Posts by Marshalltown 744 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Sep 2011
What's interesting is that it appears to indicate that the "reds" have dossiers not just on their voters but also on democrats and independents and probably the hens in the barn. So, presumably we're looking at politics in the US an information warfare situation. Presumably the democrats are similarly well equipped.
As much as I agree with the general tenor of this, the charge was not described as addressing an intention, but rather as a fact, i.e. he is alleged to have "supplied training", "was a member of [DAESH]," etc. Note the tense there. The case *allegedly* isn't about "intent" but actual acts. Theoretically, since the actual charges aren't about thoughts but rather about acts, the defendant has a vague chance of being acquitted. Or might have had before the vicious stupidity on London Bridge.
They have to put up a token resistence. Otherwise it would look far too deliberate. Trump is an obvious patsy when you get down to it. Chosen for self-centered egotism, arrogance, a total ignorance of Constitutional law, and a preference for secretive backroom deals (like these failed meetings where he tried twisting Comey's arm). This is guaranteed to get him into trouble not just with the blues but with a good many reds as well. I expect that as soon as the mid term election polls start showing up, the reds will start looking very seriously at where they stand, unless Trump shows a clear improvement in public opinion.
Not at all. Trump's "power" to execute the laws of the US as enacted by congress. He is also responsible for protecting and defending the people and Constitution of the US. That's why he's the chief "Executive." He isn't a a law enforcement officer and hasn't any legal say in what laws are inforced. Obama's action with respect to marijuana was political - recognizing a swell of popular support for legalization. That means that federal enforcement becomes more difficult since the states involved are going to be less than cooperative. In effect we are fighting a "cold Civil War" at this very moment and Obama's action was to ease things up between factions. It was certainly no better founded than Trumps attempt to protect Flynn, and get the DOJ to ease off on Russia.
Flynn however was consulting - AS A FORMER DIA DIRECTOR - with foreign and not necessarily friendly powers. There's no state or popular tie there. The only question is whether he endangered US security. Trump's action in meeting privately with Comey were not only unprecedented - though not illegal - but by even expressing his "hopes" directly to Comey constitute outright misfeasance of office. Firing Comey after failing to gain his "hopes" was almost certainly malfeasance after having those conversations with him. He would have been better off to have never spoken with Comey and simply asked for his resignation. Obama in contrast acted OPENLY and publicly making an outright political call, and didn't fire anyone for disagreeing about the call. And you can bet that there are loads of DEA and ICE out there that were worried. Current US laws regarding property forfeiture in drug enforcement cases are a literal license to the agencies to commit piracy.
It is a good question but rather murky historically. The FBI was organized in the first half of the 20th C. J Edgar Hoover was the first director taking up the post in 1935. Prior to that the US had the BI, of which Hoover was the sixth director. His approach to maintaining independence for the FBI and his own position was through thoroughly illegal means. He could blackmail almost anyone in power who didn't like him and could harass politicians that opposed him and weren't in his files by having them "investigated" intensively.
The only other director to be fired was William Sessions who was turfed out by Clinton. That act had two prongs to it. One, Sessions was a Republican and Clinton apparently wasn't happy about that, and 2) he really was an awful director. The FBI was forted up, and seriously firewalled communications with other agencies where it should have been cooperating and the evidence, scant thouh it be is that failure if cooperation between agencies has lead to some monumental intelligence failures.
Comey in contrast was a Republican into 2016. He switched to Independent sometime that year. His actions regarding Clinton and her emails very likely cost her the election, not that she would have been much more popular than Trump. Trump may have assumed that Comey was "loyal" until he failed to ease off on Flynn as "hoped."
The president appoints the director and that director serves at the pleasure of the president. Presidential interference with the FBI is clear evidence of Trump's ignorance or outright for how the US governmental system was designed to operate. He should have absolutely known going in that expressing his "wishes" and "hopes" regarding how the Justice Department operates were tantamount to misfeseance. It absolutely is irrelevant whether he expressed a "hope" or simply issued an order he has no right to issue. Likewise, stating that he expected "loyalty" is also misfeasance.
Comey's "leaking" of his memos, and Comey being both a lawyer and a procesecutor, indicates that his informed opinion was that Trump had no leg to stand on. He would absolutely know how to cover himself legally.
For a paranoid view, Trump has been set up to take the fall, leaving Mike Pence to assume the Oval Office by a Domionist conspiracy to take over the US in a religious dictatorship. Trump is so obviously unprepared, so clearly ignorant, and so blatantly corrupt that he was likely a target since his coke snorting days in the '70s.
One thumb down, hmm. Well you may not like it, but that is the bitter truth. Microsoft capitalized on human laziness at the expense of security pretty much from the founding of the company. Then, when the inevitable problems cropped up, they wanted you to pay for something they had "persuaded" computer makers to "bundle" with the hardware. Then the new user, rather than try different OS's and interfaces, simply learned what "came with the computer." MS effectively gave away Word, Excel and even Access in order to achieve dominance in the entire PC Windows environment. Excel was so horrible that there companies that banned its use due to flaws in results and bad algorithms in its statistics routines. You can still Google "Friends don't let friends use Excel" and get over a thousand hits. Developers simply went with the current (flow), developing for what the "users" had learned, and generally avoiding the costs of developing for alternate systems and smalle,r niche markets.
This pattern had already thoroughly distorted the PC environment by the very early '90s before WIndows. In addition, the Microsoft "tax" encouraged "piracy" - after all, if you already paid money to MS simply to buy that CPU, why should pay them twice to buy a "legitimate" copy of MSDOS on a disk? I went with PC-DOS, OS/2 and later Linux for my own systems. There were never-fixed bugs in MS-DOS. One in particular was replicated in alternative DOS's like IBM's PC-DOS, simply because developers were writing code that actually relied on that bug in order to work properly.
"MS have been doing everything they can to get people to move forward" - meh.
The problem is as much the fault of users as it is Microsoft, and the entire commercial approach to operating systems. Microsoft's "best effort" was to get people to PAY "to move forward." The users however received "that" OS "free" with their system and ("ooh! shiny, so pretty") expected it to "just work." Or were coerced into buying a new OS they really didn't want because some program critical to their work or simple little minds had been changed to "require" a new version of the OS. So they grudgingly spent as little as possible to get what was required, or they simply bought a new chunk of hardware with the "free" OS installed.
Yep, and trying to tell some admin type that the problem is not necessarily "how many" systems are not patched due to cost savings measures, but WHERE those vulnerable systems are located that goes right past their pointy little ears without even a glimmer of dawning comprehension. It's that that can get you thinking about super-powered cattle prods, carpet rolls and quick lime.
In the original story, the teller did not precisely follow the "document's" instructions. The script he was supposed to run would generate codes that he was supposed to use. In stead he used codes typed into the "document." I would bet the teller actually read the script and, rather than waste a chance to know more about the system, simply "tried to follow the logic" of the script. He would learn about the system doing by hand the tasks in the script. But, presumably, he did not think through the privileges that the script would need to set up his account. Or worse, he did (as an amateur, would-be BOFH), but had not properly counted on the laziness of upper levels, or anticipated the linkage to the production system, which should not have existed.
Sometime, someone should start a BUFH. Not about the normal dead from the neck up type of user, but the ones that built the network computers, wired it up, and then had the "Boss" hire a would-be BOFH to administer the system - badly. Since our - the systems builders - job was really nothing to do with computing except writing reports, data entry and analysis, etc., hiring an administrator made sense. The Boss could not have administered his way out of a wet paper bag. But, the first candidate, big into Goth looks, but neither the right gender or correct attitude to deal with the system builders, was a disaster. He threw our "real" job schedules out of the window because he "needed" to "administer" the print server. That was just the start. It didn't take more than three days to decide we had to be rid of him. Initially we resorted to the tactic of crashing the print server, moving the CAT5 connection and then rebooting it, restored to its rightful domain. The WBBOFH complained to the Boss and threatened us - the system builders! He was gone in a month.
New? The term "cloud" was used by the fellow that taught me about the workings of the internet. As nearly as I can tell, the allusion was to the nebulous nature of the user's knowledge about where his files really were. The trainer used a diagram that showed a PC linked to a LAN, in turn linked to a WAN, which in turn was linked to a "cloud" representing the internet.
"... - you ignorant arseholes have just re-branded the hosting services..."
And that ignores the even earlier days of "time sharing" where you could walk into a Radio Shack and buy time at a terminal to run your BASIC code, then save it to wherever the terminal liked to. Right before PCs appeared with exotic names like Osborne and Kaypro.
In the UK your "leaching upper class" is mainly entertainment. Britain always had the social advantage that much of its population were yeomanry rather than peasants. The Normans and later did their best to end that but still failed. The EU seems to think there is some advantage to a "nanny state" even if the nanny aspect is really limited and the PTB are "above the law." So, maybe there's a bright side to Brexit after all. Now, here in the US, if only we can find a bright side to Trump .... >:(
"...Just because the shackles that continue to bind the oarsmen to their benches are no longer tangible iron and the rhythmic drum beat does not sound like a drum ..."
A mistaken cliche, at least up to the Renaissance. The Romans for instance had the good sense to use free oarsmen who had something to stay alive for, and if necessary would free slaves for the job. The Greeks actually had professional oarsmen, some of whom had their special portable seats they carried with them from ship to ship. It helped prevent blisters
But. technically, your modern wage slave is is still a "slave" even IF they are "paid." Or they are as long as the wage payer pays at rates so low that a worker can't save enough to be able too tell an abusive employer to p*** off and leave for another job. In the US, employers resent the idea of being responsible for things like healthcare for their employees (yes Walmart - you). After all why fight a civil war if the upshot is simply that you wind up being responsible for your workers anyway. Pay them "wages" and you should be able to send them off everyday without a single thought about things like food, shelter and medical, let alone education.
These days I prefer OpenSUSE with KDE. I switched from Ubuntu when it began to be aggravating to install and use and somewhat dictatorial (yes, that is what I think). Opensuse has its own aggravations that need work-arounds, but those are limited to using the computer for entertainment. But ... the KDE interface - or rather the interface coders - has been becoming more difficult and pushy about what's "right" or "too hard" to code for. For years now I have split the desktop into virtual desktops. I open the browser and email on one, work on another, solitaire on a third, etc. I use different wall papers to identify which desktop I am on without having to peer at a miniscule icon. This capacity became aggravating unavailable for a awhile then reappeared, and is now once more unavailable. Apparently the Plasma pushers find it "too hard." KDE is beginning to be as bad as GNOME.
Wordstar and New Word were excellent tools. I've missed the Wordstar dot-file approach to mast documents for decades now. And New Word, which was WS with bells, produced by staff that departed WS, arguably had the only well written - actually enjoyable to read - software manual I have ever read. Even now I prefer Joe for editing small configuration files in Linux.
As far as ads go, why doesn't someone write an "app" that lies to server sites? The app tells the ad server it has received the ad, but writes out to /dev/null. Then everyone's happy. The ad people think they're getting views, you're happy because there's no crap on your screen. It isn't like anyone would miss anything, and the advertisers might even gain some sales to folks to did not take an oath to never buy a thing from the jerks that paid for that monumentally irritating ad.
Actually, Microsoft isn't the only random "time-to..." reporter. I ran an "update" of Opensuse from 13.2 to LEAP 42.2. The "time left" randomly flicked around from in excess of five days worth of 24-hour days to 2 minutes in random fashion. Ultimately it took six hours. Even so I went back and ran a clean install to get thing running sanely. So - as pleasurable as it is to blame Microsoft, they were merely trend setters. I can't even find a decent desktop look now. For some silly reason the developers of KDE have concluded that someone actually likes the cartooney Windows 10 and cell phone look. They never asked me though.
While acquiring my BA at a State University way back in the late '70s, we were perpetually short of funds in the sciences because the president of the university proudly would turn back funds to the state each year. We would beg for funds for equipment but were consistently refused. At the same time good instructors were heading for life boats since there was no chance they would get a raise. The president in question was felicitously equipped with the same handle as a certain well known "double-ought" agent, no fooling. It was a school laugh.
It always puzzled me what grief OS/2 was supposed to create. I used it as a substitute for Windows, running windows s/w into the early years of the century. I gathered that IBM might have still been attempting to extract its pound of flesh from developers, but as far as I was concerned, it worked fine. I built my own machines and it ran on them without problems. I also liked Rexx as a scritping language. It was immensely more useful than does and much less of a pain (to me) than MS BASIC and all its little dialects and subspecialties. The only real grief I encountered was developers who "simply couldn't" do a version for OS/2 - and, of course, MS doing their best to see that their software was less compatible than need be.
History seems to forget how thoroughly MS would break things with each "improvement." Many of the useful "improvements" in Windows were first present in OS/2 and some really nice features vanished when IBM decided the effort wasn't worth the candle. The browser with its tree-structured browsing history was remarkable. No browser since has and anything to match. Even now, relicts of the OS/2 interface are still present in KDE and GNU. Microsoft has finally moved "on" with the horrible looking and acting interface of Windows 10.
A year ago all the power in the office went out. Baffled the designated investigator went to check the breakers - nope, no problem there. Well, there's a main breaker outside next to the transformer beside the meter. Hmmm, tripped. Reset - no power in the building nor any repeat trip, that's odd. Call the power company. Crew of two arrives and goes through all the "it must be your fault" dance steps before looking into their side. Finally. Ah hah! one barbecued squirrel in the conduit running under the driveway from the pole - handy, those fibreoptic cameras. Happily, the line from the pole to the building is power co. responsibility, and the beasty had entered by traveling down through the conduit on the pole into the underground bit. For some reason, once there the critter decided to sample 13,8 kV. When the power company extracted the little corpse, all it needed was sauce.
Polls haven't been "predicting" anything for 200 years. And a loser of the popular vote has been elected before four times: 1824, 1876, 1888, and 2000. That last bit seems to be ignored generally ignored, and I believe also that the electors are not constrained to reflect the popular vote, and more than once they have not. The electoral college was established as a check on raw democracy - i.e., protect the states with small, rich populations from those with big poor ones - in short the ante bellum slave states. Effectively the vote of a citizen of a smaller state is weighted more than if they live in California or New York. Back in the day, it allowed every slave state extra power, and as the country expanded westward, the rural farming states acquired that same biased power. It still offers an extra edge to states with small populations, mostly the "red" states, who now also tend to be poor, religious, and rural. Curiously, decades ago the USSC ruled that while the country could be run that way, the states can't be. In California while representatives were elected on a "one man one vote" assumption, each county also elected two senators to the state government, providing the same area weighted bias for rural counties in the senate, which offset the urban weight given to the state house of representatives. The Supremes said that had to stop - one man one vote was the rule, except in the US Government which has a built in bias in the constitution.
Heh. Used to work for the Forest Service long ago. I returned one day from the field with a slightly sprained ankle. The H&S person asked me to detail the accident. I wrote it up. It was immediately returned as an unacceptable explanation. I had explained that while in motion, the safety helmet, which we referred to as micrometeorite protection - totally useless for real world hazards, slipped over my eyes, and I reacted poorly to being unable to see, misplacing a foot and twisting the ankle while straightening the helmet. I was informed that I could not blame safety equipment. So, when I asked what lie the H&S person preferred they left and a report was never filed.
I would have had money on a high-voltage accident involving a UPS in server room.
"We didn't see what happened. We couldn't see at all until the emergency power kicked back on. Then there was this strange, almost overwhelming smell of barbecue. We've no idea what he did to that UPS; he was only supposed to be inspecting things visually as we understand his SOPs."
Dragging enough information out of clients to actually produce a decent design they can use without much moaning is often a horrible experience. Every thing from the UI to critical but "I forgot about that" things like - "that piece of information can't be public! Why did you do that????" There's nothing like handing the client your notes from hours of discussion and asking them to find just where they mentioned that some data needed to be secured and some did not, and that was a just for a data base system for some archaeologists in Ukraine.
Not really. Maybe a little political perhaps. It is a Chamber of Commerce so most likely corrupt - well to judge from the CCs in the counties I grew up in, and it's being in Georgia - at least in minor ways. They need a web site, some editing capacity and possibly a bit of accounting ad all the social media crud. All of that can be done with FOSS. Why doesn't someone invent some antisocial media?
Ah yes. I once received an "emergency call." The caller asserted that my Bank of America account had a problem. He had a dense, south Asian accent. Then he asked me to give him my bank account number! Hmmm.
"But, you are calling me. Why would you need my account number?"
The assertion is, "we need to verify your account."
"Verify what?"
"Your account!"
"But you should already have the number."
"Yes, we do. But, we need to verify it."
"What did you say your name was?" He really hadn't. There was a pause, "Jim Smith."
"Where are you calling from?"
"Kansas City."
"Interesting, Jim. You know, from your accent, I would have thought you weren't west of Peshawar."
<Click>
I just wish the idiot would quit all the mouth motions and lip pursings. He seems to be trying to look like a horse's ass with haemorrhoids. And, he pays someone to do his hair that way. It looks like a horse holding its tail off to the side. The sole legacy that Trump may have is the divisiveness he has unleashed. That effect is second only to the Civil War and may very well culminate in the same yet.
Given the state of knowledge imparted by modern education I doubt that explaining the origin of "MASER" actually explained much. There are lots of folks that are aware of lasers as glorified flashlights (or electric torches in some geographic corners) that are really cool for things like pointing at charts in marketing sessions and letting you know where the scope thinks you are pointing the rifle.
Apparently, while currency and coin are "legal tender," and in fact currency is marked "Legal tender for all debts public and private," there are no Federal laws that require private or public agencies to actually accept cash. I found that out many years ago. I used to pay my rent in cash. One day I walked in to pay the rent and a woman at the desk said, "I'm sorry, we don't accept cash." I asked her if she had ever read the fine print on a dollar bill. I also pointed out that (at the time) each check cost me 50 cents. That was six dollars a year I wanted off my rent if they were going to insist on checks. After that I wrote checks 50 cents under the rent. There was some back and forth about the issue. The property management company explained that there were only the two women staffing the office and they would be vulnerable to bad guys who wanted the cash. My response was that's fine, I understood completely, but I was simply charging them for the cost of their insisting on checks.
"The new technologies result in new work that hadn't previously been envisaged. ..."
That is true, barely, but irrelevant to the point of being political spin. If you automate 1,000 autoworkers jobs off shore, the automakers are out their jobs indefinitely. There is no guarantee that they will (or can) be trained in some form of "new work." Especially new work that will actually pay a salary or wage comparable on an annual basis withe their old job. Otherwise how do they pay for the house and car they owe the bank a significant chunk of their income for the next 15 to 30 years for under the fractional reserve system which permits banks to print money and then point to the government as the culprit. The basic assumption of capitalism is that markets are efficient at redistributing wealth and generating new wealth. But we do not HAVE a capitalist system, nor a Marxist one for that matter. The wealthiest sectors - that one percent - dread real capitalism more than they do socialism. They can afford socialism but capitalism has a genuine potential to level the financial field in ways the socialist merely dreams of. Instead we have corporate welfare. Profits are privatized while losses are distributed socially. The vanishing middle class and manner in which wealth is becoming increasingly concentrated in the hands of a very, very few, is the problem, it is not a problem with capitalism or with socialism. It derives from oligarchic and kleptocratic patterns that are merely labeled as "capitalism."
People like Trump do think "everyone has a price," but here in the US and apparently in Scotland and Mexico, sometimes the price is "go away and die," not a higher bid. All those big megacorps have made life incredibly difficult in the Bay Area for the majority of the people who live there. Among other processes they forced families to make a choice between lowered living standards and a long, literally life-endangering commute, and a concomiitent degradation of quality of life in the regions where the commuters relocated to: stupidly higher prices, urban thinking (it is commonplace to think of of city dwellers as regarding rural people as hicks), Walmarts and Home Depots.
Those same city folk ("slickers") are often surprised when they discover that country folk don't look up to them and will stand and watch them wade through poison oak after, they ignore a polite, but laconic warning about the plant. There's some satisfaction in telling a "slicker" who demands, "why didn't you warn me?" while heavily slathered in calomine, that you did, and were told to eff off.
That is actually how politics should work. In fact, it is pretty much the evident intent of the authors of the constitution and the Bill of Rights, who were all major students of Locke, Voltaire, and Hume. The basic goals were 1) get religion out the governing business - all they do is fight, 2) protect the individual's right to live his life he sees fit, 3) protect property. That last came adrift in the late 19th C when the Supremes at the time were bribed to find corporations to have at least some of the same legal standing as actual human beings. Since then the SC has leaned on the precedent to support corporate entities right up to the point where they now have protection of free speech and can practically vote, which may be in the pipe line under Trump.
The property can only be re-assessed when the the ownership changes. So, as long as the owners remain alive and do not change the way the title reads, the property taxes stay what they are. Since the family has owned that land since the 1940s, the taxes are probably the very same as they were when Prop 13 passed. In fact, depending on details ownership, the taxes could remain the same for their heirs. We experienced that with 20 acres in Central California when my father passed away. The taxes did not change until one of my sisters had her name taken off the title. Even then there is a limit to how much the taxes can increase.
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