strings are of course looser.
you're comparing a private company with independent autonomy in the software lifecycle to a government agency beset with lobbyists and average, but not astounding talent. in some cases edicts instituted by governing bodies of the program which may mandate outsourcing to specific vendors regardless of cost; this is how politics works in both private and public sectors. im also certain the signup rate for facebook in its first six years is dwarfed by the healthcare site in its first six hours, which may help explain some of the cost of the program overall. keep in mind the estimate of ~90 million may have been an intentional underestimate as the reform had to be sold to a congress that would rather see the president dead than re-elected.
Its worth mentioning that heart disease, obesity, cancer, famine, smoking, natural disasters, car accidents, and domestic violence each individually kill more people yearly than "Terrorism." Bruce Schneier said it best when he noted we only deploy countermeasures against what terrorists have done, not what they will do. To imply global surveillance of every man woman and child somehow reduces what is already a very rare event is to call attention to the reason we combat terrorism at all. Namely, because Terrorism undermines very controversial foreign policies of certain governments and flies against the interests of their controlling parties. Terrorism may not stop these policies, or even slow them down. However the more terrorist activity occurs, the more the target nation begins to question everything from their elected leadership to the motivation behind the policies that trigger the events. And the events cannot be simply explained away. The best george bush could muster in defining terrorist activity was to say terrorists 'hate our freedom.' If freedom were the real concern, then 180 other nations with varying degrees of equal freedom around the world would certainly be able to confirm this.
What presidents dont say is, "terrorists hate our intrusive foreign policy that installs dictatorships, topples governments, crushes dissent, exploits and degrades the region, and prevents autonomous governance."
the snowden leaks are terrorism in that they empower citizens to actively question and criticize government. Without Snowdens facts, the government absolves itself of a slew of very important questions it would rather not have to answer as it pursues goals strategic to a small minority of its citizens at the expense of the greater good.
http://gizmodo.com/196551/lexus-self-parking-car-video-and-review
Lexus did this first in 2006. its entirely plausible Ford just licensed their technology as they did in the past with Toyotas Hybrid Synergy Drive
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_Synergy_Drive#Ford
here we get to vote for one of two parties, but both are controlled by the same group of billionaires so they dont really represent normal people. its at least refreshing to see a government say, "well, yeah your vote is meaningless" as opposed to the United States, where people become upset if you dont believe voting is important. even if it were, and even if we all pitched in to vote for some third or fourth party, theyd get bought off just as quickly. it wouldnt change.
ive never cared for the Pi for a few reasons, call me a hater but ive reasons..
1. power: this thing is emaciated by any standard. its got plenty of connectors but driving a media center like XBMC is a chore. with 15 watts of power i can trounce this thing with an Atom.
2. its encumbered, so enjoy one more $45 product that kicks FLOSS to the curb.. Beaglebone isnt encumbered...but beagleboard isnt the word for god on the lips and hearts of every blogosphere hipster.
3. it has no practical use. wireless access point? for 5 watts more you get better antenna gain, a better transciever, and PoE in a $35 tplink package. media center? enjoy the one skin for XBMC you can actually run, and the analog audio for icecast streaming will grind it to a halt.
i like low-power embedded stuff, you should too, but there comes a point at which it needs to do something otherwise its just more electric garbage. if you want to run a kegerator with it, or a home automation server, then i still suggest beaglebone http://beagleboard.org/Products/BeagleBone
TLDR: hipster blogcred articles make my shit itch.
this is a normal part of a functional modern consumer capitalism. planned obsolescence, crippled interoperability and limited features are all things corporations adopt in order to drive profit and increase sales yearly. its why your cellphone doesnt have expandable RAM anymore and your game consoles and processors routinely change size, shape, and pin count. The problem is not AMD, its the notion that any economic system constructed on a finite level of resources can questionlessly and consistently achieve percentages of growth regardless of demand. well built, creative and useful products serve no purpose, but are sometimes accidents of fortune in the creation of a product. once its established, each iteration becomes a steady descent into nothing more than a means to achieve what you had, and define yourself based on unrealistic expectations set by advertising and product research teams.
this problem cannot be fixed, because we would have to stop purchasing the product. we cant stop, because the product is the standard by which we esablish our likes and dislikes, as well as our perception of everything from uniqueness to wealth and success. Put your TV on the curb, download a copy of adblock plus, and in six months this entire article will seem the very definition of the hedonistic treadmill.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_Ghouta_attacks#Government_attack
A Russian defense expert said that the code found by the UN investigators on the M-14 munition showed it had been produced in 1967 by a factory in Novosibirsk for a BM-14-17 multiple rocket launcher. He said that these weapons had been taken out of service by Syria some time ago, and replaced with BM-21s, and suggested that "the insurgents could have found this ancient junk after capturing some military storage depot.".[141] Journalist Robert Fisk said that it was rumoured in Damascus that the unpublished Russian evidence included export papers for these missiles showing that they had been sold to South Yemen, Egypt, and Libya. Fisk noted that since the fall of Ghaddafi in 2011 Libyan weapons have been found in Mali, Algeria and the Sinai, and that the Syrian government had long alleged that Qatar, which supported the rebels against Ghaddafi, had helped ship weapons from Libya to Syria.[142] The OPCW said in September 2011 that Libya's chemical weapons stockpiles had remained secure since February 2011, when its inspectors had to leave due to the Libyan civil war.[143] Libya's declaration to the OPCW of chemical weapons to be destroyed did not include sarin, although it did include sarin precursors.
this is despite the many cynical posts ive seen so far excellent progress. the civil war in Syria is complex, with numerous parties standing to profit from the downfall of the government (including the United States.)
not going to war was good. Once again America had no credible, publically audited evidence to support its war. that the government used chemical weapons at all was suspicious at best, and unresearched in the UN report.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-24130181
the analysis includes relevant information about rebel captured syrian weapons depots as well, which would in fact arm rebels with nerve agent.
Instead of putting the brakes on the war machine, the california senator Barbara Boxer simply insisted she'd seen the evidence and declared it very very bad. Russia presented its evidence to the UN.
but perhaps the most damning hypocrisy is that the united states routinely uses chemical weapons in its warfare. in vietnam, and both iraq wars, white phosphorous was used liberally and without regard for the Hague conventions.
From TFA:
The recent Congressional action refers to a broader law passed in July which prohibits Nasa funds from being used to participate or collaborate with China in any way. The law has raised fears among some Nasa-funded scientists that they will have to sever ties with their Chinese collaborators, and no longer take on Chinese students. weve embraced this schitzophrenic notion that theyre both an ally as well as an enemy. our Frienemy manufacture entire lifestyles for americans, from phones to computers and even the next great bridge to replace the golden gate
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_span_replacement_of_the_San_Francisco%E2%80%93Oakland_Bay_Bridge
To insist your second largest trading partner is so prone to espionage as to warrant eviction from, historically, a great font of collaborative international scientific research of the modern era, misses the point entirely. to insist somehow they might glean some kernel of knowledge from NASA that they would not otherwise discover as a nation that manufactures supercomputers, high speed maglev transportation, and the worlds largest power plant ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Gorges_Dam ) is laughable.
this legislation was concocted by the republican party. Any woman or man of science should remember this as "the party that cant." In the past we hosted 7 astronauts aboard the russian space station MIR. Yet somehow today, the country that hasnt moved missiles into cuba, hasnt started proxy wars, and hasnt ginned up anti-american rhetoric is now so dangerous as to be inadmissable in the eyes of a party that as far as i can tell, stopped researching China after the cold war.
1. perfect the payment card identification solutions you currently have.
2. deprecate the solutions that are blatantly flawed. junk marketing flair such as RFID was a terrible idea.
3. take a more proactive approach in identity theft, dont just triage it with a new card. target and eliminate payment card processors with a consistent history of exploit or breech. refuse to reinstate service until an independent third party audit is conducted.
4. use when ready a new standard with a proven track record and a history of functional security. Stop inventing nonsense piecework systems that hackers swarm like flies on sugar.
there are several reasons why i outsource my wireless to a dedicated piece of off-the-shelf hardware that connects to a linux router. pci and USB cards have poor support and arent really suited for the task. for example:
open source ralink 802.11g chipsets in TPLink and other wireless cards have a sleep mode bug that causes the access point to disappear when using hostapd in the 3.10 kernel..its been a bug for quite a while. the AP cannot be recovered until the cards module is reloaded. in some cases, this cannot be recovered from until the machine is rebooted. the card isnt stable after suspend from ram either.
one more issue is Windows clients. if you have Vista users, they can usually connect to your pci/usb hostapd card. if you have windows 7/8 users the chances of them being able to connect and acquire a DHCP address is going to be spotty. they will randomly lose association as well. Ive never fully determined why some netlink USB adapters in windows 7 require multiple attempts to get on a hostapd network.
next up: antenna gain. the little antennas shipped with PCI cards in my experience are miserable. you'll want a dedicated 9db antenna of at least 6" in length, just like your linksys routers have. Even then checking the signal strength you'll notice a pretty decent lack of power. expect the problem to be worse with USB based solutions as voltage is pretty restricted. so is USB bandwidth:if you have more than 1-2 users on the wireless at a time, you can expect performance to be wretched.
This all having been said, I cant speak for newer wireless pci cards... id be curious to see how newer wireless N cards perform. are multiple SSID's supported? is there a chipset requirement that virtual SSID's be specially constructed to match virtual mac addresses in a specific means? for example again, Realtek and Broadcom chips do require, among firmware requirements in the latter, that virtual SSIDs are mapped to hexidecimally sequential MAC's and even then, Realtek will often times simply ignore other SSIDs its supposed to advertise.
My suggestion, and what as a network engineer ive used at home: linux router with a dedicated TPLink access point(s). I know, the point is wireless but here we really only want it for the excellent transciever(s) that maintain affinity with clients across a broad range of guest operating systems and provide uniform signal coverage in a predictable radiation pattern from the dipole antennas. you also open up the possibility of 48v PoE, so running access points looks cleaner if you're putting them across the house and in the yard. Finally, vlan capability and multiple SSID are affordable and quite functional should you need it.
speaking as a hosting engineer, the sites youre seeing are in 'static maintenance' meaning the original content is replaced with a banner. since each site has a banner page for a shutdown, for example usda.gov, its feasible to presume the shutdown sites were created ahead of time and are all hosted on one or two machines at government facilities that have not been shut down.
static maintenance pages arent saving cash in the form of hosting costs or electricity but they do mean your normal 'staff' of engineers and content creators for the sites can be sent home safely. you dont need to worry about content expiring, which if your the USDA or the FCC thats a good thing because you dont end up misleading people inadvertantly about advisories or notices because no one was around to remove expired content.
now, once the crisis ends and everyone goes back to work, im certain lifting the 'shutdown' banners and playing catchup with a few weeks of missed content and data is going to cost money. congressional staff are likely to begin filing their helpdesk tickets in a 'zerg rush' fashion, so anticipate their cost centers to accrue more charges than usual ( as a government IT worker, you often assign every minute of time to a department.) any unforseen outages or problems caused by say, two weeks of database updates or transactions, might be problematic and require more engineering time than had we not shut down the government. also for the static maintenance team (those guys in charge of the banner only) you'll need to start sending them backpay for their ongoing work and overtime for their miserable on-call rotations.
TL;DR: shutting down the government does not save money in the long term or short term in any appreciable amount.
nuclear and other power plants should not be allowed construction without adequate consideration of cleanup cost. as it stands, superfund is a joke considering an insolvent or nonexistant subsidiary deprecated after the working lifespan of a reactor just lets the government foot the cleanup bill under the guise that its insolvent or nonexistent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfund
in TFA the James A. FitzPatrick Nuclear Power Plant is arguably at the end of its useable lifespan (30-40 years.) Coincidentally so is the Ginna plant. for those keeping track of the joke that is Nuclear Regulation in america, both have been given a 30 year extension despite having gone from megawatt to gigawatt in their installed versus actual capacity. the reactor cleanup cost would likely go to Entergy...who would either declare bankruptcy or drag the government and mohawk energy (a prior owner) into court over potentially responsible party definition as that would determine who has to clean things up. if Mohawk were to declare themselves insolvent, or the PRP could not be identified in court, the entire site would become an orphan share. that means no one has to clean it up but the taxpayer out of the congressional general fund. its lemon socialism.
Entergy likely understands the cost to litigate its way out of a superfund cleanup is way cheaper than actually cleaning a nuclear site and once its absolved of cleanup, it can focus on investing in the gas fracturing movement, which is likely vastly more lucrative than maintaining 40 year old nuclear sites.
the analog version of the chemistry E-Book has also been hacked. an enormous toothbrush mustache has been rendered in analog on Marie Curie making her look exactly like hitler...a clear violation of our zero tolerance policy.
who still uses gnome? Certainly Ubuntu and Fedora thrust it into the user experience for all of us but how long does it stay around until the average slashdotter can get XFCE, Fluxbox or Awesome installed?
3 has devolved into a screaming race to the bottom alongside KDE, mod points be damned. Gnome started out as a sly wink to Mac, an environment the users of the once famed #2 OS could find themselves at ease just as KDE was a sly wink to windows. These days either environment is the equivalent of a bathsalt trip down pick-and-choose lane. should an icon slide? or click? in Gnome 3 it can do both in some applications... which is an infuriating experience for mouse users but screw the base. the user needs yet another input-driven excuse for wild cirque du soleil gesticulations in the pursuit of his tablet experience. Hotspots? lets put them everywhere. the Dock? lets make it meaningless icons you'll either wait to metriculate from the edge of the screen or bungle into trying to get to a different menu entirely, which incidentally is now totally obscured by the dock. Reverse course captain stubing, the mouse has run aground. how do we power the machine off? click the tiny gear in the upper right hand corner but full stop captain! the mouse! she's moored in another hotspot which has pulled up an entire screen of random unlabeled icons. If you've the latest graphics card this screen will snap to attention like a seasoned warrior, but for anyone a few years dated the experience is beguiling as the screen slowly dims and icons like so many phantoms gradually condense into existence.
releasing the knowledge that the middle-click paste is being deprecated in gnome is like learning the news that your senile aunt who once enjoyed pudding cups, now only eats pudding on a stick. its different for auntie but expected behavior in the context of the other nursing home residents.
Texting and driving is way, way too prevalent. In ohio its an artform. People merge into the far right lane, press the phone against their steering wheel, and dont look up until the glow of the tail lights from the car ahead has completely illuminated their vehicle cabin. It renders the lane a horrendous mess of jerky start-stop traffic that wastes gas and infuriates anyone trying to merge from an on-ramp only to be met with a person whos completely divorced from operating a few thousand pounds of car or truck. It kills quite a number of people as well.
but as a police officer, fixating on one traffic infraction is a complete waste of my tax dollars. Try branching out and engaging in the two years of criminal law enforcement my tax dollars sent you to academy for. issue citations for the beamer roaring down the fast lane, or the pick up truck with a teetering unsecured mass of various brick-a-brack in the bed. I cant begin to list off how many people ive seen with a complete absence of functional tail lights, turn signals or competent lane change.
1. uncontrollable sobbing in the mens room may be attributable to the creation of a monster that no longer seems to respond to any economic theory past or present.
2. exhausted yawns and dosing are considered a sign that regulation is being proposed.
3. flatulence indicates carmimes deli has started using that half-mayo half-mustard topping on its deli subs again...
We here at the NSA would like to thank slashdot for its interest in this position.
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1. calmly speak your resume into any cellphone, preceded by one or more of the words: "Terror, Obama, Occupy, Syria"
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3. open a copy of your CV in any Microsoft Operating System.
regards,
oscar nascar pickle marmalade1234
NSA Human Resources
when faced with the option of complying with federal law or challenging it, im willing to guess most major corporations that butter their bread with federal dollars would be reluctant to question so much as the color of the stamp on the envelope in which the request was delivered.