I know. FISA is a mess. It's possible that the regulations it introduces will help the situation; that's why Obama voted for it. I still would have voted against it, myself.
I voted for Nader in 2000. I'm voting for Obama because he exemplifies (I'm using that word correctly, look it up) the kind of politics Nader was proposing: resisting tainting outside influences and getting the money you need to run from the people who will vote for you. People like me, as I've given hundreds of dollars to BO.
Not all democrats are the same, neither are all republicans the same. And nobody will agree with me on everything.
I think it's safe to say that Verizon and its little friends are big fans of the current surveillance-friendly administration, seeing as how the W administration just gave the telcos the world's largest "Get Out Of Jail Free" card with their little "retroactive immunity" bill.
*sigh* Obama voted for it. (I'm voting for him anyway.)
Of course, I'm suspicious of the way gas prices suddenly drop in October of years divisible by 4, too.:)
They drop every October. Every September, too. People drive more in the summer.
Or they're working on the basis of what words you're already receiving in your email. I can tell you, since I signed up the day his website went online, that Obama's campaign sends a buttload of email. I actually read or skim most of it (I really did ask for it, after all), but the spammer is hoping I'm as interested in their junk as the real deal.
What I don't understand is why spammers are too stupid to make their emails look legitimate. It's been years since I can remember receiving even a single spam I couldn't sniff out instantly from the subject line.
An other great book on this subject is Clarke's The Light of Other Days. He posits that not only is privacy screwed now, but everything you've ever done in the past is also out in the open, you just don't know it yet. And he suggests that society will adapt just fine.
My position is that the powerful have more to lose from a breakdown of privacy than the "private" citizen has to fear. The loss of privacy is only a problem when the powerful get to keep theirs. As Sarah Palin's email accounts illustrate, that ain't gonna be the case for long. As the ease of copying information approaches zero, the difficulty of securing it approaches infinity. But nobody cares about you and your information, so you just need to keep from popping up in the anti-terrorist list for a few more decades until this works itself out.
Think of it as steganography... try not to stand out as long as there's only a few people in the database; but as they pile in more and more (1 million on the TSA's no-fly list), your individual exposure becomes less. Eventually your public information is just lost in the noise, the way it has always been.
And then it will be time for the powerful to answer for their secrets, and yours won't matter any more.
I'd take their "no fly" list and identify every single person on it who was a legitimate threat and either have them under 24 hour surveillance or arrested.
You might get a few votes from that. But your actual suggestion is impossible. The list hit a million names lately. Gonna investigate a million people? BTW, you have to investigate everyone in the world, not just people in the US.
The list should be burned, along with everyone responsible for its creation. (Oops, I probably just went on the list. Oh well, I'll use my middle name next time I fly.)
Not PJ. The EFF. This is what they were founded to do. While I'm at it, I think I'll go make them a donation. The EFF has probably done more for you (as an observer interested in technology) than either presidential candidate.
This one? Probably not. Maybe a later version. Trust in software and systems is built the same way trust in people is built: with time to wait for failures and exposure to the principles. Casual people will try it out first, find the problems, and then maybe in 5 years it'll be trustworthy enough to use.
Nothing is 100% trustable. There is a nonzero chance that your perfectly secure software will spontaneously reconfigure itself into a spying device for the Chinese, just based on the laws of probability. So you takes your chances with anything; every choice the truly paranoid make must be about whether they trust the system enough.
And, to paraphrase Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., if you don't believe in any cause enough to die for it, you are already dead. The freedom fighters over there in Nonfreedonia already know their lives are on the line, and it's the people they associate with that are the biggest risks, not the stupid Linux distribution they use.
I think a lot of people misunderstand the concept of "single point of failure". With all of this stuff in one place, yes, there's only one place that attackers need to attack. But there's also only one place that defenders need to defend. The alternative is that all these security programs remain scattered in lots of places on the Internet. True, attackers probably won't be able to subvert more than a couple of those, but it only takes one flaw in your security for them to get you. If you subverted GPG, it doesn't matter much that TrueCrypt is still working for you. If someone subverted SSL, or DNS, and it doesn't matter much that the Linux Kernel is still secure. Best to get everything from one place, and make sure that one place is really, REALLY damn secure.
Uh, it's almost exactly the opposite of what you're saying. You don't have to have a Python 3.x line; you can just deploy your code on Python 2.6, keep your working application working, and do all your new development and testing with Python 3.x warnings turned on. Then your next release is Python 3.0 compatible; or if you somehow fail to do finish the Python 3.x upgrades in time for your next release, you don't have to release on Python 3.x, you can just keep using Python 2.6 even though your code is partially upgraded.
Partially upgraded codelines are always the problem with major version upgrades, and the Python 2.6/3.0 future compatibility is designed precisely so that this problem is not a problem.
Python has bent over backwards to make the upgrade as easy as possible for people with serious Python applications in production.
Come on, we all know wireless causes cancer. So any idiot would realize that to cure cancer, you only have to invert the peaks and valleys of the wireless waves.
Are you a complete ass? If you actually read my post you would know that I agreed with you. I was making an additional point about the value of learning. Considering your sig, you're a bit hasty to throw down the "troll" moniker.
On the contrary sir. An amateur should attempt this; but a company with assets on the line should only attempt this with someone who understands asynchrony, parallelism and distributed computing.
An amateur, i.e. someone working on their own time with no money on the line, should be doing this so they can learn how it's done. The feeling when you first understand asynchronous programming or some concept of parallelism is a natural high that I enthusiastically recommend. It's also a good way to get yourself a fat paycheck later, when you've been playing with it for a while, and can talk coherently in a job interview about how it works. Or at an IT/R&D meeting, where you demonstrate your new value to your boss.
A company with money to lose had better be careful though. Hire people who know about technology, and tell them to hire people who understand parallelism. It ain't easy.
this is just an algorithm which counts how closely the speaker's diction and delivery match those used by McCain and assigns a value for the McCaininess of the speech
Yep, exactly right. FTFA:
"I" tends to indicate less spin than "we", for example"
Well, ffs, of course Obama is going to score high on the spin-o-meter then. How about we use the algorithm to determine the selfishness of the speaker instead? "I" scores higher than "we".
If the government is going to frame you... why go through the hastle of actually using real footage.
Because they don't know if they want to frame you yet. We're all anonymous and faceless.. until some tracking trend decides that we'd be a nice scapegoat. You have to show up on somebody's radar for that to happen. Your unusual, slashdot-reading, open-source programming, bookstore-visiting habits might be enough. Don't give them any hooks to go after you. If they can't track it, they won't be interested what it says about you--or what they can make it appear to say about you.
Slashdot Mirror
Word is he'll be coming back down after he lands on the moon.
Via a moongate.
I know. FISA is a mess. It's possible that the regulations it introduces will help the situation; that's why Obama voted for it. I still would have voted against it, myself.
I voted for Nader in 2000. I'm voting for Obama because he exemplifies (I'm using that word correctly, look it up) the kind of politics Nader was proposing: resisting tainting outside influences and getting the money you need to run from the people who will vote for you. People like me, as I've given hundreds of dollars to BO.
Not all democrats are the same, neither are all republicans the same. And nobody will agree with me on everything.
Santa Claus isn't running this year.
Besides, disagreeing with someone on one issue doesn't mean I think they are evil. That's black and white thinking, and not useful to the discourse.
I think it's safe to say that Verizon and its little friends are big fans of the current surveillance-friendly administration, seeing as how the W administration just gave the telcos the world's largest "Get Out Of Jail Free" card with their little "retroactive immunity" bill.
*sigh* Obama voted for it. (I'm voting for him anyway.)
Of course, I'm suspicious of the way gas prices suddenly drop in October of years divisible by 4, too. :)
They drop every October. Every September, too. People drive more in the summer.
Uh, yes he fucking minds. That's the whole point. :-)
Or they're working on the basis of what words you're already receiving in your email. I can tell you, since I signed up the day his website went online, that Obama's campaign sends a buttload of email. I actually read or skim most of it (I really did ask for it, after all), but the spammer is hoping I'm as interested in their junk as the real deal.
What I don't understand is why spammers are too stupid to make their emails look legitimate. It's been years since I can remember receiving even a single spam I couldn't sniff out instantly from the subject line.
An other great book on this subject is Clarke's The Light of Other Days. He posits that not only is privacy screwed now, but everything you've ever done in the past is also out in the open, you just don't know it yet. And he suggests that society will adapt just fine.
My position is that the powerful have more to lose from a breakdown of privacy than the "private" citizen has to fear. The loss of privacy is only a problem when the powerful get to keep theirs. As Sarah Palin's email accounts illustrate, that ain't gonna be the case for long. As the ease of copying information approaches zero, the difficulty of securing it approaches infinity. But nobody cares about you and your information, so you just need to keep from popping up in the anti-terrorist list for a few more decades until this works itself out.
Think of it as steganography... try not to stand out as long as there's only a few people in the database; but as they pile in more and more (1 million on the TSA's no-fly list), your individual exposure becomes less. Eventually your public information is just lost in the noise, the way it has always been.
And then it will be time for the powerful to answer for their secrets, and yours won't matter any more.
You might get a few votes from that. But your actual suggestion is impossible. The list hit a million names lately. Gonna investigate a million people? BTW, you have to investigate everyone in the world, not just people in the US.
The list should be burned, along with everyone responsible for its creation. (Oops, I probably just went on the list. Oh well, I'll use my middle name next time I fly.)
Not PJ. The EFF. This is what they were founded to do. While I'm at it, I think I'll go make them a donation. The EFF has probably done more for you (as an observer interested in technology) than either presidential candidate.
Mostly correct, but it seems a bit strange to cast IE as the alternative to "OS-specific". :-)
Awesome. :-)
This one? Probably not. Maybe a later version. Trust in software and systems is built the same way trust in people is built: with time to wait for failures and exposure to the principles. Casual people will try it out first, find the problems, and then maybe in 5 years it'll be trustworthy enough to use.
Nothing is 100% trustable. There is a nonzero chance that your perfectly secure software will spontaneously reconfigure itself into a spying device for the Chinese, just based on the laws of probability. So you takes your chances with anything; every choice the truly paranoid make must be about whether they trust the system enough.
And, to paraphrase Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., if you don't believe in any cause enough to die for it, you are already dead. The freedom fighters over there in Nonfreedonia already know their lives are on the line, and it's the people they associate with that are the biggest risks, not the stupid Linux distribution they use.
I think a lot of people misunderstand the concept of "single point of failure". With all of this stuff in one place, yes, there's only one place that attackers need to attack. But there's also only one place that defenders need to defend. The alternative is that all these security programs remain scattered in lots of places on the Internet. True, attackers probably won't be able to subvert more than a couple of those, but it only takes one flaw in your security for them to get you. If you subverted GPG, it doesn't matter much that TrueCrypt is still working for you. If someone subverted SSL, or DNS, and it doesn't matter much that the Linux Kernel is still secure. Best to get everything from one place, and make sure that one place is really, REALLY damn secure.
Uh, it's almost exactly the opposite of what you're saying. You don't have to have a Python 3.x line; you can just deploy your code on Python 2.6, keep your working application working, and do all your new development and testing with Python 3.x warnings turned on. Then your next release is Python 3.0 compatible; or if you somehow fail to do finish the Python 3.x upgrades in time for your next release, you don't have to release on Python 3.x, you can just keep using Python 2.6 even though your code is partially upgraded.
Partially upgraded codelines are always the problem with major version upgrades, and the Python 2.6/3.0 future compatibility is designed precisely so that this problem is not a problem.
Python has bent over backwards to make the upgrade as easy as possible for people with serious Python applications in production.
Come on, we all know wireless causes cancer. So any idiot would realize that to cure cancer, you only have to invert the peaks and valleys of the wireless waves.
Not to mention the "reward" would likely be in the amount of $1005.
Nah, if they had it they'd be shouting it from the rooftops. But GEGL is there now, and I expect CMYK to follow rapidly.
Are you a complete ass? If you actually read my post you would know that I agreed with you. I was making an additional point about the value of learning. Considering your sig, you're a bit hasty to throw down the "troll" moniker.
On the contrary sir. An amateur should attempt this; but a company with assets on the line should only attempt this with someone who understands asynchrony, parallelism and distributed computing.
An amateur, i.e. someone working on their own time with no money on the line, should be doing this so they can learn how it's done. The feeling when you first understand asynchronous programming or some concept of parallelism is a natural high that I enthusiastically recommend. It's also a good way to get yourself a fat paycheck later, when you've been playing with it for a while, and can talk coherently in a job interview about how it works. Or at an IT/R&D meeting, where you demonstrate your new value to your boss.
A company with money to lose had better be careful though. Hire people who know about technology, and tell them to hire people who understand parallelism. It ain't easy.
But it is rewarding.
Noob. I'll be the one next to you, selling all the TV's and converters I just bought, at 100% markup.
I'll make my getaway by shouting, "Hey, the pitchfork guy bought all my overstock!" and making a run for it.
Hands up, who thinks McCain is the most truthful candidate?
Why McCain is the only candidate so dedicated to the truth that he is willing to debate himself to examine the truth more in depth!
this is just an algorithm which counts how closely the speaker's diction and delivery match those used by McCain and assigns a value for the McCaininess of the speech
Yep, exactly right. FTFA:
Well, ffs, of course Obama is going to score high on the spin-o-meter then. How about we use the algorithm to determine the selfishness of the speaker instead? "I" scores higher than "we".
Google will not like it.
really?
Google's browser is the first to include one.
If the government is going to frame you... why go through the hastle of actually using real footage.
Because they don't know if they want to frame you yet. We're all anonymous and faceless.. until some tracking trend decides that we'd be a nice scapegoat. You have to show up on somebody's radar for that to happen. Your unusual, slashdot-reading, open-source programming, bookstore-visiting habits might be enough. Don't give them any hooks to go after you. If they can't track it, they won't be interested what it says about you--or what they can make it appear to say about you.