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Comment Stockman is an asshat (Score 4, Interesting) 347

Stockman is one of the stranger Tea Party candidates who recently was elected to the House.

He walked out of the State of the Union Address saying "I could not bear to watch as he continued to cross the clearly-defined boundaries of the Constitutional separation of powers". Really adult.

He's running for Senate in Texas against Senator Corwyn, the Senate Minority Whip, and he just dropped off the map. He missed 17 House votes in a row. It also seems that even though he is a official candidate, he is doing zero campaigning. http://www.cbsnews.com/news/texas-senate-candidate-steve-stockman-goes-awol/

He has also been cited by the Office of Congressional Ethics (I know, I laughed too). He accepted campaign contributions from his own staff members, which is a big no no. He is also accused of using his full time House staff members to work on his Congressional campaign. They all pull this trick, but there is a legal way and a stupid way to do this. He chose stupid. http://oce.house.gov/2014/06/june-11-2014---oce-referral-regarding-rep-steve-stockman.html

So it's not surprising that he would be the one to further complicate the snake pit of uncontrolled domestic surveillance by injecting it into a congressional investigation. Considering his quote about Obama breaking the constitution, his appeal to use unconstitutionally collected data to get at the IRS is mind boggling. His brain is clearly an irony free zone.

Comment Dell can have no valid opinion on this. (Score 4, Insightful) 173

Dell is a reseller. They do not invest in any of the fundamental technologies like CPUs or Operating Systems. They have no design expertise in virtual machines like the JVM. They don't do chip design or fab. They have never been in any of these businesses.

HP has a long history of OS and CPU design, including their own computers with a proprietary architecture. Not all of their designs were successful, since they were co-designers of the Itanium with Intel. So HP has the exactly opposite corporate background the Dell.

Why would anyone pay attention to what a Dell talking head has to say?

Comment What about the FTC? (Score 1) 93

Since the cable scum have monopolies in their service areas, and they are clearly interstate businesses, there should be some other entity at the Federal level that can address this issue. I'm guess the FTC, but it not them, there should be someone else.

Oops, I forgot that we don't have any actual capitalism in the USA any more, because the regulators are all controlled by industry groups. Forget it. Your cable/phone/ISP bill is going to continue to go up far faster then inflation, and your service will suck even more. And there is nothing you can do about it.

Nothing to see here, move along. No capitalism, no competition, no democracy.

Comment This worked for the NSA (Score 4, Insightful) 372

Snowden said he sent emails to the appropriate internal authorities before he went rogue, and the NSA said they couldn't find them. Everyone in the political establishment believed the NSA version. Now the IRS says that they can't find emails because of a technical problem, and no one believes them.

The NSA are professional liars. They've been caught lying about a huge number of things: spying on friendly foreign leaders, mass phone surveillance on everyone in the USA, modifying routers before they are shipped overseas, etc.

Double standard much? Who is more likely to be lying: the NSA or the IRS? Everyone in Washington are going after the IRS. Committees are meeting, IRA officials are testifying under oath, criminal investigations have been started. Higher ups at the IRA are going to be forced out, and there will be criminal charges. The same thing is also going to occur with the Veteran's Administration scandal.

Meanwhile over at the NSA, the sound of crickets. They claim that their own secret investigations have found they did everything right. Somehow this seems good enough. No one has been called to task. Even the people responsible for letting Snowden get access to all that information seem to be off the hook.

As bad as the IRS and VA situations are, they pale in comparison to the NSA situation and yet nothing has happened as a result. It's business as usual. The NSA is completely unaccountable to anybody for anything, and when they do screw up nothing happens to any insiders. This is guaranteed to result in a culture of incompetence. We are in big trouble.

Comment My computer talks to me (Score 1) 121

When I'm near the computer I hear these voices that no one else can hear.

It tells me things that no one else knows. Things that I'm not supposed to hear.

Sometime it tells me to do things. It told me not to tell you what they are.

Computers only talk to very special people. You wouldn't understand.

It told me to shut up now. Bye.

Comment Sounds like Multics (Score 1) 257

A single addressing space that eliminates the distinction between memory and bulk storage (disk). Where have we seen this before?

Multics implemented a single level store for data access, discarding the clear distinction between files (called segments in Multics) and process memory. The memory of a process consisted solely of segments which were mapped into its address space. To read or write to them, the process simply used normal CPU instructions, and the operating system took care of making sure that all the modifications were saved to disk. In POSIX terminology, it was as if every file was mmap()ed; however, in Multics there was no concept of process memory, separate from the memory used to hold mapped-in files, as Unix has. All memory in the system was part of some segment, which appeared in the file system; this included the temporary scratch memory of the process, its kernel stack, etc.

Comment Apple's profit is outside of space/time (Score 5, Interesting) 155

http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/eu-set-to-probe-irelands-tax-arrangements-with-apple

Ireland's taxation laws allow multinationals to set up subsidiaries that effectively turn them into stateless entities whose revenues are subject to no jurisdiction. It's the definition of entirely legal tax avoidance, and Apple has been among the most successful companies in routing much of its international revenues and earnings through its Irish subsidiaries.

Apple has conspired with the Irish government to move it's profit outside the space/time continuum. How else can you explain "revenues are subject to no jurisdiction?" That means the money has no legal presence anywhere on the planet. Or off the planet, as far as we know.

There are lots of locations where the rule of law doesn't apply. There are places where many different legal systems claim to be in charge. There are places like Antarctica where the international community has set up treaties so that one one country has control. Apple has been able to secrete it's money so it is not in any of these places.

They have outflanked the rule of law. They are in a literal sense "lawless": without law. Yet they make extensive use of the legal system and expect to have their business protected by civil and criminal authorities. It's corporate hypocrisy at it's most blatant.

Why are they getting away with this? I have a counter suggestion: round up all current and former living board members, everyone who was a Chief Executive Anything, put them in indefinite detention and strip them of every asset they have. Why do the deserve legal protection when they have made it their business to be above the law?

Comment Re:War of government against people? (Score -1, Troll) 875

Stop masturbating in public. Your "argument" that more guns results in lower crime is a right wing fantasy.

How can I say this? None of your assertions have any factual support.

When you say "the most dangerous cities to live in today, are precisely those cities with the strictest gun control" you are making things up.

How can I make this assertion? N.R.A. Stymies Firearms Research, Scientists Say

The amount of money available today for studying the impact of firearms is a fraction of what it was in the mid-1990s, and the number of scientists toiling in the field has dwindled to just a handful as a result, researchers say.

The dearth of money can be traced in large measure to a clash between public health scientists and the N.R.A. in the mid-1990s. At the time, Dr. Rosenberg and others at the C.D.C. were becoming increasingly assertive about the importance of studying gun-related injuries and deaths as a public health phenomenon, financing studies that found, for example, having a gun in the house, rather than conferring protection, significantly increased the risk of homicide by a family member or intimate acquaintance.

Alarmed, the N.R.A. and its allies on Capitol Hill fought back. The injury center was guilty of “putting out papers that were really political opinion masquerading as medical science,” said Mr. Cox, who also worked on this issue for the N.R.A. more than a decade ago.

Initially, pro-gun lawmakers sought to eliminate the injury center completely, arguing that its work was “redundant” and reflected a political agenda. When that failed, they turned to the appropriations process. In 1996, Representative Jay Dickey, Republican of Arkansas, succeeded in pushing through an amendment that stripped $2.6 million from the disease control centers’ budget, the very amount it had spent on firearms-related research the year before.

“It’s really simple with me,” Mr. Dickey, 71 and now retired, said in a telephone interview. “We have the right to bear arms because of the threat of government taking over the freedoms that we have.”

The Senate later restored the money but designated it for research on traumatic brain injury. Language was also inserted into the centers’ appropriations bill that remains in place today: “None of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may be used to advocate or promote gun control.”

The prohibition is striking, firearms researchers say, because there are already regulations that bar the use of C.D.C. money for lobbying for or against legislation. No other field of inquiry is singled out in this way.

In the end, researchers said, even though it is murky what exactly is allowed under this provision and what is not, the upshot is clear inside the centers: the agency should tread in this area only at its own peril.

“They had a near-death experience,” said Dr. Arthur Kellermann, whose study on the risks versus the benefits of having guns in the home became a focal point of attack by the N.R.A.

In the years since, the C.D.C. has been exceedingly wary of financing research focused on firearms. In its annual requests for proposals, for example, firearms research has been notably absent. Gail Hayes, spokeswoman for the centers, confirmed that since 1996, while the agency has issued requests for proposals that include the study of violence, which may include gun violence, it had not sent out any specifically on firearms.

So over here in the real world there are no facts about gun violence because the N.R.A. and their toadies in the Republican establishment hate facts. It's just like denying climate science on global warming: facts are the enemy.

Instead of engaging in rational debate and making knowledge based policy decisions, the right wing operates by spewing out wildly hostile propaganda and subverting decision making by coercion and bribery (AKA unlimited untraceable campaign contributions).

The result of all this is that fools like you can mask your twisted power fantasies about guns as an acceptable opinion in the public discourse because you live in a fact free bubble.

Comment In a hut on an island in Norway (Score 1) 310

I wasn't writing code from scratch, I was modifying it to work in the field.

The user display end of the system was in the hut. The sensor end was in an WWII gun pillbox that was built by the Nazis as part of the Atlantic Wall. It was an empty concrete shell with all the emplacement hardware removed. Being there was unsettling.

Comment Re:there is some evil in this (Score 1) 147

So I guess I can assume that you live in a shack like Ted Kaczynski because you do not want to be polluted by the "evil" of contemporary life? You have somehow acquired a computer free of the low paid sweat shop labor in China/Korea/Viet Nam/etc, it's powered by a home built water powered generator running off a natural spring on your property, you have found the one ISP that does no allow any spam on their network, and you use a Linux/BSD distros that have completely open source software with no vendor supplied binaries.

Your are clearly a superior being compared to the rest of the "evil" people on Slashdot. We are clearly all polluted because we have at some point in our lives seen a frame generated by RenderMan, even if it was before Disney bought them. You only post here to set an example and shame you inferiors in the hope that we will see the error of our ways.

I also assume that you are a complete Vegan, don't wear or use any animal derived product, don't ride in cars (gas, diesel, natural gas, hydrogen, electric) and grow or gather all the food you eat without any non-natural substances.

I wonder if you have made it all the way to breatharianism and now live off pure light.

Comment License fees are a hidden tax (Score 4, Interesting) 131

I worked for a company that was trying to develop technology for MPEG. It was a pure intellectual property play.

MPEG is (theoretically) a non-profit, open to all international standards body. The separate entity MPEG-LA is the MPEG License Authority. It's the business end. The technical committees are front organizations for the license authority, which generates a lot of cash.

The entire setup is a sham. The big players send so many representatives to the technical committees that they dominate by sheer numbers. Sometimes meetings extend for hours late into the night. The faction that wants to get their proposal excepted keeps their people in the meeting, and then when they count a majority they hold a vote and get what they want.

It's not about technology or quality or making things faster/better/cheaper. It's about decades long revenue streams protected by international standards and laws like the DCMA. Even though it looks like technology is driving to lower costs, the reality is that patent royalties are effective a huge tax on users.

The return is completely disproportionate to the initial investment. How much do you think it cost to come up with the standard for the HDMI cable? How much do you think is being made worldwide if even $1.00 US is going for license fees?

No capitalism here. Nothing to see. Move along.

Comment How about a meaningful comparison? (Score 2) 142

Comparing a web site to an OS is crazy. Why is anyone taking this seriously?

At a minimum, you would need to compare HealthCare.gov to another web site that had similar requirements. It would have to be nationwide and be HIPPA compliant. For example, AMAZON or EBAY would not count, because they don't have any of the legal requirements that a heath provider has.

It is obvious that this bogus number is just another politically motivated smear against the ACA (Obamacare). Everyone here is quibbling about LOC, while the real issue is that people are engaged in propaganda and wild lies because they oppose a government program.

Something must be wrong with me. I keep making the mistake that those who post on Slashdot are somehow more intelligent then the average population. When you fixate on minute technical details rather then the larger issues you are not smart, you are dumb.

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