It doesn't mean "live and breath" like it is worded IMO. You should love what you do and be happy (most of the time) to be at work though. I get very frustrated when working with people that have the opinion: who care's? Good enough it runs and passes unit tests. Refactorablity/beautiful code is a "nice to have". Business has a value on all metrics of a implementation of course but a lot of things are determined by giving a damn/having put in effort to learn new skills and thought to actually apply them in your work. When creating a generic solution would be just as performant and time consuming to implement but you don't bother because that wasn't in the feature description and isn't the way you learned how to do it 10 years ago in school and you can't be bothered to learn something new, you fail.
Part of being a professional is applying your special skills in the best interest of the client even when they might not be able to properly articulate all the intricacies of what they want. You need communication skills to get them to nail down exactly what they want as best as possible then you need to apply your judgement to make the best choices you can (as determined by their best interests). If you don't care you might as well be an if/then/else monkey because you add no extra value.
On the flipside of the issue: your employer shouldn't expect to dictate your personal interests: as in why are you spending 10 hours a week riding a bike when you could be using it to work on FOSS projects and learn stuff you can use here? Work is work, home is home. You should have passion at both and both will likely have some overlap but how much work blends into life isn't their business (though the opposite is since they are paying you for that time).
I get the promise of faith and just believing. But I'd say other religions don't just blindly assume you are something you can't be either. because:
1) They don't require that you have been perfect your whole life just that you achieve perfection (at some point). ie they don't hold your sin against you for all eternity like the western faiths do
2) They either don't care about the afterlife (you just rejoin the collective) or have reincarnation (so you only have to get closer to perfection in your lifetime not achieve it).
Hubbard and friends families not believing them: there are also cults where entire villages committed mass suicide, husband, wife, children etc all literally drank the Kool-aid. People do irrational things.
Deadsea scrolls and James: those scrolls also state that James was Jesus' successor not Peter. Most christian tradition particularly catholic don't agree. It is impressive that books were preserved that long but so has the Korean and Bhagavad Gita etc. It could just as easily be the case that those books that remained important were translated and otherwise preserved and those that were not considered important were more loosely copied. Then church councils came along and blessed some books as from God and some others as not. Or the opposite: books that remained unchanged were deemed miraculously protected by God and then included in the corpus but those that didn't were dropped. Regardless good scribe/librarian work doesn't make me believe that God must have protected something just that the people doing the copying did a good job and cared enough to do so.
Genesis versus parables: point taken about differences in literary styles. But, why do we have to take any of it literally? It all comes down to belief and faith, somehow the stories in the bible are real because I believe them to be but stories in Sherlock Holmes collection (or more comparatively the Bhagavad Gita) are not because I believe them to not be. If we believe some things to be the literal truth and others just symbols and just chose to consider anything that doesn't make sense to be the later our choice of religion is just as arbitrary as picking a random fiction novel from a library and just dropping anything that doesn't make sense. Some of the stuff that happened in the Bible might have actually happened and be documented elsewhere that doesn't imply to me that the Bible is therefore right and should get a pass on all the times it is wrong, just that some of the stories weren't made up (you know like an episode of the Family Guy: sometimes MJ really did just want to play with the little children).
Exactly. If someone had a few thousand followers now who claimed he could bring people back from the dead, create food out of nothing, his mother was a virgin etc etc. they'd be called a cult and laughed at. Point to an old book that claims the same thing and... presto piety.
I think it is more that crappy software developers going on. A lot of the markets are very small the business model couldn't support enough top notch coders to keep it up to date with web standards that change several times a year for say bowling alley management software.
Another area I've experienced issues with upgrading it was a matter of (virtual) monopolistic power and integrated supply chain. Specifically it was healthcare. This company that shall remain nameless has about a 70-80% healthcare IT penetration including software AND IT management services. When the guy selling you the server is the same one that decides when your client gets updated guess what? Nothing changes. Ever. Heck they wouldn't even let us upgrade a computer from XP because it wouldn't be able to run their software even when our department explicitly told them that no one in our department uses it. They sell server license/client or whatever based on asses in "seats" and whether or not you actually use it is besides the point (because they were managing the IT department planning). Even if you separated your IT from the software you are buying there are few others to buy from and the server software is 100k-10M investment so you make your clients match your server requirements not the other way around.
I imagine other industries are like that too. Small law office software, funeral homes, car dealerships etc. Something has to push the whole industry to start to care before any movement on getting current will happen.
Fixed it for you. He took over it was trading mid 50's, now it trades mid 30's. I think businesses using MS tech have more to thank him for. SQL Server,.Net, and Windows Server all were created/made huge gains under his leadership. Actually turning that into money in shareholders pockets? Not so much.
Yep that they were. Also had an issue once where we had configuration issues in a new fabric we'd installed and had to bounce an array a couple times to get it stable (some firmware setting had to be set to get 10Gb fiber working if I recall). Over the next few months a couple drives failed in that array. Once spinning it is best if you can get away with never having to stop them.
Sadly I've already posted on this thread so can't +1 you. I totally agree: admitting the problem isn't enough. Admitting early XBox360s had a problem wasn't enough. There is a problem what are you going to do about it? The numbers are the numbers if you realize you have a problem you need to yank that crappy 1.5TB drive off the market not throw it into your cheap enclosure and sell it at Walmart for $50 and hope no one notices before your crappy 1yr warranty is up.
Also, I could be wrong here but my guess is that the average consumer is not analyzing the specs of harddrives too much before buying them. They are walking into Best Buy or the equivalent with $200 burning a hole in their pocket and a laptop full of porn. They want to buy as much space for tits as possible with that $200. So they get the Green rather than the Black drive, they get the MyBook external drive because it is on sale rather than the competitors etc. Heck a lot of them don't even know the underlying drive because it is in an enclosure with another name (I'd guess it is about 1:1 internal vs external drive sales, and probably more like 4:1 in favor of external for after market sales) and they are strictly buying on how shinny the box is and how large the number on the front is.
I seem to recall it being mentioned in my statistics for managers course that harddrives similar to light bulbs failures follow a logirithmic distribution. A drive is exactly as likely to fail in the 0-1 month interval as the 5yr 5yr1mth interval. What that ends up meaning in practice is the number that fail in the first few years is misleadingly large since it is a half life of a much larger set of drives, what matters is the relative reduction in the population which is approximately constant. As you say the cost ends up replacing most before the failure. Running a 40 drive array of 300GB drives causes about the same as a 40 drive array of 4TB drives but the throughput will go up because of increases in aerial density and nic/FC speeds, eventually either IO performance or total storage requirements will demand something better and given a few year (at least) enterprise wareentee on a raid array you'll probably just opt for a new model once more than a few drives start failing.
Consumer market is different of course. At least in my geek community generally by the time hardware starts failing the "chief geek" wants something newer. They use it as an excuse to buy themselves a new box and maybe scrounge up a spare drive from somewhere to resuscitate the old system which becomes a kids/mother/guest/playing around computer. Even non-geeks I know tend to ditch there 3+ year old computer when it starts to have problems and buy a new $500 model from someone (which breaks/obsoletes early because it is junk to begin with... and the cycle repeats).
Can't give exact numbers as I only worked in an IT role where I was dealing with largish storage for a couple years (2006-2008) ~200TB spinning disk on ~400 disks in a dozen or so raid arrays. Anyways: failures seemed fairly clustered. We'd lose a drive in an array get the replacement then a month later the same chassis would lose another drive. It might have been power supply stressed the drives, it might have been for whatever reason those disks where getting hit harder over time than other arrays, might have been the load of doing the rebuild or just that they were in the same stripe set so getting similar load, similar/same batch of drives since they came together. How knows? Anyways, server load might have a longer MTA but intrachassis failure rates seem to be from my (albeit limited) experience highly correlated.
I don't know if it would ever get down to nuclear levels. The energy density is just too low, you need a few guys to spend a few days on a roof to generate 10kwH of power. They can use proper rigs and suck but ultimately someone has to go up the roof the first time without a harness to mount the ropes for the harnesses, they have to do this a few hundred times to equal the capacity of 1 reactor. The density of a nuclear plant means things like skyjacks, rigging etc gets diffused over many more kwH of generation. The project is bigger so it can afford a few $100k employees doing nothing but looking after safety versus a traveling building inspector overseeing 100+ job sites across a city which means that they are at best only at the site a few minutes a day (if they even show up at all before the project is completed). But I get what you are saying there definitely is level of regulation/level of cost for bad outcomes differential between the two techs.
The range of coal problems extend much farther too. Coal doesn't kill you right away so the don't evacuate you. Instead you die at 65 rather than 75 because of all the population in the air or water. As mentioned by another poster too: evacuations prevent the deaths. There is a cost to evacuating to be sure, even likely a non-zero death toll for the average evacuation of the scale of Fukushima but the thing is you can evacuate people vs having the air poisoned for 1000+km around the site of use but a low enough levels you can't get assistance (or permanently relocate) the people affected.
So it is the nuclear industries fault that they follow safety regs and your mom and pop solar installer doesn't?
Nuclear is far far safer than most things. 250k coal mining deaths in the last 50 years worldwide. 64 nuclear deaths. Even accounting for relative energy production nuke is about 6% (fossiil fuels were lumped together where I found them http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...) and scaling: you'd be looking at ~1k deaths if all were nuke versus about 500k if all coal (assuming ~50% of the fossil fuels is coal generation, the rest oil, natural gas).
My understanding is the GPL (and most other OSS licenses) forces you to distribute your code with the source. It doesn't force you to distribute your code. If you don't distribute by definition you don't have to distribute your source.
1) Despite its shortcomings the one you have is always the best. 2) After a bit of training it will do what you tell it too. 3) A lot of them are illegitimate. 4) They often walk in on mommy and daddy having sex 5) They are often damaged when number 4 happens
IMO speed chess is for douches. It is all about proving you've memorized a lot of stuff rather than having time to reason through a problem and find a solution. No time to properly access the "emotion" that the other player plays with either (do they gamble, always attack etc)? With speed chess you are playing the next move in the sequence you've memorized not thinking.
Exactly. It takes my monitors longer to realize that my OS is back up after rebooting than it actually takes to reboot, ie post and Win 8.1 boot is done before the monitor goes from no signal to my login.
Exactly. If you are a small company having access to the linux source doesn't help you you don't have time generally to do anything meaningful to give you a product to sell. If you are a large company you can donate some of your devs time and get a seat on the various stearing commitees so again you don't really have to care if it is open because it will always be open to you (do you really think HP doesn't get a peak at the Windows source whenever they have reason to want to?) to manipulate by providing "guidance" or bounties on the things you want.
This is a compiler. What stops a company from branching a GCC and keeping their own mods secret? They can leave the GPL license in place but just not contribute their changes anywhere. I'm pretty sure they would be free to put their own changes in a separate dll under a different license and just hook it into the normal GCCs compile process. Or they could (Apple for example is pretty big brother why not get bigger?) just require people submitting to their App store to provide the source via a web submission and run their custom compiler against the code. Anyways, there is usually a way around a license you don't like so GPL isn't guaranteeing anything WRT leechers.
Yes because the thing that really says cool is: we were making computers in the 80's. If it was longer than 5 years ago it has 0 impact on me whether or not I'll buy your current product. (less then 5 I don't have a reasonable, as reasonable as possible in the tech industry, that you build quality and will be around long enough to handle warranty issues).
True I guess. The trick is what they say it is being used for and what they actually end up using it for. If they collect all your info and only use it to screen for criminal activity that is one thing and I wouldn't have a problem with it. But if later they decide it is their right to know whether you are Pepsi or Coke fan that is where it becomes fun.
A "police state" that only enforces the laws that where put in place by an elected government isn't that threatening. It is the police state that changes the rules or has one set of rules and another that they actually use (say you haven't done a crime but every time you do an activity you get pulled in for questioning, you are inconvenienced but not formally charged with anything so don't have legal protection till you can convenience a judge that it is harassment (which usually requires it to a repeated unwanted action).
Anyways, a lot of the controversy against Big Brother seems to revolve around "what if they decide to do something evil with this" rather than "they are doing something evil with this". Admittedly any legal system deriving from British Common Law suffers from this via the need for warrants before search in most cases rather than just allowing them to do whatever they want in cases like electronic communication where there is no inconveniencing of the target of the tap (you aren't temporarily deprived of your property for example).
There is a saying to the victor goes the spoils. I think that applies to Versailles. I'm sick of hearing Versailles caused WWII. No racist nutjobs did. The total German payout was around 90B dollars in today's money (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_I_casualties , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...). That is about 1500 per german citizen and only about 6k each for each non-German war death. Hardly onerous. Did reparations bring people's families back? If not then they weren't too much. They couldn't afford $1500 each but somehow could afford to build up the Wehrmarcht.
Similarly, I find it silly when banks get "punished" for doing criminal activities with fines that a single digit percentages of the profits they made on the crimes. I say at least make them give it all back (if not punitive damages) + jail time for the culprits.
That is exactly it. Some things require a password that you simply don't care that much about. My password to post comments on/. or CNN? I don't care if I lose it. Oh no some person I don't know might think I wrote a message that was actually written by someone else I don't know.
Facebook and other social media: I care a bit more just because of the tendency of people to use it for screening job candidates or even screening potential personal relationships.
Banking, taxes and other "important stuff" are at another level. Generally I try to use hard random passwords (though nothing is really hard with modern hardware) for the important stuff, the not important at all stuff can all use a common dummy password, the middle stuff I might use a different password for each site or not but will at least use a complex password. (Generally speaking if you own my FB or LinkedIn you might as well own the other because my contacts and the personal implications of your spamming in my name etc are the same).
Slashdot Mirror
It doesn't mean "live and breath" like it is worded IMO. You should love what you do and be happy (most of the time) to be at work though. I get very frustrated when working with people that have the opinion: who care's? Good enough it runs and passes unit tests. Refactorablity/beautiful code is a "nice to have". Business has a value on all metrics of a implementation of course but a lot of things are determined by giving a damn/having put in effort to learn new skills and thought to actually apply them in your work. When creating a generic solution would be just as performant and time consuming to implement but you don't bother because that wasn't in the feature description and isn't the way you learned how to do it 10 years ago in school and you can't be bothered to learn something new, you fail.
Part of being a professional is applying your special skills in the best interest of the client even when they might not be able to properly articulate all the intricacies of what they want. You need communication skills to get them to nail down exactly what they want as best as possible then you need to apply your judgement to make the best choices you can (as determined by their best interests). If you don't care you might as well be an if/then/else monkey because you add no extra value.
On the flipside of the issue: your employer shouldn't expect to dictate your personal interests: as in why are you spending 10 hours a week riding a bike when you could be using it to work on FOSS projects and learn stuff you can use here? Work is work, home is home. You should have passion at both and both will likely have some overlap but how much work blends into life isn't their business (though the opposite is since they are paying you for that time).
I get the promise of faith and just believing. But I'd say other religions don't just blindly assume you are something you can't be either. because:
1) They don't require that you have been perfect your whole life just that you achieve perfection (at some point). ie they don't hold your sin against you for all eternity like the western faiths do
2) They either don't care about the afterlife (you just rejoin the collective) or have reincarnation (so you only have to get closer to perfection in your lifetime not achieve it).
Hubbard and friends families not believing them: there are also cults where entire villages committed mass suicide, husband, wife, children etc all literally drank the Kool-aid. People do irrational things.
Deadsea scrolls and James: those scrolls also state that James was Jesus' successor not Peter. Most christian tradition particularly catholic don't agree. It is impressive that books were preserved that long but so has the Korean and Bhagavad Gita etc. It could just as easily be the case that those books that remained important were translated and otherwise preserved and those that were not considered important were more loosely copied. Then church councils came along and blessed some books as from God and some others as not. Or the opposite: books that remained unchanged were deemed miraculously protected by God and then included in the corpus but those that didn't were dropped. Regardless good scribe/librarian work doesn't make me believe that God must have protected something just that the people doing the copying did a good job and cared enough to do so.
Genesis versus parables: point taken about differences in literary styles. But, why do we have to take any of it literally? It all comes down to belief and faith, somehow the stories in the bible are real because I believe them to be but stories in Sherlock Holmes collection (or more comparatively the Bhagavad Gita) are not because I believe them to not be. If we believe some things to be the literal truth and others just symbols and just chose to consider anything that doesn't make sense to be the later our choice of religion is just as arbitrary as picking a random fiction novel from a library and just dropping anything that doesn't make sense. Some of the stuff that happened in the Bible might have actually happened and be documented elsewhere that doesn't imply to me that the Bible is therefore right and should get a pass on all the times it is wrong, just that some of the stories weren't made up (you know like an episode of the Family Guy: sometimes MJ really did just want to play with the little children).
pesto piety? Yum.
Exactly. If someone had a few thousand followers now who claimed he could bring people back from the dead, create food out of nothing, his mother was a virgin etc etc. they'd be called a cult and laughed at. Point to an old book that claims the same thing and ... presto piety.
I think it is more that crappy software developers going on. A lot of the markets are very small the business model couldn't support enough top notch coders to keep it up to date with web standards that change several times a year for say bowling alley management software.
Another area I've experienced issues with upgrading it was a matter of (virtual) monopolistic power and integrated supply chain. Specifically it was healthcare. This company that shall remain nameless has about a 70-80% healthcare IT penetration including software AND IT management services. When the guy selling you the server is the same one that decides when your client gets updated guess what? Nothing changes. Ever. Heck they wouldn't even let us upgrade a computer from XP because it wouldn't be able to run their software even when our department explicitly told them that no one in our department uses it. They sell server license/client or whatever based on asses in "seats" and whether or not you actually use it is besides the point (because they were managing the IT department planning). Even if you separated your IT from the software you are buying there are few others to buy from and the server software is 100k-10M investment so you make your clients match your server requirements not the other way around.
I imagine other industries are like that too. Small law office software, funeral homes, car dealerships etc. Something has to push the whole industry to start to care before any movement on getting current will happen.
http://finance.yahoo.com/echar...;
Fixed it for you. He took over it was trading mid 50's, now it trades mid 30's. I think businesses using MS tech have more to thank him for. SQL Server, .Net, and Windows Server all were created/made huge gains under his leadership. Actually turning that into money in shareholders pockets? Not so much.
Yep that they were. Also had an issue once where we had configuration issues in a new fabric we'd installed and had to bounce an array a couple times to get it stable (some firmware setting had to be set to get 10Gb fiber working if I recall). Over the next few months a couple drives failed in that array. Once spinning it is best if you can get away with never having to stop them.
Sadly I've already posted on this thread so can't +1 you. I totally agree: admitting the problem isn't enough. Admitting early XBox360s had a problem wasn't enough. There is a problem what are you going to do about it? The numbers are the numbers if you realize you have a problem you need to yank that crappy 1.5TB drive off the market not throw it into your cheap enclosure and sell it at Walmart for $50 and hope no one notices before your crappy 1yr warranty is up.
Also, I could be wrong here but my guess is that the average consumer is not analyzing the specs of harddrives too much before buying them. They are walking into Best Buy or the equivalent with $200 burning a hole in their pocket and a laptop full of porn. They want to buy as much space for tits as possible with that $200. So they get the Green rather than the Black drive, they get the MyBook external drive because it is on sale rather than the competitors etc. Heck a lot of them don't even know the underlying drive because it is in an enclosure with another name (I'd guess it is about 1:1 internal vs external drive sales, and probably more like 4:1 in favor of external for after market sales) and they are strictly buying on how shinny the box is and how large the number on the front is.
I seem to recall it being mentioned in my statistics for managers course that harddrives similar to light bulbs failures follow a logirithmic distribution. A drive is exactly as likely to fail in the 0-1 month interval as the 5yr 5yr1mth interval. What that ends up meaning in practice is the number that fail in the first few years is misleadingly large since it is a half life of a much larger set of drives, what matters is the relative reduction in the population which is approximately constant. As you say the cost ends up replacing most before the failure. Running a 40 drive array of 300GB drives causes about the same as a 40 drive array of 4TB drives but the throughput will go up because of increases in aerial density and nic/FC speeds, eventually either IO performance or total storage requirements will demand something better and given a few year (at least) enterprise wareentee on a raid array you'll probably just opt for a new model once more than a few drives start failing.
Consumer market is different of course. At least in my geek community generally by the time hardware starts failing the "chief geek" wants something newer. They use it as an excuse to buy themselves a new box and maybe scrounge up a spare drive from somewhere to resuscitate the old system which becomes a kids/mother/guest/playing around computer. Even non-geeks I know tend to ditch there 3+ year old computer when it starts to have problems and buy a new $500 model from someone (which breaks/obsoletes early because it is junk to begin with ... and the cycle repeats).
Can't give exact numbers as I only worked in an IT role where I was dealing with largish storage for a couple years (2006-2008) ~200TB spinning disk on ~400 disks in a dozen or so raid arrays. Anyways: failures seemed fairly clustered. We'd lose a drive in an array get the replacement then a month later the same chassis would lose another drive. It might have been power supply stressed the drives, it might have been for whatever reason those disks where getting hit harder over time than other arrays, might have been the load of doing the rebuild or just that they were in the same stripe set so getting similar load, similar/same batch of drives since they came together. How knows? Anyways, server load might have a longer MTA but intrachassis failure rates seem to be from my (albeit limited) experience highly correlated.
I don't know if it would ever get down to nuclear levels. The energy density is just too low, you need a few guys to spend a few days on a roof to generate 10kwH of power. They can use proper rigs and suck but ultimately someone has to go up the roof the first time without a harness to mount the ropes for the harnesses, they have to do this a few hundred times to equal the capacity of 1 reactor. The density of a nuclear plant means things like skyjacks, rigging etc gets diffused over many more kwH of generation. The project is bigger so it can afford a few $100k employees doing nothing but looking after safety versus a traveling building inspector overseeing 100+ job sites across a city which means that they are at best only at the site a few minutes a day (if they even show up at all before the project is completed). But I get what you are saying there definitely is level of regulation/level of cost for bad outcomes differential between the two techs.
The range of coal problems extend much farther too. Coal doesn't kill you right away so the don't evacuate you. Instead you die at 65 rather than 75 because of all the population in the air or water. As mentioned by another poster too: evacuations prevent the deaths. There is a cost to evacuating to be sure, even likely a non-zero death toll for the average evacuation of the scale of Fukushima but the thing is you can evacuate people vs having the air poisoned for 1000+km around the site of use but a low enough levels you can't get assistance (or permanently relocate) the people affected.
So it is the nuclear industries fault that they follow safety regs and your mom and pop solar installer doesn't?
Nuclear is far far safer than most things. 250k coal mining deaths in the last 50 years worldwide. 64 nuclear deaths. Even accounting for relative energy production nuke is about 6% (fossiil fuels were lumped together where I found them http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...) and scaling: you'd be looking at ~1k deaths if all were nuke versus about 500k if all coal (assuming ~50% of the fossil fuels is coal generation, the rest oil, natural gas).
My understanding is the GPL (and most other OSS licenses) forces you to distribute your code with the source. It doesn't force you to distribute your code. If you don't distribute by definition you don't have to distribute your source.
In many way they are treated like babies:
1) Despite its shortcomings the one you have is always the best.
2) After a bit of training it will do what you tell it too.
3) A lot of them are illegitimate.
4) They often walk in on mommy and daddy having sex
5) They are often damaged when number 4 happens
IMO speed chess is for douches. It is all about proving you've memorized a lot of stuff rather than having time to reason through a problem and find a solution. No time to properly access the "emotion" that the other player plays with either (do they gamble, always attack etc)? With speed chess you are playing the next move in the sequence you've memorized not thinking.
Exactly. It takes my monitors longer to realize that my OS is back up after rebooting than it actually takes to reboot, ie post and Win 8.1 boot is done before the monitor goes from no signal to my login.
Exactly. If you are a small company having access to the linux source doesn't help you you don't have time generally to do anything meaningful to give you a product to sell. If you are a large company you can donate some of your devs time and get a seat on the various stearing commitees so again you don't really have to care if it is open because it will always be open to you (do you really think HP doesn't get a peak at the Windows source whenever they have reason to want to?) to manipulate by providing "guidance" or bounties on the things you want.
This is a compiler. What stops a company from branching a GCC and keeping their own mods secret? They can leave the GPL license in place but just not contribute their changes anywhere. I'm pretty sure they would be free to put their own changes in a separate dll under a different license and just hook it into the normal GCCs compile process. Or they could (Apple for example is pretty big brother why not get bigger?) just require people submitting to their App store to provide the source via a web submission and run their custom compiler against the code. Anyways, there is usually a way around a license you don't like so GPL isn't guaranteeing anything WRT leechers.
Yes because the thing that really says cool is: we were making computers in the 80's. If it was longer than 5 years ago it has 0 impact on me whether or not I'll buy your current product. (less then 5 I don't have a reasonable, as reasonable as possible in the tech industry, that you build quality and will be around long enough to handle warranty issues).
It has been too long since I found a "company tries to make money on products they make" story on /. Good job op.
True I guess. The trick is what they say it is being used for and what they actually end up using it for. If they collect all your info and only use it to screen for criminal activity that is one thing and I wouldn't have a problem with it. But if later they decide it is their right to know whether you are Pepsi or Coke fan that is where it becomes fun.
A "police state" that only enforces the laws that where put in place by an elected government isn't that threatening. It is the police state that changes the rules or has one set of rules and another that they actually use (say you haven't done a crime but every time you do an activity you get pulled in for questioning, you are inconvenienced but not formally charged with anything so don't have legal protection till you can convenience a judge that it is harassment (which usually requires it to a repeated unwanted action).
Anyways, a lot of the controversy against Big Brother seems to revolve around "what if they decide to do something evil with this" rather than "they are doing something evil with this". Admittedly any legal system deriving from British Common Law suffers from this via the need for warrants before search in most cases rather than just allowing them to do whatever they want in cases like electronic communication where there is no inconveniencing of the target of the tap (you aren't temporarily deprived of your property for example).
There is a saying to the victor goes the spoils. I think that applies to Versailles. I'm sick of hearing Versailles caused WWII. No racist nutjobs did. The total German payout was around 90B dollars in today's money (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_I_casualties , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...). That is about 1500 per german citizen and only about 6k each for each non-German war death. Hardly onerous. Did reparations bring people's families back? If not then they weren't too much. They couldn't afford $1500 each but somehow could afford to build up the Wehrmarcht.
Similarly, I find it silly when banks get "punished" for doing criminal activities with fines that a single digit percentages of the profits they made on the crimes. I say at least make them give it all back (if not punitive damages) + jail time for the culprits.
If they tell you your going to be safe it will be them that robs/rapes/kills you :)
That is exactly it. Some things require a password that you simply don't care that much about. My password to post comments on /. or CNN? I don't care if I lose it. Oh no some person I don't know might think I wrote a message that was actually written by someone else I don't know.
Facebook and other social media: I care a bit more just because of the tendency of people to use it for screening job candidates or even screening potential personal relationships.
Banking, taxes and other "important stuff" are at another level. Generally I try to use hard random passwords (though nothing is really hard with modern hardware) for the important stuff, the not important at all stuff can all use a common dummy password, the middle stuff I might use a different password for each site or not but will at least use a complex password. (Generally speaking if you own my FB or LinkedIn you might as well own the other because my contacts and the personal implications of your spamming in my name etc are the same).