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Comment You missed the madness (Score 2) 331

it was just evidence (photo and/or video) of folks actually raping kids. [...] And if it puts a dint in the practice, I don't think I'd characterize aggressively pursuing leads, as madness.

What you have just described isn't madness at all. I would argue that it makes perfect sense for law enforcement to treat child pornography as evidence of serious criminal activity (child rape) and to pursue aggressively the perpetrators of such a crime.

Unfortunately, there is madness in Western countries surrounding the issue of child pornography and pedophelia. Here are some examples:

  1. In the US, any image of an unclothed child is considered to be a serious crime. There have been many documented cases of photo labs reporting photos of unclothed babies in the bathtub (in no sexual context) to the police, and then the babies were taken from their parents and the parents were charged with manufacturing child pornography, a sex crime.
  2. In the US, while it is perfectly legal for 17-year-olds to have consensual sex with each other, if they happen to take a photo of this lawful sexual activity, they could be charged with manufacturing child pornography. Several teenagers have been charged with the sex crime of manufacturing and distributing child pornography for simply texting their boyfriend or girlfriend photos of their unclothed selves.
  3. In Australia, adult women with small breasts are considered to be children for the purposes of child pornography laws, so they may not appear in any adult entertainment without it being considered to be child pornography.
  4. In the US, all doctors and mental health professionals must report to the police anyone who comes to them seeking help with sexual attraction to minors. This discourages pedophiles from seeking the help that they need to avoid committing actual offenses against children. In our lust to burn the witches at the stake, we put real children at risk because pedophiles aren't getting the treatment that they need.

So, yes, our hysteria surrounding child pornography does rise to the level of madness. I'm not sure how we fix it, because it is political suicide to appear to be soft on pedophilia, but in the meantime, the madness is definitely doing more harm than good.

Comment Re:And? (Score 1) 448

The cognitive burden of facing all those "decisions" and the constant bombardment of the nickle and diming fees makes the entire experience less enjoyable for everyone.

The way that I handle this is to say to myself, "Self, realize that under the old regulated airfare structure, adjusted for inflation, this ticket would have cost $3000. So just pay for what you need to be comfortable and be happy that you're paying 1/5 of what it otherwise would have cost!"

Comment Re:And? (Score 1) 448

I dunno. I just flew roundtrip between PHX and LGA and brought a bunch of food from home (sandwiches, veggies, fruit rolls, almonds, and anything else I'm forgetting about). TSA never said anything to me about it.

I know a person who lost a small jar of peanut butter, and was told that if it were spread on a sandwich, it is a baned item still.

Well, this must not be enforced, because my sandwiches were peanut butter sandwiches. My flights were last week, so this is fairly current information.

Comment Re:I guess i am old (Score 1) 119

He's surprised what he thought was keys to S3 unlocks the entire kingdom.

Why? Is there even such a thing as an "S3 key"? I've been using AWS for a long time, and I've never seen one of these (unless you count the goofball time-limited key pre-signing thing, and those keys can't be used for any purpose outside of S3).

There are, of course, AWS keys, and those keys can be granted privileges. If you grant an AWS key full access, then yes, it can be used for any API call. But really that's bad practice. If your application needs only access to a specific S3 bucket, you'd create an AWS key for your app and grant it access only to that bucket.

Since I haven't done it in a while, I tested this out. I just created an AWS key and here's what I found: it has no access at all. I can click "attach user policy" and it gives me a ton of choices for what type of access I can give the key, including "Amazon S3 Full Access" and "Amazon S3 Read Only Access", or I can use a custom policy generator.

So I think AWS is doing a halfway decent job here, giving people simple options for simple situations and complex options for complex situations. If a user is going to create an admin-level AWS key and post it to github, what is AWS supposed to do about that?

Comment Re:Sounds like multiple failures (Score 1) 119

Okay, so you might not find it intuitive that S3 keys can lead to new EC2 instances - I wouldn't have guessed that either, even though I've used both repeatedly.

Actually, S3 keys either can or can't be used to launch EC2 instances, depending on user configuration. Using IAM, you can grant AWS keys only as many rights as are necessary, so if your program only needs to write to a certain S3 bucket, you should grant access to the key only to write to that bucket. Then, that key couldn't be used for any other purpose (like launching EC2 instances).

Also, IAM roles can be used to avoid using AWS keys in your code/config files at all if your code will be running within EC2. Just give your instance an IAM role with permissions to make only the necessary calls, and let AWS handle your key acquisition and rotation for you.

Comment Re:The problem with doxing (Score 1) 171

The problem with doxing Is that everyone has some skeletons in the closet they're hiding.

That's small potatoes compared with the real problem with doxxing. The real problem is that once the doxxed person's info is public, any asshole on the Internet can and does start harassing the victim both online and offline. Threats of violence, harassing the victim's employer, trying to get him/her fired, swatting, etc., are all common consequences of doxxing.

It's a really shitty thing to do. I don't really give one tenth of one flying fuck if someone finds out that I smoked weed in high school or banged my girlfriend in high school. Hell, if you asked me those, I'd just tell you the truth. But if I'm getting death threats left and right and people are calling my clients and saying that I am a terrible person or whatever, that's when shit starts to get real.

Comment Re:Lots of Interview but no job... yet (Score 2) 45

Amazon interviewed me 3 different times, were completely confused and in the end , rejected because I don't have a degree...

Somehow I knew that you were going to say this because many large tech employers, often to a fault, insist that all applicants have a CS degree. I bet a lot of these teams wanted to hire you but couldn't get you through HR because of this stupid, inflexible requirement.

Comment Re:Why bother? (Score 1) 421

In my organization, we have purchased Java applications from vendors that are based on all of these: Oracle Weblogic, IBM Websphere, Apache Tomcat, Redhat JBoss, and Apache Geronimo, and we have to figure out how to admin and support them all.

Why in the actual fuck would you want to do that? For the love of all things holy, pick one of those (or one commercial + one free, if that is more appropriate to your company) and standardize. Do you support half a dozen office suites as well?

So I really don't understand where this bashing of .Net comes from, but I'm guessing a lot of it is from open source fanboys that love to hate Microsoft and have never taken time to use the recent (last 3-5 years) iterations of it's products.

Lack of familiarity. MS was extremely opaque about what the hell .NET even was when it first came out until they finally admitted that it was their version of Java. And since there was no reasonable free way to get started with it (and I don't think it's cross platform, right?), most devs and universities standardized on Java.

At this point, from my point of view, there is little point in ever learning .NET since it offers nothing over the Java ecosystem. My next language will probably be either Python or Scala.

Comment Re:Spankers and spankees trend toward Republicanis (Score 3, Insightful) 323

I wish you would have read the next sentence:

This could help explain why changing methods of discipline is so difficult and why science faces an uphill battle in facilitating change.

They managed to get an anti-science dig in with their prone-to-violence dig. This is the typical crap that you read in The Atlantic.

Comment Re:I don't even... (Score 4, Interesting) 323

I'd be curious to read what exactly these people recommend in place of timeouts. I mean, I'm always up for learning new parenting techniques, but I just don't see how a "teachable moment" tactic will work in the real world. Certainly with younger children.

As you well know, when a parent corrects a young child's behavior, the typical response is to either engage in a debate or to throw a tantrum. In neither case is the child internalizing the lesson behind the "teachable moment". A timeout effectively avoids both of those responses because once the child is placed into a timeout, there is no one to argue with, and there is no one to watch the tantrum.

So that would be my question: how does this new technique compensate for the real-world problem of toddlers acting like toddlers?

Comment Re:AP and accessible (Score 1) 208

I can tell you my high school AP Calc class went at the same rate as a typical college Calc class. Maybe a little faster. So right there, my anecdotal evidence in juxtaposition with yours shows you can't generalize from your knowledge.

Was that BC Calc? Because if it was, then that's not really a fair comparison because BC Calc is supposed to cover 2 semesters. That being said, you're not seriously arguing that AP Calc is harder than taking the course in college, are you? Any day of the week, I'd rather learn calculus from an experienced, English-speaking teacher in a 20 person classroom whose career goal is to teach students mathematics than from a math prof who only teaches because he has to in a 300 person lecture hall and a TA from Elbonia. A few decades later, I remember a lot of calc from my AP calc class, but I don't remember a damn thing from calc 3 which I had to take in college.

Anyway, the AP classes that I was talking about were things like AP U.S. History, AP U.S. Lit, AP Chemistry, Physics, etc. These were all semester-long courses in university, but took a full year to teach in high school. Learning the same material in twice the time is not impressive to me.

The school system is a factory system. Factory systems that are tuned to the mean, roughly. Individualized Education Programs (IEPs) set up after NCLB are esentially a selection of 7 or 8 learning supports or enrichments that are minor modifications of the base system.

Aren't we talking about a minor change, here? All I'm saying is that a motivated student ought to be able to take a bloody AP class if he or she wants to, even in the absence of a stellar transcript. I mean, really. If a kid is fascinated with history, why shouldn't that kid be allowed to take AP U.S. History instead of standard U.S. History? The kid'll get some exposure to college level work in a class that piques his or her interest instead of being told, "Hey, sorry kid. You're too dumb to handle college work."

Back when I was in school, there was this chick who really wanted to take AP Econ, but she didn't have good grades, and the teacher gave her the boot (it was in front of the whole class, too. Ouch!). All I'm saying is that there were plenty of supposedly qualified kids in that class who never even came close to grasping the material, but I bet this chick would have gotten it because she cared more than they did.

I know it's just an anecdote and I know it's just my opinion not a scientific study, but anyway, that's what I think. Because frankly, who cares if they fail? I'd rather see a motivated kid challenge him or herself and come up short than not to take the challenge at all.

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