Seems like a roundabout way of saying "there never should have been such a thing as a computer-phone."
917 karma · joined June 30, 2018
Former congressman from NOLA, Bill Jefferson, orchestrated scams involving securing minority-preferred business loans to found rural phone companies. Those rural phone companies would then pay him back by getting pre-arranged contracts from African countries like our phone scammer friends in Nigeria.
When hurricane Katrina hit, they found $90,000 in cash in his freezer. Was pretty close to the $100,000 in cash that the DOJ had videotaped him receiving from the Nigerian government's vice president a few days before.
https://www.nola.com/news/article_ed0819a4-9aab-5510-b68c-41...
I mean, it's never going to go well.
Is it some sort of deranged catharsis in trying to convince yourself?
On the other hand CIA handled instigators killed far in excess of 45,000 people during the 'cold' war.
I know it won't make you feel any better, but when you get into your late 40s (assuming you're younger due to the age of your daughter) it will dawn on you that there's nothing you could have done differently, it's not anyone's fault.
The cruel joke of life is that you don't know what to do until middle-age, and by then you have the briefest of moments to make the most of it because your physical / mental endurance is on borrowed time at that point. That sounds work-related, but the same things apply to people's social lives too. They don't recognize their compulsive behaviors and mistakes until they're old enough to know better. Some never do.
https://www.dallasnews.com/news/crime/2021/04/27/allen-man-w...
Do you really think that was the motivation? That someone is going to bat for Bob at Alice's expense?
Or do you think it more likely that "equality" is another way of saying both Bob and Alice will never threaten someone in management enough to cost them even a minute of sleep on any given night, and that's all management really cares about at the end of the day.
> This mentality of thinking is exactly the problem, I think. You want a tool that can solve an entire class of problems. We are telling you that no such tool can exist to do what you want, the problem and the tools don't work that way. Each project should be planned as a snowflake.
> This is exactly right and is the biggest problem with "Management" types. They want a "cookie cutter methodology" to solve all their problems so they can be spared thinking through each one. Hence the various "Management" fads and buzzwords.
Which is another way to say... if there was a system to do their thing, they wouldn't have to pay smarter people a lot of money to do it. Reliance on a system (any system) tells you that the people don't value your expertise, but rather see you as a cost to be minimized.
I order my dog's meds offshore, plain post mail from Australia flew by DHL and got here (Texas) in under a week.
Bingo.
Of the two, Facebook has added functionality over the years that does quite well (groups supplant lazy entrenched competitors like forums and reddit, marketplace supplants lazy entrenched competitors like eBay and craigslist), while Twitter has... aligned themselves politically? Hired a bunch of bad ideas from Facebook to market themselves to celebrities (pre-censored posts)?
Speaking of aligning themselves politically, look at point #1 in their list of intended uses for the new API:
> Improve the health and safety of the public conversation
Looking to recruit free censors seems high on the list of needs / wants. The highest, as a matter of fact!
And yet you can land an airplane without looking out the windows, by measuring timestamps between source and destination of a signal (GPS).
I'd argue not that impractical.
-- the person currently in charge of the DOJ, when running for office, speaking to donors.
> ... FBI agent texted one of the shooters before the event, "tear up Texas." [2]
> In an affidavit filed in another case the government disclosed that the FBI undercover agent had actually "traveled to Garland, Texas, and was present... at the event." [3]
> Last month (article from August 2018), the stately Belo Mansion in downtown Dallas was home to an event many have been anticipating for over a decade: the investiture of Judge Karen Gren Scholer as a federal judge for the Northern District of Texas. It was one of those rare occasions in today’s hyperpartisan environment when local jurists, elected officials and ordinary citizens from both sides of the aisle had cause for celebration — the March 7 swearing-in of a highly respected jurist who is the first Asian-American U.S. district judge in Texas." [4]
Note the date here, that judge was sworn in on March 7, 2018. What did she do on March 8, 2018? Send a message not to sue the FBI, that's what... [5]. It should be noted that the Dallas Morning News is not a left leaning publication, to the contrary it's chock full of neocons, hence the hagiography written for this judge appointed to put in a fix for a 3 letter agency. No one outside of one DC blog seemed to notice that on her first day in the ND of Texas a brand new judge, sworn in the day before, took over a 3 year old case involving the FBI orchestration of terrorist activity in at least two states. [6] Cases in which the DOJ (stupidly) prosecuting one case admitted to instigating the so-called terrorists in another case halfway across the country.
1. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/29/opinion/sunday/terrorist-... and https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/21/government-age...
2. https://theintercept.com/2016/08/09/fbi-agent-goaded-garland...
3. https://reason.com/2017/03/29/that-time-an-undercover-fbi-ag...
4. https://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/editorials/2018/08/01/sea...
5. https://i.imgur.com/ivGq1In.png
6. https://freebeacon.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Motion-to-...
One of Trump's 2017 judicial appointments in the ND of Texas dismissed the civil suit against the FBI, DOJ, and Comey by name for organizing the "ISIS" mass shooting in Garland, TX in 2015. We know they organized it because local cops caught an undercover in the parking lot who was waiting on the shooters to arrive. [1] He had to identify himself as undercover to stop the local cops from shooting him. [2] A security guard who was shot in the incident brought the civil suit against the feds, discovery produced text messages showing the same undercover FBI agent giving the shooters instructions. The FBI also had to remove flags from databases so the shooters could pass background checks for gun purchases.
And before anyone falls for the knee-jerk tendency of thinking one political party is different from the other, the judge who dismissed the case on her first day was a stalled Obama appointment to the same seat before she was a Trump appointment confirmed for that seat. And the person who blew the whistle on the FBI paying people to recruit and train domestic "terrorists" said they began doing so when Obama took office in 2009.
1. https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/phoenix/2017/02/1...
2. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/terrorism-in-garland-texas-what...
I managed to get the desktop app working in Linux after messing with Wine and permissions (it had some cache files written to a relative directory and what not) and after telling management about it they figured the potential market for such a thing would be small enough that they could just send any support requests about it directly to me for setup help, and likewise tell the sales reps to forward inquiries to me if Linux came up on a sale or demo install.
In the decade I worked there I got exactly one call from a Linux admin at a law firm asking for the docs on using the desktop app.
With that in mind, for quick/dirty things they're great. I've thrown together proofs of concept in NodeRed in 45 minutes that would otherwise take hours / days of boilerplate.
https://gist.github.com/awhileback/1fffac899d9321a6a9ec15bc9...
Requires some ocr / pdf parsing / metadata tools, see the comments.
Autopiloted cars are just investor marketing.
I can point to a handful of low-effort journos whose whole schtick is asking dumb questions on Twitter so that the would-be know-it-alls can post "well, actually" to them in the replies.
By virtue of the engagement numbers they clearly love it, and come back for more slop every day.
Therefore, arguing precedent and consistency is relatively pointless. My point was an exercise in "anything goes, so make the law fit the argument." That's what Chevron would do.
In other words: What's the desired outcome? That corporations cannot wantonly create mass surveillance any more than the government can. So make the law fit the desired reality: extend the 4th amendment to say that privacy is a basic human right and people cannot contractually sign it away any more than they can contractually sign away themselves into forced labor. A clever judge could outlaw H1 visas in the same ruling and get 2 birds with 1 stone.
A person cannot sell themselves into slavery. Yet we allow the US government to endorse indentured servitude for immigrant labor, because corporations want indentured servitude.
Nor can a US citizen sign away workplace safety rights, legally. Yet we allow US construction companies to rampantly hire off-the-books undocumented labor so that they can freely ignore workplace safety rights, since no one will exist to make claims against them.
It would have been perfectly reasonable for a court to broadly ban surveillance of individuals by telecom companies back in the 1990s, based on the same principles that those courts have willfully violated on behalf of corporations in the other examples above.
By extension, people can learn some things about their employer by their opinions of using open source libraries in company products.
1. The company is against open source entirely, preferring to buy closed source alternatives, which tells you that the company thinks software development (and by extension you as the developer) is just a cost to be minimized that they don't care about otherwise.
2. The company is not against open source, but does a poor job of keeping tabs on security patches, which just tells you that the bosses are not very smart, I suppose.
3. The company does a good job of using open source, contributing back to the libraries they use to improve them, and keeps up with security patches and issues, which means the company is invested in its developers and development processes and is likely a good place to work.
To set up a table saw (generic multi-function tool) to do what a tenoner does requires quite a bit of ingenuity. It's going to be a trip to the machine shop anyway because you'll need a shaper extension (or a standalone shaper / router table) to cut the coped ends of the muntins and rails. I spent as much on a router table extension for my table saw as I spent on the saw itself (the saw was a Powermatic model 66 from the 1970s, bought used).
Cutting the grooves (rabbets) where the glass in a wooden window or door rests is not only rather dangerous (you have to use a stacked up "dado" blade which is rather rough in terms of operation, and your fingers have to be close to it), but not trivial to set up for. You have to do the muntin ends with the boards standing on end, which requires a tenon jig for the table saw. These [1] videos [2] present a pretty good picture of how silly this all is for the muntins (the 'bars' in a window) and this one [3] is how you have to use a table saw to cut the glass recess in the rails / stiles.
In the case of the tenoning jig, if you search for one, you'll find a plethora of videos and guides from people claiming to have made one on their own out of scrap lumber, plywood, particle board, etc. They're really javascript frameworks manifest into mechanical devices when you watch them. There's no concern in any of these people's faces for the lack of rigidity, unstable nature of the materials they're using to build the thing, or infinitely small likelihood of longevity for the tool they've built. The only concern is making a blog post or youtube video that gets some clicks, just like youtube "coding channels," lol.
Making windows and doors that fit together properly, from experience, needs repeatable accuracy in your cutting machines of about 5 thousandths of an inch. How do people think they can do that with plastic / plywood / particle board jigs they home-built for multi-purpose machines? It's insanity, especially when a very simple purpose-built machine from the 1960s / 1970s can do what they're spending hours on in about 10 seconds, with perfectly repeatable precision.
Eventually all of this becomes a philosophical discussion, of course. My suggestion in the post above that people educate themselves about architecture and art to improve their own houses denotes doing that in their spare time. As in, not spending their spare time as a consultant or contract developer to make more money and just throw money at the problem and hope for a better outcome. Required in the undertaking is the acceptance that money will not buy everything they want. A dangerous consideration, indeed.
The whole world was built with a post-ww2 American economic model, in which factories get expensive purpose-built machines and hobbyists get poor multi-function machines that prevent them from competing with factories. Everyone can take whatever middle-man place they prefer if they make a living in this market, and prices can always go up because demand will always go up too, right? Except when (insert cog in the machine) doesn't, then it all breaks down and starts to consume itself for the last few quarters of bonuses, and the finale is the "Goldman Sachs special" when a finance firm loads a company like Powermatic with debt that they fully intend to default on: the mob-style bust-out.
1. https://youtu.be/jb-KpTfgwQo