Politics aside (Glen Beck is an idiot), this reeks of a dirty political trick. Without doubt many people here would be screaming bloody murder if the situation was reversed and it was a democratic party rally.
Look, this is the way technology works. A standard is invented, it is faster than the old, peripherals are manufactured and sold to the standard. The standard becomes prevalent and widely used and after a while the standard becomes saturated or limitations that were previously viewed as acceptable become more and more unacceptable. During this entire time the standards committee works on replacing the very standard they themselves setup with a new and better one. The new and better one will make the old standard obsolete, this is the normal course of action in technology.
Now why on earth would you ask if something else will make the new standard obsolete? Does the submitter have any experience with IT at all? I'll tell you what, you know what they're doing right now? They're working on USB 4!
Unfortunately you have probably initiated a different conversation than you intended. In principal you have a fair question and the location really shouldn't matter for your question.
All that being said, you have given a bit of a mystery as the name of the city that you are talking about. This being slashdot people are going to start querying for cities in the middle east with a population of a few million. They will than expand this with those large cities in the middle east that have the highest traffic and mortality rates per 1000 KM. Following this it will be narrowed down by those with a main avenue in excess of 15 KM. Just for good measure it can than be narrowed down even further with the consideration of high humidity.
You'll probably have more luck if you can embarrass people into complying. A number of police departments have posted pictures online of traffic scofflaws with success. You could also do as they are in India and have people post pictures of violations on facebook. All told I think a public education campaign might work best as fixed traffic signals increase accident rates (see studies from the UK for reference) and would probably not have the affect you are looking for. Kudos for providing first aid though, too many can't be bothered.
If something like this makes the front page at slashdot, what's next? Roswell aliens, JFK Conspiracy theories, how about the 9/11 conspiracy saying the fed's were behind everything? Is it possible to have the slightest bit of editorial standards at this website?
I've been through this a few years ago with a kid (now 8) who is severely ADHD. When he was five or six he was already accepted to be evaluated by the professionals at nationally well known hospital for ADHD. One of the things I had tried to consider was how do you define 'hyper'? I found an answer, and it was one that baffled the medical evaluators yet they took seriously anyways.
I counted calories, I had long noticed that he seemed to eat more in a day than my wife and I combined. So I kept food journals for a few days of everything he ate (1/3rd of a jar of peanut butter a day, half a dozen sandwiches etc). I presented the first food journal to the evaluator. Her response was to ask if that was what he ate last week, I told her 'no, that was what ate yesterday'.
I then showed dated journals for several days before that with calorie counts per item. On average he ate between 5000 to 6000 calories per day, every day. Now you have to understand that he is a skinny kid and just burns that many calories being hyper. That was how I defined hyper, by how many calories could be burned every day through activity.
How long until this self righteous assange goes on trial for murder over his wanton disregard over the lives of innocents? He effectively released a hit list and made it freely available to one of the most violent organizations on the planet. At a minimum that's manslaughter in most countries.
I used to work large balance fraud for a living in my previous career. I think fraud is typically pretty easy for a human to bust. There are certain kinds of things that can and should be easy to catch. There's. No harm and I think the proof has now come to show how much damage fraud can do.
Information like that would be a treasure trove for educating the public
Coal emits 25% of global carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels.
Google, it is your friend. Logic, you can learn it. Math, it has power, doesn't follow politics and can free your mind. Quit being a tool and open your damn mind already.
They are the coal industries useful idiots and they don't even know it. Much like many gun stores have named obama national gun salesman of the year for their significant increase in gun sales. The coal industry owes it's very existance to Greenpeace whether Greenpeace likes it or not. It's time for Greenpeace to wake up and realize they've been playing to coal industries tool for the last few decades.
If cheaper and simpler solutions had been worked on the for the last few decades instead of being stifled they would have been available to nations like China to use instead of coal. Look back at history, the US was once the world leader in nuclear energy. The plants the France has built up over the last few decades were a standardized design purchased from the Americans. There is ample precedent to say that we would have provided nuclear energy designs as a form of foreign aid.
The only false dichotomy here is the one you just presented. Solar panels were not viable for any widespread usage back in the 70's. They are only now starting to become viable, and even then only with significant government subsidies. Look at the public subsidies for solar power in places like Germany and Spain and you'll see that their solar panels have come at a very expensive cost. I say this as someone who likely put solar panels on my own house in the next couple of years.
Solar power in most environments only supplies spot power, much like wind power. They typically do very little when the sun is down (molten salt solutions that allow for night time use are just now coming into use). In case you haven't noticed society needs power outside of those times it is sunny or windy.
Certainly nuclear power plants should reprocess fuel. Your point about plants is moot though as greenpeace has consistently managed to kill funding for new and improved designs across different nations for decades. Greenpeace has never invested a single dollar into renewable energies, (you know trying to solve these problems) instead choosing that they prefer 'direct action' and political influence. You still haven't run the math, I think your afraid of the answers you'll get.
They've earned their place in history all right, the coal industry would be dead and buried as a relic of history like whale oil if it weren't for Greenpeace. I have long wondered if the coal industry discreetly financially supports Greenpeace, much like some republicans spent a great deal of money on Ralph Naders 2004 campaign.
You raise an interesting point about making information available to the public to make their own choices. In general I have to concede that you have a good point. The only problem is where do you draw the line, how much science does there need to be to justify having it at all? I don't think I'll ever forget the warning label on a can of pure oxygen that stated the 'contents are known to be a possible cause of cancer in the state of California'.
I don't have time to find a citation at the moment, but I'll lay out the math for you. Take the pre-nuclear scare rate of building nuclear power plants. That number gives you a ratio to the power grid and power needs. Extend that ratio to what it would be today if Greenpeace hadn't killed nuclear power plants in 70's.
Now realize that instead of everyone singing kumbyah and living in caves they decided to be part of civilization instead. Now realize that their power came from coal burning power plants instead of the nuclear power plants that would have built in their place.
Realize that the average coal plant releases more radiation into the atmosphere every year than three mile island did in it's meltdown. Take the radiation, the sulfur and all the other pollutants that were put into our environment by coal power plants. Add those numbers up, add up the number of injuries, add up the wanton devastation caused by things like mountain top mining and the reclassification of streams to no longer be wetlands. The coal industry today would be dead and buried if it wasn't for Greenpeace.
Run the numbers for the last several decades, let the math speak for itself. Do the same for places like Germany where Greenpeace has done even more damage to the environment. I then challenge you to find any company anywhere in history that comes anywhere near that.
At some point you stop and realize that some of these people are out after a power trip and have no interest the public welfare. I consider myself pretty pro-consumer, usually support class actions and that kind of thing, but I look at this and have to ask 'what science is behind this?'
Seriously, I want these cell phone fearing Luddites to fail in a public way, to be exposed to the world for the scam artists that they are. Why? Because Luddites like these make normal pro-consumer people look like nut-cases by association. Just like Greenpeace has done more environmental harm than any company in history with their self righteous and reckless actions.
Makes me wish the judge could pass the following sentence in court "Luddites be gone, back to your cave and never to see civilization again"
This is bad logic, ivory tower thinking even, they are assuming the entire ecosystem will have their chosen set of corp centric values. You would think they would have learned otherwise by now!
Vulnerabilities will be discovered, sometimes by multiple independent parties. These vulnerabilities are either going to be sold, exploited selectively (corp esp against a chosen target), exploited publicly, reserved for future use or given to the vendor.
The responsible thing is to try to move as many to the latter as possible. The most popular way to do that is with cash.
Most people don't understand the nature of large amounts of data like that. They think "I want more, more, more" and never beyond that. Getting data is easy, getting useful data is far more important and for that you need to have your customers spend some time with the database where they can tell you everything that they don't need or want. Once you can confirm the accuracy of that information you can then purge your data of the clutter.
What people really fail to understand though is that getting rid of data is just as important. Unless your dealing with something like scientific research data, or have a compelling legal reason (SEC etc), or another really good reason (manufacturing plans) than your data needs to have a planned lifecycle just like any other asset. You need to have a date for end of life for data (SQL Data, documents, etc) just like you would for emails or other documents. As a rule of thumb, set up an end of life asset policy for your data, notify the stakeholders and users and from that point forward - every chance you have to destroy that data, do so.
If you destroy data when you had a subpeona, knew a subpeona was coming or knew a criminal investigation was coming you can end up a felon. Any data that isn't destroyed can be used against you in a court of law. However - if your data is destroyed via policy on a given date and that destruction doesn't violate something like a SEC requirement that you are safe. Yes, I do speak as someone that has at times been heavily involved in litigation (the technical expert that has prepared data for use in court and explained what everything means to lawyers) more than once.
There cultural values fell by the wayside years ago. The bottom line became the end all and be all of everything. They outsourced everything they could, getting rid of every non-Indian employee they could. Does it come as any surprise that a company that would sell out it's own employees would also sell out their customers?
They got rid of their greatest asset, their people, and with it also got rid of the ethic that made them what they were. Dell was a very hard working hungry company, full of hard working people. Get rid of the hardworking people and you get rid of the hardworking ethos.
You can't outsource ethics. When damage control becomes more important that quality control your company has lost it's way.
It happens, and if it's not done by IT monitoring just gets done elsewhere. The thing that baffles me is that people are surprised when it happens. All that being said they have much stronger laws on privacy in Europe than here in the US and you have to be aware of international laws for such things. You can rack up some pretty serious legal fines or jail time depending on what country your employee is working in, and even more if the data is brought back to the US (as we have horribly weak privacy laws). If your not careful you can readily have violations of HIPAA, SEC rules or SOX as well.
All that being said, when monitoring inevitably comes up, your job is never to say 'no'. If you do that they will simply find someone else and you will have damaged your career. Your job is to ensure that if it has to happen it happens in full compliance with the letter of the law and any special rules that affect your organization. You'd be surprised at the dollar amounts fines start at, it can easily be six figures. After presenting all the legal requirements to perform a given piece of monitoring to your management, don't be surprised if they back off altogether.
Monitoring has it's place, I try to encourage managers to use monitoring tools like a surgeons knife, not a chainsaw. I've known of employee backlash that can cause significant employee relations damages to organizations when tools were used overly broadly. And for crying out loud, if your at work, assume your being monitored and work accordingly. Whether you telecommute or otherwise, you never work in a vacuum.
No doubt that space debris will clean itself over time, that's inevitable for almost all of it. The point I was trying to make is the time frame that would take is outside the envelope for what people are willing to wait.
I don't know the cost trade benefit for refueling such a dozer versus replacement. Certainly the technology to do such hook ups with unmanned flights has been around for quite some time. In principal if the primary package doesn't need to be a normal communications package or the like you would gain much more weight availability for fuel.
If you put this in the right orbit it could slowly whittle away a lot of the uncontrolled debris that is up there now. I don't pretend to be a rocket scientist, it's just an idea.
We need a maneuverable satellite dedicated to cleaning up our garbage. It could find a wayward satellite or piece of space debris and push it down into the atmosphere to burn up at a safe time and place. Call it a space bulldozer.
Any nation that has put up more than a token number of satellites should take the responsible action and put up a bulldozer satellite. They can then go around and work on slowly cleaning up their messes. Space is littered with an incredible amount of junk, and it would benefit everyone to clear it up.
We make messes on Earth and they tend to get cleaned up (at least in most first world countries). Why should outer space be any different? Just like on Earth, the mess doesn't go away on it's own and inevitably being ignored just makes the problems get worse and worse.
Certainly in the long run this would be cheaper than dedicated rocket launches to get just one thing at a time and would create less debris than simply blowing it up.
The battle isn't winnable, not without a significant world wide crackdown on rights and liberties.
Using that logic to say we shouldn't fight the battle at all is fundamentally flawed though. It's akin to saying that the battle against murder, rape and kiddie porn isn't winnable and should be given up. Human nature cannot be changed, we've spent countless thousands of years learning and relearning that lesson when we forget what history has taught us before.
Just because human nature cannot be changed does not mean that we give up on protecting ourselves. You don't play to win, you play because you can't afford to lose.
Slashdot Mirror
Politics aside (Glen Beck is an idiot), this reeks of a dirty political trick. Without doubt many people here would be screaming bloody murder if the situation was reversed and it was a democratic party rally.
Look, this is the way technology works. A standard is invented, it is faster than the old, peripherals are manufactured and sold to the standard. The standard becomes prevalent and widely used and after a while the standard becomes saturated or limitations that were previously viewed as acceptable become more and more unacceptable. During this entire time the standards committee works on replacing the very standard they themselves setup with a new and better one. The new and better one will make the old standard obsolete, this is the normal course of action in technology.
Now why on earth would you ask if something else will make the new standard obsolete? Does the submitter have any experience with IT at all? I'll tell you what, you know what they're doing right now? They're working on USB 4!
Unfortunately you have probably initiated a different conversation than you intended. In principal you have a fair question and the location really shouldn't matter for your question.
All that being said, you have given a bit of a mystery as the name of the city that you are talking about. This being slashdot people are going to start querying for cities in the middle east with a population of a few million. They will than expand this with those large cities in the middle east that have the highest traffic and mortality rates per 1000 KM. Following this it will be narrowed down by those with a main avenue in excess of 15 KM. Just for good measure it can than be narrowed down even further with the consideration of high humidity.
You'll probably have more luck if you can embarrass people into complying. A number of police departments have posted pictures online of traffic scofflaws with success. You could also do as they are in India and have people post pictures of violations on facebook. All told I think a public education campaign might work best as fixed traffic signals increase accident rates (see studies from the UK for reference) and would probably not have the affect you are looking for. Kudos for providing first aid though, too many can't be bothered.
If something like this makes the front page at slashdot, what's next? Roswell aliens, JFK Conspiracy theories, how about the 9/11 conspiracy saying the fed's were behind everything? Is it possible to have the slightest bit of editorial standards at this website?
I've been through this a few years ago with a kid (now 8) who is severely ADHD. When he was five or six he was already accepted to be evaluated by the professionals at nationally well known hospital for ADHD. One of the things I had tried to consider was how do you define 'hyper'? I found an answer, and it was one that baffled the medical evaluators yet they took seriously anyways.
I counted calories, I had long noticed that he seemed to eat more in a day than my wife and I combined. So I kept food journals for a few days of everything he ate (1/3rd of a jar of peanut butter a day, half a dozen sandwiches etc). I presented the first food journal to the evaluator. Her response was to ask if that was what he ate last week, I told her 'no, that was what ate yesterday'.
I then showed dated journals for several days before that with calorie counts per item. On average he ate between 5000 to 6000 calories per day, every day. Now you have to understand that he is a skinny kid and just burns that many calories being hyper. That was how I defined hyper, by how many calories could be burned every day through activity.
How long until this self righteous assange goes on trial for murder over his wanton disregard over the lives of innocents? He effectively released a hit list and made it freely available to one of the most violent organizations on the planet. At a minimum that's manslaughter in most countries.
I used to work large balance fraud for a living in my previous career. I think fraud is typically pretty easy for a human to bust. There are certain kinds of things that can and should be easy to catch. There's. No harm and I think the proof has now come to show how much damage fraud can do.
Information like that would be a treasure trove for educating the public
I think you got my point better than anyone here yet. I consider myself very pro green and consider Greenpeace a plague upon the green movement.
Google, it is your friend. Logic, you can learn it. Math, it has power, doesn't follow politics and can free your mind. Quit being a tool and open your damn mind already.
They are the coal industries useful idiots and they don't even know it. Much like many gun stores have named obama national gun salesman of the year for their significant increase in gun sales. The coal industry owes it's very existance to Greenpeace whether Greenpeace likes it or not. It's time for Greenpeace to wake up and realize they've been playing to coal industries tool for the last few decades.
If cheaper and simpler solutions had been worked on the for the last few decades instead of being stifled they would have been available to nations like China to use instead of coal. Look back at history, the US was once the world leader in nuclear energy. The plants the France has built up over the last few decades were a standardized design purchased from the Americans. There is ample precedent to say that we would have provided nuclear energy designs as a form of foreign aid.
The only false dichotomy here is the one you just presented. Solar panels were not viable for any widespread usage back in the 70's. They are only now starting to become viable, and even then only with significant government subsidies. Look at the public subsidies for solar power in places like Germany and Spain and you'll see that their solar panels have come at a very expensive cost. I say this as someone who likely put solar panels on my own house in the next couple of years.
Solar power in most environments only supplies spot power, much like wind power. They typically do very little when the sun is down (molten salt solutions that allow for night time use are just now coming into use). In case you haven't noticed society needs power outside of those times it is sunny or windy.
Certainly nuclear power plants should reprocess fuel. Your point about plants is moot though as greenpeace has consistently managed to kill funding for new and improved designs across different nations for decades. Greenpeace has never invested a single dollar into renewable energies, (you know trying to solve these problems) instead choosing that they prefer 'direct action' and political influence. You still haven't run the math, I think your afraid of the answers you'll get.
They've earned their place in history all right, the coal industry would be dead and buried as a relic of history like whale oil if it weren't for Greenpeace. I have long wondered if the coal industry discreetly financially supports Greenpeace, much like some republicans spent a great deal of money on Ralph Naders 2004 campaign.
You raise an interesting point about making information available to the public to make their own choices. In general I have to concede that you have a good point. The only problem is where do you draw the line, how much science does there need to be to justify having it at all? I don't think I'll ever forget the warning label on a can of pure oxygen that stated the 'contents are known to be a possible cause of cancer in the state of California'.
I don't have time to find a citation at the moment, but I'll lay out the math for you. Take the pre-nuclear scare rate of building nuclear power plants. That number gives you a ratio to the power grid and power needs. Extend that ratio to what it would be today if Greenpeace hadn't killed nuclear power plants in 70's.
Now realize that instead of everyone singing kumbyah and living in caves they decided to be part of civilization instead. Now realize that their power came from coal burning power plants instead of the nuclear power plants that would have built in their place.
Realize that the average coal plant releases more radiation into the atmosphere every year than three mile island did in it's meltdown. Take the radiation, the sulfur and all the other pollutants that were put into our environment by coal power plants. Add those numbers up, add up the number of injuries, add up the wanton devastation caused by things like mountain top mining and the reclassification of streams to no longer be wetlands. The coal industry today would be dead and buried if it wasn't for Greenpeace.
Run the numbers for the last several decades, let the math speak for itself. Do the same for places like Germany where Greenpeace has done even more damage to the environment. I then challenge you to find any company anywhere in history that comes anywhere near that.
At some point you stop and realize that some of these people are out after a power trip and have no interest the public welfare. I consider myself pretty pro-consumer, usually support class actions and that kind of thing, but I look at this and have to ask 'what science is behind this?'
Seriously, I want these cell phone fearing Luddites to fail in a public way, to be exposed to the world for the scam artists that they are. Why? Because Luddites like these make normal pro-consumer people look like nut-cases by association. Just like Greenpeace has done more environmental harm than any company in history with their self righteous and reckless actions.
Makes me wish the judge could pass the following sentence in court "Luddites be gone, back to your cave and never to see civilization again"
This is bad logic, ivory tower thinking even, they are assuming the entire ecosystem will have their chosen set of corp centric values. You would think they would have learned otherwise by now!
Vulnerabilities will be discovered, sometimes by multiple independent parties. These vulnerabilities are either going to be sold, exploited selectively (corp esp against a chosen target), exploited publicly, reserved for future use or given to the vendor.
The responsible thing is to try to move as many to the latter as possible. The most popular way to do that is with cash.
The laser may well be impractable, however the mirror is even more impractable.
So what was the last piece of legislation before this that actually was designed to protect an individuals rights? It has been too many years....
Most people don't understand the nature of large amounts of data like that. They think "I want more, more, more" and never beyond that. Getting data is easy, getting useful data is far more important and for that you need to have your customers spend some time with the database where they can tell you everything that they don't need or want. Once you can confirm the accuracy of that information you can then purge your data of the clutter.
What people really fail to understand though is that getting rid of data is just as important. Unless your dealing with something like scientific research data, or have a compelling legal reason (SEC etc), or another really good reason (manufacturing plans) than your data needs to have a planned lifecycle just like any other asset. You need to have a date for end of life for data (SQL Data, documents, etc) just like you would for emails or other documents. As a rule of thumb, set up an end of life asset policy for your data, notify the stakeholders and users and from that point forward - every chance you have to destroy that data, do so.
If you destroy data when you had a subpeona, knew a subpeona was coming or knew a criminal investigation was coming you can end up a felon. Any data that isn't destroyed can be used against you in a court of law. However - if your data is destroyed via policy on a given date and that destruction doesn't violate something like a SEC requirement that you are safe. Yes, I do speak as someone that has at times been heavily involved in litigation (the technical expert that has prepared data for use in court and explained what everything means to lawyers) more than once.
There cultural values fell by the wayside years ago. The bottom line became the end all and be all of everything. They outsourced everything they could, getting rid of every non-Indian employee they could. Does it come as any surprise that a company that would sell out it's own employees would also sell out their customers?
They got rid of their greatest asset, their people, and with it also got rid of the ethic that made them what they were. Dell was a very hard working hungry company, full of hard working people. Get rid of the hardworking people and you get rid of the hardworking ethos.
You can't outsource ethics. When damage control becomes more important that quality control your company has lost it's way.
It happens, and if it's not done by IT monitoring just gets done elsewhere. The thing that baffles me is that people are surprised when it happens. All that being said they have much stronger laws on privacy in Europe than here in the US and you have to be aware of international laws for such things. You can rack up some pretty serious legal fines or jail time depending on what country your employee is working in, and even more if the data is brought back to the US (as we have horribly weak privacy laws). If your not careful you can readily have violations of HIPAA, SEC rules or SOX as well.
All that being said, when monitoring inevitably comes up, your job is never to say 'no'. If you do that they will simply find someone else and you will have damaged your career. Your job is to ensure that if it has to happen it happens in full compliance with the letter of the law and any special rules that affect your organization. You'd be surprised at the dollar amounts fines start at, it can easily be six figures. After presenting all the legal requirements to perform a given piece of monitoring to your management, don't be surprised if they back off altogether.
Monitoring has it's place, I try to encourage managers to use monitoring tools like a surgeons knife, not a chainsaw. I've known of employee backlash that can cause significant employee relations damages to organizations when tools were used overly broadly. And for crying out loud, if your at work, assume your being monitored and work accordingly. Whether you telecommute or otherwise, you never work in a vacuum.
No doubt that space debris will clean itself over time, that's inevitable for almost all of it. The point I was trying to make is the time frame that would take is outside the envelope for what people are willing to wait.
I don't know the cost trade benefit for refueling such a dozer versus replacement. Certainly the technology to do such hook ups with unmanned flights has been around for quite some time. In principal if the primary package doesn't need to be a normal communications package or the like you would gain much more weight availability for fuel.
If you put this in the right orbit it could slowly whittle away a lot of the uncontrolled debris that is up there now. I don't pretend to be a rocket scientist, it's just an idea.
We need a maneuverable satellite dedicated to cleaning up our garbage. It could find a wayward satellite or piece of space debris and push it down into the atmosphere to burn up at a safe time and place. Call it a space bulldozer.
Any nation that has put up more than a token number of satellites should take the responsible action and put up a bulldozer satellite. They can then go around and work on slowly cleaning up their messes. Space is littered with an incredible amount of junk, and it would benefit everyone to clear it up.
We make messes on Earth and they tend to get cleaned up (at least in most first world countries). Why should outer space be any different? Just like on Earth, the mess doesn't go away on it's own and inevitably being ignored just makes the problems get worse and worse.
Certainly in the long run this would be cheaper than dedicated rocket launches to get just one thing at a time and would create less debris than simply blowing it up.
The battle isn't winnable, not without a significant world wide crackdown on rights and liberties.
Using that logic to say we shouldn't fight the battle at all is fundamentally flawed though. It's akin to saying that the battle against murder, rape and kiddie porn isn't winnable and should be given up. Human nature cannot be changed, we've spent countless thousands of years learning and relearning that lesson when we forget what history has taught us before.
Just because human nature cannot be changed does not mean that we give up on protecting ourselves. You don't play to win, you play because you can't afford to lose.