"Doing the honorable thing" and being a thief are two different things. Furthermore, the Supreme Court IIRC did not care if the trash was out on the street or not. It was in the trash.
Your opinion on what is honorable is different than what is legal.
How do you know where the trash was located? I read the article. Anderson only took it after the garbage men, instructed by the Museum to throw anything not salvageable, picked it up and restored it. It was coated with melted materials.
So in actuality, he did wait until the garbage men made it trash by throwing it away. You are acting upon a belief that he was rummaging through the remains in the middle of the night, when in fact, he was there in plain daylight by virtue of a close relationship with the curator.
If you read further, once he determined what it was, he kept it as a memento of the Museum and back in those days people expected space flights to be a commonplace event in 20 years. He did not think at the time (he was 17) that it was going to be one of a couple hundred Moon rocks in existence.
"Should of" and "legally bound to do so" are two different things. So you can freely express your belief that he should return the rock, but retract your statement of thievery because it is simply untrue. According to facts at hand.
Also, let's remember this. According to the facts... he started the lawsuit after being made aware of the search and intentions to collect all the rocks. So he did come forward after nearly 40 years, in an honorable fashion, to dispute ownership.
He could of have just quietly smiled and spent the twilight years of his life looking it at on the wall of his home and we might not have known the location for another 50-100 years.
Did he do that? No. He came forward and said he claimed it from the trash in full view of the authorities and museum, restored it, and has kept it from further harm for 40 years.
He did not steal it. He did not buy it from the black market. He has not attempted to quietly sell it on the black market for millions either.
So give the man the credit he deserves and stop denigrating him without cause. Let the court decide in this case if he can claim salvage rights, etc.
Anderson says he found the rock in the trash mixed with debris following a fire at an Anchorage museum in 1973
The museum, according to this, threw it away in the trash. I could quote The Burbs here, but I think the Supreme Court made it pretty clear AFAIK. Once you throw away something in the trash you have relinquished all claims of ownership.
IANAL, but comparing this to looting is just specious.
Should Anderson have been compelled to contact another Museum and tell them that he thought he had a piece of a Moon rock? Maybe. Is he morally wrong for not doing so? That's highly questionable.
To me Anderson is without question the legal owner of the rock if it was thrown out in the trash.
That is my opinion, but to label the man a thief is hardly fair. Obviously he has some sentimental attachment to it and if everyone could be adults about it they could just come to an agreement that upon Anderson's death ownership is transferred to the Museum.
It would not be the first such arrangement either. Why the Moon rock all of the sudden gets special treatment is beyond me. Sure, it took a heck of lot more resources to obtain and makes it inherently quite valuable, but it was thrown away in the trash.
Quit. Find another job, or at least start looking right now. Even if you safely move one foot to the other like a stepping stone, DO IT.
I am speaking from experience here. Salaried and was working 20 hours a day for over a year and half. I finally did a re-fi and cashed out the equivalent of 3.5 years worth of my salary (I was not compensated well in the first place).
First two weeks I slept 14 hours a day and woke up after having nightmares where I dreamed about cronjobs, databases, and SQL statements. I would wake up screaming with panic attacks wondering if certain processes were done.
Quit.
What it did was completely shot my adrenal glands. I had nearly killed them. Doctors put me on stuff for a year, and it took about that long for me to get back to normal sleeping patterns and feel better.
It truly is not worth it, life is too fucking short. Don't waste your life on this.
If you have children, a wife, or a girlfriend that IS suffering right now. If you have children you are performing a great sacrifice and being a good father, but you could be a better one being there. I can honestly say that I would have rather been a little more poor, eaten a little less, had less conveniences and video games if I got to see my father more.
The reason why this continues in this environment is that WE let it. An awful lot of IT people are not lazy at all. Some are driven to bad behavior and apathy, but more are driven to keep things alive at all cost. It is our purpose. I took it that seriously. It was like the Path of the Warrior and shit like that. The SQL server WILL not fucking do down BECAUSE I WONT LET IT. I'll figure out a way to work with what I have to make things as redundant as possible.
Quit. Quit. Quit.
Find another job, even if it pays only 80% as much, even if it is a different type of job. Quit.
If you continue down this path, it will be you writing this post to a possibly younger IT guy on some website in the future trying to tell him the same thing. Although, honestly, I would have ignored the advice back then and pushed on like a solider anyways... till I physically could not do it anymore.
Well I may be geeking out extra here..... but couldn't we consider the Darth Vader's SSD to be more of less a triangle and that going into an Asteroid field (You never want to hear the odds of successfully navigating one) and firing on the asteroids was not pretty much the movie already?
In all fairness, the Clue movie was not actually that terrible. It had what's his face from the Rocky Horror picture show and was actually quite entertaining.
Sure it was based on a board game, but in this particular instance it was not a complete bomb. B movie maybe, but I can think of far far worse movies that I have sat through.
Let me put in this context.... Clue or the latest Justin Bieber movie? Yeah......... I'll make the popcorn and we can watch Clue.
1) There needs to be a law that says a citizen cannot be forced to use services on the "secure" net and 2) Why does the 4th Amendment even apply here?
If the goal is to secure infrastructure...... Hello!? They already do this with the government now with the intelligence agencies and military. Citizens do not need to have access or be on this network at all. The whole reason why it sounds good is that it protects our fundamental infrastructure but is a disingenuous attempt at removing anonymity (which is dubious at best.. who knows what vulnerabilities will exist) from the citizens.
I *love* the idea of creating a whole separate infrastructure that is very secure at every layer to interconnect our power grids, utilities, etc. What is stupid, misleading, and completely unnecessary is the idea that a regular citizen would need to have anything to do with this network at all. There should be no interconnects of any kind between the public and secure network.
Then it comes down to laziness and ease of use. Well *fuck* the admins. If you are going to work in a company that has entire sections existing *only* on the secure network then get your ass of the couch and go to a secure facility to do your work. Remote operations in this secure context are idiotic, especially, if they are attempting to create a secure bridge from the secure network over the public one. If absolutely required that some workers have remote access then set up wireless secure access to the secure network and have isolated equipment (that can only connect to the secure network) and let those particular workers use them. Obviously, I am talking about something pretty damn secured with active monitoring, GPS, biometrics, etc.
The moment the summary said, "4th Amendment rights", I knew it was just another bullshit attempt at creating a national ID in both meat space and cyberspace.
They can say whatever they want. Anonymity is the greatest enemy of the NSA and CIA and they know it. High Level buttheads like this guy sit around thinking of ways to slowly push a "network" on us that not only supports the goals of the major companies (Big Entertainment, Banking) but also makes it impossible for citizens to assemble and speak to each other anonymously. It *might* be private, but it will not be anonymous, and there is a difference between the two, and a critical one at that.
Nobody should be fooled for an instant. If they want to secure our infrastructure they can do so without involving citizens and their rights at all.
They just play on our fears, propose something seemingly reasonable, and hope we are all stupid enough to say, "Yes".
He might as well have started out with, "In the interests of not seeing American children being sodomized I propose the following".....
The problem is the "evolution" part of the discussion. Some people just shut down and refuse to talk about any further because it can't exist and is too contentious of a conversation.
Explaining that evolution can exist as a process, does exist as a process, and we don't need to discuss origins of life is difficult.
However, if we lose the race with the bacteria and there are a lot of super strains that start making it out the public it will make it pretty hard to deal with the truth then. Unless it devolves into the Black Plague again and it was just a "punishment" from God.
I think it is a no-brainer. Only use it when it is in a setting that is required. Sick people stay the hell home, and stop contributing to the problem.
Hospitals should be using every technology possible to eliminate viruses and bacteria because sick people come there. Using it for your socks because you can't do a load of laundry? That's just laziness.
How many days could you take a shit in your living room until you could no longer tolerate it?
The answer is 12.
I doubt any amount of evolutionary pressure could enable you to swim in a diarrhea swimming pool.
No.... but the pressure of the person behind you pushing you in and your desire to survive at all costs would cause you to swim. Besides, at this point your crapping in your living room. Why do you care about the swimming pool?
I honestly wonder if will see the beginnings of the Matrix in our lifetime.
If Watson really is that good that it can replace a customer service agent, then it will only be a matter of decades before technology converges and we have robotic servants similar to the Bicentennial Man or I, Robot.
This would be good for Japan I think, but then if we are all serviced by robots, and the robots service the robots for repairs and maintenance, and robots are designing other robots.... than just what are the humans here for again?
I am not a Luddite, but I think there are some things that should remain fundamentally human. Either that, or if the robotic lifeform becomes so good that we can't tell the difference, than it should be granted rights just like the rest of us.
Seriously? Citation needed? This is common knowledge at this point.
The UK government has made it clear that they have a massive coordinated effort aimed at reducing crime (watching the citizens). How many Slashdot stories, or CNN, BBC news stories do I need to link too on this?
As far as China goes..... I think that they have made it quite clear and not just with cameras. They have people looking at instant messages, the Great Firewall, etc. If you really need a citation to know that the Chinese Government uses many forms of surveillance to monitor their citizens, quell disturbances, and "maintain the peace and stability" of their country.... I don't think some citations will help you understand that.
In what way does half a dozen video cameras in the centre of a city, and half a dozen cameras spread out around some of the more notorious motorway junctions infringe my privacy?
It infringes your privacy because we have a reasonable expectation of privacy when perform our daily activities, even in public. I said reasonable.
If you and I are on a motorway, or in a park, we have a reasonable expectation that nobody is recording is visually or audibly. In a parking lot in a grocery store, we know that we are probably on a camera, but not being listened to. We also reasonable expect that the recordings are destroyed within 30 days and only used when a crime has occurred.
Additionally, you should expose yourself to game theory.
It is basically this simple:
1) A homeless person. They overhear your conversation or notice that you come to the park regularly. 2) A normal citizen. They also overhear your conversation or notice that you frequent certain places on a regular basis or engage in activities with specific people. 3) Law enforcement. They are recording your conversations in addition to video, but also recording all known instances where you are identified. As well as all of your friends, families, and acquaintances. On the roads they are recording each license plate as it stops and passes through the lights at high speed. So not just your static points, but your paths between points. 4) A very large corporation. As part of their free services they have drones regularly scouting the city and recording visual and aerial images and then storing it such a way that it can cross referenced, searched, and data mined effectively. 5) A government intelligence agency. Collects data from all the large corporations through laws (Patriot Act) and then runs its own drone program, and even without one, collects all footage and data points from the cameras in the park and the motorways.
There is a very simple concept. Relative Power.
The homeless person is mostly concerned with where he/she will sleep and eat. Maslov's Pyramid at work. Highly doubtful that he/she will be able to take advantage of any information gained by their surveillance of you or knowing who you are with due to a chronic lack of resources and likely ignorant and unsophisticated. Having a tawdry affair?:)
The citizen has more resources. They are mobile and might be able to take advantage if they were so inclined. Once again, highly dependent on the situation.
Both the homeless person and the citizen are highly constrained by Law Enforcement though. To harm you, abridge your rights, or otherwise interact with you in an unlawful way puts them at risk of incarceration, loss of resources (fines), and whatever other consequences I am leaving out.
Law Enforcement can keep the information as long they want. Possessing resources and IT staff they can gain access to software and platforms that allow them to search for specific people... or heck... even just browse (like the UK) looking for anything that might be a crime or a gateway to an investigation. Abuses are likely, have occurred in the past, and will occur in the future. I c
Oh yes. That reminds of a wonderful night in Las Vegas.
Got so hammered that when I had to pee, and I had to pee bad... I could not gain access to myself. The belt was just too difficult in my current state and the zipper actually broke off in my hand.
I eventually just said fuck it and yanked everything down like a 3 year old (or Butters from South Park) and started pissing away. I saw the other guys looking at me and I calmly and drunkly informed them I was having a "wardrobe malfunction" and to mind your own business. Then I farted for good measure.
Best part was that since the zipper part was gone it only took a little while for the whole thing to separate and then I spent the rest of the night with my "fly undone".
You don't. Such a place does not exist. Host your stuff in the EU in a country that will actually resist and fight the US from coming in and taking the data.
The US can still seize your domain and put up that nice intimidating seal that informs all of your users that the US is busy going elbow deep on your ass. All domains fall under the influence of a company that is entirely under the influence of the US government.
The Internet, domains being the foundation, is entirely the property of the US government and has been for a long time. We just were not dicks about it until now. 10 years of oppression and the Patriot Act has emboldened those in the upper echelons to take further questionable actions that are clearly abhorrent to anyone with a brain.
You my friend, might as well Google the directions to Never Never Land.
Want it changed? Then start yelling as loudly as possible and have millions upon millions of people marching in the EU to demand that the EU form their own domain registration company, root servers, and start operating it on their own. Hard to believe that the EU being mostly socialist can't get together to form something like that.
Please do it. You would be surprised how many domain registrations would be transferred from the US to your new system overnight.
That is by far not the most concerning part about the Patriot Act at all. Law enforcement was always seeking ways to obtain data. In every country. Nothing new. For most of them, they are a bit zealous but probably want to protect you. Meaning, the small guys. They are not the brightest bunch and have a hard time seeing the big picture but they are risking their lives daily to protect yours.
The REAL CONCERNING part about the Patriot Act is the SILENCE BY FORCE.
When you can't speak about what they are doing out of fear of being incarcerated, we no longer live in the United States of America.
So what really happened nearly 10 years ago was the United States Of America died. Its soul was stripped, its people were robbed, and we are still reeling in a deluded and dazed confusion arguing about meaningless shit (immigration, gay people wanting rights, and Obama's fucking birth certificate) without confronting the truth that a law exists that makes it illegal for you to talk about actions that need to be talked about.
When you are a business owner that is being raided by the government for all of your customers information indiscriminately without warrants or just cause and you cannot even warn your customers that their rights are being violated and should be offered the chance to face and defend themselves against their accusers and those that abridged their rights, we all need to seriously consider just what country we live in, is it really free, and have thrown the baby with the bath water out when it comes to protecting Freedom?
Not to mention, more than likely, this stuff will be deployed to a desert.
Those premium optics-grade mirrors better be coated with much better shit than you can get at your local prescription eyeglasses store. Coating each one of them with something harder than any dust particle will be quite expensive indeed.
Of course, that just means a half billion per drone. From the state of affairs in the US the military industrial complex it gets whatever money it wants anyways......
Let me know when they figure out how to use this to send up satellites, use it in medical diagnostics, etc. Something peaceful. At this point we just waste all of our money putting ourselves into the poor house to attack a bunch of people that really tangentially related at best to the 6 foot asshole that made one of our pretty buildings fall down.
To the people that think I am forgetting the nearly 3,000 lives lost that day.... what do you think about the millions that have been lost since?
Unless you watched Eagle Eye and though it was a documentary, the vast majority of the CCTV networks are of poor quality and not interconnected at all.
I get your point, but the truth is that I have seen the quality of the video in my city on the traffic cams, and unless they are really hiding something, I can't figure out how you could even get a license plate off a car with it. In any case, that is the only known interconnected system in my city.
Everything else is private. I manage several branch offices with CCTV of much higher quality and I can tell you that I don't echo the feed to Metro for their amusement. We only keep stuff for 30 days anyways with a nightly cronjob removing the data.
What is happening in China and the UK is much much different. It is a coordinated effort to watch the citizens and invade their privacy. Yes, their privacy is a reasonable expectation even in a public place and I have tried again and again to explain to other Slashdotters that you cannot treat a government, your neighbor, and the bum on the street as equals when it comes to information and the power to exploit said information.
I am upset, because Cisco is a US company and if we are truly not hypocrites and defenders of Freedom and Human Rights, then why are we helping another country to create a system used to oppress their citizens?
Of course... what am I talking about. The number of people that have died in the last 50 years from US manufactured weapons is a lot damn higher than the number of cameras we are installing........ In fact how many US servicemen have died in Afghanistan from weapons funded by the US?
Our behavior makes it pretty clear. We are not really that serious about Freedom or "exporting Democracy", and are willing to apathetically let it all go down the drain while helping the other countries in the world to the same to its citizens or far worse .
You remind me of a story with a much different ending, but very similar.
A friend of ours in college went to this Beauty School where, apparently, some smoking hot 10 that looked like she was combined with another smoking hot 10, was busy learning how to cut hair.
It was a riot. He would come back with the goooooofiest smile on his face because this chicks breasts kept getting pushed into his face during the shampoo and the haircut.
I can't describe the hair cuts. He came back bleeding one time from one of his ears. I think I was drunk one time and spoke about his hair for an entire hour with everybody in hysterics.... except him.
He did not care either. He looked like some screwed up mentally challenged dude for the next 6 months till she "graduated". After that, his hair went back to normal.
Their prior art experience in their native country is worth nothing here. A patent is not being granted in China (is that actually worth anything?) or the EU. It is being granted in the US. To allow a naturalized citizen without at least 10 years of experience in the field he is examining is gross negligence. It is very much akin to getting a MD after only 2 years in a foreign country and thinking that can make you a doctor here. Riggghttt...
The whole USPTO needs to be revamped from the ground up, nearly everybody fired, and aggressively head hunt the smartest researchers we can find in the various required fields with actual experience.
I am talking about the guy that once he starts talking about a subject he can tell you stories about stuff used to be done in the Telco industry 20 years ago and that routing was mechanical and that at certain times of the day that one of switches would start to stick due to heat and that's why somebody kept getting connected with a person just one number off the one they called. True story.
THAT guy should be reviewing Telco patents along with others like him. The guys that have seen nearly everything and actually understand and work with full breadth of the technology. At the very least employ the guy who has the phone number for the old guy I mentioned.
Not somebody from a foreign country that does not even know how our telephone systems worked in the 70's and 80's.
4 is a big problem too. Lets say I have an idea while walking down the street. Do you think I have the time/money/inclination to stay searching for prior art, and previous patents to see if something matches, and the degree of matching? I'm not a patent lawyer. Do I have to employ one?
It's a HUGE problem and it would be the very heights of hubris to think you know it all, even in your field. You also don't know what other people have done, or that an idea that is already in the public domain simply did not receive enough attention, or resources, to become widely used.
There is no way you can punish for it unless you can prove to a jury, beyond any reasonable doubt, that the patent submitter knew about that one specific piece of prior art.
This is why patent lawyers need to be employed simply because they hire people that are really good at searching for prior art. It is not a fast process either. A good search can take weeks.
The other reason why the "small guy" is usually precluded from being granted a patent is that is not easy to write a patent. They have to be well constructed and give good examples, descriptions, and explanations of how the technology is used. I am specifically leaving out software and business method patents because those are patent bullshit from the start.
The most critical part of the patent itself is the claims. Your patent might not be wholly rejected. It can be rejected claim by claim. Therefore, it would be really really really good idea to have somebody experienced write your claims after interviewing you and attempting to understand the technology. Claims are crucial, and just some wording can make the difference between being granted the protection of the claim and a rejection.
#3 in the post is also a problem. Just like prior art, enforcing novelty requirements puts the burden on the USPTO which is being hammered on all sides by pissed off people and corporations that don't want to wait that long. Novelty can only be determined by an experienced researcher and examiner. Obviously, with some granted patents the USPTO must have scouts out at the special needs schools instead of Universities.
Preventing the system from being "gamed" is a good goal. Not that easy to achieve in reality.
If anything, I would have the patent in a "just-about-to-be-approved" status and publish it on the Internet. Give 60 days for comments from any citizen in the US (so no corporations, just the people working at the corporation), and let the world speak on prior art.
If a patent can survive crowdsourced attempts to find prior art for 60 days, especially for the big patents worth billions, then I would venture to say that no prior art exists.
Not exactly. You are, in a small way, being pedantic.
To further that, you are describing the difference between TCP and UDP. Saying that network speeds degrade without talking about protocols is missing something already. Poor quality cables can affect this, but cable length will absolutely affect it as well. The difference is that you have to get a pretty long Ethernet cable before you can start to notice this at all. When you have cables under 20ft you don't really even get to notice the difference and keeping the twist on the pairs when you make the connector is less important on a 3ft patch cable then it is on a 100ft run. Use a Fluke or good tester and you can tell the difference by seeing a "short" error which usually indicates cross-talk interference. It can still work, but at a slower speed. That's why some guys just don't care when they make small length cables and pay attention to the wire order and twist when making longer ones and use TIA/EIA-568-B. The theory being the twist in the cables can actually make a difference and lower total speed.
Furthermore, the NIC is not out of the scope of this discussion either. I saw some NICS being sold at Comdex one year where they had signals being pushed across 500 meters of Cat5E. Expensive of course, but the point is the NIC is important as well.
Also, the software running on the HDMI connected device also makes a great deal of difference as well as the source. Very few sources are actually raw data, but compressed. We have all seen the artifacts when looking at flowing water in movies right? So when the HDMI cable has a problem the software can react and give you part of the picture, not just a black frame.
You're being simplistic and HDMI quality is a little bit more complicated than just the cable. That being said, super high quality HDMI cables are not going to compensate for a shitty display with shitty software and poor sources, or poor equipment unable to decode the video data correctly. As long your HDMI cable can get the 1's and 0's to the display with a minimum of interference due to signal loss you will not be able to notice the problem in the cable and will notice the problem in the source and display a LOT SOONER.
Not to mention, even Hollywood pressed DVDs and BlueRays (other people's houses) can be mastered so poorly that you see artifacts all over the place during high action sequences. Put the same DVD in my computer and it looks great on my native 16:10 1920x1200 screen.
Ahhh, you referring to what some call Hanlon's Razor, "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity".
Except you forgot the exception to the rule. Marketers, Lawyers, and Salesmen and with the proper cool sayings like "interlocks and dynotherms engaged", can combine and become The Politician.
compare the molex power cables of yesterday to the sata power cables of today
I was a body builder for nearly 3 years and could bear hug 600 pounds and carry it downstairs. Almost burst a blood vessel trying to remove a molex power cable from a hard drive it had been connected to for years. It was ridiculous and I almost considered hooking it up to a car and my tree in the front yard:)
That was NASA level type connectors there. Designed to keep connected when the Klingons were having a bad day with you and red shirts were bouncing around the walls.
I totally agree with you. Those DB9 and DB15 cables were a pain in the ass, but there is a reason why I like DVI versus Displayport. Once you get those cables in, they don't come out. Especially when you can lock the SOB's.
I look forward to fiber being used everywhere when it also has a locking type connector.
Ethernet cables suffer from some of the same things too. Plenty of places I have walked into where they are using solid core as patch cables and they keep wondering why they break every couple of months.
To me, the most basic and non-negotiable requirements of a cable are:
1) It locks 2) It is keyed very well. When the cable is so teeny tiny that even visual inspection requires effort to determine it, you have failed in keying it.
Ironically, keying is about the most simple and cheapest thing you can do. Just wrap the damn thing in plastic or metal with a ridge running along one side, or down the center along with the female component. Makes it really difficult for even the most stupid user to screw up. As an example, the old PATA cables with the notch at the top. Try putting in one of those connectors wrong.
All that being said, we should design it to be just *slightly* easier to remove then the old style molex power connectors. There is a balance between a good reliable connection and requiring power tools to get the damn thing off.
You know if Eva Mendes had attempted to teach me Quantum Physics I have a feeling that I might be working at the LHC right now.
You may have something there. She would have to be clothed though, otherwise learning is impossible with erection. We don't need scientific studies to prove that either.
Swordfish was full of shit as a movie simply because it tried to lead people to believe that a man could hack *anything* in less than 60 seconds while getting a sloppy one. I don't even care if he was gay.
Slashdot Mirror
"Doing the honorable thing" and being a thief are two different things. Furthermore, the Supreme Court IIRC did not care if the trash was out on the street or not. It was in the trash.
Your opinion on what is honorable is different than what is legal.
How do you know where the trash was located? I read the article. Anderson only took it after the garbage men, instructed by the Museum to throw anything not salvageable, picked it up and restored it. It was coated with melted materials.
So in actuality, he did wait until the garbage men made it trash by throwing it away. You are acting upon a belief that he was rummaging through the remains in the middle of the night, when in fact, he was there in plain daylight by virtue of a close relationship with the curator.
If you read further, once he determined what it was, he kept it as a memento of the Museum and back in those days people expected space flights to be a commonplace event in 20 years. He did not think at the time (he was 17) that it was going to be one of a couple hundred Moon rocks in existence.
"Should of" and "legally bound to do so" are two different things. So you can freely express your belief that he should return the rock, but retract your statement of thievery because it is simply untrue. According to facts at hand.
Also, let's remember this. According to the facts... he started the lawsuit after being made aware of the search and intentions to collect all the rocks. So he did come forward after nearly 40 years, in an honorable fashion, to dispute ownership.
He could of have just quietly smiled and spent the twilight years of his life looking it at on the wall of his home and we might not have known the location for another 50-100 years.
Did he do that? No. He came forward and said he claimed it from the trash in full view of the authorities and museum, restored it, and has kept it from further harm for 40 years.
He did not steal it. He did not buy it from the black market. He has not attempted to quietly sell it on the black market for millions either.
So give the man the credit he deserves and stop denigrating him without cause. Let the court decide in this case if he can claim salvage rights, etc.
Absolutely incorrect.
Anderson says he found the rock in the trash mixed with debris following a fire at an Anchorage museum in 1973
The museum, according to this, threw it away in the trash. I could quote The Burbs here, but I think the Supreme Court made it pretty clear AFAIK. Once you throw away something in the trash you have relinquished all claims of ownership.
IANAL, but comparing this to looting is just specious.
Should Anderson have been compelled to contact another Museum and tell them that he thought he had a piece of a Moon rock? Maybe. Is he morally wrong for not doing so? That's highly questionable.
To me Anderson is without question the legal owner of the rock if it was thrown out in the trash.
That is my opinion, but to label the man a thief is hardly fair. Obviously he has some sentimental attachment to it and if everyone could be adults about it they could just come to an agreement that upon Anderson's death ownership is transferred to the Museum.
It would not be the first such arrangement either. Why the Moon rock all of the sudden gets special treatment is beyond me. Sure, it took a heck of lot more resources to obtain and makes it inherently quite valuable, but it was thrown away in the trash.
Quit. Find another job, or at least start looking right now. Even if you safely move one foot to the other like a stepping stone, DO IT.
I am speaking from experience here. Salaried and was working 20 hours a day for over a year and half. I finally did a re-fi and cashed out the equivalent of 3.5 years worth of my salary (I was not compensated well in the first place).
First two weeks I slept 14 hours a day and woke up after having nightmares where I dreamed about cronjobs, databases, and SQL statements. I would wake up screaming with panic attacks wondering if certain processes were done.
Quit.
What it did was completely shot my adrenal glands. I had nearly killed them. Doctors put me on stuff for a year, and it took about that long for me to get back to normal sleeping patterns and feel better.
It truly is not worth it, life is too fucking short. Don't waste your life on this.
If you have children, a wife, or a girlfriend that IS suffering right now. If you have children you are performing a great sacrifice and being a good father, but you could be a better one being there. I can honestly say that I would have rather been a little more poor, eaten a little less, had less conveniences and video games if I got to see my father more.
The reason why this continues in this environment is that WE let it. An awful lot of IT people are not lazy at all. Some are driven to bad behavior and apathy, but more are driven to keep things alive at all cost. It is our purpose. I took it that seriously. It was like the Path of the Warrior and shit like that. The SQL server WILL not fucking do down BECAUSE I WONT LET IT. I'll figure out a way to work with what I have to make things as redundant as possible.
Quit. Quit. Quit.
Find another job, even if it pays only 80% as much, even if it is a different type of job. Quit.
If you continue down this path, it will be you writing this post to a possibly younger IT guy on some website in the future trying to tell him the same thing. Although, honestly, I would have ignored the advice back then and pushed on like a solider anyways... till I physically could not do it anymore.
Good luck.
So in the rated R version of your story does the Unconsummated Love turn into Consumated Love? Basic Instinct style?
Well that does not sound to bad now. We at least know the soundtrack will be a Rush mix tape.
Well I may be geeking out extra here..... but couldn't we consider the Darth Vader's SSD to be more of less a triangle and that going into an Asteroid field (You never want to hear the odds of successfully navigating one) and firing on the asteroids was not pretty much the movie already?
In all fairness, the Clue movie was not actually that terrible. It had what's his face from the Rocky Horror picture show and was actually quite entertaining.
Sure it was based on a board game, but in this particular instance it was not a complete bomb. B movie maybe, but I can think of far far worse movies that I have sat through.
Let me put in this context.... Clue or the latest Justin Bieber movie? Yeah......... I'll make the popcorn and we can watch Clue.
The whole thing sounds good on the surface.
I have two problems with it:
1) There needs to be a law that says a citizen cannot be forced to use services on the "secure" net and
2) Why does the 4th Amendment even apply here?
If the goal is to secure infrastructure...... Hello!? They already do this with the government now with the intelligence agencies and military. Citizens do not need to have access or be on this network at all. The whole reason why it sounds good is that it protects our fundamental infrastructure but is a disingenuous attempt at removing anonymity (which is dubious at best.. who knows what vulnerabilities will exist) from the citizens.
I *love* the idea of creating a whole separate infrastructure that is very secure at every layer to interconnect our power grids, utilities, etc. What is stupid, misleading, and completely unnecessary is the idea that a regular citizen would need to have anything to do with this network at all. There should be no interconnects of any kind between the public and secure network.
Then it comes down to laziness and ease of use. Well *fuck* the admins. If you are going to work in a company that has entire sections existing *only* on the secure network then get your ass of the couch and go to a secure facility to do your work. Remote operations in this secure context are idiotic, especially, if they are attempting to create a secure bridge from the secure network over the public one. If absolutely required that some workers have remote access then set up wireless secure access to the secure network and have isolated equipment (that can only connect to the secure network) and let those particular workers use them. Obviously, I am talking about something pretty damn secured with active monitoring, GPS, biometrics, etc.
The moment the summary said, "4th Amendment rights", I knew it was just another bullshit attempt at creating a national ID in both meat space and cyberspace.
They can say whatever they want. Anonymity is the greatest enemy of the NSA and CIA and they know it. High Level buttheads like this guy sit around thinking of ways to slowly push a "network" on us that not only supports the goals of the major companies (Big Entertainment, Banking) but also makes it impossible for citizens to assemble and speak to each other anonymously. It *might* be private, but it will not be anonymous, and there is a difference between the two, and a critical one at that.
Nobody should be fooled for an instant. If they want to secure our infrastructure they can do so without involving citizens and their rights at all.
They just play on our fears, propose something seemingly reasonable, and hope we are all stupid enough to say, "Yes".
He might as well have started out with, "In the interests of not seeing American children being sodomized I propose the following".....
That I would agree with.
The problem is the "evolution" part of the discussion. Some people just shut down and refuse to talk about any further because it can't exist and is too contentious of a conversation.
Explaining that evolution can exist as a process, does exist as a process, and we don't need to discuss origins of life is difficult.
However, if we lose the race with the bacteria and there are a lot of super strains that start making it out the public it will make it pretty hard to deal with the truth then. Unless it devolves into the Black Plague again and it was just a "punishment" from God.
I think it is a no-brainer. Only use it when it is in a setting that is required. Sick people stay the hell home, and stop contributing to the problem.
Hospitals should be using every technology possible to eliminate viruses and bacteria because sick people come there. Using it for your socks because you can't do a load of laundry? That's just laziness.
How many days could you take a shit in your living room until you could no longer tolerate it?
The answer is 12.
I doubt any amount of evolutionary pressure could enable you to swim in a diarrhea swimming pool.
No.... but the pressure of the person behind you pushing you in and your desire to survive at all costs would cause you to swim. Besides, at this point your crapping in your living room. Why do you care about the swimming pool?
I honestly wonder if will see the beginnings of the Matrix in our lifetime.
If Watson really is that good that it can replace a customer service agent, then it will only be a matter of decades before technology converges and we have robotic servants similar to the Bicentennial Man or I, Robot.
This would be good for Japan I think, but then if we are all serviced by robots, and the robots service the robots for repairs and maintenance, and robots are designing other robots.... than just what are the humans here for again?
I am not a Luddite, but I think there are some things that should remain fundamentally human. Either that, or if the robotic lifeform becomes so good that we can't tell the difference, than it should be granted rights just like the rest of us.
Interesting times I guess.
As a previous poster said, [citation needed].
Seriously? Citation needed? This is common knowledge at this point.
The UK government has made it clear that they have a massive coordinated effort aimed at reducing crime (watching the citizens). How many Slashdot stories, or CNN, BBC news stories do I need to link too on this?
As far as China goes..... I think that they have made it quite clear and not just with cameras. They have people looking at instant messages, the Great Firewall, etc. If you really need a citation to know that the Chinese Government uses many forms of surveillance to monitor their citizens, quell disturbances, and "maintain the peace and stability" of their country.... I don't think some citations will help you understand that.
In what way does half a dozen video cameras in the centre of a city, and half a dozen cameras spread out around some of the more notorious motorway junctions infringe my privacy?
It infringes your privacy because we have a reasonable expectation of privacy when perform our daily activities, even in public. I said reasonable.
If you and I are on a motorway, or in a park, we have a reasonable expectation that nobody is recording is visually or audibly. In a parking lot in a grocery store, we know that we are probably on a camera, but not being listened to. We also reasonable expect that the recordings are destroyed within 30 days and only used when a crime has occurred.
Additionally, you should expose yourself to game theory.
It is basically this simple:
1) A homeless person. They overhear your conversation or notice that you come to the park regularly.
2) A normal citizen. They also overhear your conversation or notice that you frequent certain places on a regular basis or engage in activities with specific people.
3) Law enforcement. They are recording your conversations in addition to video, but also recording all known instances where you are identified. As well as all of your friends, families, and acquaintances. On the roads they are recording each license plate as it stops and passes through the lights at high speed. So not just your static points, but your paths between points.
4) A very large corporation. As part of their free services they have drones regularly scouting the city and recording visual and aerial images and then storing it such a way that it can cross referenced, searched, and data mined effectively.
5) A government intelligence agency. Collects data from all the large corporations through laws (Patriot Act) and then runs its own drone program, and even without one, collects all footage and data points from the cameras in the park and the motorways.
There is a very simple concept. Relative Power.
The homeless person is mostly concerned with where he/she will sleep and eat. Maslov's Pyramid at work. Highly doubtful that he/she will be able to take advantage of any information gained by their surveillance of you or knowing who you are with due to a chronic lack of resources and likely ignorant and unsophisticated. Having a tawdry affair? :)
The citizen has more resources. They are mobile and might be able to take advantage if they were so inclined. Once again, highly dependent on the situation.
Both the homeless person and the citizen are highly constrained by Law Enforcement though. To harm you, abridge your rights, or otherwise interact with you in an unlawful way puts them at risk of incarceration, loss of resources (fines), and whatever other consequences I am leaving out.
Law Enforcement can keep the information as long they want. Possessing resources and IT staff they can gain access to software and platforms that allow them to search for specific people... or heck... even just browse (like the UK) looking for anything that might be a crime or a gateway to an investigation. Abuses are likely, have occurred in the past, and will occur in the future. I c
Oh yes. That reminds of a wonderful night in Las Vegas.
Got so hammered that when I had to pee, and I had to pee bad... I could not gain access to myself. The belt was just too difficult in my current state and the zipper actually broke off in my hand.
I eventually just said fuck it and yanked everything down like a 3 year old (or Butters from South Park) and started pissing away. I saw the other guys looking at me and I calmly and drunkly informed them I was having a "wardrobe malfunction" and to mind your own business. Then I farted for good measure.
Best part was that since the zipper part was gone it only took a little while for the whole thing to separate and then I spent the rest of the night with my "fly undone".
Anybody seen the movie Commando? :)
You don't. Such a place does not exist. Host your stuff in the EU in a country that will actually resist and fight the US from coming in and taking the data.
The US can still seize your domain and put up that nice intimidating seal that informs all of your users that the US is busy going elbow deep on your ass. All domains fall under the influence of a company that is entirely under the influence of the US government.
The Internet, domains being the foundation, is entirely the property of the US government and has been for a long time. We just were not dicks about it until now. 10 years of oppression and the Patriot Act has emboldened those in the upper echelons to take further questionable actions that are clearly abhorrent to anyone with a brain.
You my friend, might as well Google the directions to Never Never Land.
Want it changed? Then start yelling as loudly as possible and have millions upon millions of people marching in the EU to demand that the EU form their own domain registration company, root servers, and start operating it on their own. Hard to believe that the EU being mostly socialist can't get together to form something like that.
Please do it. You would be surprised how many domain registrations would be transferred from the US to your new system overnight.
Define "Terrorists" please.
I know of a group of people that took down a building and killed a few thousand people and bombed a bunch of embassies.
I also know of a group of people responsible for death of millions, the waste of trillions, and wiped their asses with the US Constitution.
Please define who a terrorist is again please?
That is by far not the most concerning part about the Patriot Act at all. Law enforcement was always seeking ways to obtain data. In every country. Nothing new. For most of them, they are a bit zealous but probably want to protect you. Meaning, the small guys. They are not the brightest bunch and have a hard time seeing the big picture but they are risking their lives daily to protect yours.
The REAL CONCERNING part about the Patriot Act is the SILENCE BY FORCE.
When you can't speak about what they are doing out of fear of being incarcerated, we no longer live in the United States of America.
So what really happened nearly 10 years ago was the United States Of America died. Its soul was stripped, its people were robbed, and we are still reeling in a deluded and dazed confusion arguing about meaningless shit (immigration, gay people wanting rights, and Obama's fucking birth certificate) without confronting the truth that a law exists that makes it illegal for you to talk about actions that need to be talked about.
When you are a business owner that is being raided by the government for all of your customers information indiscriminately without warrants or just cause and you cannot even warn your customers that their rights are being violated and should be offered the chance to face and defend themselves against their accusers and those that abridged their rights, we all need to seriously consider just what country we live in, is it really free, and have thrown the baby with the bath water out when it comes to protecting Freedom?
Not to mention, more than likely, this stuff will be deployed to a desert.
Those premium optics-grade mirrors better be coated with much better shit than you can get at your local prescription eyeglasses store. Coating each one of them with something harder than any dust particle will be quite expensive indeed.
Of course, that just means a half billion per drone. From the state of affairs in the US the military industrial complex it gets whatever money it wants anyways......
Let me know when they figure out how to use this to send up satellites, use it in medical diagnostics, etc. Something peaceful. At this point we just waste all of our money putting ourselves into the poor house to attack a bunch of people that really tangentially related at best to the 6 foot asshole that made one of our pretty buildings fall down.
To the people that think I am forgetting the nearly 3,000 lives lost that day.... what do you think about the millions that have been lost since?
Unless you watched Eagle Eye and though it was a documentary, the vast majority of the CCTV networks are of poor quality and not interconnected at all.
I get your point, but the truth is that I have seen the quality of the video in my city on the traffic cams, and unless they are really hiding something, I can't figure out how you could even get a license plate off a car with it. In any case, that is the only known interconnected system in my city.
Everything else is private. I manage several branch offices with CCTV of much higher quality and I can tell you that I don't echo the feed to Metro for their amusement. We only keep stuff for 30 days anyways with a nightly cronjob removing the data.
What is happening in China and the UK is much much different. It is a coordinated effort to watch the citizens and invade their privacy. Yes, their privacy is a reasonable expectation even in a public place and I have tried again and again to explain to other Slashdotters that you cannot treat a government, your neighbor, and the bum on the street as equals when it comes to information and the power to exploit said information.
I am upset, because Cisco is a US company and if we are truly not hypocrites and defenders of Freedom and Human Rights, then why are we helping another country to create a system used to oppress their citizens?
Of course... what am I talking about. The number of people that have died in the last 50 years from US manufactured weapons is a lot damn higher than the number of cameras we are installing........ In fact how many US servicemen have died in Afghanistan from weapons funded by the US?
Our behavior makes it pretty clear. We are not really that serious about Freedom or "exporting Democracy", and are willing to apathetically let it all go down the drain while helping the other countries in the world to the same to its citizens or far worse .
You remind me of a story with a much different ending, but very similar.
A friend of ours in college went to this Beauty School where, apparently, some smoking hot 10 that looked like she was combined with another smoking hot 10, was busy learning how to cut hair.
It was a riot. He would come back with the goooooofiest smile on his face because this chicks breasts kept getting pushed into his face during the shampoo and the haircut.
I can't describe the hair cuts. He came back bleeding one time from one of his ears. I think I was drunk one time and spoke about his hair for an entire hour with everybody in hysterics.... except him.
He did not care either. He looked like some screwed up mentally challenged dude for the next 6 months till she "graduated". After that, his hair went back to normal.
Exactly.
Their prior art experience in their native country is worth nothing here. A patent is not being granted in China (is that actually worth anything?) or the EU. It is being granted in the US. To allow a naturalized citizen without at least 10 years of experience in the field he is examining is gross negligence. It is very much akin to getting a MD after only 2 years in a foreign country and thinking that can make you a doctor here. Riggghttt...
The whole USPTO needs to be revamped from the ground up, nearly everybody fired, and aggressively head hunt the smartest researchers we can find in the various required fields with actual experience.
I am talking about the guy that once he starts talking about a subject he can tell you stories about stuff used to be done in the Telco industry 20 years ago and that routing was mechanical and that at certain times of the day that one of switches would start to stick due to heat and that's why somebody kept getting connected with a person just one number off the one they called. True story.
THAT guy should be reviewing Telco patents along with others like him. The guys that have seen nearly everything and actually understand and work with full breadth of the technology. At the very least employ the guy who has the phone number for the old guy I mentioned.
Not somebody from a foreign country that does not even know how our telephone systems worked in the 70's and 80's.
4 is a big problem too. Lets say I have an idea while walking down the street. Do you think I have the time/money/inclination to stay searching for prior art, and previous patents to see if something matches, and the degree of matching? I'm not a patent lawyer. Do I have to employ one?
It's a HUGE problem and it would be the very heights of hubris to think you know it all, even in your field. You also don't know what other people have done, or that an idea that is already in the public domain simply did not receive enough attention, or resources, to become widely used.
There is no way you can punish for it unless you can prove to a jury, beyond any reasonable doubt, that the patent submitter knew about that one specific piece of prior art.
This is why patent lawyers need to be employed simply because they hire people that are really good at searching for prior art. It is not a fast process either. A good search can take weeks.
The other reason why the "small guy" is usually precluded from being granted a patent is that is not easy to write a patent. They have to be well constructed and give good examples, descriptions, and explanations of how the technology is used. I am specifically leaving out software and business method patents because those are patent bullshit from the start.
The most critical part of the patent itself is the claims. Your patent might not be wholly rejected. It can be rejected claim by claim. Therefore, it would be really really really good idea to have somebody experienced write your claims after interviewing you and attempting to understand the technology. Claims are crucial, and just some wording can make the difference between being granted the protection of the claim and a rejection.
#3 in the post is also a problem. Just like prior art, enforcing novelty requirements puts the burden on the USPTO which is being hammered on all sides by pissed off people and corporations that don't want to wait that long. Novelty can only be determined by an experienced researcher and examiner. Obviously, with some granted patents the USPTO must have scouts out at the special needs schools instead of Universities.
Preventing the system from being "gamed" is a good goal. Not that easy to achieve in reality.
If anything, I would have the patent in a "just-about-to-be-approved" status and publish it on the Internet. Give 60 days for comments from any citizen in the US (so no corporations, just the people working at the corporation), and let the world speak on prior art.
If a patent can survive crowdsourced attempts to find prior art for 60 days, especially for the big patents worth billions, then I would venture to say that no prior art exists.
Not exactly. You are, in a small way, being pedantic.
To further that, you are describing the difference between TCP and UDP. Saying that network speeds degrade without talking about protocols is missing something already. Poor quality cables can affect this, but cable length will absolutely affect it as well. The difference is that you have to get a pretty long Ethernet cable before you can start to notice this at all. When you have cables under 20ft you don't really even get to notice the difference and keeping the twist on the pairs when you make the connector is less important on a 3ft patch cable then it is on a 100ft run. Use a Fluke or good tester and you can tell the difference by seeing a "short" error which usually indicates cross-talk interference. It can still work, but at a slower speed. That's why some guys just don't care when they make small length cables and pay attention to the wire order and twist when making longer ones and use TIA/EIA-568-B. The theory being the twist in the cables can actually make a difference and lower total speed.
Furthermore, the NIC is not out of the scope of this discussion either. I saw some NICS being sold at Comdex one year where they had signals being pushed across 500 meters of Cat5E. Expensive of course, but the point is the NIC is important as well.
Also, the software running on the HDMI connected device also makes a great deal of difference as well as the source. Very few sources are actually raw data, but compressed. We have all seen the artifacts when looking at flowing water in movies right? So when the HDMI cable has a problem the software can react and give you part of the picture, not just a black frame.
You're being simplistic and HDMI quality is a little bit more complicated than just the cable. That being said, super high quality HDMI cables are not going to compensate for a shitty display with shitty software and poor sources, or poor equipment unable to decode the video data correctly. As long your HDMI cable can get the 1's and 0's to the display with a minimum of interference due to signal loss you will not be able to notice the problem in the cable and will notice the problem in the source and display a LOT SOONER.
Not to mention, even Hollywood pressed DVDs and BlueRays (other people's houses) can be mastered so poorly that you see artifacts all over the place during high action sequences. Put the same DVD in my computer and it looks great on my native 16:10 1920x1200 screen.
ignorance, not malice.
Ahhh, you referring to what some call Hanlon's Razor, "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity".
Except you forgot the exception to the rule. Marketers, Lawyers, and Salesmen and with the proper cool sayings like "interlocks and dynotherms engaged", can combine and become The Politician.
compare the molex power cables of yesterday to the sata power cables of today
I was a body builder for nearly 3 years and could bear hug 600 pounds and carry it downstairs. Almost burst a blood vessel trying to remove a molex power cable from a hard drive it had been connected to for years. It was ridiculous and I almost considered hooking it up to a car and my tree in the front yard :)
That was NASA level type connectors there. Designed to keep connected when the Klingons were having a bad day with you and red shirts were bouncing around the walls.
I totally agree with you. Those DB9 and DB15 cables were a pain in the ass, but there is a reason why I like DVI versus Displayport. Once you get those cables in, they don't come out. Especially when you can lock the SOB's.
I look forward to fiber being used everywhere when it also has a locking type connector.
Ethernet cables suffer from some of the same things too. Plenty of places I have walked into where they are using solid core as patch cables and they keep wondering why they break every couple of months.
To me, the most basic and non-negotiable requirements of a cable are:
1) It locks
2) It is keyed very well. When the cable is so teeny tiny that even visual inspection requires effort to determine it, you have failed in keying it.
Ironically, keying is about the most simple and cheapest thing you can do. Just wrap the damn thing in plastic or metal with a ridge running along one side, or down the center along with the female component. Makes it really difficult for even the most stupid user to screw up. As an example, the old PATA cables with the notch at the top. Try putting in one of those connectors wrong.
All that being said, we should design it to be just *slightly* easier to remove then the old style molex power connectors. There is a balance between a good reliable connection and requiring power tools to get the damn thing off.
Hmmmmmmm....
You know if Eva Mendes had attempted to teach me Quantum Physics I have a feeling that I might be working at the LHC right now.
You may have something there. She would have to be clothed though, otherwise learning is impossible with erection. We don't need scientific studies to prove that either.
Swordfish was full of shit as a movie simply because it tried to lead people to believe that a man could hack *anything* in less than 60 seconds while getting a sloppy one. I don't even care if he was gay.