Don't forget that Ron Paul wants to take away the privileges large corporations get from government
Except that he will give them a lot more than he will take away from them. He plans to abolish most of the regulatory agencies that large businesses are always bitching about - you know the agencies that are tasked with keeping our air and water clean; silly things like that. Taking away their privileges is trivial in comparison to the mandated blind eye that we will be forced to turn towards them as they kill us off in the name of profit.
Wow, another slashdot message in blind support of Ron Paul. Shocked, I am not. Said message didn't bother to read all of what I said; also not shocking.
The one who is against corporate personhood?
Saying you're against corporate "personhood", and then removing regulations that prevent corporations from effectively owning people and walking all over both those they do and those they do not own, are a conflict that Ron Paul has no apparent problem with. He is fine to strip out government regulations that keep our water, air, and food safe. That's not libertarianism; that's just extreme pro-business action.
What a shocking surprise, that you wrote up a message of nonsense, in reply to a message that you didn't read in its entirety, and yet you got moderated up because you praised Ron Paul. Next you're going to try to tell us that there is a secret enclave of far-left slashdotters holding you down.
I want to see a New Hampshire candidate run solely on "Live Free Or Die".
Isn't that essentially what Libertarian Party members are running on?
Not any libertarian I've ever heard of running for anything notable. Every self-proclaimed libertarian I've seen lately who has been able to bring attention to their campaign is just another conservative who finds it advantageous to run under a different label.
When you are tethered to corporate everything the way the likes of Ron Paul wants people to be, you are less free than we are now. And when you continually roll back anything resembling controls on large corporations, you inevitably give them the power.
I'm not a Libertarian, and I'm not pimping for them here, but doesn't that essentially boil down to their whole party platform?
The people who call themselves libertarians - at least in the US - are functionally identical to republicans on >99% of all matters.
The Unique Candidates of the New Hampshire Primary and only one to restore sanity.
That on its own doesn't mean shit. You want us to read your signature? Maybe you should actually say something in your message. Or is one of your hands too busy since you're thinking about your messiah candidate?
You really should stop phoning it in like this. You make people who actually want to say something look like screwballs by being associated with you.
I want to see a New Hampshire candidate run solely on "Live Free Or Die". Extra points if he (or she) can get away with appending it to "Live Free Or Die, Bitches"
The fact that reportedly a 6-inch cannonball fired from a homemade cannon busts through a cinder-block wall, then bounces off a hillside, then flies 700 yards and bounces again, then goes through a front door, bounces up a stairway and into a bedroom where it proceeds to bust through a stucco wall, and after all that, still had enough energy to fly over to a neighboring house hitting its roof and destroying a few roof tiles, crosses a six lane highway (still in the air, presumably) over into another neighborhood and crashes into a parked minivan shattering its windshield and destroying its dashboard
Actually, the part that discredited it for me was that the course of the ball didn't end in "nothing but net". Which clearly means it was faked, just like the JFK magic bullet and the moon landing.
Now I have an email addresses through hotmail, gmail and yahoo that I use for different things and facebook also gives me an email address. So, I doubt students really need email addresses provided by the university anymore.
You are quite wrong. Email addresses - especially.edu addresses - are still quite valuable. At lot of academic resources that take registration via email won't allow registration to go to a throwaway account (a la hotmail, gmail, yahoo, etc). Many organizations that are interested in real information on users insist that users use an actual unique account and not a freebie. And when you're in college and making very little money a lot of those things can be important.
I think it just shows that trying to build IT competence into a government agency basically a waste of money because the institutional culture of government
You're not very accurate on that, either. Government organizations need to be able to keep track of their email - especially internal communications - which they would not be able to do if they outsourced email and other telecom.
In short, all of these kinds of organizations could just offer email through gmail/google business or any number of other providers that will scale up almost infinitely.
With the various privacy breeches that have occurred, that would be a terrible idea. And on top of that, IT is a lot more than just email. Do you want the government to turn to comcast for networking support while their at it? What if the IRS web servers go down on tax day? Do you want them to have to lean on an outside company to get it back up?
IT people need to move into management at a more useful rate. Instead most of the people who ultimately make the financial decisions for IT centers around the world have little grounding in IT and hence limited understanding of what is actually important beyond the bottom line.
Of course, this requires IT people who are willing to put their foot down. We don't seem to have many of those...
After all, your carrier already knows what numbers you are communicating with, how often, for how long, and when. They know the text of the messages you send, as well. The only difference is now there is a company who you are not directly paying who is also watching what you're up to. I'm not saying I approve of it, but it really isn't that big of a change form my perspective. If your carrier just sold your calling records to someone, would it be this much of an issue?
Ultimately, any carrier that doesn't already have this kind of detailed information on every one of their customers is at the least irresponsible and more likely idiotic - and even more likely soon out of business. Even for the "unlimited" plans out there, it is still worthwhile for the companies to watch what is going on in order to properly position themselves for future changes in consumer and business phone use.
I would immediately moderate that comment up if I had mod points today. That gibberish deserves to score (+5, insightful) for sure. Way better than the goatse or GNAA stuff that is usually posted anonymously here.
Is some CIA agent in Tangiers using Slashdot as a communication outpost
Admittedly, that wouldn't be that bad of an idea, since nobody reads Slashdot any more any ways.
The iPhone is an extremely successful handheld game console
Really? How many multiplayer games have been released for the iPhone? How many games have been released for the iPhone that were sold for more than $10? Just because thousands of people play farmville and scrabble on their iPhone does not make it a successful gaming platform. And it doesn't show the trajectory in sales numbers or real dollars to support the notion that it is in any way capable of unseating a dedicated game console for the gaming experiences that dominate sales today for the dominant consoles on the market.
They are quite capable of using computers and cell phones and shredders.
They certainly are. However a shredder requires electricity, and warlords often thrive in areas with inconsistent (or worse) electricity. In comparison, any hack with matches and gasoline can torch a building, day or night.
A warlord is more or less equally as dangerous as uncontrolled fire.
if you have a big stack it can actually take longer to burn them beyond recovery. Why? It's about oxygen availability - the corners, top and bottom pages will burn first, but the center of a pile of documents will often remain intact
That is assuming that someone is burning only paper. Indeed, a stack of paper can be a bitch to burn beyond recognition. But if you're in the business of raping women and torching villages, you just throw the documents into a building that you are going to burn to the ground and then you leave town. Eventually the temperature of the fire gets high enough that the paper incinerates well beyond any hope of recovery.
And fire is one thing that warlords are almost universally good at. One may find themselves in a place where electricity for running a shredder is hard - or even impossible - to come by, but they can always find something they are interested in burning to the ground, even when they are fleeing someone else.
Every phone so far that has attempted to be a gaming console has been a failure. And frankly, I don't want a phone to do that any ways. I want my game console to be connected to my TV, and have a controller that works well for the game. Any game that is significantly more complicated than Tetris isn't worth playing on any phone that I would want to own.
And on top of that, phones are doing so many things now that battery life is starting to fall again. If we throw more games at them, battery life will only get worse. Some of us want to... what's the word... talk on our phones. And a dead battery from too much Call of Duty Twelve doesn't help that.
I don't see this being very useful for overseas operations. They mentioned before this would be good for recovering documents shredded by "warlords' operations" but that doesn't seem to make a lot of sense. Many of the warlords we are most concerned about right now have such a dramatically different sense of morality than our own that they use rape as a weapon - or tool, really - of war.
Why, then, would we expect them to use a shredder for their documents, when they can much more easily set fire to the documents? No amount of de-shredding is going to put back together documents that have been incinerated.
I suspect we are much more likely to see this used by the FBI than the CIA or DOD.
124.82.44.82 - - [02/Dec/2011:03:22:20 -0500] "GET/favicon.ico HTTP/1.1" 200 247 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1) AppleWebKit/535.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/15.0.874.121 Safari/535.2"
We see Mozilla, Chrome, and Safari all on the same line. And I see a lot of lines like that. In fact of 587 lines I saw in my log that accessed the favicon.ico page, they all mentioned Mozilla and only three did not mention Safari.
... that indeed, there is nothing worth watching on broadcast TV. Cable is the easiest bill to cut out entirely, and would be the first I would axe completely if I lost my job (and of course that same demographic is also very much impacted by the crappy economy and high unemployment).
Renting isn't that great of an option if you want to watch something that came out more than 4 or 5 years ago. >99% of the titles at blockbuster - which is the only nationwide rental chain left with brick-and-mortar locations - are less than 5 years old. And the 1% that is older than 5 years consists mostly of things you see on cable every week anyways.
And don't tell me redbox or netflix are any better, because they really aren't. Netflix can get you some older stuff through the mail, but then you're waiting for it. Redbox... forget it, they only do stuff that is less than 5 (in their case more like less than 2.5) years old.
So really if you want good depth, you have to pay for it. Thankfully older titles pop up for sale online with fairly regular frequency if you know where to look.
For example, the last courses I needed for my BS were 4xxx level, full-year courses that had 3xxx level full-year courses as prerequisites. Those 3xxx level courses had 2xxx level full-year prereqs and those courses had full-year 1xxx level prereqs.
Your university is using the prerequisite system to justify the 4 year length of the program.
No, they are not. The prereqs were valid and intense courses. Taking the 4xxx level course without taking the 3xxx level course would have been pretty well impossible, same for the relations between the others and their prereqs. The 2xxx and 3xxx level courses in particular shoved about 3 semester's worth of material into two semesters as it was, so they could not have been condensed.
I know I'll get ridiculed for this comment
You deserve to be, yes.
but I learned more in my two-year MBA program than I did in my 4-year Engineering program which was about 6 useful classes and years of filler.
Then either you went through a crappy engineering dept, or you didn't know shit about management. One alternate possibility is that you actually knew something about engineering before beginning your 4 year program but I find that highly unlikely. Being as you didn't say what type of engineering, it is impossible to know if you actually majored in something difficult and rigorous or if you instead chose a fluff major so you could spend time in frat parties.
(US should dump a lot of filler classes)
In college and cut the time to 3 years.
The valuable programs in a lot of colleges now have four years worth of required courses, and cannot be cut to a three year program (and those that can probably aren't educating students adequately). For example, the last courses I needed for my BS were 4xxx level, full-year courses that had 3xxx level full-year courses as prerequisites. Those 3xxx level courses had 2xxx level full-year prereqs and those courses had full-year 1xxx level prereqs. Even if I took no "filler courses" as you see them, I still would not have been able to graduate in three years in this program, it simply wasn't possible. I even took summer courses on top of my usual semesters of course work (while working on average 30 hours per week at the same time).
The only way they could have changed that would be if every course was offered every semester - including the summer. That is a discussion that is worth having, for sure. However many of those courses just don't have the demand currently to justify offering them every semester.
However your subject line also implies that the US has somehow, as a nation, decided on this system. That is of course wholly incorrect. There is no legislation on the national level I have ever encountered that requires liberal education requirements (or "filler" as you call them) to be fulfilled in order for a student to complete a bachelor's degree. Just one case in point, I had no foreign language requirement for my BS (although BA students were required to take at least 1 year).
I have been an IT support guy - I was a Netware admin for some time back when Netware was a solid product - and now I am an end user who occasionally is at odds with the IT dept. And the tension does go both ways. One thing we worked out where I am now was to assign an "IT liaison" to act as a go-between. It's not because end users can't handle the tech, but rather because sometimes the IT people aren't aware of why some resources are critical to users. The liaison is responsible for knowing who is responsible for specific hardware items across different depts so that if IT determines something is causing trouble on the network, the correct people are contacted.
Being as I work for the largest employer in my county, that is not a trivial matter. Our IT dept has responsibilities in over a dozen buildings in numerous zip codes. Just having one person know who to contact when IT has an issue with something makes a huge difference, and that person is our first contact when we need something beyond usual support requests from IT.
For example, we had the conficker worm running through our network, it was hugely valuable for IT to know who to contact for specific machines - especially if they were machines that for various reasons could not be kept under automated control of IT. Of course around the same time our network was ravaged by the errant Norton antivirus update that was identifying a standard Windows XP executable as being infected - and throwing every XP system into an infinite reboot loop.
So really, the conflict often comes down to communication more than anything. And by that I mean human-human communication, done by people actually talking with one another. Once people actually establish what they need and how to work with one another, tempers settle and work gets done. It's not terribly difficult and can be managed even in very large institutions.
Slashdot Mirror
After all, when your customer has unlimited funds, you can charge as much as you want for your app.
Don't forget that Ron Paul wants to take away the privileges large corporations get from government
Except that he will give them a lot more than he will take away from them. He plans to abolish most of the regulatory agencies that large businesses are always bitching about - you know the agencies that are tasked with keeping our air and water clean; silly things like that. Taking away their privileges is trivial in comparison to the mandated blind eye that we will be forced to turn towards them as they kill us off in the name of profit.
This place is overrun by Ron Paul zombies. If a potential candidate can find a way to control them, they'd certainly win my vote.
Tethered to corporate everything? Ron Paul?
Wow, another slashdot message in blind support of Ron Paul. Shocked, I am not. Said message didn't bother to read all of what I said; also not shocking.
The one who is against corporate personhood?
Saying you're against corporate "personhood", and then removing regulations that prevent corporations from effectively owning people and walking all over both those they do and those they do not own, are a conflict that Ron Paul has no apparent problem with. He is fine to strip out government regulations that keep our water, air, and food safe. That's not libertarianism; that's just extreme pro-business action.
What a shocking surprise, that you wrote up a message of nonsense, in reply to a message that you didn't read in its entirety, and yet you got moderated up because you praised Ron Paul. Next you're going to try to tell us that there is a secret enclave of far-left slashdotters holding you down.
I want to see a New Hampshire candidate run solely on "Live Free Or Die".
Isn't that essentially what Libertarian Party members are running on?
Not any libertarian I've ever heard of running for anything notable. Every self-proclaimed libertarian I've seen lately who has been able to bring attention to their campaign is just another conservative who finds it advantageous to run under a different label.
When you are tethered to corporate everything the way the likes of Ron Paul wants people to be, you are less free than we are now. And when you continually roll back anything resembling controls on large corporations, you inevitably give them the power.
I'm not a Libertarian, and I'm not pimping for them here, but doesn't that essentially boil down to their whole party platform?
The people who call themselves libertarians - at least in the US - are functionally identical to republicans on >99% of all matters.
The Unique Candidates of the New Hampshire Primary and only one to restore sanity.
That on its own doesn't mean shit. You want us to read your signature? Maybe you should actually say something in your message. Or is one of your hands too busy since you're thinking about your messiah candidate?
You really should stop phoning it in like this. You make people who actually want to say something look like screwballs by being associated with you.
I want to see a New Hampshire candidate run solely on "Live Free Or Die". Extra points if he (or she) can get away with appending it to "Live Free Or Die, Bitches"
The fact that reportedly a 6-inch cannonball fired from a homemade cannon busts through a cinder-block wall, then bounces off a hillside, then flies 700 yards and bounces again, then goes through a front door, bounces up a stairway and into a bedroom where it proceeds to bust through a stucco wall, and after all that, still had enough energy to fly over to a neighboring house hitting its roof and destroying a few roof tiles, crosses a six lane highway (still in the air, presumably) over into another neighborhood and crashes into a parked minivan shattering its windshield and destroying its dashboard
Actually, the part that discredited it for me was that the course of the ball didn't end in "nothing but net". Which clearly means it was faked, just like the JFK magic bullet and the moon landing.
Now I have an email addresses through hotmail, gmail and yahoo that I use for different things and facebook also gives me an email address. So, I doubt students really need email addresses provided by the university anymore.
You are quite wrong. Email addresses - especially .edu addresses - are still quite valuable. At lot of academic resources that take registration via email won't allow registration to go to a throwaway account (a la hotmail, gmail, yahoo, etc). Many organizations that are interested in real information on users insist that users use an actual unique account and not a freebie. And when you're in college and making very little money a lot of those things can be important.
I think it just shows that trying to build IT competence into a government agency basically a waste of money because the institutional culture of government
You're not very accurate on that, either. Government organizations need to be able to keep track of their email - especially internal communications - which they would not be able to do if they outsourced email and other telecom.
In short, all of these kinds of organizations could just offer email through gmail/google business or any number of other providers that will scale up almost infinitely.
With the various privacy breeches that have occurred, that would be a terrible idea. And on top of that, IT is a lot more than just email. Do you want the government to turn to comcast for networking support while their at it? What if the IRS web servers go down on tax day? Do you want them to have to lean on an outside company to get it back up?
IT people need to move into management at a more useful rate. Instead most of the people who ultimately make the financial decisions for IT centers around the world have little grounding in IT and hence limited understanding of what is actually important beyond the bottom line.
Of course, this requires IT people who are willing to put their foot down. We don't seem to have many of those...
At 0:54 in the video you briefly catch a glimpse of a 3-eyed fish jumping out of the lake ... eerily reminiscent of the Simpsons.
Unfortunately, that fish is only visible if you're watching the video on the 30th of February.
After all, your carrier already knows what numbers you are communicating with, how often, for how long, and when. They know the text of the messages you send, as well. The only difference is now there is a company who you are not directly paying who is also watching what you're up to. I'm not saying I approve of it, but it really isn't that big of a change form my perspective. If your carrier just sold your calling records to someone, would it be this much of an issue?
Ultimately, any carrier that doesn't already have this kind of detailed information on every one of their customers is at the least irresponsible and more likely idiotic - and even more likely soon out of business. Even for the "unlimited" plans out there, it is still worthwhile for the companies to watch what is going on in order to properly position themselves for future changes in consumer and business phone use.
Is some CIA agent in Tangiers using Slashdot as a communication outpost
Admittedly, that wouldn't be that bad of an idea, since nobody reads Slashdot any more any ways.
The iPhone is an extremely successful handheld game console
Really? How many multiplayer games have been released for the iPhone? How many games have been released for the iPhone that were sold for more than $10? Just because thousands of people play farmville and scrabble on their iPhone does not make it a successful gaming platform. And it doesn't show the trajectory in sales numbers or real dollars to support the notion that it is in any way capable of unseating a dedicated game console for the gaming experiences that dominate sales today for the dominant consoles on the market.
They are quite capable of using computers and cell phones and shredders.
They certainly are. However a shredder requires electricity, and warlords often thrive in areas with inconsistent (or worse) electricity. In comparison, any hack with matches and gasoline can torch a building, day or night.
A fire can be dangerous, a shredder is convenient
A warlord is more or less equally as dangerous as uncontrolled fire.
if you have a big stack it can actually take longer to burn them beyond recovery. Why? It's about oxygen availability - the corners, top and bottom pages will burn first, but the center of a pile of documents will often remain intact
That is assuming that someone is burning only paper. Indeed, a stack of paper can be a bitch to burn beyond recognition. But if you're in the business of raping women and torching villages, you just throw the documents into a building that you are going to burn to the ground and then you leave town. Eventually the temperature of the fire gets high enough that the paper incinerates well beyond any hope of recovery.
And fire is one thing that warlords are almost universally good at. One may find themselves in a place where electricity for running a shredder is hard - or even impossible - to come by, but they can always find something they are interested in burning to the ground, even when they are fleeing someone else.
Every phone so far that has attempted to be a gaming console has been a failure. And frankly, I don't want a phone to do that any ways. I want my game console to be connected to my TV, and have a controller that works well for the game. Any game that is significantly more complicated than Tetris isn't worth playing on any phone that I would want to own.
... what's the word ... talk on our phones. And a dead battery from too much Call of Duty Twelve doesn't help that.
And on top of that, phones are doing so many things now that battery life is starting to fall again. If we throw more games at them, battery life will only get worse. Some of us want to
I don't see this being very useful for overseas operations. They mentioned before this would be good for recovering documents shredded by "warlords' operations" but that doesn't seem to make a lot of sense. Many of the warlords we are most concerned about right now have such a dramatically different sense of morality than our own that they use rape as a weapon - or tool, really - of war.
Why, then, would we expect them to use a shredder for their documents, when they can much more easily set fire to the documents? No amount of de-shredding is going to put back together documents that have been incinerated.
I suspect we are much more likely to see this used by the FBI than the CIA or DOD.
We see Mozilla, Chrome, and Safari all on the same line. And I see a lot of lines like that. In fact of 587 lines I saw in my log that accessed the favicon.ico page, they all mentioned Mozilla and only three did not mention Safari.
... that indeed, there is nothing worth watching on broadcast TV. Cable is the easiest bill to cut out entirely, and would be the first I would axe completely if I lost my job (and of course that same demographic is also very much impacted by the crappy economy and high unemployment).
While it is clearly not a FQDN, does an address in someone else's domain count as an URL? It's not like they really own it...
Renting isn't that great of an option if you want to watch something that came out more than 4 or 5 years ago. >99% of the titles at blockbuster - which is the only nationwide rental chain left with brick-and-mortar locations - are less than 5 years old. And the 1% that is older than 5 years consists mostly of things you see on cable every week anyways.
... forget it, they only do stuff that is less than 5 (in their case more like less than 2.5) years old.
And don't tell me redbox or netflix are any better, because they really aren't. Netflix can get you some older stuff through the mail, but then you're waiting for it. Redbox
So really if you want good depth, you have to pay for it. Thankfully older titles pop up for sale online with fairly regular frequency if you know where to look.
For example, the last courses I needed for my BS were 4xxx level, full-year courses that had 3xxx level full-year courses as prerequisites. Those 3xxx level courses had 2xxx level full-year prereqs and those courses had full-year 1xxx level prereqs.
Your university is using the prerequisite system to justify the 4 year length of the program.
No, they are not. The prereqs were valid and intense courses. Taking the 4xxx level course without taking the 3xxx level course would have been pretty well impossible, same for the relations between the others and their prereqs. The 2xxx and 3xxx level courses in particular shoved about 3 semester's worth of material into two semesters as it was, so they could not have been condensed.
I know I'll get ridiculed for this comment
You deserve to be, yes.
but I learned more in my two-year MBA program than I did in my 4-year Engineering program which was about 6 useful classes and years of filler.
Then either you went through a crappy engineering dept, or you didn't know shit about management. One alternate possibility is that you actually knew something about engineering before beginning your 4 year program but I find that highly unlikely. Being as you didn't say what type of engineering, it is impossible to know if you actually majored in something difficult and rigorous or if you instead chose a fluff major so you could spend time in frat parties.
(US should dump a lot of filler classes)
In college and cut the time to 3 years.
The valuable programs in a lot of colleges now have four years worth of required courses, and cannot be cut to a three year program (and those that can probably aren't educating students adequately). For example, the last courses I needed for my BS were 4xxx level, full-year courses that had 3xxx level full-year courses as prerequisites. Those 3xxx level courses had 2xxx level full-year prereqs and those courses had full-year 1xxx level prereqs. Even if I took no "filler courses" as you see them, I still would not have been able to graduate in three years in this program, it simply wasn't possible. I even took summer courses on top of my usual semesters of course work (while working on average 30 hours per week at the same time).
The only way they could have changed that would be if every course was offered every semester - including the summer. That is a discussion that is worth having, for sure. However many of those courses just don't have the demand currently to justify offering them every semester.
However your subject line also implies that the US has somehow, as a nation, decided on this system. That is of course wholly incorrect. There is no legislation on the national level I have ever encountered that requires liberal education requirements (or "filler" as you call them) to be fulfilled in order for a student to complete a bachelor's degree. Just one case in point, I had no foreign language requirement for my BS (although BA students were required to take at least 1 year).
I have been an IT support guy - I was a Netware admin for some time back when Netware was a solid product - and now I am an end user who occasionally is at odds with the IT dept. And the tension does go both ways. One thing we worked out where I am now was to assign an "IT liaison" to act as a go-between. It's not because end users can't handle the tech, but rather because sometimes the IT people aren't aware of why some resources are critical to users. The liaison is responsible for knowing who is responsible for specific hardware items across different depts so that if IT determines something is causing trouble on the network, the correct people are contacted.
Being as I work for the largest employer in my county, that is not a trivial matter. Our IT dept has responsibilities in over a dozen buildings in numerous zip codes. Just having one person know who to contact when IT has an issue with something makes a huge difference, and that person is our first contact when we need something beyond usual support requests from IT.
For example, we had the conficker worm running through our network, it was hugely valuable for IT to know who to contact for specific machines - especially if they were machines that for various reasons could not be kept under automated control of IT. Of course around the same time our network was ravaged by the errant Norton antivirus update that was identifying a standard Windows XP executable as being infected - and throwing every XP system into an infinite reboot loop.
So really, the conflict often comes down to communication more than anything. And by that I mean human-human communication, done by people actually talking with one another. Once people actually establish what they need and how to work with one another, tempers settle and work gets done. It's not terribly difficult and can be managed even in very large institutions.