22 February 2013

Thoughtcrimes

Another discussion board post for my "Ethics In Information Technology" class. I've some fables nearly-ready to blog/post whence I get my homework done, sose prolly tomorrow at lest.


Question:

Read the article in Time Magazine Asia on Chinese censorship of the Internet: www.time.com/time/asia/magazine/article/0,13673,501051010-1112920,00.html
 Comment on why computing and networking access is restricted in some countries? What is good or bad about the restrictions? How is it different from the US? Provide an example.

[thread] Discussion 6 - Chinese Censorship


Who watches the watchers? -- The efforts of Chinese censorship restrict free speech, to maintain a narrative of China's government. I do not like that procedure because if the censorship is unjust the abusive element to that equation can continue persecuting those who are freely speaking while the accused has no rights, thus it is unfair.

To provide an example of other countries, North Korea has recently allowed network access to visiting foreigners in an effort to arrest spies from reporting-out the events that occur in that country. Meanwhile, the citizens of said country are unable to learn from the successes of the outside world, which would benefit them greatly. -- http://www.fastcompany.com/3006165/fast-feed/north-korea-opens-door-mobile-internet-foreigners -- whereas keeping data private is concerned, what for example US people/companies keep private is a collection of data they have acquired freely and openly, the individuals and entities in a censored environment can only be indoctrinated, which does not absolutely prevent malicious intents and in the process of being enacted sets a bad example, thereby teaching the crimes it intends to prevent. Perpetual totalitarianism, a cycle of violence created by a disrespect of free will and private property.

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15 February 2013

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?






They say if you forget something important, relax and rely on your brain's grey matter, if it's important probability becomes practicality. I had a discussion board assignment for a class, which the topic was Privacy Laws. I've been wanting to say what I've just written for some time, to the bottom-feeders, posers, and political leeches from the commie side of the political spectrum, when I was your age we didn't sell our children to the government; learn and enjoy. 

[Begin Thread]

Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) 2002

http://www.forbes.com/sites/frederickallen/2012/07/29/sarbanes-oxley-10-years-later-boards-are-still-the-problem/ (Forbes July 2012)

This article makes mark of the Sarbanes-Oxley 10th anniversary, but inveighs that the Act did not go far enough, particularly noting that it misses a more pertinent danger of Boards of Directors. Although I am not a fan of free-market regulation myself, Sarbanes-Oxley goes to publicize the financial affairs, whereas regulating Boards and Directors of, is a hard task, an imposition to citizen privacy, and borderline totalitarian - watching/monitoring the balance sheets thru public efforts and public channels is a increasingly more important task in the Credit Age, all though difficult it may be.

It's more important to know exactly what the Sarbanes-Oxley Act is, it is a law after all, and good to know nonetheless.

It's full title is, "An Act To protect investors by improving the accuracy and reliability of corporate disclosures made pursuant to the securities laws, and for other purposes." - 'and for other purposes' is a way for politicians to merely remember the title of any bill in supposition for a legitimate excuse.

Of course I'm political, I'm conservative.

http://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/sarbanesoxleyact.asp#axzz2KwRr7Ywo (Investopedia, link visited 2013) 

Its official purpose is to keep transparency where government cannot, a public display of resources and records for the general public to avoid and protect from critical stock-market dangers. In my opinion it allows financial sector workers (and thus lobbyists) to add a clean and law-abiding balance-sheet to their company resume for investors to see. The damage it does is allow the illicit entities of the business world to keep more secrets than previously had, so long as their Sarbanes-Oxley mask is ready. In other words, when the financial regulators only have to look for the Sarbanes-Oxley checklist, they're not looking for much else.

This fallacy of transparency allows traditional "banksters", insider trading (on the outside) thru credit/currency war, and plays hell on consumers via inflation via liquidity crises. It's successor "Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010" was/is as equally flawed, but in addition to that condition has a small amount of consumer protection in regards to consumer credit, but in the same deceitful fashion that I implied above, masks risky borrowing individual. For example, the Dodd/Frank designed to prevent predatory lending, resulted in prosecution of lenders so that credibility of borrowers could not be assessed, that interest rates would be low although irrelevant to a borrower with bad credit. The probably reason being, many loan defaulters revert to lower-class standards and the dole and taxpayers on the hook for a property grab of egregious proportions.

Those that borrowed the home-loans likely had good intentions, many were certainly real-estate entrepreneurs, taxes should be used to catch their fall into poverty/eviction, but we wouldn't handle every dollar of theirs like parents do for children, like the Sarbanes-Oxley act attempts to do, including regulating new problems found in the Dodd/Frank bill. Tax-payer bailout from the possibly manufactured crisis was much better than the alternative, foreclosure on plausibly every bank in the country to Uncle Sam.

I love that I turned this into another objectivist rant.


Keep in mind, credit goes beyond being the aid of the financial industry, in traditional commerce things like assets, allowances, and alliances, can be made in traditional barter fashion. Watching the money doesn't always lead to a pot-o-gold or a leprechaun caught red handed.

That's right, I said leprechauns. 





















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14 February 2013

Cacoethes Scribendi

Latin: Cacoethes Scribendi

Translation: Insatiable desire to write.

Cacoēthes[1] "bad habit", or medically, "malignant disease" is a borrowing of Greek kakóēthes.[2] The phrase is derived from a line in the Satires of Juvenal: Tenet insanabile multos scribendi cacoethes, or "the incurable desire (or itch) for writing affects many". See hypergraphia
  

#1: cacoēthes. Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short. A Latin Dictionary on Perseus Project. 

#2: κακοήθης. Liddell, Henry George; Scott, Robert; A Greek–English Lexicon at Perseus Project

 

Hypergraphia: An overwhelming urge to write. It is not itself a disorder, but can be associated with temporal lobe changes in epilepsy, and hypomania and mania in the context of bipolar disorder.


Causes:

Several different regions of the brain govern the act of writing. The physical motion of the hand is controlled by the cerebral cortex which comprises part of the outer layer of the brain. The drive to write, on the other hand, is controlled by the limbic system, a ring-shaped cluster of cells deeply buried in the cortex which governs emotion, affiliated instincts and inspiration and is said to regulate the human being's need for communication. Words and ideas are cognized and understood by the temporal lobes behind the ears, and these temporal lobes are connected to the limbic system. Ideas are organized and edited in the frontal lobe of the brain.

Although temporal lobe lesions cause temporal lobe epilepsy, it is also known to run in families. Hypergraphia is understood to be triggered by changes in brainwave activity in the temporal lobe. Hypergraphia has been observed in 8% of patients with temporal lobe epilepsy.[3]

It is also associated with bipolar disorder. Manic and depressive episodes have been reported to intensify hypergraphia symptoms. Additionally schizophrenics and people with frontotemporal dementia can also experience a compulsive drive to write.

Neurologist Alice Weaver Flaherty, in her book The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain, describes its relationship to writer's block and to compulsive reading or hyperlexia.


 #3: Schachter, Holmes, Kasteleijn-Nolst Trenité 2008, p. 254.



~    Happy Valentine's Day    ~









09 February 2013

Purge RE

Maledicent: One who is addicted to abusive speech.


In the 21st century, the democrat party has never met a tax it didn't like.  They fanatically endorsed the PPACA, forcing people to buy health insurance or use it thru the dole. It is both a tax and a penalty, the prior for the redistribution system and the latter in violation of free will. Consider it as such, you've bought a car and insured it, the manufacturer warranty has expired and the time of you owning your vehicle is born, and in this scenario your insurance will pay for any intentional or accidental damage. The idea behind a healthcare mandate is that you are the car, the gov't is paying your healthcare bills eventually via medicare, and they are mandating that you get regular checkups because you burden the entitlement system when your wife wants to trade you for a new one. The irony, and massive flaw, is that every legal citizen pays a medicare tax the duration of their working career, and against all logic this impetuously lauded socialist system denies the obvious, the want of the public to afford what they use and their ability to do so, be it by current affluence or systems of capitalism that build wealth and plenitude.

You can't have socialism if you don't have capitalism, there is no shade without the work of the tree. If this wasn't de facto incompetence on the behalf of liberals everywhere, it gets worse.

I read recently that the democrat party of Califruitcakes, besides being more morally bankrupt than a crackwhore in the White House, having lost a party-wide political campaign for victim disarmament wants gun owners to buy liability insurance. I propose an isolated tax of my own, I call it the Maledicent Tax. 

The immoral unthinking majority set a bad example for the formative minds in our society, the result of such licentious perpetual forays in to minimizing, denying, or blaming, in matters of culpability, has beyond lost them their honesty and accountability, but it has influenced countless generations and indefatigably countless more. The resulting trustfund hippie and legislator vandals alike, mindless violent unions who've become the long-fought company thugs, the party heads that despoil prosperity while defiling and corrupting the very language we use to spot their lies resulting in social division, and the communists who in their belief that man is god denounce Him in a sadly hilarious failure to self-promote, the protests of solvency, the calls for equality by those who detest being evaluated because YOU SUCK, but I digress.

The financial cost they have incurred is undeniably in the trillions, and the private sector losses are immense, but in terms of security this tax will recompense the abused capitalists, for the thefts from the productive, excused by liberals with derision of success and employers, for the mass-shooters and serial killers who were/are in the majority registered democrats, for the digital breadlines that could be multitudinous hefty happy workers, for the taxes stolen for pensions that subsidize inflation, for the nearly 50% of American highschool students who drop out to find work, for the other half of highschool students who graduate only to not find work, the collegiate deluge, for the illegal immigrant on slave wages who, tho forgivable, unwittingly stole a job from each - the children, youths, and the aged; for them.

So.... about 70 million democrats championing about 50 thousand militant atheists. If you open your dumbass mouth again, pay the price. 

I say $20K a year sounds fair to start, for now, we can always raise it later. Right comrades? 









 


 

08 February 2013

Once more unto the breach

Cross-posted to Elsewhere

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2013/feb/06/federal-reserve-anonymous

"Federal Reserve hacked"

Hacked is the mighty Federal Reserve! I would've wrote. This being reported only days ago alleges "Anonymous" hacked into their secure internal domain, further alleging to steal private info on thousands of FedRes employees.

This seems to me as an outright breech of the Fed's security implementation, for security purposes they did not reveal how it was done, but that it involved a "temporary vulnerability in a website vendor product", which leaves me to believe a group-licensed application was exploited and used to disguise the breach.

Behind layers of security redundancies their more sensitive data remains unaffected, call me crazy, I know identities can be used for espionage in the financial sector, but I assume the network infiltration was in attempt to access and manipulate monied accounts. In sinister form 'Anonymous' hackers have shared the data retrieved on FedRes employees in part to remind the financial institution titan where they plausibly stand in the digital world and their susceptibilities regarding their employee regime. Could it be a public relations stunt, could Anonymous be claiming responsibility for someone else's work, regardless of those questions, the network is always connected, security is a must.

I would potentially beef-up security by adding layers of redundancy, encryption policies, and secure and encrypted log-on mechanisms and practices, as well as review the human element in the digital trespass.

The article goes on to hint that the hack-in was in response to a fellow hacktivist suicide and that the hack reached a level of FedRes operations responsible for inter-bank mundane communications involving literal water floods and other natural disasters the like. I imagine this means the mail server was poached via a recently installed accounting program.


Insincerely,
Anonymous


04 February 2013

Merlin 3:10 “Au Contraire”

Merlin 3:10 “Au Contraire”

The clouds pall over green pastures and the day is long whence light breaks from clouds incontinent, yoked to mountains distant are the thunders and deluge of vigor and earthly vitality, thruout distance Sino walks with artifice diabolic, upon a small hamlet and waiting until nightfall merely to murder in shadows and enter the tavern to wassail and prurient pertain. Whispering hexes into the ales turning them to tainted libations, with sick tended a stranger whose welcome now remanded takes the lives of those who seen him have. In the mind of a world without end the sunlight a river over the world and fares the feign of distance to next of those who have not value and earn their viands, for as are not they slaves, having displeasure for the weak willed the hypocrisy endeavors and in smaller villages thus. Productivity is the mark of bearing true reward but tithe the possession to barter the stranger trades his impatience for their unrepentant worth, had their currency been jewelry he their lives might have spared, to his hand one of the many silent black birds he knifes to a door. Characterized by lascivious and lustful thoughts madness oft desires, starring at the roiling blood then turning in paranoia, and thinking loudly for the birds the bleak malaise.

Put to disparity the inexorable furor drives him into the forest where the sound of twigs breaking beneath his feet drive his ego to hate his conscience for its torpor in distraction, from salient sensationalism until stopped by abderian youths who have taken this day upon themselves to intimidate the smallest of their ranks. Stopping resolutely inferred of their assumptions, implicated as the perfect stranger to rob so very far from society, he emotes not while admiring their bestial postures, in this his fawning to their shadows invoking deeply ancient fears they begin algerining to him with smiles of wolves beginning first of one then of most. With wave of hand blinded are they by agelast shadow and soon each falls, tying one’s hands behind a tree he waits until the moment they wake to sacrifice their leader, cutting the throat he reaches into the chest to feel the heart’s final notes. Turning to the enthralled, he walks with blade and stares with eyes of bright darkness, slipping the knife into his sleeve all run except two who are ribald with awe and envy, closely facing one he grabs the boy by shirt and holds a sanguinely soaked fist, but with unfurling his fingers blood-coated diamonds fall to the ground. He gestures with his dry hand to the deceased, inviting them to scour their defeated comrade for wealth, for thence is whence art Sino dost of his past in the days by three.

As Sino drifts between reality and fantasy, he remembers his old labors of love, and ruminates upon the myths and realities of war. The sufferance of sorcerers exists in secrecy, a glamour cast on clearest day thereupon a morning mist and rays of light thru the budding forest, a smallish carriage of varnished pine with its driver standing afore the portside door, on an old road cut for wagons now decays beneath the overgrowing grass of a sparsely-worn horse trail. The driver and emissary to the patron resides by the door, his hair is grey and turning black with old agerasia, his trenchant cloak black each flapped pocket without button holds hexed artifacts, tinctures, decoctions, and powders, and the handles of many vexing blades aureate and argentine glimpse from be nether his lapels.

Sino walks toward them in the foggy forest of the sun thinking he is alone, the hand of a woman reaches from the open coach door and points to him, the driver walks to confront, emerging from the obfuscating vapor, surprising to see and greeted solemnly without vitriol entrained.

Jimson: “The mistress of the dark will see you now.”
Sino: “The succor to demons and first offender, do you not welcome darksome strangers? Mine troth I am loth to wreaking glamours.”
Belladonna: “Aright, brother mine, beyond nonpareil, is his prompture without reckon or grace.”
Sino: “Your redolent quips interminable, tearing shadows to convey what I ask.”
Belladonna: “Without regard is all you have not brought?”
Sino: “So much am I maleficent, I have only what is promised.”

As Sino reaches into his clothing, Jimson reaches grasps the handle of his sword, the sheath narrow and slightly curved, but deterring action comes of Belladonna as she reaches her hand forward to his shoulder and rises out of her car as Sino reveals a dark hallow embonpoint sphere. Her fingers bridge to the stygian glass with electricity, the web of tiny lines halts as he retracts the orb with his wrist. She halts and wisps herself and vista against the carriage pausing in this act to stare at Jimson. As he silently acknowledges her and watches for spies she hold her palms empty, closing and turning them into fists, and opening her right hand with an amulet necklace of thin chain and rough crystalline stone, she hesitates in sake for askance.

Belladonna: “You have the smell of death to you, Sino.”
Sino: “Anger are the dead, the weak do aspire.”

She admires the small and lucent hearthstone, giving to him the chain and grasping with the miniscule lightning seemingly a voltaic silk nest between her fingers and the hexed looking crystal ball as her eyes lose all color except darkness. As of now Jimson, staring with scanning eyes at the ball begins approach, she turns from Sino and he reaches his hand halting her new artifact, it becomes heavy and faintly begins crackling to her dismay.

Sino: “Import blithe or genuine article, that it makes my stages, run from the day.”
Belladonna: “Never common vain a peaceful yesterday, it is true.”
Jimson: “Rest you well.”
Belladonna: “Stow it plenty with ashes of wolf’s bane.”

Sino releases the round glass from his spell craft, it nearly escapes her fingers as it silently falls, and there is a thunder in the darkening forest whose floor over the world waxes and wanes like tidal waves in slowest motion. The sound is of hooves in the distance and in hearing them Sino poignantly distances himself into the morrow growth of the fading road a maledicent stranger to suspicion.

That rumbling is none other than a red bull, lone rampantly to flee from two riders, elves tall as any man whose skin is white boldly effaced, the pale hair and pointed ears, to sun effects reflection shall the radiance affectation commonly from tales of hiding and hunting in the highest caves. A skyline’s severance, the bull hefty and hearty to trod and sharply cut direction over natural obstacles, closing to Belladonna and Jimson it crosses the aged path, soon the cavalrymen in pursuit crossing after it. Relieved she and he retreat, taking the sphere into the coach and his hands on the reign they proceed with caution, the two elfish equestrians slowly steer their steeds to the road far into the distance and the weak afternoon shadows. With raucous they begin a charge, abandoning the red bestial quarry to confront strangers in the forest preserved.

Jimson recasts the glamour that falsely draws the fog and rays of light shining through celestial breeze and willow trees, the riders charge faster making post haste their certainty to confront in warren antipathetic. They halt before the wagon patently avoiding collision with some patient distance with their skin of strength irradiant of twilight magic has power to shine thru the conjuration.

Dain: “What severs the flexible minds and truths to visit on us unlawful magic?”
Gareth: “Clear this air and;”
Dain: “—you two begin to talk, make with movements slow;”
Gareth: “—for we to see.”

The witch looks for Sino but he has departed along the forest road disappearing more shadows of morrow sunset than of the disparate black smoke of his escape, though of spying eye. Jimson clears the vista-scene with a waving hand the smoke itself vanishes into the air as it consumes itself as quickly as cast.

Gareth: “A poor deceit unjustly bleak, to patents remit, what are your names, quickly.”
Dain: “Do not pore on this question or I will assume your deportment avaricious.”
Belladonna: “We are agents for Völund. I am Belladonna Nightshade, my brother Jimson, children of Simon.”

She begins to stand, the elves ready their weapons, quicker than soldiers from lesser realms doth, Gareth ready to throw a dagger, Dain standing in stirrups with short arrow drawn taught, and they take no chance in losing.

Dain: “Let us avoid resurrection, who you say to be bear runes of dark illusion.”
Gareth: “Post haste.”

Her hand raises and in her palm the death rune glows, soon other tattoos invisible emerge irradiant tho soon are all depleted. The effulgent sigil decays, unveiling the moonlight anew to commensurate day and night and with the dimness after longing darkness breaks the beyond eve into subtle nightfall the living moon, so bright and full and radiance amassed, calls to the werewolves of the land whom call to it in bale and blithe.