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Comment Re:$3500 fine? (Score 4, Interesting) 286

I have to agree. If we have these laws, we need to enforce them.

If that means that the costs of products go up because we aren't using illegal aliens as slave labor, then we need to see that cost and understand why that is the case.

We think this is benefiting businesses primarily, but bear in mind, those who favor government programs and regulations to curry favor with progressives may be able to understate the economic effect of those items on the full economy by conveniently pointing to American productivity, but leaving out how much of that productivity is due to workers and businesses that evade those regulations.

Remember, it is a win-win for regulation and business if you can pretend that you have laws you enforce for higher standard of living, but you collude with businesses to make sure that the economy is not harmed by actually applying OSHA rules, minimum wage and social security to *every worker*.

I point this out, not to take the heat off of businesses. They are the ones who actually employ the illegal labor, and they are the primary people at fault. I'm trying to get to the heart of why the government is not enforcing these rules when it would be relatively simple for them to do so effectively. I think it is because no one wants to be up-front about why illegal workers are required to maintain our standard of living. No one wants to admit that we employ an underclass to maintain our citizens in comfort.

Comment Re:Sigh... (Score 1) 170

And for my part, I think that a sustained growth velocity metric is very useful out of the box. You know or you can calculate easily how big your filesystem is, so you can calculate a "time to full" which becomes your "window of opportunity" to fix the issue within. Any time the rate means that the remaining free space will be consumed in under a certain "safety" interval, you know you need to act. You then set a alarm threshold which makes sense with your reaction time.

If you have automation to deal with the issue, you set the alert and auto-fix interval to some amount of time that is sufficient for it to react. If you are simply alerting a human, then you use a reaction time interval that is more in line with a human reaction time.

You do have to pick a good sampling interval to reduce false alarms, but it is useful to have an alarm that states: "You now have less than one hour at the current rate of growth to prevent /dev/sda1 from filling up" Even if the rate slows down after a few seconds, you know that your system is doing something that is capable of a rate of growth that could fill your disk up in less than an hour, should it come to pass that the root cause manifests again.

Comment Re:Sigh... (Score 1) 170

You need both. Sysadmins are adaptive, but (relatively) slow to respond. Automation is (should be?) much faster, but not usually all that adaptive.

Automation is used, first and foremost, to trigger anything that you need to do to save your whole application or system which must run faster than a human reaction time. In that case, we consider a disk space alarm to be a signal to automation to step in before it is too late. But how do we know when it is too late?

My answer to the poster's original question is that you do want to tailor your disk alarms to your specific usage patterns, but you want use those percentages, or some well-considered standard initially. That's because setting alarms properly isn't a one size fits all solution, it is a process driven by knowledge of your system or your application.

Someone pointed out that it may take someone a year to go from 90% to 91%, especially in a personal environment, so they questioned the 90% number as useful. I think that entirely misses the point. For one thing, if you select a number, you are triggering yourself to take some action where you had none before. If, at 90%, you evaluate the situation and determine you need to raise the threshold, then nothing stops you from doing that.

Many times, people who suggest default percentages are trying to do something important: they want to make sure there is a simple, easy to implement solution by default. Having a default 85-90% alarm apply to all hosts by default allows you to be covered by default while you work out the specific needs of your application. What is the worst thing that can happen? You get annoyed by the alarm a little bit more? Once you hit 90% for the first time, I'm betting you now have good data on your disk usage patterns. You can then make a data-driven decision about your thresholds.

So, don't over think the percentages. Use a reasonable standard (like percentages), and then refine. At that point, you will know what method works best and you will have some protection in the meantime.

And this is where you want a sysadmin. They clean up the mess and analyze the data. They tell the automation to trigger at 95% or 10GB remaining, or a growth velocity of greater than 1GB/hour. Or all three. And then he resets the alarms and/or mass deletes the files on the server and brings it back into service on his own terms and not in panic mode. And then hopefully writes a script to improve his log rotation (or whatever).

Comment Re:There are limits to freedom of speach (Score 1) 489

I'm sorry to quote hardcore authoritarians like Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson at you. Perhaps you would prefer the more soft-core fascist, Thomas Jefferson,

"[a] strict observance of the written law is doubtless one of the high duties of a good citizen, but it is not the highest. The laws of necessity, of self-preservation, of saving our country when in danger, are of higher obligation. To lose our country by a scrupulous adherence to the written law, would be to lose the law itself, with life, liberty, property and all those who are enjoying them with us; thus absurdly sacrificing the ends to the means."

Or just read about some of the other Nazis who have said the same things in this right-wing agitprop piece:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...

Comment Re: What I recommend (Score 2) 115

I'm hearing that this person wants to criticize someone in Poland who likes Putin. I'm guessing Russia is not actually a good choice here.

Russia is only better when you aren't doing something that directly opposes Russian interests. If you are opposing Russian interests, you'd probably have better luck in China.

Russia doesn't protect free speech, they just allow things to be hosted that piss off countries they don't like. That looks like free speech only to those who the Russian government likes or doesn't give a shit about.

Comment Re: Polish (Score 1) 115

Historically, they do hate them just as much. It's just that the Germans are only the second to last occupiers. The Soviets are the most recent.

The Poles also kicked out millions of Germans from the lands they they were granted out of Germany when the USSR compensated Poland for lands that the USSR itself took from Poland. The Poles also hung the shit out of a number of Nazi war criminals.

No one has let the Poles hang any Russians. So, I'd say that the Poles have the bigger score to settle with the Russians.

Which is not to say I think that the Poles actually want to settle any scores, I just think they want to avoid being a puppet state of Russia again. Germany isn't currently attempting to do anything like that.

Comment Re:There are limits to freedom of speach (Score 1) 489

Maybe you should blame the people who decide to do the mobilizing.

No. You should not force someone to ignore a threat that they cannot themselves prove is untrue.

If by that you mean "free speech" isn't free because it isn't totally free from all possible restraint or responsibility, then perhaps it isn't, but considering the alternatives around the world, I think it is also completely missing the point.

In any event, it has already been pointed out that the Constitution is not a suicide pact. If speech has a good chance of getting people killed by creating a credible, but fraudulent threat, that's in no way legal, and I don't think any less of the government for considering that to be a perfectly reasoned exception to absolute free speech.

Comment Re:Cheap way to score political points (Score 1) 489

Yes, a longer maximum sentence, or more charges that can be applied are usually the difference between getting off as "innocent" and having to take a plea deal to avoid the possibility of complete disaster. It creates convicts where no convicts would usually be found.

And while I have some sympathy for those prosecutors who must deal with the organized criminals who can use the system against them, the reality is that these sorts of escalations just end up causing more poor people to become incarcerated.

Comment Re:There are limits to freedom of speach (Score 1) 489

Calling in a bomb threat usually mobilizes police and emergency responders. If we let people who were "just joking" off, then we need to become a lot more thick skinned about when we dispatch those responders. And then when someone dies because there was a real issue and the sensitivity level had to be reduced because the rest of them were "just joking", the first responders end up looking incompetent even though they were forced to their wits end with this bullshit and stepped back their response.

I think it is reasonable to charge someone for being that kind of asshole which falsely mobilizes that sort of response. Perhaps the people calling the cops might be asked to ask, "are you joking?", but I don't agree with that unless it is a kid or something. Adults need to know better.

If we don't actually make that sort of speech illegal, I think we should also make it not illegal for the people affected by this "joker" to beat the ever-living shit out of that person for scaring them, and potentially causing someone to die because responders can't take reports seriously anymore. After all, free speech should not make you immune from the consequences of that speech.

Comment Re:May I suggest RTFA? (Score 1) 334

I think the problem is the Canadian government does not want to cobble together multiple suppliers for one weapon like this. If they can go with Mosin-Nagants, they have a durable weapon that's an even older design than the Enfield, and probably still has a bunch of suppliers. Just make sure to get a model with some decent sights.

They could also go with an M98 system, like a K98k.

That or you can pick a weapon that was designed sometime in the 20th Century, as opposed to the 19th. There's a lot of bolt action goodness out there.

I do agree that if they go with a composite, and not wood, they would benefit from the weight savings, but they will need to be very careful about the characteristics of the material they use, and all that technology is going to cost $$$. The big benefit of those old bolt-action rifles is that they were designed and built in the days of the conscript armies before WWI. Other than something like an AK-47, you don't find weapons as numerous, durable, and well tested these days without some R&D money that needs to be paid off.

Comment Re: Scarier still.... (Score 1) 366

Eugenics *can* work, for some value of "working". The problem with eugenics is that you have to have a goal and then work towards it, but that goal has to be rather objective, well defined, and the end goal actually has to be *an improvement*.

What is a "smart" person? An idiot savant who is a human calculator? Someone who takes tests well? Someone who is imaginative?

All of those probably have different genetic and environmental components and we may need all of those types of people. It may be useful to have a few more of each, but do we need 100 million people who can ace the SAT?

And the same goes for so-called "sheeple". It doesn't take very much for people to become an uncontrollable mob that almost accidentally throws you out of power. What is the "activist" gene? What is the gene for "courage"? Are both of those behaviors expressed as a result of a combination of more than just a few traits? Does the new tractability of a population actually hurt you more than it helps you?

You can totally turn your population into a group that you define as say "Aryans". But does being "Aryan" actually make you more successful or help humanity? One might say that the only thing a eugenics program to create Germanic types is good for is... creating more people who are Germanic.

Comment Re:Let me get this right (Score 1) 839

Yes, you need to tax where the money is. On the poor and middle class.

Wait... what? Why? Because there are so many more of them by far.

It is a lot easier to get one dollar out of 300 million people, than it is to get 300 million dollars out of one person. That one rich person has the ability to fight back more effectively, and they are a lot more likely to notice the fleecing and try to do something about it.

More to the point, there are not a lot of people you can get 300 million out of. Even if they don't all flee to the Bahamas, you start to run out of rich people.

The Communists in Russia and China killed all the rich people and took their assets and money. It probably helped a little at the beginning, but it clearly didn't fix their problems. If you add up the amount of money that the richest people in the US have, and then take *all* that money away, including their assets and capital, you get about a trillion dollars. Sounds like a lot, but the US goes through that in about three months, every year. After you spend all the rich people's money, you then have the same expenses, but you've done little more than add a handful of people to the welfare rolls.

A small number of phenomenally rich people doesn't compare to the amount of money that millions of workers make put together. And those rich people aren't holding on to that money in the Scrooge McDuck vault. Unless they reinvest their money, it gets taxed by inflation. Not to mention that most of the "wealth" of people like your Bill Gates' and Buffets are in corporate stocks and other investment instruments, not in actual cash.

The problem with the economy isn't that there are a lot of rich people hoarding all the money, it is that our spending is out of control and that the poor and middle class are facing increasing prices without increasing wages.

If there is a problem with rich people, it is not so much that they are extremely rich as much as that it causes them to lose touch with the basic need to survive, which causes them to become involved in decisions that benefit only them, while ignoring the human element. They are not a giant money pinata which if we keep hitting it, will make everyone and the government suddenly comfortable, the biggest problem with the rich is that they *make the decisions for everyone* because they have the ability to sit around and run for Congress, or contribute to campaigns, whereas the rest of us need to get a real job.

In short, you have people running the country that don't understand the actual problems that most of the country has.

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