champu

!!! Go Hawks !!!

I know people use this broken word all the time, but if you're trying to make a specific distinction on a word, I would pick something other than, "surveilling." It's like taking the word "consternation" and saying "this situation consterns me." You end up with something that's kinda close but just sounds goofy. And the level of rigor suggested by the real word, surveying, is largely ambiguous and probably spans the line you would draw on what is acceptable.

Indeed... Sesame Street reference fail. I could edit it to fix it, but I'll just own it instead.

Six... Six threads at once. ah. ah. ah.

Moore's Law is pretty specific, and certainly can't go on forever, but the wikipedia article on it is actually a decent discussion of the progression of computer power in general. My point was simply that claiming end-all-be-all computing capabilities is pretty silly. I'm biased though, in my industry it's not about gate counts nor flops, it's about what you can do with one transistor.

The sum of the two need not be constant. In other words, both can be increased, or both can be decreased simultaneously. In the case of the US, both are increasing. I think you're talking past one another. In the context of this discussion, safety/security means preventing "bad" things from happening and privacy/freedom means leaving people who aren't doing "bad" things alone within that domain that is trying to be secured. You can, as you point out, increase both safety/security and privacy/freedom within a domain at the same time if you identfy an existing invasive and ineffective practice and replace it with a less invasive and more effective practice. That is to say, the process of trading privacy for safety is not adiabatic. And, of course, across domains it's easy to have privacy vs. safety going in different directions. Note how states across the country are simultaneously instituting bans on assault weapons and decriminalizing marajuana. There are plenty of people who see this as win-win and plenty who see it as lose-lose. However, provided that the methods you institute are at least somewhat effective in a given domain, then lawrocket has a point... the bigger the tuna net you cast the more dolphins that are going to get trapped in it. Preventing spactacular terrorist attacks, for example, means finding out about it ahead of time. This could be a very short amount of time before it takes place (x-raying luggage and millimeter wave scanners at airports to try and find devices), it could be well ahead of when it takes place (analyzing call patterns or digging further into the content itself to identify a plan), or it could be ahead of when it might have even occured at all (trolling extremist forums and running a sting operation with a fake bomb.) You can pretty easily see the pivacy vs safety trade off as the government does more or less in each of these phases.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law

I think we can all agree that the Z80 processor is, and always has been, ballin' outta control.

Someone apparently had three firearms who, in hindsight, shouldn't have had them. I haven't seen any details about whether or not they were his or his family members or how he obtained them. I also haven't seen any information about whether the firearms or magazines in question violated California laws. I've already written about what I consider reasonable measures and if the above details come out I'd be happy to discuss them in the context of my suggestions.

Not sure if you're joking or if you've never worked at a big organization before. I take so many of these 20 minute annual refresher trainings throughout the year I'm probably close to a worst-case example. Ethics, export compliance, electrostatic discharge, material review board, workplace emergency, highbay safety, half a dozen security related ones, FOD eleminatiion, workplace violence, information systems, sexual harassment, and conflicts of interest to name a few off the top of my head. Thinking of it as an "award" is akin to Steve Martin celebrating in The Jerk when he discovers his name made it into the phone book.

While you can request anything, not being secret (or otherwise classified) does not automatically mean it is releasable under the Freedom of Information Act. It's entirely possible for information processed on a .gov system to be exempt from release. More important in this instance, though, is that you have to be pretty specific when making an FOIA request, so regardless of whether there are two destination mailboxes or one, a request for a person's correspondence may only net you some of it if you're not exhaustive in listing aliases in your request. So if alias usage is found to be widespread (for whatever reason, good or bad) that actually does have a negative impact on the effectiveness of FOIA requests. I am skeptical, however, of the assertion that people are doing this for the express purpose of circumventing FOIA.

Came for this, leaving satisfied. To all those jumping cameras as soon as you can find someone who will let you on their plane with one, try not to hurt yourself or anyone else while you're Blair-Witching it up. Also, don't forget to make sure the lens bezel on your gopro matches your jumpsuit or you'll look like an asshole.

Yes, baby! Even better than "ilk". And we issue decoder rings. Do the rings have an engraving of a South American mountain range around the table?

I'd imagine getting paid to be there and talking to people who had paid to be there to learn about a particular topic had something to do with it. Also, nobody flips the hell out when you teach circuit theory complaining that the whole class is a bullshit republican approximation that refuses to acknowledge liberal displacement current.

The leak of the video of the helicopter incident in Iraq and the leak of the cables were two seperate events. I'll refer you to yet another years old post that I stand by. I've heard it all before and I could do this all day.

What, no love for Bahrain?

I've shared my opinion on this several times years ago but in short, I don't believe Manning should be allowed to hide behind the "whistle blower" moniker. It's my opinion that while his motivation was not to specifically aid a given enemy, it was also not simply to uncover a select injustice.

I ride my bicycle to work and now that I think about it, I can't tow shit. That's it, after work I'm going to buy an F-650.

If all the trolls were actually one person I'd give him or her a lot of credit for being able to adjust writing style so well.

If women become breadwinners more and more frequently that's fine by me. So long as they remain afraid of spiders, women will still have a reason to keep us around.

Why do you think they come in the foil wrappers? So you can't sneak them through security... ...Obviously.

With a fruit filling shroud to keep you from burning your hand.

Oh HAARP... ...honestly who doesn't love HAARP?

What's important is we teach children never to own, depict, or talk about firearms, for their own safety. "You're a child Timmy. For god sakes, think of yourself!"

They are talking about a modification to the magazine release on a rifle that prevents you from being able to use it with your finger. It makes it much smaller and recesses it so that you have to use a small pointed object (such as a loose round, hence the name "bullet button") to remove the magazine. The point is that it makes removing the magazine sufficiently cumbersome so as to ease the fear (or so it was thought) of people who believe that people reloading quickly is a statistically significant factor in gun violence.