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Comment Re:missing option (Score 1) 340

It's not irony. The Declaration of Independence was an illegal act. High Treason against the Crown. Every signatory was eligible to be executed, if the war had turned against the colonists.

Comment Re:Missing Option: I HATE fireworks. (Score 1) 340

You just take them outside immediately they begin to disturb others.

Nice trick at 40,000 feet.

They do not like this and they learn.

You've obviously made an unannounced subject transition from "baby" to "school-age child". The earliest the "take them outside because they don't like this" trick can possibly work is about 3 years old. Much younger than that, and the kid is crying for purely internal reasons, and the only thing "taking them outside" does is remove the child from the presence of other people whom their crying is disturbing. An acceptable approach, if feasible, but not a learning one. Besides, at some point choosing between "being someplace for important reasons" and "not annoying people around you" has to come down to "being someplace for important reasons", and "other people" will just have to suck it up.

Comment Re:White collar prison (Score 5, Insightful) 682

If the lowly peon isn't held accountable for his direct actions, then the next time management asks him to do something wrong or illegal, there's one less reason for him to refuse. If he refuses, he can be assured of repercussions from management, but experience has shown him that threat of legal consequences is low if he complies; the path of least resistance is clear.

What you're advocating is that the IT puke be arrested, tried, convicted, sentenced, and punished for... working an anonymous hardware ticket in the IT task management tool. Probably one of dozens added to the system in any day.

I'm sure you're envisioning IT minion being called into Big Bad Evil Bureaucrat's office and being told "This hard drive contains crucial evidence which will destroy every Great and Evil thing I have worked for so long to accomplish. You must destroy it... use the Impractically Slow Hard Drive Destruction Machine in our Sea of Japan secret volcano base."

In practice, I'm sure it was the IP weenie going "Huh. A hardware decommisioning ticket from Remedy. A dozen hard drives."

Yeah. There's individual moral responsibility. But while we're at it, let's imprison undertakers for destroying murder evidence in cases where the murder isn't uncovered until after the burial.

Comment Re:Chicago Blackhawks too? (Score 1) 646

Speaking of "Sioux", why isn't that being pilloried as derogatory? The most common etymology is that the name comes from Ojibwa for "small snake", but more recent research traces it back to a Ojibwa word roughly equivalent to "barbarian".

Neither of which are very flattering.

Note, indeed, that most people identified as "Sioux" often self-identify by one of the related nations (such as Lakota, Santee, or Yankton).

Comment Re:Absofuckinglutely (Score 1) 398

Nice troll. Ukraine isn't a US ally

That's funny; that's exactly what Obama said to Ukraine. Pointed out very carefully that if you read all the fine print in the Budapest Memorandum, the words "ally" and "military support" never occur. Those were just in the marketing material. Silly Ukraine for signing stuff without reading it first.

Iraq refused to sign an agreement with the US

Well, to tell the truth, there really isn't one Iraq, even in the government, and in they end they weren't convinced they really wanted or needed us. That's turning out pretty well in retrospect.

Comment Re:what's the point anymore (Score 5, Interesting) 113

I don't know much (ok, anything at all) about the Libre lines but the Dorado machines have some very unusual characteristics such as 9-bit bytes which would render anything other than hardware compatibility a total disaster necessitating a forced conversion to another platform immediately.

Right. Goes back to the multiple-of-9-bit native word length of the the entire 11xx/22xx heritage, back to the Univac 418. Since bytes aren't the native access mode in that architecture anyway, they're an afterthought and rather harder to code for in assembler.

That's not the only oddity of that architecture, too. 1s complement math? Negative zero?

Yeah. I'm an old grey geek that started out on an 1180 back in the day. Mostly assembler real-time stuff.

I'm a bit misty-eyed at the thought of that heritage code running, essentially, by run-time emulation rather than natively.

Sic transit gloria mundi.

Communications

IRS Lost Emails of 6 More Employees Under Investigation 465

phrackthat writes with an update to Friday's news that the IRS cannot locate two years worth of email from Lois Lerner, a central figure in the controversy surrounding the IRS's apparent targeting of Tea Party groups for extra scrutiny. Now, the IRS says there are another six workers for whom the agency cannot locate emails. As with Lerner, they attribute the unrecoverable emails to computer crashes. Among them was Nikole Flax, who was chief of staff to Lerner’s boss, then-deputy commissioner Steven Miller. Miller later became acting IRS commissioner, but was forced to resign last year after the agency acknowledged that agents had improperly scrutinized tea party and other conservative groups when they applied for tax-exempt status. Documents have shown some liberal groups were also flagged. ... Lerner’s computer crashed in the summer of 2011, depriving investigators of many of her prior emails. Flax’s computer crashed in December 2011, Camp and Boustany said. The IRS said Friday that technicians went to great lengths trying to recover data from Lerner’s computer in 2011. In emails provided by the IRS, technicians said they sent the computer to a forensic lab run by the agency’s criminal investigations unit. But to no avail.
Programming

Ask Slashdot: Best Rapid Development Language To Learn Today? 466

An anonymous reader writes "Many years ago, I was a coder—but I went through my computer science major when they were being taught in Lisp and C. These days I work in other areas, but often need to code up quick data processing solutions or interstitial applications. Doing this in C now feels archaic and overly difficult and text-based. Most of the time I now end up doing things in either Unix shell scripting (bash and grep/sed/awk/bc/etc.) or PHP. But these are showing significant age as well. I'm no longer the young hotshot that I once was—I don't think that I could pick up an entire language in a couple of hours with just a cursory reference work—yet I see lots of languages out there now that are much more popular and claim to offer various and sundry benefits I'm not looking to start a new career as a programmer—I already have a career—but I'd like to update my applied coding skills to take advantage of the best that software development now has to offer. (More, below.)

Comment Re: In the US they'd have been charged (Score 2) 378

You're advocating against millennia of moral teaching and (perhaps genetic) altruism: the willingness to personally endanger one's self in order to help someone else.

I'd argue these youngsters, and other white hats, are modern Good Samaritans. Everyone familiar with the Parable of the Good Samaritan picks up on how the Samaritan was socially unlikely to help the Jew, and under no real obligation to do so, and therefore a moral exemplar. But one of the subtexts of the story is that the Samaritan put himself in personal peril to help the victim: the robbers that nearly killed the Jew could have still been in the vicinity, and the Samaritan (with travelling funds and a valuable donkey) could have been their next victim... and he had to know it.

The fact that modern robbers make being a good Samaritan dangerous is no reason to teach people to avoid helping others.

Comment Re:Fundamental problem . . . (Score 1) 170

The unavoidable weakness of which is pad recovery. As in, the adversary prevents you from destroying your pad and recovers it. Or, not you; someone else trusted with the pad (such as your corresponedent, who's languishing in a jail as an imposter receives your encrypted messages and decrypts them with the captured pad).

This is why self-destructs are so popular in "no-kidding" grade crypto gear, and why they often don't get an opportunity to work.

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