Comment Re:Now taking bets... (Score 1) 214
Excuse me... Did you just try to cop the Nuremburg Defence on behalf of the NSA?
I'm just saying you need to blame the politicos who are responsible.
Excuse me... Did you just try to cop the Nuremburg Defence on behalf of the NSA?
I'm just saying you need to blame the politicos who are responsible.
Or in Redneckistan Virginia, 50/25 (FiOS) for $45.
Nice, but then you'd have to live in Virgina! (I kid... Apparently Viginia is quite nice, and the guy who said that was a Pakistani Muslim immigrant so the whole "redneck" thing has to be exaggerated, or at least in suburbia.)
"Martha, there's a nice young man at the gate trying too sell me FiOS... Can you bring him a bowl of that squirrel stew and my checkbook?"
You are very, very naive. NSA IS a core part of government and they have a "intelligence" shitpile on EVERY American by now. They decided Obama's shitpile was smelling better than Romney's.
The NSA were just following orders. All the programs you are so scared of now were put in place during a Republican mandate and are only scaled up versions of what they have been doing for decades. I can only speculate why they were allowed to continue.
Complaining that a lawful government agency was following orders and fulfilling a mandate related to national security is naive.
Shoot the messenger much? It's the political bosses that are to blame, not the foot soldiers.
If that's all it takes why am I still paying $60/mo for 1 mb down...?
Mb or MB?
That's pretty sad when in the Commune of Quebec in the Soviet Republic of Kanada you can get 60Mb down / 10Mb up for $80 a month. (And according to speedtest.net, they're lowballing it, it's actually 62Mb.)
Just like software optimization. When you've got '1000 things' to fix, you've really got 1 thing to fix: Process/Culture. There is a difference between premature optimization and not doing stupid slow things.
Even if you can eventually 'fix' the mess, it's now a mess with the inner loops optimized, not cleaned up. The original team is likely making another mess.
Not at all, you can be inefficient in non-critial code if it makes it easier to understand or maintain.
But if you're attacking a performance problem you don't start by wasting your time and money on little pointless fixes, you go for the root of the problem with extreme prejudice.
"Well we're still bottlenecked on the DB, but I made the pages load 5ms faster by spending the day optimizing our CSS."
And now nobody will understand it... thanks Bob...
The U.S. has overall been a force for good in the world, but do not fail to consider your failings as well. Military force requires oversight.
No worries then - they provide oversights aplenty.
I know you're being ironic but... On a global scale, significantly better than average. From an ideal perspective, never enough.
Honestly if I was working for GCHQ or NSA my response would be: "Of course we're bloody spying, that's what you damn well pay us to do."
Mr. Clapper didn't take that approach because he knows damn well if he told us what he was doing, we'd tell him to stop and/or stop the payments.
Mr. Clapper does not take that approach because he's not allowed to take that approach. Like the Marines, if the NSA is doing something it's because they've been TOLD to do something. (Same for SAS and GCHQ)
I agree! The budget is so big that we shouldn't even consider looking at an item if it isn't in the "top 100" projects list.
In this sense, let's buy everyone an Alienware computer, upgrade to the most expensive brand of toilet paper, put in a soda fridge that is fully stocked for all federal employees, paint the building every year, and invite Britney Spears to the company picnic.
Waste less than 1% of the budget is still waste. The fact that the employees themselves thought that it was enough waste to report it should be an indication.
True... but this is like software optimization, you can spend your time fixing 1000 things that have a 0.00126% impact and you're still fucked.
Or you can go after something that will actually make a difference.
I suspect most if not all nations do it to some extent, the questions are which ones and to what extent.
It's not a question of who is spying, it's a question of who is going to get caught spying.
Honestly if I was working for GCHQ or NSA my response would be: "Of course we're bloody spying, that's what you damn well pay us to do."
... but despite a wealth of capability and opportunity have managed to abstain from it ever since. (The U.S. has reduced the number of warheads stockpiled by over 80% since 1967)
There were some pretty nasty genocidal maniacs running around in Europe just 60 years ago.
It takes a considerable amount of balls to play that card after Vietnam, Cambodia, and the so called War on Terror which were all just political power moves back home.
The U.S. has overall been a force for good in the world, but do not fail to consider your failings as well. Military force requires oversight.
Abolition in the U.S. was decades after most of Europe, and you had to fight a civil war over it.
However, I agree that trying to compare the morality of America with Europe is silly, since you're both pretty guilty.
The biggest fear is that a group of people who are clueless about what actual customers want and never talk to anyone outside their small circle believe that they know more about what customers want than people that actually talk to customers.
It gets worse when an arrogant developer becomes a manager and can impose his twisted world view on minions with a complete disregard of what is best for anyone but himself.
When did you last time see a pretty woman doing great things like that? Woman is either fugly and has no choice but study, or pretty and not compelled to do anything besides her hair and nails. This is the way how things are.
The most beautiful woman I ever met was a mathematician who was working on her Phd. Her idea of small talk was Pi. When she walked down a hallway every man she passed literally stopped walking as soon as she passed by and drank her in. I have never seen men behave that way, before or since.
One of my cousins is a lawyer who worked through college as a fashion model.
Perhaps one day you'll get to move out of Mom's basement.
"Experience has proved that some people indeed know everything." -- Russell Baker
