There are plenty of laws that prohibit harassment. Here is an experiment you can try right in your own town/city. Go down town. Find some old lady walking down the road, and follow behind her calling out "fucking hag", "stupid bitch", "go die", as loud and as often as you find it within your power of free speech. No do this for most of the day, randomly switching out people (try to find the most pathetic persion you can, elderly, children, invalids, etc..) You'll quickly learn that there are plenty of laws that prohibit this type of behavior.
Besides, have you even bothered typing "harassment laws"?
Only to the limited extent that the "immunities" help them preform their duties. The President is immune from prosecution post office for actions taken as the holder of the office (no chance for prosecuting GW for the Iraq war). Police officers can speed and make a left handed turn without using a blinker, and have no fear of being ticketed by some "civic vigilantly".
Its not a perfect solution, but without these types of limited immunities, there would be no doctors, police officers, fire fighters, government officials/agents/servants, etc.. Without a limited but reasonable exception to certain laws, certain jobs would simply be vulnerable to litigation to be worth doing.
Very few entities are immune to criminal prosecution (to some extent). The action plus the intent are key factors in determining whether something was being done for the "job" or for the "person". In cases involving crime with the government, the government may remain blameless, but the person perpetrating the crime may very well be liable.
Since I am sounding kinda "pro-government", a sure fire way to be modded down, let me throw out the following +5 interesting/insughtful plugs:
- Bush is evil - Americans are fat - America is corrupt - America is to blame for all the worlds woes - Americans are stupid - Socialism and Communism aren't like perpetual motion...
How about "universal soldier MICE"?!?! Have you not seen all the wonder drugs made for mice? The world, fooled by the tiny size of mice, have overlooked all the scientific breakthroughs in the field of "super mice enhancement". Everything from "mental performance enhances", "cancer curing medicine" and now "muscle building drugs"... The days of humans are number. Fuck Asimov, Mice dont follow no rules.
I've worked in plenty of positions that have a lot of over site and peer review. The problem is, the people performing the peer review, often rely on me to explain to them exactly what i did, and what the changes I made actually accomplish. This is not because the person is absolutely retarded, it has more to do with the fact that the position I occupy is a higher paying position, and the person doing the review... well... is not so well paying, thus a more junior (read as: less experienced) person.
This here in is the problem. Unless your company is oozing with cash, there is a fairly good chance that your really talented senior tech person is going to be able to slide hundreds of back doors into the system that the auditors or the peer review teams are going to be unable to detect.
I'm not sure if there is a real solution for this problem, as it exists in all industries from financial services (read as: enron, mci, etc.) to the medical industry. There will always be those who know and can take advantage of the majority of people who are not in the know.
You really seem to be missing the point of waterboarding. In waterboarding, you do not drown the person. In waterboarding, you keep pushing that person to the point where they feel like they are drowning, and then bring them back up for air. You do not get the option to die. Your only option is to continuously revisit the sensation of dying.
So you have to be more like "professional almost dying person" if you want to be able to defeat water boarding or other torture like tactics that keep you in the "dying" flux....
Yes, because its traditional to treat a "flight crew" with the same type of accommodations as high ranking official. If you dont like being treated like a member of a flight crew (read as: enlisted person), get a college degree and go to OCS. There are alot of reasons for treating officers good and treating enlisted individuals marginally. Its an unfortunate aspect of military service, but the disparity is well known, accepted, and absolutely necessary.
There is never a good time to do anything when it comes to the suffering/malignancies of humanity. If we used every problem as a reason to stop moving forward in other areas, the United States would never have put a man on the moon. Just take a look at this wiki page with references to 1969:
You have the Vietnam War, massive protests throughout the country, civil rights movements (and everything that went along with it)... etc.. The world will always be a messy place, no reason to stop making progress.
Nah. The FCC will brutally and efficiently prosecute anyone who is not a big business with well placed lobbyists, and a constituency that relies on the jobs these big businesses provide. Open up a pirate radio station and watch what happens. You will find the FCC on your doorstep quickly, and they will have no mercy.
Now, if your a big company like Comcast, have no fear. You'll just have to do some "reporting" which is pretty stupid since elected officials and their supporting staff have no idea what those reports would even mean.
I find it questionable to believe that Microsoft would have any reason to support open source. According to Microsoft sales people (not very reliable, but only figures I care to research), Vista has sold millions of copies, providing Microsoft with massive amounts of revenue. Most of Vista sales are in the form OEM agreements, where microsoft continues to utilize its effective monopoly over the market in order to push a product that most people do not want, need, or are even ready to accommodate.
Could it be that microsoft has spent most of its monopolistic capital pushing vista that they now need to seriously consider alternative routes? This is a serious question because I am in no position to where microsoft really stands in the market post vista melt down.
Or not. While the federal government of the USA may have backbones capable of running IPV6, they seriously lack the ability to effectively make the switch without a great amount of pressure. Lets face it, with NAT and other technologies, the need to migrate to a new standard has been severely reduced. Not saying that it is not needed, I am sure the "rest of the world" outside of the US and the EU would like some IP space all of their own, but market forces have already relegated that individuals have no need for unique IP space and NAT is good enough for the unwashed masses.
Having had a little bit of experience working with big networks based on IPV4, the migration to IPV6 is going to be pretty awesome... like the titanic sinking, or an entire city being leveled by an earth quake.
I think its encouraging that the state of Lousiana is supporting role playing in their school environments. Being a fan of D&D for more than two decades, having a whole bunch of people discuss fiction on such a large scale can only benefit the FRP community as a whole. I am always amazed at the level of depth grown men can achieve talking about a fictious being and the possible actions such a fictious being can take against the people of the real world. Even better is the discussion of the fictious creatures that said fictious being can send to do its combat. Though I have yet to hear these people discuss statistics, I'm sure they will given this new input into the academic settings, where things are weighed and measured for accuracy.
We are talking about role playing... oh... religion. Nevermind.
Actually, this provides a great opportunity in interface design. Computers have had a very little foot print on the inside of a car, outside of GPS. Equipping a car with the ability to access the internet opens up a whole new sector for specialized computer electronics. The real key will be designing an interface that is easy to use from behind the wheel. I wonder if Microsoft Sync will begin to take advantage of this?
I could easily argue about the thousands of specialized creatures that have died out over the course of time. I am not talking about "individuals" but entire species. I never said anything about people "specializing" to being "engineers", I talked about "specializing" as far as focus versus multi tasking. I'm not attempting a juvenile game of "one upsmanship", so don't take it that I am trying to split hairs with words.
Professions have very little to do with "multi-tasking". Multi tasking is the ability to juggle several different tasks simultaneously, as opposed to being only being able to do "one thing at a time". Another example would be a mother who is able to cook for her family and supervise her children at the same time. A mother that could not handle both tasks would greatly increase their child's likely to have an accident and perish. Perhaps women are better predisposed to multi-task for men due to their role in our species.
Your right about that, I am not much of an armchair evolutionary biologist. I'm just taking stabbing guesses for the sake of amusement.
However, you speak about specialization as if it is a path to evolutionary success, when it seems history is full of specialization losers. The more focused a species is towards one particular aspect of their survival, the more likely that species is destroyed due to change. Humanity is the top of the change specifically because we can adapt. Adaption seems to be contradictory to extreme focus.
You state that if multitasking had evolutionary advantages in humans, it would have been selected for, not against. I see no evidence that would show that humans are not multi tasking creatures. I know it is tempting to judge evolution by the trend of a dozen or even hundred of years, but you must look at human evolution of the course of tens of thousands of years, if not more, to distinguish trends.
Here is my complete speculative analysis on multi-tasking.
Just take a look at human evolution. Do you think that being "extremely focused" is a really good survival trait? Being able to do more than "one thing" at a time would seem to be a much more advantageous, in the greater scheme of things, than being able to focus at the detriment of other things. Human beings are meant to multi-task. Staying alert for potential predators while gathering food seems like a top notch trait to carry on. Human beings are at the top of the totem pole not because we are physically superior, but because we are mentally superior. Our ability to out think more physically capable predators is not only because we are smart, but also because we are cognsaint of more than one thing going on at a time, and are better able to process that information.
It seems more likely that the "genius" trait, while desirable for geek credit, is really not a trait that evolution seems to favor.
Am I missing something? Outside of a few very large organizations, isnt the operation of a data center separated from the equipment inside the data centers? Dont most data centers rent out space for customers? If this is the case, outside of increasing customers bills for energy consumption, there is nothing that a data center can do to change the way the customer does business. Not every customer is going to find it practical to have a managed virtual server environment, or be ok with allowing systems to be powered down.
The real challenge for data centers is going to be how they isolate cooling they provide to their customers. Cooling seems like a massive cost compared to all other aspects of a data center.
This is part of the Red Hat enterprise experience, which in my humble opinion is not that great of an experience. I have used the RHN in the past, and I have been completely underwhelmed by the outdated up2date style gui's (which tend to freeze) and lack of really comprehensive command line support.
On top of that, your not really getting what you pay for over all. Sure, in corporate world you have a blame line and someone to go back to at least as far as distribution and configuration goes, but RHN is not "far superior" to current 'apt' and 'yum' type solutions that are available to the rest of the "free world". Any given day, I would trade off RHN interface for package management for those managers available on a (brace yourself) Ubuntu desktop.
Also, if your concerned about the "security' aspect of updating your enteprise from a public source (which is ridiculous in this day and age, just keep off the cutting edge and your fine) you can always create your own "yum" and "apt" repositories for a fraction of the price (price only implies hardware, bandwidth, and maintenance) of RHN.
On a "btw" I have never been in an environment where I needed to run the "same command" at exactly the "same time" on a variety of different servers. Of course... nothing says lovin like writing a perl script that has a "central server with distributed SSH key" that can "fork" processes off to the background and do a routine on multiple boxes for sans fee....
There is also the case of the two rovers on Mars right now that are still going 2 years after their original expected termination period. Not too many humans going to survive 2 years after their planned expiration period... (think: starvation)
With the new Anti-Immigration laws being passed in the EU, could this be a US type of shrill from the UK gaming industry to try increase the amount of H1B type visa's (not sure how this works in the UK)? I mean, if you cannot import cheap labor, than you are going to have to actually start paying people decent salaries... and that means less yachts and new cars for your little Johnny...
This is mixing two separate issues. Oil is not the problem as far as producing electricity, its coal. Coal produces an enormous carbon foot print and is just all around nasty (from other residual waste to the damage to the environment that occurs just getting at it). I grew up in north east Pennsylvania, and I have seen first hand the impact of coal mining, its pretty horrific.
Back to my point. Pushing nuclear energy has relatively very little do with our dependence on gasoline via crude oil. Please lets not confuse the two. There is no chance that there will be cars powered by "under the hood" nuclear reactors in the near future. Wind power will also do nothing for our dependence on oil for gasoline.
Another case of policitians using unrelated events to push policy. Albiet, in poor taste, he is at least using this opportunity to point us to a real solution. I hate to say it, but Wind, Solar, Geothermal, etc. are not ready for deployment today. They eventually will be, but by that time (10+ years), it will take another 20+ years before they even make up a few % of global energy production. By that time Nuclear plants can be rolled out en mass and go a long way to reduce our carbon footprint (but not demand on foreign oil, sorry, thats just a different topic).
I call bullshit. I may not have liked having to "pay" to go from 98 to XP (I skipped 2000 because 98 was working "just fine"), but the transition was pretty clear and clean because XP was not much different than 98 (at least from a user perspective, I find windows overly complicated compared to linux).
I have vista now, and I hate the fact that I have to use "google" to find a way to get simple shit to work (that UAC crap). XP may have had problems with virus's and malware, but I can deal with that more than I can not getting anything to work anyway. Put office 2003 on top of VISTA and you are talking a giant heap of shit that defies the old Microsoft convention of "conformity". If I want an OS that supports a limited amount of applications, than I will go back to using Ubuntu as my desktop... and for once my wife actually agrees with me (because we refuse to pay another $100+ for Office, instead we could just use OO on Linux, which also doesnt support Itunes).
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There are plenty of laws that prohibit harassment. Here is an experiment you can try right in your own town/city. Go down town. Find some old lady walking down the road, and follow behind her calling out "fucking hag", "stupid bitch", "go die", as loud and as often as you find it within your power of free speech. No do this for most of the day, randomly switching out people (try to find the most pathetic persion you can, elderly, children, invalids, etc..) You'll quickly learn that there are plenty of laws that prohibit this type of behavior.
Besides, have you even bothered typing "harassment laws"?
Only to the limited extent that the "immunities" help them preform their duties. The President is immune from prosecution post office for actions taken as the holder of the office (no chance for prosecuting GW for the Iraq war). Police officers can speed and make a left handed turn without using a blinker, and have no fear of being ticketed by some "civic vigilantly".
Its not a perfect solution, but without these types of limited immunities, there would be no doctors, police officers, fire fighters, government officials/agents/servants, etc.. Without a limited but reasonable exception to certain laws, certain jobs would simply be vulnerable to litigation to be worth doing.
Very few entities are immune to criminal prosecution (to some extent). The action plus the intent are key factors in determining whether something was being done for the "job" or for the "person". In cases involving crime with the government, the government may remain blameless, but the person perpetrating the crime may very well be liable.
Since I am sounding kinda "pro-government", a sure fire way to be modded down, let me throw out the following +5 interesting/insughtful plugs:
- Bush is evil
- Americans are fat
- America is corrupt
- America is to blame for all the worlds woes
- Americans are stupid
- Socialism and Communism aren't like perpetual motion...
How about "universal soldier MICE"?!?! Have you not seen all the wonder drugs made for mice? The world, fooled by the tiny size of mice, have overlooked all the scientific breakthroughs in the field of "super mice enhancement". Everything from "mental performance enhances", "cancer curing medicine" and now "muscle building drugs"... The days of humans are number. Fuck Asimov, Mice dont follow no rules.
Can we please get a tag called "supermice"?
I've worked in plenty of positions that have a lot of over site and peer review. The problem is, the people performing the peer review, often rely on me to explain to them exactly what i did, and what the changes I made actually accomplish. This is not because the person is absolutely retarded, it has more to do with the fact that the position I occupy is a higher paying position, and the person doing the review... well... is not so well paying, thus a more junior (read as: less experienced) person.
This here in is the problem. Unless your company is oozing with cash, there is a fairly good chance that your really talented senior tech person is going to be able to slide hundreds of back doors into the system that the auditors or the peer review teams are going to be unable to detect.
I'm not sure if there is a real solution for this problem, as it exists in all industries from financial services (read as: enron, mci, etc.) to the medical industry. There will always be those who know and can take advantage of the majority of people who are not in the know.
You really seem to be missing the point of waterboarding. In waterboarding, you do not drown the person. In waterboarding, you keep pushing that person to the point where they feel like they are drowning, and then bring them back up for air. You do not get the option to die. Your only option is to continuously revisit the sensation of dying.
So you have to be more like "professional almost dying person" if you want to be able to defeat water boarding or other torture like tactics that keep you in the "dying" flux....
Were you talking about Vista or Linux? Last I checked, Linux had the better compatibility of the two. Oops, enuf of my M$ fanboying....
This is a great idea. The Japanese are a very ingenious people. If their space ships are half as impressive as Mr. Roboto, we are in business!!!
Yes, because its traditional to treat a "flight crew" with the same type of accommodations as high ranking official. If you dont like being treated like a member of a flight crew (read as: enlisted person), get a college degree and go to OCS. There are alot of reasons for treating officers good and treating enlisted individuals marginally. Its an unfortunate aspect of military service, but the disparity is well known, accepted, and absolutely necessary.
There is never a good time to do anything when it comes to the suffering/malignancies of humanity. If we used every problem as a reason to stop moving forward in other areas, the United States would never have put a man on the moon. Just take a look at this wiki page with references to 1969:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1969
You have the Vietnam War, massive protests throughout the country, civil rights movements (and everything that went along with it)... etc.. The world will always be a messy place, no reason to stop making progress.
Nah. The FCC will brutally and efficiently prosecute anyone who is not a big business with well placed lobbyists, and a constituency that relies on the jobs these big businesses provide. Open up a pirate radio station and watch what happens. You will find the FCC on your doorstep quickly, and they will have no mercy.
Now, if your a big company like Comcast, have no fear. You'll just have to do some "reporting" which is pretty stupid since elected officials and their supporting staff have no idea what those reports would even mean.
Just in... military works towards real intelligence...
The only real eco friendly fireworks are the ones that we dont use. Seriously, celebrating indepd
I find it questionable to believe that Microsoft would have any reason to support open source. According to Microsoft sales people (not very reliable, but only figures I care to research), Vista has sold millions of copies, providing Microsoft with massive amounts of revenue. Most of Vista sales are in the form OEM agreements, where microsoft continues to utilize its effective monopoly over the market in order to push a product that most people do not want, need, or are even ready to accommodate.
Could it be that microsoft has spent most of its monopolistic capital pushing vista that they now need to seriously consider alternative routes? This is a serious question because I am in no position to where microsoft really stands in the market post vista melt down.
Or not. While the federal government of the USA may have backbones capable of running IPV6, they seriously lack the ability to effectively make the switch without a great amount of pressure. Lets face it, with NAT and other technologies, the need to migrate to a new standard has been severely reduced. Not saying that it is not needed, I am sure the "rest of the world" outside of the US and the EU would like some IP space all of their own, but market forces have already relegated that individuals have no need for unique IP space and NAT is good enough for the unwashed masses.
Having had a little bit of experience working with big networks based on IPV4, the migration to IPV6 is going to be pretty awesome... like the titanic sinking, or an entire city being leveled by an earth quake.
I think its encouraging that the state of Lousiana is supporting role playing in their school environments. Being a fan of D&D for more than two decades, having a whole bunch of people discuss fiction on such a large scale can only benefit the FRP community as a whole. I am always amazed at the level of depth grown men can achieve talking about a fictious being and the possible actions such a fictious being can take against the people of the real world. Even better is the discussion of the fictious creatures that said fictious being can send to do its combat. Though I have yet to hear these people discuss statistics, I'm sure they will given this new input into the academic settings, where things are weighed and measured for accuracy.
We are talking about role playing... oh... religion. Nevermind.
"IPv4 uses 32-bit (four-byte) addresses, which limits the address space to 4,294,967,296 (232) possible unique addresses. "
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv4
Thats alot of people using a system that never really intended to accommodate such a massive volume of users.
Actually, this provides a great opportunity in interface design. Computers have had a very little foot print on the inside of a car, outside of GPS. Equipping a car with the ability to access the internet opens up a whole new sector for specialized computer electronics. The real key will be designing an interface that is easy to use from behind the wheel. I wonder if Microsoft Sync will begin to take advantage of this?
I could easily argue about the thousands of specialized creatures that have died out over the course of time. I am not talking about "individuals" but entire species. I never said anything about people "specializing" to being "engineers", I talked about "specializing" as far as focus versus multi tasking. I'm not attempting a juvenile game of "one upsmanship", so don't take it that I am trying to split hairs with words.
Professions have very little to do with "multi-tasking". Multi tasking is the ability to juggle several different tasks simultaneously, as opposed to being only being able to do "one thing at a time". Another example would be a mother who is able to cook for her family and supervise her children at the same time. A mother that could not handle both tasks would greatly increase their child's likely to have an accident and perish. Perhaps women are better predisposed to multi-task for men due to their role in our species.
Your right about that, I am not much of an armchair evolutionary biologist. I'm just taking stabbing guesses for the sake of amusement.
However, you speak about specialization as if it is a path to evolutionary success, when it seems history is full of specialization losers. The more focused a species is towards one particular aspect of their survival, the more likely that species is destroyed due to change. Humanity is the top of the change specifically because we can adapt. Adaption seems to be contradictory to extreme focus.
You state that if multitasking had evolutionary advantages in humans, it would have been selected for, not against. I see no evidence that would show that humans are not multi tasking creatures. I know it is tempting to judge evolution by the trend of a dozen or even hundred of years, but you must look at human evolution of the course of tens of thousands of years, if not more, to distinguish trends.
Here is my complete speculative analysis on multi-tasking.
Just take a look at human evolution. Do you think that being "extremely focused" is a really good survival trait? Being able to do more than "one thing" at a time would seem to be a much more advantageous, in the greater scheme of things, than being able to focus at the detriment of other things. Human beings are meant to multi-task. Staying alert for potential predators while gathering food seems like a top notch trait to carry on. Human beings are at the top of the totem pole not because we are physically superior, but because we are mentally superior. Our ability to out think more physically capable predators is not only because we are smart, but also because we are cognsaint of more than one thing going on at a time, and are better able to process that information.
It seems more likely that the "genius" trait, while desirable for geek credit, is really not a trait that evolution seems to favor.
Am I missing something? Outside of a few very large organizations, isnt the operation of a data center separated from the equipment inside the data centers? Dont most data centers rent out space for customers? If this is the case, outside of increasing customers bills for energy consumption, there is nothing that a data center can do to change the way the customer does business. Not every customer is going to find it practical to have a managed virtual server environment, or be ok with allowing systems to be powered down.
The real challenge for data centers is going to be how they isolate cooling they provide to their customers. Cooling seems like a massive cost compared to all other aspects of a data center.
This is part of the Red Hat enterprise experience, which in my humble opinion is not that great of an experience. I have used the RHN in the past, and I have been completely underwhelmed by the outdated up2date style gui's (which tend to freeze) and lack of really comprehensive command line support.
On top of that, your not really getting what you pay for over all. Sure, in corporate world you have a blame line and someone to go back to at least as far as distribution and configuration goes, but RHN is not "far superior" to current 'apt' and 'yum' type solutions that are available to the rest of the "free world". Any given day, I would trade off RHN interface for package management for those managers available on a (brace yourself) Ubuntu desktop.
Also, if your concerned about the "security' aspect of updating your enteprise from a public source (which is ridiculous in this day and age, just keep off the cutting edge and your fine) you can always create your own "yum" and "apt" repositories for a fraction of the price (price only implies hardware, bandwidth, and maintenance) of RHN.
On a "btw" I have never been in an environment where I needed to run the "same command" at exactly the "same time" on a variety of different servers. Of course... nothing says lovin like writing a perl script that has a "central server with distributed SSH key" that can "fork" processes off to the background and do a routine on multiple boxes for sans fee....
So why buy RHN again?
There is also the case of the two rovers on Mars right now that are still going 2 years after their original expected termination period. Not too many humans going to survive 2 years after their planned expiration period... (think: starvation)
With the new Anti-Immigration laws being passed in the EU, could this be a US type of shrill from the UK gaming industry to try increase the amount of H1B type visa's (not sure how this works in the UK)? I mean, if you cannot import cheap labor, than you are going to have to actually start paying people decent salaries... and that means less yachts and new cars for your little Johnny...
This is mixing two separate issues. Oil is not the problem as far as producing electricity, its coal. Coal produces an enormous carbon foot print and is just all around nasty (from other residual waste to the damage to the environment that occurs just getting at it). I grew up in north east Pennsylvania, and I have seen first hand the impact of coal mining, its pretty horrific.
Back to my point. Pushing nuclear energy has relatively very little do with our dependence on gasoline via crude oil. Please lets not confuse the two. There is no chance that there will be cars powered by "under the hood" nuclear reactors in the near future. Wind power will also do nothing for our dependence on oil for gasoline.
Another case of policitians using unrelated events to push policy. Albiet, in poor taste, he is at least using this opportunity to point us to a real solution. I hate to say it, but Wind, Solar, Geothermal, etc. are not ready for deployment today. They eventually will be, but by that time (10+ years), it will take another 20+ years before they even make up a few % of global energy production. By that time Nuclear plants can be rolled out en mass and go a long way to reduce our carbon footprint (but not demand on foreign oil, sorry, thats just a different topic).
I call bullshit. I may not have liked having to "pay" to go from 98 to XP (I skipped 2000 because 98 was working "just fine"), but the transition was pretty clear and clean because XP was not much different than 98 (at least from a user perspective, I find windows overly complicated compared to linux).
I have vista now, and I hate the fact that I have to use "google" to find a way to get simple shit to work (that UAC crap). XP may have had problems with virus's and malware, but I can deal with that more than I can not getting anything to work anyway. Put office 2003 on top of VISTA and you are talking a giant heap of shit that defies the old Microsoft convention of "conformity". If I want an OS that supports a limited amount of applications, than I will go back to using Ubuntu as my desktop... and for once my wife actually agrees with me (because we refuse to pay another $100+ for Office, instead we could just use OO on Linux, which also doesnt support Itunes).