At this point in the discussion there is a need to remind everyone that this level of physics is appropriate to describing models of the Universe. But, as pointed out by the luminaries who formulated the Copenhagen convention, the Universe is not the model, and the human mind is fundamentally incapable of comprehending how the models we construct differ from the Universe.
Not only do we not know what is really going on, we cannot possibly ever know that; it is one of the limitations that make us humans rather than gods. But we can make models that are fun to play with, and sometimes lead to new insights. Or even new gadgets, like computers, the Internet, slashdot...
I can't believe I used to think that what I thought was happening was really going on --The Sugar Beets
Coming soon to a computer near you: "MSSVG; it's the ENHANCED SVG!"
Fixt dat for ya.
What irritates me most at the moment are slashdot sigs that call for the death of perfectly good memes. The sophomoric quality of slashdot is a part of its charm.
A nuclear plant would use maybe 50 acres and produce a gigawatt. I think the capital expense is comparable. What is the benefit here?
Much lower operational costs.
All nuclear plant technologies are dependent on relatively costly feedstock. Sunlight is free.
Uranium based nuclear plant technologies, which are the only ones we know how to build, have relatively expensive post production costs and end of life costs. There are no post production costs for sunlight. End of life costs for the solar chimney are comparable with tearing down a large building with a glass facade.
This could have been different, if the nuclear power industry had bothered to do any significant research on alternatives to uranium and plutonium. Apparently in theory a thorium reactor would have very low post production costs, much lower feedstock costs, and be safer as well, since it could be easily designed to avoid a runaway reaction. But the nuclear power industry seems to have been consistently more concerned with matters of marketing rather than working out better engineering.
It seems like we agree that sending FUD up the corporate ladder is inappropriate, even though those constructing the FUD may have good intentions; are doing it "for the good of the Order". I can see that this is a separate issue from decisions to replace equipment that are based on long term cost comparisons.
In the VA in 1997 - 2000, there was a lot of FUD directed up the corporate ladder that involved both
exaggerating the risks of Y2K related problems;
misrepresenting the long term costs of early systems replacement. In particular, the cost of diverting IT staff from their expected activities to handling the configuration, installation, and retraining for the new systems were glossed over.
IT ended up patting itself on the back while clinicians had to delay implementation of some programs and were unable to deliver expectations on other programs for lack of the needed IT support during these years. At that time, upper management did not have enough computer savvy to connect the dots and recognize that the problems in meeting these patient care goals were due to a failure of IT to provide the needed support. After all, the IT staff was interacting daily with the clinicians, replacing their computers, showing them how to work the upgraded software, isolating and fixing the bugs... The IT staff never seemed to figure out why nobody else was happy with them when they had done such a Good Thing. But at the time nobody else really understood why they had this gut feeling that IT had somehow screwed them over. Maybe all the shiny new computers were too much of a distraction.
There is no dogma, no canon, no "book of how to behave", no punishment, no reward.
That applies not only to atheism, but also to a very wide swath of neopagan practices, that most definitely are organized religions. With Circles and Covens and Rites, oh my. And ordained ministers recognized by State and Province governments as able to perform legally binding ceremonies like handfastings, wickenings, and funeral services.
While there are always exceptions, in general neopagans are more concerned with orthopraxy than with the trappings of orthodoxy: so long as everyone is doing all the right things to craft the magic properly, nobody much gives a hoot about what one actually believes.
Back on point: does this mean that Irish preachers now have to be careful about phrasing their sermons and lessons lest they get pulled out of the pulpit and slapped with a fine for blaspheming the guys who worshiped the golden idols, and so forth? That would seemingly put a lot of their core material out of bounds. Maybe not a bad thing for Ireland, but maybe the Pope would not approve.
And do you still believe in gaming the reports so an issue similar in scope to the Y2K issue will appear to be a mission critical threat to high level management?
Oh wait... you now are high level management. Let's put this in your current perspective.
When somebody reporting to you pulls the wool over your eyes and you buy into their fictions and alter the budget to their benefit, what do you do when you discover that they've led you down the primrose path? Do you promote them to higher levels of responsibility?
I bought into this line of reasoning at the time, as well. It was only years later that I realized the books were cooked in a rather subtle way.
The comparison of costs between using operating funds to correct Y2K deficiencies in existing systems and expending capital on new systems was an apples and oranges comparison. It was a fiction. More specifically, it ignored the costs of configuration, installation, and retraining staff associated with the new equipment, which was directly comparable with the operating costs of correcting the Y2K deficiencies in the existing systems. In short, the same operating costs would have faced with either alternative. The difference in costs between the alternatives was the purchase of the new systems.
That's how I feel about the global warming issue. If we succeed in stopping the effects of climate change
Not to worry, we won't succeed. At this point it is accepted that we will be impacted by global climate change, and the concern is how to minimize it, and how to mitigate what will still happen no matter what we do from this point onward.
Y2K was overblown by middle level IT managers who saw it as an excuse to replace all the older equipment and software whose maintenance they hated with brand new toys that would be more fun to work with.
These are the guys that fed the press the bullshit. Naturally the press got parts of it wrong, since most of what they were being given was being spin-doctored to advance a hidden agenda. But these were the available credentialed experts, willing-- nay, often eager-- to be interviewed. With their camera-ready Love Me walls of MSCE certificates in the background.
This sounds like a conspiracy theory, but there was no need for a conspiracy. The majority of persons in mid level IT management from 1997 t0 2000 were the guys who learned all kinds of clever coding tricks back in the day when it was necessary to use tricks to get acceptable performance out of 8088 and 6502 machines. These were not the best programmers of the times; these were the ones who were merely adequate, the ones who could not make the distinction between an elegant solution and one that was only clever and probably a set up for a future failure. These guys realized they could have more fun using their specialized knowledge in clever ways in the politics of mid level management. So the group attitude of these managers was one of disdain for following rules that got in the way of doing the job, and applause for non-obvious solutions that got the job done in an unexpectedly fast and seemingly effective way. They had learned to do quick and dirty programming, and they transferred that skill into management, but as a group they really didn't see anything wrong with being dirty: a little grime was considered a healthy part of the job.
And these guys were the ones who controlled the reports on the potential impact of Y2K, and they saw those reports as an opportunity to modernize their infrastructures. Rather than looking at patches to work around Y2K issues, for only a hundred times more money, just replace the entire computer and all its software, and everything will be better. Who would argue with that? More to the point, who with good credentials would argue with that, when virtually everyone with credentials would see it as a laudable quick and dirty approach to improving the infrastructure?
There was no need for a conspiracy. The selection pressures of 1985 - 1995 assured that the vast majority of mid level IT managers were all practicing quick and dirty office politics. The entire species was going to respond in the same way to the Y2K stimulus.
Part of that hype was deliberate FUD from elements of the USA permanent government.
In the Veterans Administration and presumably a number of other agencies, during the 3 years from 1997 to 2000 there was a major drive to get every computer "Y2K Compliant". And the tests for compliance were made strict enough to ensure that entire operations had to have brand new CPUs (and associated interfaces and so on) across the board. Y2K was quickly seen as an excuse for emergency authority to spend much more on new hardware than the budget called for.
The FUD was aimed primarily at high level management and professional staff who controlled or influenced disbursement of discretionary funds. But as those persons became concerned that the IT infrastructure would crash in flames around them unless they bought the new toys, they naturally talked with their counterparts in the private sector, and the FUD spread further.
Darlene and John, I'm looking at you. You, and other mid level managers, flexed your ethics to push your agenda, and a shitload of unnecessary new equipment was bought and installed. You would have upgraded the network to fiber optics if only you could have dreamed up an argument that CAT5 itself was maybe not Y2K compliant. Meanwhile, programs to assist veterans with PTSD were delayed or curtailed. Way to go, guys. Zippity-doo-dah.
You could do what I just did, and try lining three sides of a cardboard box with aluminum foil.
My wifi host lives in the basement; I recently moved into a second story room. I have reasonable throughput after a connection is established, and the authorization handshake happens quickly without failures. But things frequently hang while negotiating the IP address, and often fail after a lengthy delay. The article got me to thinking about interference... My host's signal is often being reported at 30% - 50%, while another wifi on the same channel often comes in at 65% or better.
By carefully orienting my brand new tinfoil box, I've decreased the other wifi's strength to 45%, and boosted my hosts' strength to 50-60%. I'm seeing fewer failures to connect, and the IP address negotiation is faster.
So I'll probably refine this. It is pretty crude at the moment. Also I might speak to the guy that runs the host about trying a home built hyperbolic reflector behind his antenna... he's currently pumping half his output into the dirt...
Why would I want a perfectly good Linux machine to look like a Windows machine?
There's no money in selling a pirated knockoff of Ubuntu.
There may still be money in selling a simulated pirated copy of WinXP. Not as much money as there used to be, but then the risks are lower now, too.
If you know what Ubuntu is, you do not fit the demographic of the target market.
Of course in another year or so the market may very well shift from know-nothings looking for the very best Microsoft experience to boomer uber geeks wanting to buy the nostalgia of the WinXP that they used when they were at the top of their game... like the 1932 Ford Coupes, WinXP is never going to go completely away...
So this is an act of civil disobedience, used in an effort to secure the rights of Australian Internet users.
It is, then, similar to the acts of civil disobedience that were perpetrated by Martin Luther King and by Gandhi.
Now be a good little law-abiding aussie: go take your seat at the back of the bus, shut up, and read only what we say you can read. Or the nice cop will haul your ass to jail.
...to have a.com.au domain, you need to either have a registered business/trading name related to the domain, or have the domain be your actual name....
So, if one of the members of this dissident group is sometimes called "Stephen Conroy", then they have met the second test and the domain name is legitimate.
It might take longer than three hours to muster the paperwork showing that provenance though.
I agree that this is an egregious violation of the Minister's personal intellectual property: it is a form of identity theft and the website should be forced to rename itself.
Eventually.
I do think this is one of those times where the wheels of justice should grind very, very slowly. We've got a Minister who is hell bent on destroying personal freedom of information. The first, and often the most effective, means of defending against Big Government trampling on the individual's rights is to scream as loudly as you can about it. Within that context, this website is clearly an act of civil disobedience of the same nature as those that were used by Ghandi and Martin Luther King.
My sincere hope is that it takes a very long time to determine whether this website should be taken down. And that the arguments pro and con are very loud, reaching all corners of the world, and bringing Stephen Conroy's association with censorship by big government into question.
Perhaps a simpler resolution would be for Stephen Conroy to move to one of those regions where Internet censorship is already practiced. In many respects he would seem more at home in China or Iran than in a country descended from British rule.
Hope this understandable. Composition has been difficult due to distractions from a flakey wifi connection.
Unlike some others on this thread, I will leave it to the courts to separate the relevant facts of the case from the productions of the spin doctors. I am not saying that the assertions of parent post are false. I am saying that I am not in a position to make that judgment, but neither is author of parent post. And for my purposes here, the facts in this specific case don't matter.
What is abundantly clear is that this case revolves around professional behavior as opposed to the expected behavior of mere white collar employees.
If a Registered Information Technologist license had existed, and if the City of San Francisco had been required to fill this role with an RIT, the RIT would have certainly been required by his profession to assure that the City had an acceptable method of securing the passwords he used. Securing meaning not only protection against theft, but also protection against loss, as might happen if he fell under a bus or something.
It is quite possible that Childs would never have made it passed the screening process, would never have become a licensed RIT, and would have found satisfactory employment in a white collar job. There will always be plenty of those in information technology. If the City had been required to hire an RIT for this position, and Childs was not an RIT, then we wouldn't have this story. And the world would be a better place.
This whole situation developed out of unprofessional practices that probably go back more than 15 years. Childs is certainly not blameless in this affair-- if he had behaved professionally from the beginning, the situation could not have developed since the City would have had an alternate way of getting the passwords. Of course he probably would have been fired long ago for being too much of a Boy Scout: employers like maleable employees, and dislike having to deal with professionals.
I think it is doubtful that Childs can use "professional behavior" as a defense: he, like every other IT worker, is neither licensed nor bonded nor in any other way recognized as a practicing member of a profession. He is a mere white collar worker.
The point being that mere white collar workers should not be given these kinds of responsibilities. It really is time to make some parts of information technology a professional practice. Like architecture, civil engineering, health care, law, and so on. Microsoft Certifications just are not good enough. Nor are academic degrees. Neither are designed to turn out persons with an internalized sense of professional ethics, nor do they provide the infrastructure that can guide and support the IT practitioner in their handling of day to day issues. Let alone major conflicts between what the employer demands and what is ethically correct.
He wasn't contractually obligated to evaluate if someone was qualified to receive the passwords. He was obligated to ensure they were authorized, which being his employers, they were.
Above quote shows a continuing confusion between the expectations of white collar workers and professional behavior.
A white collar worker's primary responsibility is fulfilling their contractual obligations.
A member of a profession has an overriding responsibility to his professional ethics. While important, his contractual obligations are subservient to the dictates of his professional ethics.
There is not yet a profession of information technology. There definitely needs to be one since many IT roles now have a major impact on public safety and the common weal. What we've got are a bunch of persons with no effective schooling beyond white collar skills who necessarily go along with a lot of low level unethical crap, and occasionally face an ethical situation that is so egregious they have to attempt to behave in the manner of a licensed professional. Since they have neither the training nor the support that their equivalents in healthcare, law, or civil engineering have, they tend to royally screw it up. That seems to be what has happened in this case.
We really need to develop an actual IT profession, and assure that only Registered Information Technologists (or whatever your title of choice) can fill certain critical roles. Mechanisms for grandfathering in those who currently hold such positions can be built into the process.
It doesn't matter since in this case, the people this guy works for asked for the passwords. He is completely free of guilt
Above is a strongly unprofessional point of view. Literally unprofessional.
A significant difference between doctors, nurses, architects, civil engineers, lawyers and other recognize professionals and blue collar workers are that the professionals are held to codes of ethics that transcend their responsibilities to their employers. This guy may have been attempting to apply professional ethics in his role as a sys admin, but without the infrastructure of an established profession, that can be very difficult.
According to this book I've partly read [disclaimer below], it was only 6,000 years ago, and it was only one alien. A pretty powerful guy, but still only one of him.
[disclaimer] I never finished that book. I skipped over all the begats that establish the time line, for one thing. And frankly a lot of it is just tl;dr. Then I completely stopped reading it as I began to realize just how sick in the head that alien guy is, if one is to believe the book's descriptions of his motives and actions. He's got some serious hangups about sex and fun, for one thing. And he's prone to violence that he justifies with very selfish reasoning, in fact he really seems to fit the diagnosis of narcissistic sociopath (I think the DSM now has a different name for that).
If there is such a guy out there, presumably he is not alone, and we can hope that the others are more sane and community minded than this jerk is.
'Bloviate': such a perfectly cromulent word! How could it be that this is the very first time I have ever seen it?
Kudos, glrotate! To bring such a rare and wonderful word out of the obscure depths of ancient dictionaries and set it glittering before all the Intarwebs is a marvelacious deed, indeed!
Re:Is the word for "leopard" really "tree"?
on
Monkeys With Syntax
·
· Score: 1
I tried to read parent post, I really did.
It wasn't tl;dr that caused me to quit halfway through.
It was tms: too much syntax.
Syntax can be overused. When the mapping of syntactic possibilities begin to branch in too complex a fashion, then information is destroyed rather than conveyed.
I don't follow defense technology at all and I do question the value of a number of the programs. But from what I've seen so far, the RQ-170 makes a lot of sense.
The best battle is the one you never have to fight because your enemy realizes he cannot possibly win by any method of scoring. Systems like the RQ-170 are major components of this best practices strategy.
This also suggests the primary reason for beginning to publicize the RQ-170 at this time, and for its deployment in Afghanistan. The USA is saying to the Taliban and Al Qaida that for this and all kinds of other technical reasons, they should abandon their attempts to achieve a military success and try instead to bargain for some small piece of their vision. I can think of no other reason for the story of the RQ-170 to become public right now: it is abundantly clear that sending this message to the Afghan insurgents is well worth the cost of bringing this bird out of the closet.
And as others in this thread have suggested, it should cause potential adversaries to question whether the RQ-170 program has also served as a way of hiding the development and deployment of something even more capable...
Q. Do I need permission from my employer to run SETI@home on computers at work?
A. Yes! Of course! We've been saying that for 10 years, and despite what some bloggers have said, Niesluchowski wasn't the first person to lose his job over this. The first time was many years ago.
This should have been the beginning and end of the Q&A. Regardless of the relative merits of SETI@Home or what it does or doesn't do to a computer or network, the bottom line is pretty simple: Install unauthorized software on computers that aren't yours and you get spanked.
Well, duh. Of course in this case the person who loaded the software on the computers is also the person who decides which software is authorized.
Slashdot Mirror
At this point in the discussion there is a need to remind everyone that this level of physics is appropriate to describing models of the Universe. But, as pointed out by the luminaries who formulated the Copenhagen convention, the Universe is not the model, and the human mind is fundamentally incapable of comprehending how the models we construct differ from the Universe.
Not only do we not know what is really going on, we cannot possibly ever know that; it is one of the limitations that make us humans rather than gods. But we can make models that are fun to play with, and sometimes lead to new insights. Or even new gadgets, like computers, the Internet, slashdot...
I can't believe I used to think that what I thought was happening was really going on --The Sugar Beets
Fixt dat for ya.
What irritates me most at the moment are slashdot sigs that call for the death of perfectly good memes. The sophomoric quality of slashdot is a part of its charm.
A nuclear plant would use maybe 50 acres and produce a gigawatt. I think the capital expense is comparable. What is the benefit here?
Much lower operational costs.
This could have been different, if the nuclear power industry had bothered to do any significant research on alternatives to uranium and plutonium. Apparently in theory a thorium reactor would have very low post production costs, much lower feedstock costs, and be safer as well, since it could be easily designed to avoid a runaway reaction. But the nuclear power industry seems to have been consistently more concerned with matters of marketing rather than working out better engineering.
There are only 10 kinds of people in this world, those who understand binary, and....
It seems like we agree that sending FUD up the corporate ladder is inappropriate, even though those constructing the FUD may have good intentions; are doing it "for the good of the Order". I can see that this is a separate issue from decisions to replace equipment that are based on long term cost comparisons.
In the VA in 1997 - 2000, there was a lot of FUD directed up the corporate ladder that involved both
IT ended up patting itself on the back while clinicians had to delay implementation of some programs and were unable to deliver expectations on other programs for lack of the needed IT support during these years. At that time, upper management did not have enough computer savvy to connect the dots and recognize that the problems in meeting these patient care goals were due to a failure of IT to provide the needed support. After all, the IT staff was interacting daily with the clinicians, replacing their computers, showing them how to work the upgraded software, isolating and fixing the bugs... The IT staff never seemed to figure out why nobody else was happy with them when they had done such a Good Thing. But at the time nobody else really understood why they had this gut feeling that IT had somehow screwed them over. Maybe all the shiny new computers were too much of a distraction.
There is no dogma, no canon, no "book of how to behave", no punishment, no reward.
That applies not only to atheism, but also to a very wide swath of neopagan practices, that most definitely are organized religions. With Circles and Covens and Rites, oh my. And ordained ministers recognized by State and Province governments as able to perform legally binding ceremonies like handfastings, wickenings, and funeral services.
While there are always exceptions, in general neopagans are more concerned with orthopraxy than with the trappings of orthodoxy: so long as everyone is doing all the right things to craft the magic properly, nobody much gives a hoot about what one actually believes.
Back on point: does this mean that Irish preachers now have to be careful about phrasing their sermons and lessons lest they get pulled out of the pulpit and slapped with a fine for blaspheming the guys who worshiped the golden idols, and so forth? That would seemingly put a lot of their core material out of bounds. Maybe not a bad thing for Ireland, but maybe the Pope would not approve.
And do you still believe in gaming the reports so an issue similar in scope to the Y2K issue will appear to be a mission critical threat to high level management?
Oh wait... you now are high level management. Let's put this in your current perspective.
When somebody reporting to you pulls the wool over your eyes and you buy into their fictions and alter the budget to their benefit, what do you do when you discover that they've led you down the primrose path? Do you promote them to higher levels of responsibility?
I bought into this line of reasoning at the time, as well. It was only years later that I realized the books were cooked in a rather subtle way.
The comparison of costs between using operating funds to correct Y2K deficiencies in existing systems and expending capital on new systems was an apples and oranges comparison. It was a fiction. More specifically, it ignored the costs of configuration, installation, and retraining staff associated with the new equipment, which was directly comparable with the operating costs of correcting the Y2K deficiencies in the existing systems. In short, the same operating costs would have faced with either alternative. The difference in costs between the alternatives was the purchase of the new systems.
That's how I feel about the global warming issue. If we succeed in stopping the effects of climate change
Not to worry, we won't succeed. At this point it is accepted that we will be impacted by global climate change, and the concern is how to minimize it, and how to mitigate what will still happen no matter what we do from this point onward.
Y2K was overblown by middle level IT managers who saw it as an excuse to replace all the older equipment and software whose maintenance they hated with brand new toys that would be more fun to work with.
These are the guys that fed the press the bullshit. Naturally the press got parts of it wrong, since most of what they were being given was being spin-doctored to advance a hidden agenda. But these were the available credentialed experts, willing-- nay, often eager-- to be interviewed. With their camera-ready Love Me walls of MSCE certificates in the background.
This sounds like a conspiracy theory, but there was no need for a conspiracy. The majority of persons in mid level IT management from 1997 t0 2000 were the guys who learned all kinds of clever coding tricks back in the day when it was necessary to use tricks to get acceptable performance out of 8088 and 6502 machines. These were not the best programmers of the times; these were the ones who were merely adequate, the ones who could not make the distinction between an elegant solution and one that was only clever and probably a set up for a future failure. These guys realized they could have more fun using their specialized knowledge in clever ways in the politics of mid level management. So the group attitude of these managers was one of disdain for following rules that got in the way of doing the job, and applause for non-obvious solutions that got the job done in an unexpectedly fast and seemingly effective way. They had learned to do quick and dirty programming, and they transferred that skill into management, but as a group they really didn't see anything wrong with being dirty: a little grime was considered a healthy part of the job.
And these guys were the ones who controlled the reports on the potential impact of Y2K, and they saw those reports as an opportunity to modernize their infrastructures. Rather than looking at patches to work around Y2K issues, for only a hundred times more money, just replace the entire computer and all its software, and everything will be better. Who would argue with that? More to the point, who with good credentials would argue with that, when virtually everyone with credentials would see it as a laudable quick and dirty approach to improving the infrastructure?
There was no need for a conspiracy. The selection pressures of 1985 - 1995 assured that the vast majority of mid level IT managers were all practicing quick and dirty office politics. The entire species was going to respond in the same way to the Y2K stimulus.
Part of that hype was deliberate FUD from elements of the USA permanent government.
In the Veterans Administration and presumably a number of other agencies, during the 3 years from 1997 to 2000 there was a major drive to get every computer "Y2K Compliant". And the tests for compliance were made strict enough to ensure that entire operations had to have brand new CPUs (and associated interfaces and so on) across the board. Y2K was quickly seen as an excuse for emergency authority to spend much more on new hardware than the budget called for.
The FUD was aimed primarily at high level management and professional staff who controlled or influenced disbursement of discretionary funds. But as those persons became concerned that the IT infrastructure would crash in flames around them unless they bought the new toys, they naturally talked with their counterparts in the private sector, and the FUD spread further.
Darlene and John, I'm looking at you. You, and other mid level managers, flexed your ethics to push your agenda, and a shitload of unnecessary new equipment was bought and installed. You would have upgraded the network to fiber optics if only you could have dreamed up an argument that CAT5 itself was maybe not Y2K compliant. Meanwhile, programs to assist veterans with PTSD were delayed or curtailed. Way to go, guys. Zippity-doo-dah.
You could do what I just did, and try lining three sides of a cardboard box with aluminum foil.
My wifi host lives in the basement; I recently moved into a second story room. I have reasonable throughput after a connection is established, and the authorization handshake happens quickly without failures. But things frequently hang while negotiating the IP address, and often fail after a lengthy delay. The article got me to thinking about interference... My host's signal is often being reported at 30% - 50%, while another wifi on the same channel often comes in at 65% or better.
By carefully orienting my brand new tinfoil box, I've decreased the other wifi's strength to 45%, and boosted my hosts' strength to 50-60%. I'm seeing fewer failures to connect, and the IP address negotiation is faster.
So I'll probably refine this. It is pretty crude at the moment. Also I might speak to the guy that runs the host about trying a home built hyperbolic reflector behind his antenna... he's currently pumping half his output into the dirt...
Why would I want a perfectly good Linux machine to look like a Windows machine?
There's no money in selling a pirated knockoff of Ubuntu.
There may still be money in selling a simulated pirated copy of WinXP. Not as much money as there used to be, but then the risks are lower now, too.
If you know what Ubuntu is, you do not fit the demographic of the target market.
Of course in another year or so the market may very well shift from know-nothings looking for the very best Microsoft experience to boomer uber geeks wanting to buy the nostalgia of the WinXP that they used when they were at the top of their game... like the 1932 Ford Coupes, WinXP is never going to go completely away...
So this is an act of civil disobedience, used in an effort to secure the rights of Australian Internet users.
It is, then, similar to the acts of civil disobedience that were perpetrated by Martin Luther King and by Gandhi.
Now be a good little law-abiding aussie: go take your seat at the back of the bus, shut up, and read only what we say you can read. Or the nice cop will haul your ass to jail.
...to have a .com.au domain, you need to either have a registered business/trading name related to the domain, or have the domain be your actual name....
So, if one of the members of this dissident group is sometimes called "Stephen Conroy", then they have met the second test and the domain name is legitimate.
It might take longer than three hours to muster the paperwork showing that provenance though.
I agree that this is an egregious violation of the Minister's personal intellectual property: it is a form of identity theft and the website should be forced to rename itself.
Eventually.
I do think this is one of those times where the wheels of justice should grind very, very slowly. We've got a Minister who is hell bent on destroying personal freedom of information. The first, and often the most effective, means of defending against Big Government trampling on the individual's rights is to scream as loudly as you can about it. Within that context, this website is clearly an act of civil disobedience of the same nature as those that were used by Ghandi and Martin Luther King.
My sincere hope is that it takes a very long time to determine whether this website should be taken down. And that the arguments pro and con are very loud, reaching all corners of the world, and bringing Stephen Conroy's association with censorship by big government into question.
Perhaps a simpler resolution would be for Stephen Conroy to move to one of those regions where Internet censorship is already practiced. In many respects he would seem more at home in China or Iran than in a country descended from British rule.
Bequeath
Hope this understandable. Composition has been difficult due to distractions from a flakey wifi connection.
Unlike some others on this thread, I will leave it to the courts to separate the relevant facts of the case from the productions of the spin doctors. I am not saying that the assertions of parent post are false. I am saying that I am not in a position to make that judgment, but neither is author of parent post. And for my purposes here, the facts in this specific case don't matter.
What is abundantly clear is that this case revolves around professional behavior as opposed to the expected behavior of mere white collar employees.
If a Registered Information Technologist license had existed, and if the City of San Francisco had been required to fill this role with an RIT, the RIT would have certainly been required by his profession to assure that the City had an acceptable method of securing the passwords he used. Securing meaning not only protection against theft, but also protection against loss, as might happen if he fell under a bus or something.
It is quite possible that Childs would never have made it passed the screening process, would never have become a licensed RIT, and would have found satisfactory employment in a white collar job. There will always be plenty of those in information technology. If the City had been required to hire an RIT for this position, and Childs was not an RIT, then we wouldn't have this story. And the world would be a better place.
This whole situation developed out of unprofessional practices that probably go back more than 15 years. Childs is certainly not blameless in this affair-- if he had behaved professionally from the beginning, the situation could not have developed since the City would have had an alternate way of getting the passwords. Of course he probably would have been fired long ago for being too much of a Boy Scout: employers like maleable employees, and dislike having to deal with professionals.
I think it is doubtful that Childs can use "professional behavior" as a defense: he, like every other IT worker, is neither licensed nor bonded nor in any other way recognized as a practicing member of a profession. He is a mere white collar worker.
The point being that mere white collar workers should not be given these kinds of responsibilities. It really is time to make some parts of information technology a professional practice. Like architecture, civil engineering, health care, law, and so on. Microsoft Certifications just are not good enough. Nor are academic degrees. Neither are designed to turn out persons with an internalized sense of professional ethics, nor do they provide the infrastructure that can guide and support the IT practitioner in their handling of day to day issues. Let alone major conflicts between what the employer demands and what is ethically correct.
He wasn't contractually obligated to evaluate if someone was qualified to receive the passwords. He was obligated to ensure they were authorized, which being his employers, they were.
Above quote shows a continuing confusion between the expectations of white collar workers and professional behavior.
A white collar worker's primary responsibility is fulfilling their contractual obligations.
A member of a profession has an overriding responsibility to his professional ethics. While important, his contractual obligations are subservient to the dictates of his professional ethics.
There is not yet a profession of information technology. There definitely needs to be one since many IT roles now have a major impact on public safety and the common weal. What we've got are a bunch of persons with no effective schooling beyond white collar skills who necessarily go along with a lot of low level unethical crap, and occasionally face an ethical situation that is so egregious they have to attempt to behave in the manner of a licensed professional. Since they have neither the training nor the support that their equivalents in healthcare, law, or civil engineering have, they tend to royally screw it up. That seems to be what has happened in this case.
We really need to develop an actual IT profession, and assure that only Registered Information Technologists (or whatever your title of choice) can fill certain critical roles. Mechanisms for grandfathering in those who currently hold such positions can be built into the process.
It doesn't matter since in this case, the people this guy works for asked for the passwords. He is completely free of guilt
Above is a strongly unprofessional point of view. Literally unprofessional.
A significant difference between doctors, nurses, architects, civil engineers, lawyers and other recognize professionals and blue collar workers are that the professionals are held to codes of ethics that transcend their responsibilities to their employers. This guy may have been attempting to apply professional ethics in his role as a sys admin, but without the infrastructure of an established profession, that can be very difficult.
aliens terraformed earth a long time ago
According to this book I've partly read [disclaimer below], it was only 6,000 years ago, and it was only one alien. A pretty powerful guy, but still only one of him.
[disclaimer] I never finished that book. I skipped over all the begats that establish the time line, for one thing. And frankly a lot of it is just tl;dr. Then I completely stopped reading it as I began to realize just how sick in the head that alien guy is, if one is to believe the book's descriptions of his motives and actions. He's got some serious hangups about sex and fun, for one thing. And he's prone to violence that he justifies with very selfish reasoning, in fact he really seems to fit the diagnosis of narcissistic sociopath (I think the DSM now has a different name for that).
If there is such a guy out there, presumably he is not alone, and we can hope that the others are more sane and community minded than this jerk is.
'Bloviate': such a perfectly cromulent word! How could it be that this is the very first time I have ever seen it?
Kudos, glrotate! To bring such a rare and wonderful word out of the obscure depths of ancient dictionaries and set it glittering before all the Intarwebs is a marvelacious deed, indeed!
I tried to read parent post, I really did.
It wasn't tl;dr that caused me to quit halfway through.
It was tms: too much syntax.
Syntax can be overused. When the mapping of syntactic possibilities begin to branch in too complex a fashion, then information is destroyed rather than conveyed.
KISS is good. Parent post was not KISS.
I don't follow defense technology at all and I do question the value of a number of the programs. But from what I've seen so far, the RQ-170 makes a lot of sense.
The best battle is the one you never have to fight because your enemy realizes he cannot possibly win by any method of scoring. Systems like the RQ-170 are major components of this best practices strategy.
This also suggests the primary reason for beginning to publicize the RQ-170 at this time, and for its deployment in Afghanistan. The USA is saying to the Taliban and Al Qaida that for this and all kinds of other technical reasons, they should abandon their attempts to achieve a military success and try instead to bargain for some small piece of their vision. I can think of no other reason for the story of the RQ-170 to become public right now: it is abundantly clear that sending this message to the Afghan insurgents is well worth the cost of bringing this bird out of the closet.
And as others in this thread have suggested, it should cause potential adversaries to question whether the RQ-170 program has also served as a way of hiding the development and deployment of something even more capable...
Q. Do I need permission from my employer to run SETI@home on computers at work?
A. Yes! Of course! We've been saying that for 10 years, and despite what some bloggers have said, Niesluchowski wasn't the first person to lose his job over this. The first time was many years ago.
This should have been the beginning and end of the Q&A. Regardless of the relative merits of SETI@Home or what it does or doesn't do to a computer or network, the bottom line is pretty simple: Install unauthorized software on computers that aren't yours and you get spanked.
Well, duh. Of course in this case the person who loaded the software on the computers is also the person who decides which software is authorized.