Cute? sure.

But somebody was holding that camera.

Since one staff person can clearly contain the pandas, the other one could sweep up the leaves with relative ease.

In many English dialects it is common to say something like "August twenty fourth, 1976" and since, as Unitedstatesians we(by which I implicate myself, not necessarily the reader) are obsessed with not using British standards, it not totally unexpected that we would do it that way.

I advocate simply moving to unix timestamps.

In addition to being $14/29 ( shipping auto added to pledge - $20 to the EU) on the kickstarter, it is also likely that selling this thing anywhere in the industrialized world is Illegal under copyright law.

Right now they have > 10x their required amount, they are going to have a hard time dealing with the new volume as is. So no benefit to joining at this point. It will likely be much cheaper to pick them up from newark/digikey or even sparkfun when they are actually in stock. assuming they actually ship and nobody with an IP claim to the linux kernel their chip supplier is stealing decides to sue them over it.

Super combative terminal jokey from the winning team is on camera saying he can't close IE On a system that is supposed to be secure ... I'm guessing CTF at DEF CON would wipe the floor with these folks.

Claiming to have "won" against the NSA at the end, more like failed less than the others.

These exercises are fine in themselves, but anybody who knows what they are doing and has been tasked to comply with NIST security controls ( the ones the US Gov requires) will notice that many of the requirement unambiguously reduce the security of the system, and the folks who audit these projects don't care how bad it is as long as it's checked on the list.

The problem for the military is that regimentation, "sailor proof" instructions and other necessities of running a massive organization that has to assume the lowest common denominator just don't work in computer security. If people don't know what they are doing no amount of check-listing is going to solve the problem.

Anybody who really knows what they are doing -- as some of these students may one day -- will realize that you have to choose one or the other optimal security or regulation compliance.

disclaimer: my rant may be excessive, I just wasted 18mo building a server cluster that needed to pass gov audit - so I'm bitter

I usually sneeze into a 3-4 times folded handkerchief, fold it one more time to contain the mess and put it in my pocket, and my hands don't get wet. As a kerchief user, it seems odd to go one ply.

In a pinch I'm a fan of bend over and sneeze straight at the floor, elbow is my second choice, straight into the hand is only for the most awkward of positions when the others are not feasible.

They have "value" the same way all currencies have "value", in that they are a reliable way to determine if somebody else has stored value in the currency market in question.

Calling them "coins" is probably confusing, people don't have bitcoins, people have bitcoin accounts, which you can make as many of as you wish, but new bitcoin accounts are always empty.

To get "coins" the central p2p accounting ledger called the block-chain has to show that some other account transferred coins to your account, that transfer log has to go all the way back to coins generating through mining.

The specifics of how the accounting is verified is some very cool crypto, but suffice it to say it is functionally impossible to forge bitcoin transactions.

mined coins do not stop until 2140, but the rate of mining is defined by the protocol in such a way that it drops by 50% every 210,000 cycles, so it asymptotically approaches 21Mil.

The "useful" thing that the system is calculating is actually the bookkeeping for the entire network.

Machines that mine are the accountants/auditors for the network, and the mined coins are their probabilistic payment for bootstrapping the economy.

As the mining reward drops low it becomes needful for the mining machines to generate revenue through transaction fees, which people can elect to pay to prioritize their transactions over people who don't elect to add fees to their transaction.

The flaw in this argument is that he is arguing from a non-existent present.

He argues that we can't curtail the second amendment until we reach cultural consensus, but depending on your interpretation, we either already have curtailed it, or never have.

There are basically two reasonable interpretations of the 2nd, either
A) it guarantees the rights as they were at the time: white landowning men can have muzzle-loaded un-rifled scatter guns.
or B) it guarantees weapon parity with foreign and domestic militaries: civilian nuke-ICBMs etc

Functionally nobody has a problem with A, and nobody endorses B. We are already on the continuum, it's pretty late to demand that we never get there. We are not having a debate of quality, only one of quantity.

Power in politics and the economy is violence. This nonsense at the beginning about how these protesters are totally wrong for hitting the douche-bag is completely blind to the reality of how power is used to solve political/economic disputes.

If students, in a completely symbolic act of opposition march on a university, they get beaten with clubs and attacked with chemical weapons. The people who support them decry the violence, the people who oppose them say they got what they asked for. No action is taken to reduce the disproportionate response by those in power. That's what happens on one side of the class war.

Conversely in a symbolic act of douchebagary some guy walks into a crowd of pissed off people and starts harassing them, with the explicit intent of getting his ass kicked. In this case a few of the protesters, in a non-coordinated fashion throw a couple punches, and other protesters intervene to break it up. Not only do the proponents of said douchbag claim that this somehow proves he is correct about how bad the protesters position is, but the supporters of the protesters also get their undergarments tied in knots expressing their disapproval. This is how the losing side in the class war decides to unilaterally disarm, so don't wonder why we are where we are.

Unions always come to power with the force of violence as a tool, just as workers are always subjugated to power elietes with violence as a tool, to pretend that one side in these disputes somehow has an obligation to be more "civilized", when being so means losing, is to buy hook line and sinker, the propaganda of their opponents.

It would be nice if these disputes could be handled peacefully, but the power elites of the world have learned from the passive resistance movements of the past, and immunized our society from the future use of non-violent civil disobedience. The only thing left is clubs in the street. The only question is if the protesters will have them as well as the police.

@Enzoblue

Like in any democracy, in a union , you get the representation you organize/vote for. Many Democracies are bad, I would even accept that most are. None the less, given the choice between a poorly lead union, where the workers can replace the union leaders, and an un-mediated well lead employer(tyranny), where the leader can be replaced at random by fate/the market, I choose the first.

>> ^renatojj:

@Kofi if 200 billion is not enough, wouldn't that amount increase if government didn't take away so much from it? If people were allowed to keep more of their money, I think they would have more to likely donate to charity.


Well if you look at "charity" breakdown, it's only about $35B that goes to anything like disaster relief.

So let's use that real number. And then let's pretend that it's not already spent on ongoing everyday problems, and then let's pretend the ~$60B in tax revenue that these "charities" are exempted from costs nothing.

Are you seriously claiming that you could put together a lean-mean non-profit relief org that could manage to be prepared for, and provide aid in any arbitrary situation like hurricane Sandy for $35B a year? What about the next thing? What if you go a Katrina instead?

>> ^renatojj:


Also, I'm sure you'll agree that just throwing money at a problem is not a solution, whether it's 200 billion or 2 trillion, the amount isn't everything. Just look at how much more money government takes and how poorly it does its job. Wouldn't charity, without the wasteful middle man of government, improve the situation?
Besides, wasting money is the opposite of charity, because it's money that won't go into productive employment, goods, services, and investments. So society is worse off, and while most of us can still go on with our lives, those who are needy and poor are the most affected by any amount of wasted resources.


Large Organizations are wasteful, if they are for-profit, charity, or government, having a large enough infrastructure to address large problems is costly, that is not a government problem.

We live in a high infrastructure technological society. We don't form bucket brigades when someone's house catches on fire, we have professionals, with effective equipment, who show up and solve this problem more quickly and efficiently, and at a lower aggregate cost to society.

The same is true of disaster relief, we pay for the maintenance of a professional disaster relief infrastructure, and it's cheaper than either doing it ad-hoc, or not having anything in place at all.

Kindness and charity are good and real human impulses, but they are not preparedness, we have organizations for that, we call them governments.

She never would have gotten that job at doublemeat palace if they knew about this.

I think you are right, he is trying to make a point, the problem is, this "absurd scenario" he's using to make a point is already the law of the land in the US.

When Private clubs called churches are excused from taxation, everybody has to pay the share these clubs use but don't pay for. When one attends church, they get their money back in lower membership fees, but those of us who don't belong to these clubs just pay for them without receiving any benefit.

neo-conservatism seems to now full depend on the ability to deny the fact that giving someone $100 and excusing their $100 debt are materially the same thing.

>> ^entr0py:

Honestly, I think he's being facetious. He's a conservative radio host, so he must be against the affordable care act and the individual mandate specifically. I think he's saying "taxing people over being uninsured is as ridiculous as taxing them over not going to church, because church is good for you". It's a version of the supreme court's 'eat your broccoli mandate' slippery slope argument. Only, as KnivesOut said, designed to troll liberals.

>> ^Winstonfield_Pennypacker:

Tell you what, the day a single preacher, nun or even believer gets physically assaulted by a homosexual for their beliefs, you will have something approaching a point.
http://www.ktvu.com/news/news/anger-over-prop-8-erupts-in-san-fr
ancisco/nKjWD/


protest/counter-protest
corpses: 0
blood spilled: none

http://www.wnd.com/2008/11/80220/


Inflamitory blog Posts:
corpses: 0
blood spilled: none

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4Xb-au-wpU

alleged assault
alleged corpses: 0
alleged blood spilled: none



Please contrast you "examples" of "violence" with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_violence_against_LGBT_people_in_the_United_States

Your case for "this is just more bullying" is based on an absurd argument for moral equivalence. Forceful, even offensive, speech against real physical/deadly violence, is not morally equivalent to speech advocating, or rationalizing, said violence.

The gay folks in the links, as well as Dan Savage, are not protesting/speaking against people for being Christian, but for being bigots. The use of Christianity to rationalize bigotry is the choice of bigots.

If Christians don't want Christianity to be scrutinized, they need to stop other Christians from using their religion to advocate bigotry.

"At the end of the day I'd rather not be in any category at all" -NDT

This sounds good, but is, at best, cute.

I like NDT, and I understand his (small p)political reason for taking this "position", but I don't believe him.

I do believe that he does not want to deal with it, but that does not reflect well on him.

Remember this is a man who tells a story of how he was the first black expert on TV who was an expert in something other than being black.

Black people in the US don't organize and identify as a group to share vit-D suppliments, but because there are very real socio-political disadvantaged be being a member of a non-white group. Yet NDT not only does not balk at taking this non-label, which would be completely non existent in the absence of whiteness as a label, but embraces it.

I think it's great that he publicly discusses his blackness, our society feels this is good to such an extent that it would be considered offensive if he were to disclaim being black, or to argue that it did not concern him.

I don't see how this disowning of this other marginalized group, presumably just because people in it can "pass" by waiving their hand about agnosticism, is any less offensive.

>> ^vaire2ube:

something odd... about wanting transparency.... in a system where you still have "royal" anything?
sometimes things are just based on someone's whimsy. down with the queen!


I find it interesting that constitutional monarchies tend to be better than the "pure democracies" at being just, because a small, basically symbolic subset of their government is non-partisan.

The US is supposed to have a independent judiciary, but if you look at the Roberts court, it pretty clear that that process has broken down.

I think it's a good example of the practical application of irony. Sometimes systems which seem sub-optimal, or even self contradictory, actually work better than Ideal systems.