Various Artists | Format: MP3 Download

Download: $0.00
(Visit the Top Free in MP3 Albums list for authoritative information on this product's current rank.)
The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again.
Bruce Schneier, a vocal critic of security measures used by the Transportation Security Administration, was asked to testify before Congress about TSA's security screening initiatives but then was "formally uninvited" after the agency complained.
"On Friday, at the request of the TSA, I was removed from the witness list," Schneier wrote on his blog. "The excuse was that I am involved in alawsuit against the TSA, trying to get them to suspend their full-body scanner program. But it's pretty clear that the TSA is afraid of public testimony on the topic, and especially of being challenged in front of Congress. They want to control the story, and it's easier for them to do that if I'm not sitting next to them pointing out all the holes in their position. Unfortunately, the committee went along with them."
The effectiveness of the methods used by the terrorists responsible for the 9/11 attacks jolted the world's governments into action on their airport-security procedures. So the Transportation Security Administration was formed in America; luggage screening was widely increased; cockpit doors were strengthened. And in the years since, authorities have responded to further attempted attacks by adding new layers of security, enforcing the removal of shoes, banning liquids of any significant size from hand luggage and rolling out full-body scanning machines. Is this all so much theatre, designed to give the appearance of security, while actually distracting attention and funding from other more useful ways of keeping bombs and bad people off planes? Or are they sensible responses to real threats, which require passengers to suffer minor inconveniences for the good of all?
In the entire decade or so of airport security since the attacks on America on September 11th 2001, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has not foiled a single terrorist plot or caught a single terrorist.
More than 6 billion consecutive safe arrivals of airline passengers since the 9/11 attacks mean that whatever the annoying and seemingly obtuse airport-security measures may have been, they have been ultimately successful.e
INQUIRY AREA | APPROPRIATE | INAPPROPRIATE |
Age | Questions about age are only permitted if it is necessary to ensure that a person is legally old enough to do the job. | Questions about age, dates of attending school, dates of military service, requests for birth certificate. |
Address | What is your address? | Examples: Do you own or rent your home? How long have you lived at your current address? |
Arrest Record | May ask about arrests or pending charges if they are substantially related to the job. | Questions about arrests or pending charges for jobs other than those that are substantially related to the particular job. |
Convictions | May ask about convictions if they are substantially related to the job. May let applicants know that policy requires a background check prior to hire. | Questions about convictions that are not substantially related to the job. |
Citizenship/ | May ask about legal authorization to work in the specific position if all applicants are asked. | Examples: Are you a US citizen? Where were you born? Where were your parents born? Are you an American? What kind of name is that? |
Credit Rating or Garnishments | Only if the job requires significant financial responsibility or access to cash or funds. In most cases, no question is acceptable. | Questions about credit ratings since they have little or no relations to job performance. |
Disability | Are you able to perform the essential functions of this job – with or without accommodations? Questions about knowledge of skills necessary to perform the job requirements. | Example: Do you have a disability? What is the nature of severity of your disability? |
Education | Inquiries about degrees or equivalent experiences that are related to the job being applied for. | Questions about education that are not related to the job being applied for. |
Family/Marital Status | Whether an applicant can meet work schedules or job requirements. If asking, should ask all applicants. | Any inquiry about marital status: married, single, separated, divorced, and engaged; children; pregnancy or child care plans. |
Health | None | Example: How is your (or your family’s) health? |
Military | Type of education and experience in service as it relates to a particular job. | Type of discharge or registration status. |
Name | May ask current legal name. “Is additional information, such as a different name or nickname necessary in order to check job references?” | Questions about national origin, ancestry, or prior marital status. |
Organizations | Inquiries about professional organizations related to the position. | Inquiries about organizations that might indicate race, sex, religion or national origin. |
Race or Appearance | None | Comments about complexion, color, height, or weight. |
Religion | Describe the work schedule and ask whether applicant can work that schedule. If asking, should ask of all applicants. | Inquiries on religious preferences, affiliations, or denominations. |
Sexual Orientation | None | Inquiries about sexual orientation. Inquiries revealing stereotypes for certain sexual orientation (i.e. why do you wear an earring?) |
Work Experience | Applicants’ previous employment experience. | Questions about sick leave use or worker’s compensation claims in previous jobs. |
The thing about protesting that kind of thing, is you put yourself at risk. This is largely why I am part of that complacent mass. I have a job, a home, a bright looking future. I think there's lots of problems with the world that should be fixed, but I sure as hell am not going to risk losing what I have. The only people who can protest this stuff are people who don't have much to begin with, and they just get shrugged off as "jobless hippies". It's actually a suspiciously well engineered little system.
Calling up the school in a huff because the cafeteria serves junk food on the other hand.. very low risk for the bored stay at home mom..
The problem isn't the outrage, it's that it's aimed at useless targets. By and large, the bigger problem with our society is complacency. When we really need outrage, e.g., to put bankers in jail for their crimes, the same busibodies are nowhere to be found
What is “WASTE again”?
“WASTE again” enables you to create a decentralized and secure private mesh network using an unsecure network, such as the internet. Once the public encryption keys are exchanged, sending messages, creating groupchats and transferring files is easy and secure.
Creating a mesh
To create a mesh you need at least two computers with “WASTE again” installed. During installation, a unique pair of public and private keys for each computer is being generated. Before the first connection can be established, you need to exchange these public keys. These keys enable “WASTE again” to authenticate every connection to other “WASTE again” clients.
After exchanging the keys, you simply type in the computers IP address to connect to. If that computer is located behind a firewall or a NAT-router, you have to create a portmap first to enable incoming connections.
At least one computer in your mesh has to be able to accept incoming connections, making it a “public node”. If no direct connection between two firewalled computers can be made, “WASTE again” automatically routes your traffic through one or more of the available public nodes.
Every new node simply has to exchange keys with one of the connected nodes and then connect to it. All the other nodes will exchange their keys automatically over the mesh.
Which is rather unfortunate, since I can say without exaggeration that Blackboard is probably the worst piece of modern software I've ever had to use. Moodle's certainly not perfect, but I've found it absolutely fine in general day-to-day use; Blackboard is slow, buggy, and has a web interface which manages to disable such revolutionary new browser features as 'the back button', and 'middle click'.
Compared to just about any other popular webapp however, it is complete shit. It is like all those horrible intranet applications sold to business that are completely dependent on plugins just serve static content, require 7 clicks to do something that should require 2, have poor browser support, break when you do normal things like click the back button, and seems to get worse with each new release.
One of the things I remember about Blackboard is the regular re-introduction of old bugs. Blackboard would fix a bug and the bug would come back a couple of releases later, at which point we would have to prove to Blackboard support that the bug had come back; because of course they had it in their head that they had fixed it. And of course, Blackboard would take several months to fix any bug that had any kind of workaround, even though many times the workarounds were completely unreasonable, like they IE7 compatibility workaround: 'disable every security feature of Internet Explorer 7'.
after (how many years?) the latest release finally fixes the race condition that would delete an entire class's worth of grades if two teaching assistants (who teach, say, different lab sections for a single lecture section) dared to upload grades at the same time! The same release forces you to triple-click on a cell to enter a grade, but hey, we've almost advanced to 1960's-era databases!
But in all seriousness, I don't know a single professor in the department who would use Blackboard if it weren't mandated for all courses by the university administration.
Using Blackboard is bad enough, but to get the full effect, you should try administering it.
Or developing for it.
It's the opposite of intuitive, I had to have someone take me through how to upload a simple SCORM course the first time. It's burried under about six menus, half of which tend to be un-alt-tagged generic icons. Needless to say that a year later when we had to do it again I had completely forgotten how to do it.
It's *really* clunky, and every one I've seen uses frames like they're going out of fashion. Rather than, you know, DOA.
And it's not just Blackboard Learn. It's every piece of software they've ever written (I have a great deal of experience extending and supporting BBTS at every level, there were massive gaps in middleware that they didn't provide that I had to write myself). I'm quite convinced they design the software to be intentionally bad to secure service contracts (that are enormously expensive, indeed). Even something as simple as monitoring their services was a nightmare. The tools they provided almost always hung when opened. I had to reverse engineer the protocol they were using and write an app that would detect when a service was having problems and auto-restart it. One service would just kill itself if it got too many errors (as I was told by one of their engineers, it maintains a count of failed actions, if that count gets too high, the process either hangs or exits), and these errors were internal, not really "errors," and happened at a very rapid rate. I just can't comprehend that level of bad. Don't even get me started on the DB structure, the backup methods, nor the interfaces between the individual components and their 3rd-party bindings (which weren't well maintained). Holy shit, man. Holy shit.
There were some bright people working there, unfortunately they have to support a monumental failure. I feel their pain.
For awhile they shipped a buggy version of tomcat that could not close the threads it opened. This resulted in tomcat seizing after a week or so of being up.
I spent two weeks troubleshooting this and was literally advised to "RTFM" by Blackboard support when I contacted them for help. The kicker? Blackboard was never even aware of the bug until after they accidentally fixed it by shipping an updated tomcat binary with a new release.
Every time our college escapes Blackboard and their horrendous technical support and technical staff they buy the company we moved to. Likewise, every time they buy the company we moved to, the technical support takes a noticeable nosedive. Our support people notice it, our staff notices it, it's just that obvious when it happens. We have to almost fight with them to get things done sometimes and the only thing they can manage to do with reasonable turnaround time is notify you of outages (caused, the majority of the time, at least for us, by their mistakes).
I had several Professors who used the Course Page features, such as Forums, File Management, the ability to allow students the ability to upload files, and email in the Banner portals rather than use BlackBoard. That speaks volumes to me.
Given the rarity of any terrorist attack before the TSA existed I would say that it is far more reasonable for the TSA to have the burden of proof why they should be allowed to continue to exist. - http://yro.slashdot.org/story/12/03/26/2221246/congress-capitulates-to-tsa-refuses-to-let-bruce-schneier-testify
...In the end, The Economist chose Drupal for its vibrant community, and the ecosystem of modules that it produces....
...With the sponsorship and encouragement of The Economist, Cyrve open sourced its migrate modulewhich is the heart of its migration methodology....