You do understand you're being called retarded due to your absolutely stupid and ludicrous statement of 'impenetrable security' yea? Are you really that retarded to not see this?
Man can make it, man can break it. Impenetrable security is BULLSHIT, son.
One of my favorite overheard comments: "It's not enough to be right, you also have to be effective."
You understand why I chose that particular phrase, right?
Before the trip, draw up an outline for an essay, short story, novelette, or other piece on a topic of interest to you.
During the trip, write it.
When you get back, edit the text and submit it to magazines/publishers for consideration.
Before the trip, settle on a graphics artistic project such as a book of cartoons, a pop-up book, or movie.
During the trip, draw the cartoons, sketch out the pop-up book, or storyboard the movie.
Before the trip, choose a software project that's never been done before.
During the trip, map out the block functionality, drivers, database interface, or whatever else the project needs.
When you get back, program the project and release it on Github as open source.
Get a book on sleight-of-hand and read up on the basics.
During the trip, practice the techniques with a deck of cards or a coin or a small item. (I enjoy knuckle rolls and rolling ball manipulations.)
Get a video of someone whose stage presence you like. Play 1-minute loops of the video over and over, mimicking the hand motions and gestures of the speaker while he talks. (I like James Spader, but everyone should have their own likes.) Practice until your own stage presence is animated and engaging.
Get an audio of an announcer whose style you like (I chose Morly Safer), and play 1 sentence loops of whatever they're saying over and over. Mimic their vocal variety, tonal variation, and tempo - especially the way they use pauses and emphasis to make points. When you have any one sentence down pat, switch to the next sentence. Continue until your own vocal presentation is as polished and precise as the speaker.
Choose an aspect of life that you would like to improve, or for which you think improving would benefit you, and then come up with a way to learn more or practice during your trip.
You're joking, right? You can't really be that retarded, can you?
As an outside observer, what do you think about the human race?
I have a measured IQ of 87 so yeah, I can be that retarded - but no more. What's IQ got to do with it anyway?
Here's an IQ test for you, fill in the blank:
rue is to pain as street is to ___________
It'll take about two years for this problem to disappear.
There's an enormous monetary incentive for cloud services to implement good privacy. Anyone who doesn't implement it will get their lunch eaten by someone who does.
There's already a massive exodus away from US based servers, both at home and abroad. People are thinking through the ramifications of having their sensitive information used as "incentives" to help business. Your client lists, sales information, costs and accounting - if any part of your local network is in the cloud, the US can rifle through it and trade the information to another company in return for help fighting terrorism. Many people will choose to believe that this is not happening, but what the heck - who can tell any more?
This is a self-correcting problem.
Mega has announced an encrypted E-mail service, the client software will be open for public inspection, and none of it will be hosted on US servers.
Google has admitted in court that they don't think users have an expectation of privacy.
Which E-mail service would you rather use? The one from a sleazy convicted criminal, but with impenetrable security? Or the one from a company that always rifles through the contents, but promises to only do it for the better good?
I've changed my mind, now I see the value in these articles.
Various replies have been particularly insightful. For example:
[...] "nerds" who read Slashdot often provide more insightful commentary than any other group of private citizen commentators, and certainly more insight than what the majority of the 24 hour news-cycle organizations. Furthermore, because Slashdot has global readership we get commentary from people outside the United States. I love reading slashdot comments for the same reasons I like listening to the BBC on the radio on my local public radio station (KQED), because I hear fresh viewpoints that originate not in this country.
I'd like to see more articles on Syria or Nigeria. [...] The mainstream media distracts us from the "stuff that matters" unless the shit is really hitting the fan somewhere. It's becoming more and more clear they're a propaganda machine that occasionally reports on world events to maintain a shred of credibility, but never without some partisan bullshit like the administration's refusal to classify this coup as a coup.
In these comments I see all kinds of points about policies and actions going back decades that have contributed to this situation. I'd never find something like that in the mainstream media, Google News included. They're too busy trying to convince me of which lizard is the wrong lizard.
I've changed my opinion. It's probably good that Slashdot posts important news items, simply because you don't get insightful commentary anywhere else - it's a side-effect of the moderation system. Other news outlets allow commentary and have smart readers, we're the only one with insightful discussion. (Can anyone point to another site where the comments are worth reading?)
In particular, I found the comment "I'd like to see more articles on Syria or Nigeria" thought provoking. I don't know anything about either place, and maybe I should.
Slashdot is in a sense community driven. If there's not a lot of push-back, we will continue to see important articles.
Usually news stories on this site have at least a faint aroma of tech relevance.
Certain select stories are of such a high importance that everyone wants to talk about them and they appear on this site despite having no relevance to the major purpose.
That's fine, really it is. But I have to ask, where is the dividing line? Will we be seeing articles on Syria? More than 100 people are killed there on a regular basis. Fourty-four were killed in a mosque in Nigeria the other day. Is that significant? A white-ish guy shot an innocent black kid who was definitely not bashing the white-guy's head into the pavement - is that relevant?
I found this very interesting Third Amendment lawsuit (yes, Third amendment) and didn't submit because it was offtopic.
I'm not saying that world events are not important, and this one is pretty high on the importance scale. It's just that I avoid regular news sites and frequent this one because it saves time. Yes, I can skip articles - but note that I can skip articles in Google News and Reddit as well.
I can't find the link, but I remember a chart of "Slashdot readership" that showed a general decline over the last several years.
This leade to a simple question: Is Slashdot better for reporting generic news items, or should it be more about "News for Nerds"?
"A car is just a big purse on wheels." -- Johanna Reynolds
