In October 2007, Arpaio's deputies arrested Village Voice Media executives and Phoenix New Times editors Michael Lacey and Jim Larkin on charges of revealing grand jury secrets. In July 2004, the New Times had published Arpaio's home address in the context of a story about his real estate dealings, which the county attorney's office is investigating as a possible crime under Arizona state law. A special prosecutor served Village Voice Media with a subpoena ordering it to produce "all documents" related to the original real estate article, as well as "all Internet web site traffic information" to a number of articles that mentioned Arpaio. The prosecutor further ordered Village Voice Media to produce the IP addresses of all visitors to the Phoenix New Times website since January 1, 2004, as well as what websites those readers had been to prior to visiting. As an act of "civil disobedience,"[68] Lacey and Larkin published the contents of the subpoena on or around October 18, which resulted in their arrests the same day.[69] On the following day, the county attorney dropped the case after declining to pursue charges against the two.[70] The Attorney General's office has since been ordered to appear before Judge Ana Baca due to missing documentation - including the original grand jury subpoenas - in the case file for the investigation of the New Times publication.[71]
In other words, the subpoena was so outrageous that the recipients published it, and the law enforcement authorities then "lost" their copy. For a document like that to go missing intentionally would be criminal on so many levels that I'm not sure where to start. It also means that the editors can try to justify their "act of civil disobedience" by saying that they knew that the justice department was crooked, and was likely to illegally destroy its own incriminating documentation (even when that documentation has been signed personally by judges), and that publication was the only way to ensure that the document used against them could be preserved for potential future legal investigation.
It certainly sounds crooked. It's not good when reading an online newspaper article about a potentially crooked policeman leads to a subpoena demanding that the newspaper give your IP address to the police department involved, so that they can investigate you as a potential trouble-maker.
Apparently, reading a newspaper article about police corruption can make you a legitimate target for police investigation these days. Goodbye freedom of the press, and goodbye the citizen's ability to read about the news on their PC in their own home without the police looking over their shoulder and monitoring what they're reading.
It'd seem that the editors probably realised that the subpoena was the bigger story, and that the Justice Department did too, which is presumably why someone there illegally destroyed or "relocated" the document.
I was also struck by the case listed where the parents of a mentally handicapped man asked for police help to remove him from a store, the police took him away and put him in a restraint chair, then the guy then mysteriously died from a massive methamphetamine overdose. It sounds like someone in that local police force is killing people and trying to make the deaths look like junkie deaths.
Well, I know one guy whose new machine came with Vista, and has had no problems at all with it at all and likes it. But he's a techhie.
Everyone else I know, who has it who's NOT a tecchie, hates it with a vengeance, and wants rid of it, because it works differently to what they're used to. They no longer know how to get their email working, or back up system files, or print over the network, or do day-to-day PC maintenance, or fix stuff when something goes wrong.
So if those people had their office machines switched over from XP to Vista, they'd be on the phone to tech support all the time grouching, and you'd have to hire extra tech support people to deal with that. And most of the time that those extra tech support people were on the phone they'd just be drumming their fingers and pointing the phone earpiece at the wall while the user lets off steam, about which idiot in the organisation was responsible.
Upgrading to Vista and upgrading to Linux are probably both painful for end-users. The difference is, if it's company policy to upgrade to open-source, at least the end-users know that the pain is for a reason. If they're told that open source is more reliable, and is cheaper in the long run, and stops their company being dependent on one supplier, then they're liable to grit their teeth and try to accept the switchover teething problems with a certain amount of grace.
But if the pain is for no apparent reason, involves the company spending more money rather than less, renews the company's dependence on the rotten supplier who produced Vista, and isn't even a long-term solution (because Win7's on the horizon) then it seems to be "pain for pain's sake", and the users are liable to decide, with some justification, that the IT department or whoever took the decision to reduce end-user productivity by introducing a new OS for a couple of years, for no apparent reason, is an idiot who ought to be sacked.
And in the current economic crisis, where a lot of people are facing being laid off due to budget cuts, the idea that an IT department might be squandering money and resources just so they can have fun playing with a new OS, is not likely to be taken well. Employees are going to know people who've been sacked or their contracts not renewed because money is supposed to be so tight. Unless an IT department can produce a very good rationale for their employees spending time playing with Vista, it's likely to be seen as unacceptable waste or public or company money.
They're not singling out Microsoft. They're probably very happy to continue buying XP. They say that they like XP.
But MS reps seem to be applying all sorts of dodgy rules that say that they can't supply XP unless certain criteria are met, as a matter of MS policy, because MS's top management want to sell Vista regardless of what the customers want to buy.
So in order to guarantee continuity of supply of XP, it's probably helpful to have a policy that allows agency buyers to respond to MS reps by saying, I'm sorry, we want to buy XP, and its XP or nothing... so stop fucking us around and sell us the damned operating system that we've already standardised on and want to keep using. Or sod off.
This isn't singling out Microsoft. Singling out Microsoft would be, if they still refuse to play ball, classifying them as an "unsafe supplier" and ruling that all government departments whose systems are considered mission-critical should move all future development and IT work to open-source software for security reasons, since the current manufacturer clearly can't be trusted with continuity of supply. If US government projects and infrastructure is being threatened by a supplier's refusal to supply the proprietary systems that are needed to keep things running, then that becomes a potential Homeland Security issue.
Protection of key government systems and infrastructure, an' all that.
But how much more would need to be added to your budget for for staff retraining costs?
If you have 50,000 staff using XP, who've been trained on XP, and you want to migrate them to Vista, you'll have to budget retraining them to use the new tools you're issuing them with. Are you going to send 50,000 people on a "Moving to Vista" training course?
Sometimes politicians do know what they're talking about. There's also the possibility that some of their IT people actually asked them to do this.
See, if you want to keep using XP, and buying XP, and the MS sales reps keep trying to force Vista onto you, it'd be so much nicer to to be able to shrug and tell the reps,
"Sorry, I'm simply not allowed to buy your wonderful new OS without written permission. You'll just have to sell us a load more XPs. What, you aren't allowed to do that because of MS policy? well, I'm afraid that you might have to change your MS policy and continue selling us XP, because otherwise we just can't buy from you, can we? What's that you say, the regional MS sales policy has now been changed with a special exception when the customer is the State of Texas? Oh, what a surprise..."
No, the government isn't singling out a single manufacturer, they're singling out a single product. The guy behind the bill says that XP works really well.
Ignore Microsoft's response, and read what the government guy actually said.
This is like the army saying, the standard mk5 rifles we currently use are just fine, we don;t want our buying department ordering the mk6, which the manufacturer keeps trying to foist on them, because the mk6 tends to jam, and we don't want the inefficiency and extra cost and retraining and more complicated infrastructure associated with having troops using a haphazard mix of different rifles that take different ammunition. We just want to keep using what we have, which is tested, and which works.
And if you're working in a warehouse, and the supplier tries to run a switcheroo and deliver a batch of mk6's instead of mk5's, saying that they're much better, you'll be able to tell them that you're not allowed to sign for them, thankyouverymuch.
Rather than legislate a "no-vista-upgrade" rider, they should instead devote a portion of the budget to setting up a development lab so that they can test their applications against whatever operating system they want to go with.
But if they're already using XP, and know that it works, then they can save that money on your suggested development lab, by simply telling people to keep using XP. Why squander money on testing al your ancient legacy systems against a new OS that doesn't give you anything new that's obviously worthwhile for the jobs your employees are doing, and which seems likely to be obsolete soon anyway? If you really must have a whizzy OS testing lab, have 'em testing open systems stuff and Win7, and skip Vista.
They're not saying don't do business with MS. They're saying, don't upgrade to this particular OS. They seem to think that XP works fine, the Vista upgrade means that government would have to spend money retraining their staff for the benefit of features that make their systems run slower, and that they probably don't want anyway, a lot of their legacy machines probably won't run Vista properly at all, and Win7 is supposed to be just around the corner.
If the Senate are responsible for setting a tight budget, and don't want to be hit by a load of agencies complaining that their costs overran because they had to upgrade lots of machines, then this seems like a reasonable action. They're saying, look, you don't need the latest whizzy version of the OS for boring government work, and if you really feel that your department needs Vista, and you want us to pay for it, put through an application and it can be considered.
But otherwise, you're probably wasting part of your your IT training and hardware budget on retooling for an OS that looks like it's liable to be replaced in a year or so's time anyway.
Naah. Mandelbrot's definition of what a fractal was was deliberately fuzzy. Trouble is, some folk can't cope with the concept of fuzziness. Give 'em a definition of fuzziness that's itself supposed to be fuzzy, and the first thing they do is to start imposing their own sharply-defined categories on it, to "improve" the definitions.
They'll say, Okay, there are exactly two, or three or five, or n types of fuzziness, and any fuzzy object HAS to fall neatly into one of these categories. Point out that we're dealing with a continuum, and they'll say, okay, lets assign an exact number to each fuzzy thing depending on where it falls in that continuum. Point out that the number of dimensions of the continum is itself fuzzy, and they'll try another way to impose order.
But the artificial imposition of order sometimes destroys the fragile essence of a concept, like catching a butterfly by hitting it with a hammer.
Fractals do not need a well defined fractal dimension. If they have one, that's nice, but technically, if something had an//ill//-defined fractal dimension, it'd still be a fractal wouldn't it?
There are too many math and physics guys hitting butterflies with hammers. What you end up that way with is conveniently flat, and stationary, but it lacks a lot of the key features of the original butterfly.
Not misinformed. I'm aware that this isn't how modern computer systems work, and I'm aware that trying to retrofit this sort of feature now, as a fundamental feature, for general use, is probably not easy, or necessarily a good idea. If you were designing a fault-tolerant system today and wanted to leverage a lot of existing programming skills, you'd probably find it easier to retrofit "confidence" ratings as a separate register, and leave it to the poor programmers to decide how to deal with them (or indeed, whether to deal with them).
But if you were designing a new system from scratch, where fault-tolerance was a priority and compatibility wasn't... say, if you were engineering a distributed-processing network for a long-term space probe, where the hardware had to run for decades without failing, and where the system had to be able to work even with multiple processing nodes or datalinks knocked out by cosmic rays or high-energy dust... then "null" values and/or confidence registers become more important. If a processing node goes haywire, you want it to be outputting nulls rather than junk data, and if you lose a few sensors, you want their contributions to be nulled, and for the certainty of the results of any calculations that would have used their data to be downgraded accordingly.
Sure, you can use additional variables and lots of conditional tests to achieve similar results, but its safer and cleaner if you build the validation logic in at a deep level, and let it happen automatically.
The point that I was trying to make was that the basic design concepts that our systems are based on were compromised by bad design right from the beginning. If we were designing languages and processors from scratch, we wouldn't necessarily do things the same way. But once certain conventions and decisions are sufficiently entrenched, it becomes difficult to change, even if we believe that the current system isn't optimal. Like the QUERTY keyboard -- the way that computers//currently// work isn't necessarily how they//have// to work.
Paul Allen and Bill Gates went to the same school. When Gates left and briefly went to Harvard, he supposedly lived down the hall from a guy called Steve Ballmer, who then got hired as MS's first manager (and did quite well out of it on share options).
Gates' family were well off, in corporate law and banking. His Mum knew the head of IBM. I just wp-ed Gates' old school, and their success rate in getting students to higher education is listed as 99%.
That's not a bad start in life. It doesn't//guarantee// success, but it means that at least you grow up knowing what success looks like, and what strategies to emulate. Not everybody has that.
Linux.com (mk 2) is an attempt to continue to build Linux as a brand with consumers, and build confidence in Linux as a reliable consumer product with decent support.
They've identified that while the Linux community have a tendency to complain that consumers are too dumb to use their OS, the community also has a self-destructive tendency to almost go out of their way to do things that deter the general public from using it. There's a tendency to present Linux as a computer hobbyist platform, a thing with funny names and in-joke abbreviations and prefixes, that needs specialist knowledge and tinkering to get it working and maintain it, along with occult information gleaned from specialist sites, and all sorts of funny skills ("compile a distro"? WT...?).
Windows is a brand. Apple is a brand. Linux is a geek archipelago.
That's what the new use of Linux.com is trying to fix. It's to provide a single on-ramp for anyone interested in Linux. They go to linux.com. Sorted. The existence of the branded.com site tells them that perhaps this is a finished product, and that perhaps its aimed at People Like Them. It reassures.
Now, if you call it gnu/linux you destroy the whole purpose of the.com project. What's GNU? Most people don't know. Most people don't care. They Don't Want To Know. They aren't computer enthusiasts, their skills and interests lie in other areas, and they just want something simple and reliable that they can install that'll let them run useful software to do the things that they actually//want// to do. They recognise the penguin, they've heard that the penguin is good, and perhaps they want to try the penguin... And you're presenting them with some sort of cow thing. Confusion ensues. What does the cow do? Can they get the penguin without the cow? Is the penguin better than the cow? Who makes the cow? Should they be getting the cow//instead// of the penguin? Perhaps this penguin stuff isn't as simple as they thought, and they should come back again in another two to five years once all these cows and penguins have sorted themselves out and decided who's the winner.
At this point they've already lost their initial gleam of enthusiasm and are in a descending spiral of uncertainty and doubt. The G in Gnu stands for Gnu. It's an acronym for Gnu Is Not Unix. But without the "I". So now they're worried that they need to know//why// GNU isn't UNIX. And they don't want to learn about unix or the history of mainframe computing, they just want to use office apps and play MP3s and transfer the photos off their camera. They want something easy that does its job and gets out of the way,//without// them having to take a course in operating system history.
If the linux community aren't smart enough to realise that the consumer mass market consists of people who really don't give a damn about operating systems as long as the things work, then perhaps linux still isn't quite ready for the mass consumer desktop.
But the Linux.com initiative is a very, very good sign. It suggests that there are some people out there in LinuxLand who actually understand the task ahead, and have a good idea how to set about achieving it. If you really want Linux to have a chance of displacing MS on everybody's desktops, then this is EXACTLY the sort of thing that needs to be done.
If you support zero, you also have to support null. Otherwise, a simple "one divided by zero" crashes the damned system.
One divided by zero should yield "null", meaning, "not a valid computable number for further calculations". Truth tables should all have at least three columns, one, zero and null. Null times anything is null. The ability to use null dates would have avoided the whole millennium bug mess.
So how do you express a null value? Well, apart from the idea of adding separate "certainty" registers, there was an obvious candidate. One of the major design screwups in modern computing was the implementation of asymmetrical integer ranges. That was stupid. Really, really, REALLY stupid. If negative values only go down to -127, then positive values should only go up to +127. That extra integer was a dangerous inconsistency, it meant that, for instance, if you were processing sixteen-bit waveform data, and the audio was clipped, and you wanted to phase-reverse a section of waveform, simply writing "data=(- data)" would crash the system. You'd have to manually check and weed out every appearance of a -32768 value, which shouldn't by rights have been allowed to exist in the first place.
The anomaly with signed integers was that zero exists in both the positive and negative number ranges, giving you a spare value of "minus zero", to play with, and designers figured that since they didn't know what else do do with it, they'd use it to extend one side of the range by one additional value.
They shouldn't have done it. That anomalous "minus zero" string value should have been reserved, and later wired into the processor logic as a representation of "null".
If someone gives you a memory pointer, which references an address that is "null" (or which fails), the appropriate response is for the returned value to also be "null". Easy. You shouldn't have to preemptively check everything for bad values, operations on bad values should simply return "null", and the nulls should then propagate through the calculations until they get picked up by a leisurely programmer's check, which can then spot that something's gone wrong in particular calculation and react to the situation in a graceful and appropriate manner.
One of the awful problems with computer design is that people originally wanted computers to give definite answers, and there are situations where definite numerical answers aren't just appropriate. A computer needs to occasionally be able to wail, "But I don't know!", or "This data hasn't been set!", or "This calculation has failed!". But the people who originally devised these systems and languages didn't consider that properly, and to a large extent, the perception of computer software as being often buggy and badly engineered is those people's fault.
If we're dealing with "observable" or "apparent" temperatures, there's an argument for assigning negative "apparent" absolute temperatures to matter that's beyond an observational horizon.
As a rough generalisation, the apparent temperature of a body, as seen by a distant observer, drops towards absolute zero as it approaches a horizon. Actually, Hawking radiation generates a "Hawking temperature" that complicates things, but we'll start with an idealised classical vacuum.
Once the body's passed the horizon by a significant distance, you can't see it at its actual position: you can only see an apparent temperature for it that belongs to it's earlier state near the horizon, so the "apparent temperature" for its current position seems at first sight to be "null".
However, it we take a mixture of gases, with positive and "null" temperatures, we find that the final equilibrium state for the gas presents a visible mean temperature whose value depends on how far beyond lightspeed the receding component of the gas was initially moving. In other words, for thermodynamic calculations to work across a horizon, the "initially-not-directly-visible" material has to be assigned a negative absolute temperature.
For intelligibility, we might want to refer to these negative Kelvin values as "virtual" temperatures, because normally they can't be observed directly, and can only be measured by the result of their their interactions with observably positive-temperature material.
The concept of virtual (negative) temperatures probably doesn't have much use in special relativity, but it becomes relevant when we're dealing with cosmological or gravitational horizons, or quantum mechanics (or acoustic metrics).
In some fields of physics, the properties of matter with supposed superluminal speeds tend to be assigned imaginary values. The observable effects of Brownian motion in a body of gas straddling a cosmological horizon (with information migrating across the horizon as a result of classical processes that appear in an observerspace projection as non-classical and acausal) is actually quite a good way of visualising classical Hawking radiation. When a gas molecule that's nominally behind a horizon gets knocked towards the observer and ends up nominally in front of the horizon, within observerspace geometry, it'll appear to be the result of a particle-pair production event.
So understanding these negative virtual temperatures is a handy bridge toward understanding how some familiar quantum-mechanical descriptions can be generated from (hypothetical) classical underlying processes.
Yeah, we tell kids that it's imperative to stand up to bullies and not hand over your property just because people who are bigger or more powerful or more numerous then you demand it or threaten you.
And then when a teacher finds a kid's use of something annoying, they demand that the kid hands it over, or face the consequences.
What makes you think it would do much? If a student is _that_ disruptive, to the point of flat out refusing to cooperate or obey in any form or shape, not to mention the attitude to the cops bit, I'd say the parents aren't too involved in her education, one way or another.
Not disruptive, uncooperative. Nobody's said that she disrupted any classes, or called anyone any names, or raised her voice, or been cheeky, or threatened anyone, or encouraged anybody else to rebel. We aren't told that she refused to cooperate "in any form or shape", only that she refused to cooperate on this one point of handing over the phone, or doing anything that might result in her being forced to hand over the phone.
As for her "attitude to the cops", we aren't given evidence of that. We have an allusion to her having crossed paths with one particular officer, who coincidentally (or not) also happened to be the officer who was called in this case. We don't have information telling us whether her attitude to this particular cop was justified or not, or why the same cop was involved in both incidents. Is he assigned to the school? Had they actually ever met before, or has he gotten his info from a teacher he knows socially, who may or may not be the same teacher who called him?
We don't have the information. You could construct a scenario in which she's obviously a shoplifting drugtaking gang-leading con-shagging product of a broken home, running wild, or I could construct a scenario in which she's a model student whose sick granny is ill in hospital and on the point of death, and who is beside herself with grief and anxiety, and texting desperately every hour for news.
We don't seem to have any information at all about the circumstances except what's in the police report, and that doesn't paint the adults involved in a very inspiring light, regardless of the circumstances. So all we can really comment on it what the adults actually did, according to the official account written by one of them. Saying "I'm sure that the kid did something else to deserve it", and then going on to blame the parents seems a very kneejerk response.
No, the other way to avoid a lawsuit is to accept the possibility that the kid might have won this round, on this particular day.
You can't always win every battle.
You are not entitled to win a battle at any cost.
If you don't understand (2) then you might not have the right psychological profile for working with kids. In fact, you might well be a psychopath.
If your need to win is so great that you're prepared to call the police, and disrupt classes, and escalate the confrontation to the point where the kid gets bodysearched by the police, arrested and charged, and potentially given a criminal record, for not handing her dad's phone over to you when you demanded it (by pretending that she didn't have it), then you've already lost. You're a failure. You've proven yourself unfit to have a position of authority working with kids, and you've proved some of the the worst things that those kids are saying about you. Any need that you might have to be Supreme Being (which might have attracted you to a profession where most of the people are small and powerless and unable to answer back without fear of reprisal) should be secondary to the well-being of the kids.
By calling in the police you haven't shown yourself to be strong, you've shown yourself to be weak.
By getting a police buddies to help you out, you haven't shown that the system works, you've shown that the system is corrupt.
By showing determination to win at all costs, you haven't shown that the system can't be beat, you've shown that some of the people working the system are despicable c**ts who deserve no respect or loyalty and who don't operate within a decent ethical system.
By showing an unwillingness to lose one minor battle, you aren't showing yourself to be powerful, you're showing yourself to be brittle and vulnerable and afraid.
And by cooperating in a misguided course of action that caused your school to become an internet story, you've shown yourself to be ultimately lacking in competence at the job that you get paid to do.
This wasn't about protecting kids from drugs or gangs or guns or knives. It was about one girl with a mobile who got caught texting in class, tried to pretend that she didn't have the phone with her (it wasn't her phone), and then tried to make it all the way to home time without having the phone taken off her. It shouldn't have been escalated into a news story about human rights and the US constitution and misuse of police powers.
The kid had the excuse of youth for doing something stupid. The adults didn't.
Plus right at the beginning of the report the officer admits to knowing the girl from previous negative conducts
The fact that the police officer put that in the report actually counts in favour of the girl and against the police officer.
Given that the girl hadn't been involved in any illegal activity, and hadn't even been//suspected or accused// of any illegal activity, then why were the police subjecting the girl to a body search? Because a school asked them to? Because the school wanted to enforce discipline, using a technique that the school weren't legally allowed to use themselves, so they got police officer to do it, even though the police didn't have a legal reason for doing it? Remember: Not accused or suspected of breaking any law, or of intent to break any law. Breaking a school rule isn't automatically "disorderly", neither is lying to a teacher about having broken a school rule (not doing your homework isn't grounds of arrest, neither is lying about why you didn't do your homework).
The girl can now claim that she was being victimised, and make a decent case for it, based on the official police record. She can say that the report confirms her suspicion that the police officer's motivation for overstepping the mark was partly personal animosity - the officer simply didn't like her. The officer's already written in an official report that he's had a negative encounter with her before. If the officer says, "But that's not relevant to what I did that day", the girl can answer, "Then why did you put it in the report, apparently as a justification for your actions?".
Think about the old "in loco parentis" bit. If a parent calls in the police to deal with their child, who hasn't broken any laws, and hasn't behaved in an aggressive or abusive way, but has lied to her parent and refuses to give up the evidence that she lied... and the parent demanded that the police stripsearch the child to prove that she lied... and the police did it... then most people would consider that parent to be abusive, and the police to be acting in a way that was at best improper and at worst, co-conspirators in abuse.
Suppose that a kid has strict religious parents, and they reckon that he has a dirty magazine hidden in his room, and he's stuffed it into his clothing to hide it, and now he's lying about it. Are they entitled to call the police to strip the kid and prove that the kid was lying? If they do this, and the kid figures that the police are in league with their nasty parents, and they lie to the police too, does this then allow the parents to have the kid arrested and hauled off to court and potentially criminalised in the eyes of the justice system, as punishment for breaking house rules and then not fessing up when challenged?
A parent who did this would be considered to be a despicable scumbag, and a friendly police officer who agreed that the kid was no good and "helped out" would be regarded as dodgy.
In my day, we didn't have mobile phones. Instead, kids used to write notes on scraps of paper, and pass them around the class when the teacher wasn't looking. If the teacher caught a glimpse of something going on, and demanded that a kid tell her, and they said "Nuffink Miss!", that wasn't grounds for the police to be called and for the kid to be arrested and charged and given a public court appearance, leading to a potential police record.
This is not (and AFAIK has never been) considered normal behaviour on the part of teachers or police officers. That's why the piece is newsworthy. It's an anomaly. I mean, hell, it's not as if the report suggests that the kid was even rude to the teacher.
In fact, its such an odd thing to happen... for the teacher to call in a police officer, and for that police officer to be so keen to accomodate the wishes of the teaching staff that he does something so publicly dumb that he risks losing his job over it... that my first thought when reading the article was to wonder... its a small town... are the police officer and the teacher shagging each other?
That's a different issue. if you break school rules, you're subject to school disciplinary proceedings.
What happened here was that a kid was sneakily texting under her desk, the teacher was sure that she'd done it, but couldn't catch her pupil out, police were called, and the school authorities tried to have the kid arrested, charged, and given a criminal record.
That was wrong, and now the police officer(s), teacher, and school staff involved may well be finding themselves subject to disciplinary proceedings when the school board and the local education authorities want to know why their town, Wauwatosa, and Wauwatosa East High School are now being ridiculed on the net as examples of how not to run a school, and how not to run local law enforcement.
Stupidity by a 14-year-old kid is one thing - it's not unusual... but stupidity by senior school staff and a police officer, all of whom are paid to be responsible and NOT to do stupid things, is another matter. If you're in one of those jobs, and you can't be trusted not to pull stupid stunts like this, then your superiors may have to consider whether they can afford to have you staying in that job.
Slashdot Mirror
In other words, the subpoena was so outrageous that the recipients published it, and the law enforcement authorities then "lost" their copy. For a document like that to go missing intentionally would be criminal on so many levels that I'm not sure where to start. It also means that the editors can try to justify their "act of civil disobedience" by saying that they knew that the justice department was crooked, and was likely to illegally destroy its own incriminating documentation (even when that documentation has been signed personally by judges), and that publication was the only way to ensure that the document used against them could be preserved for potential future legal investigation.
It certainly sounds crooked. It's not good when reading an online newspaper article about a potentially crooked policeman leads to a subpoena demanding that the newspaper give your IP address to the police department involved, so that they can investigate you as a potential trouble-maker.
Apparently, reading a newspaper article about police corruption can make you a legitimate target for police investigation these days. Goodbye freedom of the press, and goodbye the citizen's ability to read about the news on their PC in their own home without the police looking over their shoulder and monitoring what they're reading.
It'd seem that the editors probably realised that the subpoena was the bigger story, and that the Justice Department did too, which is presumably why someone there illegally destroyed or "relocated" the document.
I was also struck by the case listed where the parents of a mentally handicapped man asked for police help to remove him from a store, the police took him away and put him in a restraint chair, then the guy then mysteriously died from a massive methamphetamine overdose. It sounds like someone in that local police force is killing people and trying to make the deaths look like junkie deaths.
Everyone else I know, who has it who's NOT a tecchie, hates it with a vengeance, and wants rid of it, because it works differently to what they're used to. They no longer know how to get their email working, or back up system files, or print over the network, or do day-to-day PC maintenance, or fix stuff when something goes wrong.
So if those people had their office machines switched over from XP to Vista, they'd be on the phone to tech support all the time grouching, and you'd have to hire extra tech support people to deal with that. And most of the time that those extra tech support people were on the phone they'd just be drumming their fingers and pointing the phone earpiece at the wall while the user lets off steam, about which idiot in the organisation was responsible.
Upgrading to Vista and upgrading to Linux are probably both painful for end-users. The difference is, if it's company policy to upgrade to open-source, at least the end-users know that the pain is for a reason. If they're told that open source is more reliable, and is cheaper in the long run, and stops their company being dependent on one supplier, then they're liable to grit their teeth and try to accept the switchover teething problems with a certain amount of grace.
But if the pain is for no apparent reason, involves the company spending more money rather than less, renews the company's dependence on the rotten supplier who produced Vista, and isn't even a long-term solution (because Win7's on the horizon) then it seems to be "pain for pain's sake", and the users are liable to decide, with some justification, that the IT department or whoever took the decision to reduce end-user productivity by introducing a new OS for a couple of years, for no apparent reason, is an idiot who ought to be sacked.
And in the current economic crisis, where a lot of people are facing being laid off due to budget cuts, the idea that an IT department might be squandering money and resources just so they can have fun playing with a new OS, is not likely to be taken well. Employees are going to know people who've been sacked or their contracts not renewed because money is supposed to be so tight. Unless an IT department can produce a very good rationale for their employees spending time playing with Vista, it's likely to be seen as unacceptable waste or public or company money.
So in order to guarantee continuity of supply of XP, it's probably helpful to have a policy that allows agency buyers to respond to MS reps by saying, I'm sorry, we want to buy XP, and its XP or nothing ... so stop fucking us around and sell us the damned operating system that we've already standardised on and want to keep using. Or sod off.
This isn't singling out Microsoft. Singling out Microsoft would be, if they still refuse to play ball, classifying them as an "unsafe supplier" and ruling that all government departments whose systems are considered mission-critical should move all future development and IT work to open-source software for security reasons, since the current manufacturer clearly can't be trusted with continuity of supply. If US government projects and infrastructure is being threatened by a supplier's refusal to supply the proprietary systems that are needed to keep things running, then that becomes a potential Homeland Security issue.
Protection of key government systems and infrastructure, an' all that.
If you have 50,000 staff using XP, who've been trained on XP, and you want to migrate them to Vista, you'll have to budget retraining them to use the new tools you're issuing them with. Are you going to send 50,000 people on a "Moving to Vista" training course?
See, if you want to keep using XP, and buying XP, and the MS sales reps keep trying to force Vista onto you, it'd be so much nicer to to be able to shrug and tell the reps,
"Sorry, I'm simply not allowed to buy your wonderful new OS without written permission. You'll just have to sell us a load more XPs. What, you aren't allowed to do that because of MS policy? well, I'm afraid that you might have to change your MS policy and continue selling us XP, because otherwise we just can't buy from you, can we? What's that you say, the regional MS sales policy has now been changed with a special exception when the customer is the State of Texas? Oh, what a surprise ..."
The WindowsMe betas were supposed to be really good, too. The final shipping product still sucked.
Ignore Microsoft's response, and read what the government guy actually said.
This is like the army saying, the standard mk5 rifles we currently use are just fine, we don;t want our buying department ordering the mk6, which the manufacturer keeps trying to foist on them, because the mk6 tends to jam, and we don't want the inefficiency and extra cost and retraining and more complicated infrastructure associated with having troops using a haphazard mix of different rifles that take different ammunition. We just want to keep using what we have, which is tested, and which works.
And if you're working in a warehouse, and the supplier tries to run a switcheroo and deliver a batch of mk6's instead of mk5's, saying that they're much better, you'll be able to tell them that you're not allowed to sign for them, thankyouverymuch.
But if they're already using XP, and know that it works, then they can save that money on your suggested development lab, by simply telling people to keep using XP. Why squander money on testing al your ancient legacy systems against a new OS that doesn't give you anything new that's obviously worthwhile for the jobs your employees are doing, and which seems likely to be obsolete soon anyway? If you really must have a whizzy OS testing lab, have 'em testing open systems stuff and Win7, and skip Vista.
If the Senate are responsible for setting a tight budget, and don't want to be hit by a load of agencies complaining that their costs overran because they had to upgrade lots of machines, then this seems like a reasonable action. They're saying, look, you don't need the latest whizzy version of the OS for boring government work, and if you really feel that your department needs Vista, and you want us to pay for it, put through an application and it can be considered.
But otherwise, you're probably wasting part of your your IT training and hardware budget on retooling for an OS that looks like it's liable to be replaced in a year or so's time anyway.
http://erkdemon.blogspot.com/2009/03/hyperbolic-planar-tesselations-by-don.html
(it's the second image)
Four large faces, another four the next size down, twelve more the size below that, and so on.
I thought that the paper was very.
They'll say, Okay, there are exactly two, or three or five, or n types of fuzziness, and any fuzzy object HAS to fall neatly into one of these categories. Point out that we're dealing with a continuum, and they'll say, okay, lets assign an exact number to each fuzzy thing depending on where it falls in that continuum. Point out that the number of dimensions of the continum is itself fuzzy, and they'll try another way to impose order.
But the artificial imposition of order sometimes destroys the fragile essence of a concept, like catching a butterfly by hitting it with a hammer.
Fractals do not need a well defined fractal dimension. If they have one, that's nice, but technically, if something had an //ill//-defined fractal dimension, it'd still be a fractal wouldn't it?
There are too many math and physics guys hitting butterflies with hammers. What you end up that way with is conveniently flat, and stationary, but it lacks a lot of the key features of the original butterfly.
There's a difference.
Smart people who are bright enough to know that they're smart, also tend to be smart enough to keep quiet about it.
But if you were designing a new system from scratch, where fault-tolerance was a priority and compatibility wasn't ... say, if you were engineering a distributed-processing network for a long-term space probe, where the hardware had to run for decades without failing, and where the system had to be able to work even with multiple processing nodes or datalinks knocked out by cosmic rays or high-energy dust ... then "null" values and/or confidence registers become more important. If a processing node goes haywire, you want it to be outputting nulls rather than junk data, and if you lose a few sensors, you want their contributions to be nulled, and for the certainty of the results of any calculations that would have used their data to be downgraded accordingly.
Sure, you can use additional variables and lots of conditional tests to achieve similar results, but its safer and cleaner if you build the validation logic in at a deep level, and let it happen automatically.
The point that I was trying to make was that the basic design concepts that our systems are based on were compromised by bad design right from the beginning. If we were designing languages and processors from scratch, we wouldn't necessarily do things the same way. But once certain conventions and decisions are sufficiently entrenched, it becomes difficult to change, even if we believe that the current system isn't optimal. Like the QUERTY keyboard -- the way that computers //currently// work isn't necessarily how they //have// to work.
Paul Allen and Bill Gates went to the same school. When Gates left and briefly went to Harvard, he supposedly lived down the hall from a guy called Steve Ballmer, who then got hired as MS's first manager (and did quite well out of it on share options).
That's not a bad start in life. It doesn't //guarantee// success, but it means that at least you grow up knowing what success looks like, and what strategies to emulate. Not everybody has that.
They've identified that while the Linux community have a tendency to complain that consumers are too dumb to use their OS, the community also has a self-destructive tendency to almost go out of their way to do things that deter the general public from using it. There's a tendency to present Linux as a computer hobbyist platform, a thing with funny names and in-joke abbreviations and prefixes, that needs specialist knowledge and tinkering to get it working and maintain it, along with occult information gleaned from specialist sites, and all sorts of funny skills ("compile a distro"? WT...?).
Windows is a brand. Apple is a brand. Linux is a geek archipelago.
That's what the new use of Linux.com is trying to fix. It's to provide a single on-ramp for anyone interested in Linux. They go to linux.com. Sorted. The existence of the branded .com site tells them that perhaps this is a finished product, and that perhaps its aimed at People Like Them. It reassures.
Now, if you call it gnu/linux you destroy the whole purpose of the .com project. What's GNU? Most people don't know. Most people don't care. They Don't Want To Know. They aren't computer enthusiasts, their skills and interests lie in other areas, and they just want something simple and reliable that they can install that'll let them run useful software to do the things that they actually //want// to do. They recognise the penguin, they've heard that the penguin is good, and perhaps they want to try the penguin ... And you're presenting them with some sort of cow thing. Confusion ensues. What does the cow do? Can they get the penguin without the cow? Is the penguin better than the cow? Who makes the cow? Should they be getting the cow //instead// of the penguin? Perhaps this penguin stuff isn't as simple as they thought, and they should come back again in another two to five years once all these cows and penguins have sorted themselves out and decided who's the winner.
At this point they've already lost their initial gleam of enthusiasm and are in a descending spiral of uncertainty and doubt. The G in Gnu stands for Gnu. It's an acronym for Gnu Is Not Unix. But without the "I". So now they're worried that they need to know //why// GNU isn't UNIX. And they don't want to learn about unix or the history of mainframe computing, they just want to use office apps and play MP3s and transfer the photos off their camera. They want something easy that does its job and gets out of the way, //without// them having to take a course in operating system history.
If the linux community aren't smart enough to realise that the consumer mass market consists of people who really don't give a damn about operating systems as long as the things work, then perhaps linux still isn't quite ready for the mass consumer desktop.
But the Linux.com initiative is a very, very good sign. It suggests that there are some people out there in LinuxLand who actually understand the task ahead, and have a good idea how to set about achieving it. If you really want Linux to have a chance of displacing MS on everybody's desktops, then this is EXACTLY the sort of thing that needs to be done.
Well done to those involved.
One divided by zero should yield "null", meaning, "not a valid computable number for further calculations". Truth tables should all have at least three columns, one, zero and null. Null times anything is null. The ability to use null dates would have avoided the whole millennium bug mess.
So how do you express a null value? Well, apart from the idea of adding separate "certainty" registers, there was an obvious candidate. One of the major design screwups in modern computing was the implementation of asymmetrical integer ranges. That was stupid. Really, really, REALLY stupid. If negative values only go down to -127, then positive values should only go up to +127. That extra integer was a dangerous inconsistency, it meant that, for instance, if you were processing sixteen-bit waveform data, and the audio was clipped, and you wanted to phase-reverse a section of waveform, simply writing "data=(- data)" would crash the system. You'd have to manually check and weed out every appearance of a -32768 value, which shouldn't by rights have been allowed to exist in the first place.
The anomaly with signed integers was that zero exists in both the positive and negative number ranges, giving you a spare value of "minus zero", to play with, and designers figured that since they didn't know what else do do with it, they'd use it to extend one side of the range by one additional value. They shouldn't have done it. That anomalous "minus zero" string value should have been reserved, and later wired into the processor logic as a representation of "null".
If someone gives you a memory pointer, which references an address that is "null" (or which fails), the appropriate response is for the returned value to also be "null". Easy. You shouldn't have to preemptively check everything for bad values, operations on bad values should simply return "null", and the nulls should then propagate through the calculations until they get picked up by a leisurely programmer's check, which can then spot that something's gone wrong in particular calculation and react to the situation in a graceful and appropriate manner.
One of the awful problems with computer design is that people originally wanted computers to give definite answers, and there are situations where definite numerical answers aren't just appropriate. A computer needs to occasionally be able to wail, "But I don't know!", or "This data hasn't been set!", or "This calculation has failed!". But the people who originally devised these systems and languages didn't consider that properly, and to a large extent, the perception of computer software as being often buggy and badly engineered is those people's fault.
If we're dealing with "observable" or "apparent" temperatures, there's an argument for assigning negative "apparent" absolute temperatures to matter that's beyond an observational horizon.
As a rough generalisation, the apparent temperature of a body, as seen by a distant observer, drops towards absolute zero as it approaches a horizon. Actually, Hawking radiation generates a "Hawking temperature" that complicates things, but we'll start with an idealised classical vacuum.
Once the body's passed the horizon by a significant distance, you can't see it at its actual position: you can only see an apparent temperature for it that belongs to it's earlier state near the horizon, so the "apparent temperature" for its current position seems at first sight to be "null".
However, it we take a mixture of gases, with positive and "null" temperatures, we find that the final equilibrium state for the gas presents a visible mean temperature whose value depends on how far beyond lightspeed the receding component of the gas was initially moving. In other words, for thermodynamic calculations to work across a horizon, the "initially-not-directly-visible" material has to be assigned a negative absolute temperature.
For intelligibility, we might want to refer to these negative Kelvin values as "virtual" temperatures, because normally they can't be observed directly, and can only be measured by the result of their their interactions with observably positive-temperature material.
The concept of virtual (negative) temperatures probably doesn't have much use in special relativity, but it becomes relevant when we're dealing with cosmological or gravitational horizons, or quantum mechanics (or acoustic metrics).
In some fields of physics, the properties of matter with supposed superluminal speeds tend to be assigned imaginary values. The observable effects of Brownian motion in a body of gas straddling a cosmological horizon (with information migrating across the horizon as a result of classical processes that appear in an observerspace projection as non-classical and acausal) is actually quite a good way of visualising classical Hawking radiation. When a gas molecule that's nominally behind a horizon gets knocked towards the observer and ends up nominally in front of the horizon, within observerspace geometry, it'll appear to be the result of a particle-pair production event.
So understanding these negative virtual temperatures is a handy bridge toward understanding how some familiar quantum-mechanical descriptions can be generated from (hypothetical) classical underlying processes.
And then when a teacher finds a kid's use of something annoying, they demand that the kid hands it over, or face the consequences.
It's a slightly mixed message.
Not disruptive, uncooperative. Nobody's said that she disrupted any classes, or called anyone any names, or raised her voice, or been cheeky, or threatened anyone, or encouraged anybody else to rebel. We aren't told that she refused to cooperate "in any form or shape", only that she refused to cooperate on this one point of handing over the phone, or doing anything that might result in her being forced to hand over the phone.
As for her "attitude to the cops", we aren't given evidence of that. We have an allusion to her having crossed paths with one particular officer, who coincidentally (or not) also happened to be the officer who was called in this case. We don't have information telling us whether her attitude to this particular cop was justified or not, or why the same cop was involved in both incidents. Is he assigned to the school? Had they actually ever met before, or has he gotten his info from a teacher he knows socially, who may or may not be the same teacher who called him?
We don't have the information. You could construct a scenario in which she's obviously a shoplifting drugtaking gang-leading con-shagging product of a broken home, running wild, or I could construct a scenario in which she's a model student whose sick granny is ill in hospital and on the point of death, and who is beside herself with grief and anxiety, and texting desperately every hour for news.
We don't seem to have any information at all about the circumstances except what's in the police report, and that doesn't paint the adults involved in a very inspiring light, regardless of the circumstances. So all we can really comment on it what the adults actually did, according to the official account written by one of them. Saying "I'm sure that the kid did something else to deserve it", and then going on to blame the parents seems a very kneejerk response.
If your need to win is so great that you're prepared to call the police, and disrupt classes, and escalate the confrontation to the point where the kid gets bodysearched by the police, arrested and charged, and potentially given a criminal record, for not handing her dad's phone over to you when you demanded it (by pretending that she didn't have it), then you've already lost. You're a failure. You've proven yourself unfit to have a position of authority working with kids, and you've proved some of the the worst things that those kids are saying about you. Any need that you might have to be Supreme Being (which might have attracted you to a profession where most of the people are small and powerless and unable to answer back without fear of reprisal) should be secondary to the well-being of the kids.
This wasn't about protecting kids from drugs or gangs or guns or knives. It was about one girl with a mobile who got caught texting in class, tried to pretend that she didn't have the phone with her (it wasn't her phone), and then tried to make it all the way to home time without having the phone taken off her. It shouldn't have been escalated into a news story about human rights and the US constitution and misuse of police powers.
The kid had the excuse of youth for doing something stupid. The adults didn't.
The fact that the police officer put that in the report actually counts in favour of the girl and against the police officer.
Given that the girl hadn't been involved in any illegal activity, and hadn't even been //suspected or accused// of any illegal activity, then why were the police subjecting the girl to a body search? Because a school asked them to? Because the school wanted to enforce discipline, using a technique that the school weren't legally allowed to use themselves, so they got police officer to do it, even though the police didn't have a legal reason for doing it? Remember: Not accused or suspected of breaking any law, or of intent to break any law. Breaking a school rule isn't automatically "disorderly", neither is lying to a teacher about having broken a school rule (not doing your homework isn't grounds of arrest, neither is lying about why you didn't do your homework).
The girl can now claim that she was being victimised, and make a decent case for it, based on the official police record. She can say that the report confirms her suspicion that the police officer's motivation for overstepping the mark was partly personal animosity - the officer simply didn't like her. The officer's already written in an official report that he's had a negative encounter with her before. If the officer says, "But that's not relevant to what I did that day", the girl can answer, "Then why did you put it in the report, apparently as a justification for your actions?".
Think about the old "in loco parentis" bit. If a parent calls in the police to deal with their child, who hasn't broken any laws, and hasn't behaved in an aggressive or abusive way, but has lied to her parent and refuses to give up the evidence that she lied ... and the parent demanded that the police stripsearch the child to prove that she lied ... and the police did it ... then most people would consider that parent to be abusive, and the police to be acting in a way that was at best improper and at worst, co-conspirators in abuse.
Suppose that a kid has strict religious parents, and they reckon that he has a dirty magazine hidden in his room, and he's stuffed it into his clothing to hide it, and now he's lying about it. Are they entitled to call the police to strip the kid and prove that the kid was lying? If they do this, and the kid figures that the police are in league with their nasty parents, and they lie to the police too, does this then allow the parents to have the kid arrested and hauled off to court and potentially criminalised in the eyes of the justice system, as punishment for breaking house rules and then not fessing up when challenged?
A parent who did this would be considered to be a despicable scumbag, and a friendly police officer who agreed that the kid was no good and "helped out" would be regarded as dodgy.
This is not (and AFAIK has never been) considered normal behaviour on the part of teachers or police officers. That's why the piece is newsworthy. It's an anomaly. I mean, hell, it's not as if the report suggests that the kid was even rude to the teacher.
In fact, its such an odd thing to happen ... for the teacher to call in a police officer, and for that police officer to be so keen to accomodate the wishes of the teaching staff that he does something so publicly dumb that he risks losing his job over it ... that my first thought when reading the article was to wonder ... its a small town ... are the police officer and the teacher shagging each other?
What happened here was that a kid was sneakily texting under her desk, the teacher was sure that she'd done it, but couldn't catch her pupil out, police were called, and the school authorities tried to have the kid arrested, charged, and given a criminal record.
That was wrong, and now the police officer(s), teacher, and school staff involved may well be finding themselves subject to disciplinary proceedings when the school board and the local education authorities want to know why their town, Wauwatosa, and Wauwatosa East High School are now being ridiculed on the net as examples of how not to run a school, and how not to run local law enforcement.
Stupidity by a 14-year-old kid is one thing - it's not unusual ... but stupidity by senior school staff and a police officer, all of whom are paid to be responsible and NOT to do stupid things, is another matter. If you're in one of those jobs, and you can't be trusted not to pull stupid stunts like this, then your superiors may have to consider whether they can afford to have you staying in that job.