Re: @realDonaldTrump VP selection, a decision will be made in the near future and the announcement will be tomorrow at 11am in New York.
So, until now at least, it seems to be only a rumour and I wouldn't put past one planted by his campaign to generate buzz to his announcement tomorrow.
I agree that the key word here is "accredited institutions.", but for another reason.
Consider for instance the current debacle of accreditation bodies as reported by the LA Times.
The federal government is preparing to bring down the hammer on one of these toothless watchdogs. Its target is the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools, which is renowned for maintaining its accreditation of Corinthian Colleges right up to the day that chain of for-profit schools ceased operating in April 2015. Corinthian filed for bankruptcy days later. ACICS accredits some 900 campuses across the nation, giving those schools the formal imprimatur that allows them to collect an estimated $5 billion a year in federal financial aid on behalf of their students.
But its role may be ending. The Department of Education staff on Wednesday recommended the revocation of ACICS's recognition as an accreditation body. That means that schools bearing its seal of approval will have to find a new accreditation body within 18 months or lose their right to collect federal financial aid payments.
The stakes right now are "only" financial, concerning to student loans. When the scope becomes international and the stakes include a green card it will be much hard to prevent this kind of scheme.
Done right anything is possible but human nature in this particular case will be drawn by greed and greed will rapidly pervert the whole process.
Potentially more abuse prone than the H1B visa. Diploma mills are already a reality in many parts of the world, adding a green card as an incentive and the potential for abuse is immense.
That would not only be underhanded (as it amounts to lying to the electorate conflating two issues that are not related) giving more credence to the accusations of "crooked" and "liar" that Trump tries to pin on her but also it could potentially backfire big given the history of the Clintons with eminent domain:
LITTLE ROCK, Ark. - The Arkansas Supreme Court upheld the city's method of seizing land for the Clinton Presidential Library on Thursday, eliminating the last legal roadblock in the way of construction.
The court, in a 6-0 decision with one abstention, said a Little Rock landowner failed to prove that the $200-million library and archive complex wouldn't be a park as the state defines it.
The head of the William J. Clinton Presidential Foundation said the dispute over Eugene Pfeifer III's land had been the only thing delaying construction of the 28-acre site on the south bank of the Arkansas River.
"I'm shocked," Pfeifer said. "This is truly disappointing news."
A decision against the city could have forced the foundation to find another site for his planned academic center and museum.
The library ended up being built on land expropriated based on eminent domain so the tactic you proposed is, like I said, underhanded, detrimental to Clinton campaign (as it opens a can of worms that would be better sealed shut) and, in general, undemocratic.
While that's true the nature of the electoral process in the U.S. makes an truly independent candidature all but impossible, with many states having either legislation or codified processes that, along with the media, give an enormous advantage to the major parties.
It is no wonder that "outsiders" like Trump or Bernie prefer to crash the established parties over to run as independent or to found their own parties. It is a two party country and there is no way to even compete in equal footing with the candidates of the big parties.
On August 5, following the PATCO workers' refusal to return to work, Reagan fired the 11,345 striking air traffic controllers who had ignored the order, and banned them from federal service for life.
In the wake of the strike and mass firings, the FAA was faced with the task of hiring and training enough controllers to replace those that had been fired, a hard problem to fix as, at the time, it took three years in normal conditions to train a new controller.
They were replaced initially with nonparticipating controllers, supervisors, staff personnel, some non rated personnel, and in some cases by controllers transferred temporarily from other facilities. Some military controllers were also used until replacements could be trained.
The FAA had initially claimed that staffing levels would be restored within two years; however, it would take closer to ten years before the overall staffing levels returned to normal.
The only reason that was possible was because
1) the public sentiment was favourable to empty the power of what was perceived to be very corrupt institutions (the unions)
2) the government could get away with things the private sector would never ever be allowed, like using non rated personnel or military air controllers or taking 10 years instead of 3 to normalise the situation and
3) because you, the american people, was there to pick up the tab so no expenses would be spared to break up not only that union but the whole concept of collective bargaining, striking and fighting in equal footing for workers right.
For reference see what happened in the U.K, about the same time.
The situation is not very similar to the workers mentioned in TFA although the only thing they would get by unionise would be to get the company to declare bankruptcy and to reemerge with another name in the same geographical area, same business plan and most likely same portfolio of customers (but without the workers).
Headline should be "FBI Wants To Access Terror Suspect's Skype Records, legally and above the board this time" , because, as reported previously (US Mining Data Directly From 9 Silicon Valley Companies) with PRISM the DHS can pretty much do it already, only not blessed by public courts or clear legislation.
With all the improvements that are being made to this wonderful site one of the biggest flaws brought in big part by the previous owners (DICE) was the overly politicised topics that not even tangentially touches the historical major focus of this site: technology and its applications.
It is my belief that, for the original audience of this site, some here since before the 9/11, some even from when http colon slash slash was actually pronounced when reading URLs out loud, the main drive to come and read the front page is to catch up with the latest of the technology and its applications.
This kind of politicised subject (the same going for the U.S. elections, ISIS, the refugee crisis and general gossip) already abounds in the mainstream media and for more than a decade this used to be the place to run away from all that, to read about the subjects that are our jobs and our passions and to welcome our robotic overlords.
Unicode, https, burying videos, all that would be secondary if this kind of article continues to be propped up in here.
It is time for some transparency here: did this article even passed through the firehose? People actually voted for it? Maybe times changed and people here are voting for this kind of article to the front page but, otherwise, it would be a great update, maybe the greatest, to go back to the roots of "News for Nerds, stuff that matter".
Either that or at least inform the audience that Slashdot is OK with this kind of articles, that the desired audience is a new audience with a different profile and give us the alternative to go look for an alternative.
Also, taking advantage of the moment, don't forget to review the both the quality of the ads on this site and also to fix the "Thank you, here, have no ads" flag that seems to unset itself all too often and, both on Desktop but also on mobile, happens to miss some ads (screenshot for reference).
About ads, it seems that now most ads on sourceforge are tech related: JumpCloud, Intel, AdWords, Gmail, etc. Slashdot, on the other hand, suffers with all kinds of unrelated ads motivating the users to block them either with the above mentioned flag or outright with adblock. On mobile it used even worse, to the point of being outrageous: autoplaying popover videos whose close button was inaccessible on mobile.
Up until someone finds a way to introduce either a patent encumbered functionality (like H264) or one inherently proprietary (like EME for DRM) to poison the well and keep real independent implementations out of scope for everybody else except the incumbents.
This development can very much be a big reason of concern. Setting aside the fact that this will bring closed source software to an arena where it is mostly non-existent (the scriptable part of the web) this will also open a new vector for malicious scripts to hide.
If it is already a vector today imagine when it is a binary that you cannot even cursorily inspect before running.
The very asking of the headline question reeks of "freedom of speech as long as it's the right one".
People should be able to discern speech the agree with vs. speech they don't on their own after considering every opinion made.
Speech "carriers" have all the right to censor the speech in their media as they see fit (not being the government and all) but the very moment the prevent someone to speak their mind on their platform (no matter how radical they may sound) they forfeit their right to call themselves "a bastion of free speech" and become the same as every other news media: a place to broadcast the views of their owners and target audience, no more, no less.
In conclusion, every company have the right to pick and choose what they want to enable to be said on their property but as soon as they choose to censor they become yet another biased source just like every other else.
The goal is to make the data less useful and harder to tie to an individual or separate from fake data, and to increase the cost of collecting and storing such data.
Here is a new form, the same as the fighting spam one with minor changes. Feel free to use it as most of the measures proposed to fight surveillance fail for the same reasons.
approach to fighting surveillance. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws not included here)
(X) Governments can easily use it to identify dissidents ( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected ( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money ( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks ( ) It will stop surveillance for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it (X) Users will not put up with it (X) Microsoft will not put up with it ( ) The police will not put up with it (X) Requires too much cooperation from everyone (X) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once ( ) Many users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers ( ) Governments don't care about invalid addresses in their lists ( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it ( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for communication ( ) Open relays in foreign countries (X) Ease of searching all text based communication (X) Asshats ( ) Jurisdictional problems ( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes ( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money ( ) Huge existing software investment in current solutions ( ) Susceptibility of other forms of encryption ( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches ( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes (X) Eternal arms race involved in all surveillance approaches (X) Extreme profitability of surveillance ( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft (X) Technically illiterate politicians (X) Extreme stupidity on the part of people ( ) Dishonesty on the part of everyone themselves ( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering ( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical ( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable ( ) Encryption should not be the subject of legislation ( ) Blacklists suck ( ) Whitelists suck ( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored ( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud ( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks ( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually ( ) Speech should be free ( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers? ( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses (X) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem ( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome ( ) I don't want the government decrypting my stuff ( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work. ( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it. ( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
Given the fallback on the last weeks hoax declaration of war on ISIS by Mexican cartel leader 'El Chapo' the media is showing that the powers of "the fourth state" given to them is not being used to inform the public but to entertain them, distracting from more important issues (and of course, to sell advertisement).
Not FUD at all. There is an expectation when you turn of a camera / motion detector that it will stop performing its main function (filming, detecting motion) and just do nothing instead.
imagine a faucet that, when turned off, instead of stopping the flow of water it simply closed the loop in the sink, storing the water somewhere locally for further reuse.
People would not appreciate the fact that it is not letting the water go away because they want the faucet to stop running water when off.
This is a feel good measure, the very definition of "slacktivism".
Reporting twitter accounts from people most likely fanboying from their comfortable homes in the west is nothing, how long until they create another account? 1 hour, 2 hours?
When one look back and look at the most remarkable hacks against high profile targets (like the one Saudi Aramco suffered in 2012.) it puts in context that this kind of initiative is well intentioned but naive and a waste of time for the volunteers.
This is just another thinly veiled attack on Christianity and other religions.
No, it is not. It is actually a very clever way to highlight the importance of the separation between church and state.
The very first part of the First Amendment is that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;" and, making explicit exceptions for religious attire in legislation breaks not only the spirit but also the letter of that text.
Making an exception in the law for religious reasons (like in this case, no head gear except for religious reasons) undermine that very principle and opens the door for other kinds of abuse and, in the future, even in the establishment of a state endorsed religion, one that may not even be the one you profess if you think about it.
In Portugal the title "engineer" is subject to acreditation by the Order (much like medical doctors or lawyers) and not all students that complete an engineering school can use engineer as the professional title.
It's a distinction without a difference anyway, people mostly want to use "engineer" and "doctor" as a sign of status (replacing the old system of royal and noble ranks) while professionally it carries no difference at all.
YouTube made its top video creators an offer they literally couldn't refuse, or they'd have their content disappear. Today YouTube confirmed that any "partner" creator who earns a cut of ad revenue but doesn't agree to sign its revenue share deal for its new YouTube Red $9.99 ad-free subscription will have their videos hidden from public view on both the ad-supported and ad-free tiers. That includes videos by popular comedians, musicians, game commentators, and DIY instructors.
It's a tough pill to swallow that makes YouTube look like a bully. Though turning existing fans into paid subscribers instead of free viewers could earn creators more than the ad revenue, forcing them into the deal seems heavy-handed.
Google says the goal is to offer consistency, so people thinking about subscribing to Red don't have to worry about their favorite content not being available in the ad-free service. But there's no explanation why it couldn't just flag videos of those who don't sign the deal as "Not On Red", and instead had to go with a sign-or-disappear strategy.
According to Chief Business Officer Robert Kyncl at today's YouTube Red launch event, 99% of content consumed on YouTube will be still available, noting that the vast majority of creators signed the deal. But they didn't have much choice, otherwise they'd lose out on both the previous ad revenue, the new subscription revenue, and the connection with fans.
This is not one run-of-the-mill "personal use copyright infringement" suit. Some important things make this case special:
1. The plaintiff is an intelectual property lawyer
2. The use of the video was for profit
3. As the article says many other news outlets sought permission or licensed the clip but these two, despite knowing the clip was copyrighted, choose to use them anyway.
If Thomas-Rasset was ordered to pay $1,920,000 for making 22 mp3 available for download (not for profit) how much should these media be liable in this lawsuit? How many other videos they use without proper licensing and/or attribution?
This could be the first of many similar cases considering the media worldwide assume that if a video is available on Youtube they are free to reproduce them in their TV news and shows.
Slashdot Mirror
So, until now at least, it seems to be only a rumour and I wouldn't put past one planted by his campaign to generate buzz to his announcement tomorrow.
The stakes right now are "only" financial, concerning to student loans. When the scope becomes international and the stakes include a green card it will be much hard to prevent this kind of scheme.
Done right anything is possible but human nature in this particular case will be drawn by greed and greed will rapidly pervert the whole process.
Potentially more abuse prone than the H1B visa. Diploma mills are already a reality in many parts of the world, adding a green card as an incentive and the potential for abuse is immense.
The library ended up being built on land expropriated based on eminent domain so the tactic you proposed is, like I said, underhanded, detrimental to Clinton campaign (as it opens a can of worms that would be better sealed shut) and, in general, undemocratic.
While that's true the nature of the electoral process in the U.S. makes an truly independent candidature all but impossible, with many states having either legislation or codified processes that, along with the media, give an enormous advantage to the major parties.
It is no wonder that "outsiders" like Trump or Bernie prefer to crash the established parties over to run as independent or to found their own parties. It is a two party country and there is no way to even compete in equal footing with the candidates of the big parties.
The only reason that was possible was because
1) the public sentiment was favourable to empty the power of what was perceived to be very corrupt institutions (the unions)
2) the government could get away with things the private sector would never ever be allowed, like using non rated personnel or military air controllers or taking 10 years instead of 3 to normalise the situation and
3) because you, the american people, was there to pick up the tab so no expenses would be spared to break up not only that union but the whole concept of collective bargaining, striking and fighting in equal footing for workers right.
For reference see what happened in the U.K, about the same time.
The situation is not very similar to the workers mentioned in TFA although the only thing they would get by unionise would be to get the company to declare bankruptcy and to reemerge with another name in the same geographical area, same business plan and most likely same portfolio of customers (but without the workers).
Headline should be "FBI Wants To Access Terror Suspect's Skype Records, legally and above the board this time" , because, as reported previously (US Mining Data Directly From 9 Silicon Valley Companies) with PRISM the DHS can pretty much do it already, only not blessed by public courts or clear legislation.
Dear whiplash
With all the improvements that are being made to this wonderful site one of the biggest flaws brought in big part by the previous owners (DICE) was the overly politicised topics that not even tangentially touches the historical major focus of this site: technology and its applications.
It is my belief that, for the original audience of this site, some here since before the 9/11, some even from when http colon slash slash was actually pronounced when reading URLs out loud, the main drive to come and read the front page is to catch up with the latest of the technology and its applications.
This kind of politicised subject (the same going for the U.S. elections, ISIS, the refugee crisis and general gossip) already abounds in the mainstream media and for more than a decade this used to be the place to run away from all that, to read about the subjects that are our jobs and our passions and to welcome our robotic overlords.
Unicode, https, burying videos, all that would be secondary if this kind of article continues to be propped up in here.
It is time for some transparency here: did this article even passed through the firehose? People actually voted for it? Maybe times changed and people here are voting for this kind of article to the front page but, otherwise, it would be a great update, maybe the greatest, to go back to the roots of "News for Nerds, stuff that matter".
Either that or at least inform the audience that Slashdot is OK with this kind of articles, that the desired audience is a new audience with a different profile and give us the alternative to go look for an alternative.
Also, taking advantage of the moment, don't forget to review the both the quality of the ads on this site and also to fix the "Thank you, here, have no ads" flag that seems to unset itself all too often and, both on Desktop but also on mobile, happens to miss some ads (screenshot for reference).
About ads, it seems that now most ads on sourceforge are tech related: JumpCloud, Intel, AdWords, Gmail, etc. Slashdot, on the other hand, suffers with all kinds of unrelated ads motivating the users to block them either with the above mentioned flag or outright with adblock. On mobile it used even worse, to the point of being outrageous: autoplaying popover videos whose close button was inaccessible on mobile.
Congratulations to the new team, thats a big step towards keeping their loyal audience regaining goodwill among the tech crowd.
The quality of the improvements and the effort of the new team is visible, it even gets an A on ssl quality test.
Good job and don't rest on the laurels, get working on the Unicode support because that's one of the missing features.
Up until someone finds a way to introduce either a patent encumbered functionality (like H264) or one inherently proprietary (like EME for DRM) to poison the well and keep real independent implementations out of scope for everybody else except the incumbents.
This development can very much be a big reason of concern. Setting aside the fact that this will bring closed source software to an arena where it is mostly non-existent (the scriptable part of the web) this will also open a new vector for malicious scripts to hide.
If it is already a vector today imagine when it is a binary that you cannot even cursorily inspect before running.
To repeat a comment of mine in that submission:
Probably related to the recent measures proposed by the Polish government to criminalize the use of the phrase âoePolish death campsâ.
The very asking of the headline question reeks of "freedom of speech as long as it's the right one".
People should be able to discern speech the agree with vs. speech they don't on their own after considering every opinion made.
Speech "carriers" have all the right to censor the speech in their media as they see fit (not being the government and all) but the very moment the prevent someone to speak their mind on their platform (no matter how radical they may sound) they forfeit their right to call themselves "a bastion of free speech" and become the same as every other news media: a place to broadcast the views of their owners and target audience, no more, no less.
In conclusion, every company have the right to pick and choose what they want to enable to be said on their property but as soon as they choose to censor they become yet another biased source just like every other else.
Here is a new form, the same as the fighting spam one with minor changes. Feel free to use it as most of the measures proposed to fight surveillance fail for the same reasons.
Anonymous declares war on city of Orlando (28/Jun/2011)
Anonymous vs. Zetas: Hackers Taking On The Drug Cartel (02/Nov/2011)
Anonymous wages war on Westboro Baptist Church (17/Dez/2012)
Anonymous Declares War on Singapore (06/Nov/2013)
Given the fallback on the last weeks hoax declaration of war on ISIS by Mexican cartel leader 'El Chapo' the media is showing that the powers of "the fourth state" given to them is not being used to inform the public but to entertain them, distracting from more important issues (and of course, to sell advertisement).
Nice try, DICE inc, trying to persuade us with your subliminal, liminal and even superliminal messages!
Not FUD at all. There is an expectation when you turn of a camera / motion detector that it will stop performing its main function (filming, detecting motion) and just do nothing instead.
imagine a faucet that, when turned off, instead of stopping the flow of water it simply closed the loop in the sink, storing the water somewhere locally for further reuse.
People would not appreciate the fact that it is not letting the water go away because they want the faucet to stop running water when off.
This is a feel good measure, the very definition of "slacktivism".
Reporting twitter accounts from people most likely fanboying from their comfortable homes in the west is nothing, how long until they create another account? 1 hour, 2 hours?
When one look back and look at the most remarkable hacks against high profile targets (like the one Saudi Aramco suffered in 2012.) it puts in context that this kind of initiative is well intentioned but naive and a waste of time for the volunteers.
No, it is not. It is actually a very clever way to highlight the importance of the separation between church and state.
The very first part of the First Amendment is that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;" and, making explicit exceptions for religious attire in legislation breaks not only the spirit but also the letter of that text.
Making an exception in the law for religious reasons (like in this case, no head gear except for religious reasons) undermine that very principle and opens the door for other kinds of abuse and, in the future, even in the establishment of a state endorsed religion, one that may not even be the one you profess if you think about it.
In Portugal the title "engineer" is subject to acreditation by the Order (much like medical doctors or lawyers) and not all students that complete an engineering school can use engineer as the professional title.
It's a distinction without a difference anyway, people mostly want to use "engineer" and "doctor" as a sign of status (replacing the old system of royal and noble ranks) while professionally it carries no difference at all.
Actually that would have been a marvelous title for this submission: "Multiple holes found in Pocket".
This is not one run-of-the-mill "personal use copyright infringement" suit. Some important things make this case special:
1. The plaintiff is an intelectual property lawyer
2. The use of the video was for profit
3. As the article says many other news outlets sought permission or licensed the clip but these two, despite knowing the clip was copyrighted, choose to use them anyway.
If Thomas-Rasset was ordered to pay $1,920,000 for making 22 mp3 available for download (not for profit) how much should these media be liable in this lawsuit? How many other videos they use without proper licensing and/or attribution?
This could be the first of many similar cases considering the media worldwide assume that if a video is available on Youtube they are free to reproduce them in their TV news and shows.