I agree, firmly. In most contemporary business applications, relatively little processor time is spent on serious computing tasks; if the UI is slow, it slows down the person. If the UI is zippy, the computer is probably spending its time waiting for the person. Bulky computing tasks like video rendering can be offloaded to a server somewhere.
Well, I for one checked out one of those web sites and found that they discriminate against single gay people. I thought about reporting them to the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination, but I haven't had the time to go file the complaint, and I figure if they don't think my money is as green as everyone else's, I'll take it to someone who does.
I think there are people - clearly including yourself - who are capable of being single and happy and fulfilled in their life, for whom a relationship is just a bonus. Then there are others who are, for whatever reasons, incapable of being single and happy, who live with constant misery from loneliness, and who are much much happier when they're not single.
And those of us who are in the latter group get really offended when those of you in the former group try to make us feel guilty over the fact that we really want a relationship and are focused on making it happen.
I think it's quite arguable that it's "hardly illegal". You could say that they're fraudulently claiming that the object they're selling is a "router" when in fact it's an "advertising machine". Or you could say that by hijacking the DNS for google, they are fraudulently making it appear that google is endorsing their software.
Of course, the real solution is to never buy a d-link product. Haven't there been enough issues with them reported here over the years to scare away a responsible technician?
I wonder when I'll be able to order more ordinary duplicate keys by emailing in a couple of photos.
Ordering duplicate keys by sending in a photo is a whole lot less secure than doing it in person. If I go in person to get a duplicate key, I can watch and see that they didn't make a copy for themself, I get the original back right away with the copy, I don't have to tell them where I live, and I can pay cash. If I were to order remotely by photo, they know where I live (either from my shipping address or my credit card billing address) and there's nothing preventing them from making a copy I don't know about so they can come rob my house later.
I liked what Amazon had to say about the Kindle when it came out; that they recognized that DRM limited what you could do with your content, so the tradeoff they were trying to make was that if you were willing to live with DRM, you could get your ebooks at a discount price. I can live with that idea. You want to make it worth my while to put up with the inconveniences of DRM? Okay.
However, when I started looking at prices to see if the deal had held true, I found that the ebooks I was interested in (at least to start with) all seemed to have either an insignificant discount or no discount. If you want to offer me the DRM encrusted ebook version of a $5.99 paperback as a $2 ebook, great... but don't offer it to me for $5.50, or even for $6.00 . In that case I have no incentive to use the ebook instead of the paper version except convenience, and frankly, convenience isn't worth *that* much to me.
It's rather a pity, too; the hardware is nice. (I've had one on loan for a couple days.)
She can call her local police of herself or the area of where any threatening or harassing calls to her came from. THEY can get the call data from the phone companies and prosecute. (If her phone company isn't Ma Bell, she'll probably be asked to call them to get the phone number the cops are supposed to call. It's not difficult. They'll tell her what to ask for.)
It doesn't much matter if the FBI isn't interested, if she hasn't even tried her local cops yet.
When a company is using the word "cabal" to describe its customers, it has bigger problems than the exact percentage of customers that are unsatisfied.
If I am willing to be seen in public with a friend, why would I care if they appear as a "friend" on facebook? Yes, I know, it's searchable. So what. They could get their own facebook page and write on it that they're my friend, and that's searchable too. Or some third party could write on the web that they saw that I am friends with my friend, and then that's searchable. I can't stop people from learning what I do, in a broad sense, so it's not worth my time not to try.
That doesn't mean I don't value my privacy, it's just that I pick and choose what I am private about - and when I want something to be private, I am extraordinarily careful with the information. That means not only not posting it on the internet, but not telling anyone I don't completely trust with it.
I have a facebook page, but there's very little on it because I don't choose to post a lot of information about my private life. I have a livejournal, but I rarely say much about my life, mostly I just use it to share cool links with my friends and read their LJs.
Your experience in tech support is being a negative asset? Don't tell them about it. Remove it from your resume. If that leaves your resume blank, well, then you're no worse off than a recent graduate.
If they ask what you've been doing for two years, tell them that you took the time off to work on personal projects (and have something substantial to show them for it), or to travel (expect to be able to say where and actually have been there), or to take care of an elderly family member. Make something plausible up, make it sound honest, and stress that you understand that it's a little unusual but you'd just like to be treated like any other recent graduate please. An employer is not going to be inclined to doubt someone who is telling them "I have no experience."
And thus, by conducting state business on an outside, cheapo email account instead of the state-provided one she was supposed to use, Sarah Palin has exposed state business data to hacking, public exposure in potentially inappropriate ways, and corruption of data.
This proposed law, in the guise of restricting the practice of confiscating and/or searching travelers laptops, actually legalizes it. Think about it a moment: by saying "here are the requirements for doing this," implicitly it also says "you can legally do this."
I want it banned. My laptop contains the keys to my life: my bank account, my credit cards, all of my online shopping accounts, everything. It also contains all of my employer's trade secrets. No government staff should have access to that data without court order under any circumstances.
If I have to leave the country, either my laptop won't be coming with me, or I'll be encrypting the contents of its hard drive and shipping it home by UPS. (Or I suppose I could leave a backup at home, transmit any new files to my server from wherever I went, and wipe the hard disk before returning to the US.)
Bull. The patent rights to the work you do while working for a company depend on your contract and local labor law.
The company almost certainly can legally fire you if you don't want to participate in a patent process, but they don't necessarily have the right to patent your work as theirs. Talk to a lawyer.
Oh, and it would be helpful to your argument if you could produce prior art for your work to demonstrate that it's not patentable in the first place.
The SF MOMA told me that their policy was because the artworks are copyrighted and they haven't obtained permission from all of the artists to have their works photographed. I think it's ridiculous, I've never seen another museum with that policy, and I despise taking copyright to an extreme. Nevertheless, I just didn't care enough to protest. There were only one or two things in the museum I would have liked to photograph anyway.
I was at that same museum in San Francisco in May, and I was walking around with an SLR with a huge lens on it, and worse, I'd lost the lens cap on that trip so my SLR had no lens cap on, so while I was not in fact taking pictures, it probably looked like I was ready to do so any moment. I didn't get thrown out.
Upon my arrival in the museum, the first thing I did was ask about their photography policy, which I was told was that I could take pictures in the lobby only. I then obeyed it, because while I didn't like the policy, I didn't care enough to want to protest. I did take one or two pictures in the lobby.
If I remember correctly, once during my visit to the museum a guard approached me unnecessarily to tell me I could not take pictures. I replied "yes I know thank you", and that was the end of it.
I'm curious whether the museum has changed its policy since May, or if I was erroneously not thrown out, or if Mr. Hawk did something else he's not mentioning that got him thrown out.
A shopping mall is not a "public place" in Massachusetts if they lock their doors at night. In a "public place", you have the right to come and go as you please and they're not allowed to stop you or close and lock the door. A mall is a private place that does business with the public.
That said, you're right, the only thing they can do is throw you out. They have no ability to control your actions (taking pictures, not taking pictures) while you're there, other than that they can threaten to throw you out if you do something they don't like.
Did you send an angry letter to the Transportation Center telling them that their security guards are obnoxious and you won't be coming back and you're telling all your friends plus hundreds of thousands of people on the Internet?
Except the labels have caught on to the fact that concerts are where the money is, and if you research back stories on this topic, you'll find that they've started putting it into the contracts that the label organizes the concerts and gets the profits from those too.
But I agree, bands are not obligated to sign with an RIAA label. At the same time, I'm not obligated to support bands that do.
When I was in college, the dean of computer science had a pin that said "With your help, we can stamp out COBOL within our lifetime."
I know a few "old timers" who know COBOL. They've all taken it off their resumes, on the basis that if they put it on, somebody might offer them enough money to tempt them into taking a job dealing with ancient COBOL code, and they don't ever want to see COBOL again. One of them explicitly told me that she thinks she could make a good bit more money if she'd do COBOL, but doesn't want to touch it, the money isn't worth having to spend the remaining years before her retirement dealing with COBOL instead of Oracle.
But I have to disagree with you in that you said:
COBOL is EASY compared to C/C++ or even Java/C#.
If it's so easy, people would want to use it. It's not easy. It has simplistic syntax, that's a different thing entirely.
If software is implemented correctly, it will stand the test of time.
No software anticipates everything that could happen in the future.
The fact that there seems to be some hard-coded values or formulas throughout this code is a fair indication that this COBOL architecture did not have the foresight of someone ever changing minimum wage.
The fact that you seem to think you know everything about how the software works and what the problem is tells me you're arrogant and don't know nearly as much as you think you do about software.
I'll bet this software isn't modularized. I'll bet this software has some pretty low security standards.
That's easy to say because they're true of most software in general.
I'll bet this software requires a client app installed on any user's machine.
Dude, it's COBOL. It probably runs on a big box somewhere and gets accessed via terminals, or the software equivalent thereof.
As another poster pointed out, it's one thing to say "we can't make the software pay everyone minimum wage", it's a far different thing to say "we can't make the software temporarily pay everyone minimum wage, then put their pay back to what it was before the change at a later date, while meanwhile adjusting everyone's pay for what they lost in the meantime." It may simply be that what the Governator asked for is simply too oddball for it to have been designed into any pay system, so they'd have to create a bunch of custom code to deal with it. Or it may be that the manager in charge of it is simply lying because he doesn't feel like complying with the Governator's orders.
But you, being on the outside of it all, have no way to tell.
The government has ALREADY stepped into health care in some way: as a post above yours points out, it's called HIPAA, and selling your medical records would violate it.
Anybody who does sell medical records should be simply sued into the ground, along with whoever from your doctor's office or insurance company released your records to them. We *don't* have to tolerate this.
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I agree, firmly. In most contemporary business applications, relatively little processor time is spent on serious computing tasks; if the UI is slow, it slows down the person. If the UI is zippy, the computer is probably spending its time waiting for the person. Bulky computing tasks like video rendering can be offloaded to a server somewhere.
Well, I for one checked out one of those web sites and found that they discriminate against single gay people. I thought about reporting them to the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination, but I haven't had the time to go file the complaint, and I figure if they don't think my money is as green as everyone else's, I'll take it to someone who does.
I think there are people - clearly including yourself - who are capable of being single and happy and fulfilled in their life, for whom a relationship is just a bonus. Then there are others who are, for whatever reasons, incapable of being single and happy, who live with constant misery from loneliness, and who are much much happier when they're not single.
And those of us who are in the latter group get really offended when those of you in the former group try to make us feel guilty over the fact that we really want a relationship and are focused on making it happen.
I think it's quite arguable that it's "hardly illegal". You could say that they're fraudulently claiming that the object they're selling is a "router" when in fact it's an "advertising machine". Or you could say that by hijacking the DNS for google, they are fraudulently making it appear that google is endorsing their software.
Of course, the real solution is to never buy a d-link product. Haven't there been enough issues with them reported here over the years to scare away a responsible technician?
Ordering duplicate keys by sending in a photo is a whole lot less secure than doing it in person. If I go in person to get a duplicate key, I can watch and see that they didn't make a copy for themself, I get the original back right away with the copy, I don't have to tell them where I live, and I can pay cash. If I were to order remotely by photo, they know where I live (either from my shipping address or my credit card billing address) and there's nothing preventing them from making a copy I don't know about so they can come rob my house later.
I liked what Amazon had to say about the Kindle when it came out; that they recognized that DRM limited what you could do with your content, so the tradeoff they were trying to make was that if you were willing to live with DRM, you could get your ebooks at a discount price. I can live with that idea. You want to make it worth my while to put up with the inconveniences of DRM? Okay.
However, when I started looking at prices to see if the deal had held true, I found that the ebooks I was interested in (at least to start with) all seemed to have either an insignificant discount or no discount. If you want to offer me the DRM encrusted ebook version of a $5.99 paperback as a $2 ebook, great... but don't offer it to me for $5.50, or even for $6.00 . In that case I have no incentive to use the ebook instead of the paper version except convenience, and frankly, convenience isn't worth *that* much to me.
It's rather a pity, too; the hardware is nice. (I've had one on loan for a couple days.)
They will after a cop gets jailed for theft.
She can call her local police of herself or the area of where any threatening or harassing calls to her came from. THEY can get the call data from the phone companies and prosecute. (If her phone company isn't Ma Bell, she'll probably be asked to call them to get the phone number the cops are supposed to call. It's not difficult. They'll tell her what to ask for.)
It doesn't much matter if the FBI isn't interested, if she hasn't even tried her local cops yet.
When a company is using the word "cabal" to describe its customers, it has bigger problems than the exact percentage of customers that are unsatisfied.
If I am willing to be seen in public with a friend, why would I care if they appear as a "friend" on facebook? Yes, I know, it's searchable. So what. They could get their own facebook page and write on it that they're my friend, and that's searchable too. Or some third party could write on the web that they saw that I am friends with my friend, and then that's searchable. I can't stop people from learning what I do, in a broad sense, so it's not worth my time not to try.
That doesn't mean I don't value my privacy, it's just that I pick and choose what I am private about - and when I want something to be private, I am extraordinarily careful with the information. That means not only not posting it on the internet, but not telling anyone I don't completely trust with it.
I have a facebook page, but there's very little on it because I don't choose to post a lot of information about my private life. I have a livejournal, but I rarely say much about my life, mostly I just use it to share cool links with my friends and read their LJs.
Your experience in tech support is being a negative asset? Don't tell them about it. Remove it from your resume. If that leaves your resume blank, well, then you're no worse off than a recent graduate.
If they ask what you've been doing for two years, tell them that you took the time off to work on personal projects (and have something substantial to show them for it), or to travel (expect to be able to say where and actually have been there), or to take care of an elderly family member. Make something plausible up, make it sound honest, and stress that you understand that it's a little unusual but you'd just like to be treated like any other recent graduate please. An employer is not going to be inclined to doubt someone who is telling them "I have no experience."
And thus, by conducting state business on an outside, cheapo email account instead of the state-provided one she was supposed to use, Sarah Palin has exposed state business data to hacking, public exposure in potentially inappropriate ways, and corruption of data.
Shame on her!
This proposed law, in the guise of restricting the practice of confiscating and/or searching travelers laptops, actually legalizes it. Think about it a moment: by saying "here are the requirements for doing this," implicitly it also says "you can legally do this."
I want it banned. My laptop contains the keys to my life: my bank account, my credit cards, all of my online shopping accounts, everything. It also contains all of my employer's trade secrets. No government staff should have access to that data without court order under any circumstances.
If I have to leave the country, either my laptop won't be coming with me, or I'll be encrypting the contents of its hard drive and shipping it home by UPS. (Or I suppose I could leave a backup at home, transmit any new files to my server from wherever I went, and wipe the hard disk before returning to the US.)
Bull. The patent rights to the work you do while working for a company depend on your contract and local labor law.
The company almost certainly can legally fire you if you don't want to participate in a patent process, but they don't necessarily have the right to patent your work as theirs. Talk to a lawyer.
Oh, and it would be helpful to your argument if you could produce prior art for your work to demonstrate that it's not patentable in the first place.
The SF MOMA told me that their policy was because the artworks are copyrighted and they haven't obtained permission from all of the artists to have their works photographed. I think it's ridiculous, I've never seen another museum with that policy, and I despise taking copyright to an extreme. Nevertheless, I just didn't care enough to protest. There were only one or two things in the museum I would have liked to photograph anyway.
I was at that same museum in San Francisco in May, and I was walking around with an SLR with a huge lens on it, and worse, I'd lost the lens cap on that trip so my SLR had no lens cap on, so while I was not in fact taking pictures, it probably looked like I was ready to do so any moment. I didn't get thrown out.
Upon my arrival in the museum, the first thing I did was ask about their photography policy, which I was told was that I could take pictures in the lobby only. I then obeyed it, because while I didn't like the policy, I didn't care enough to want to protest. I did take one or two pictures in the lobby.
If I remember correctly, once during my visit to the museum a guard approached me unnecessarily to tell me I could not take pictures. I replied "yes I know thank you", and that was the end of it.
I'm curious whether the museum has changed its policy since May, or if I was erroneously not thrown out, or if Mr. Hawk did something else he's not mentioning that got him thrown out.
A shopping mall is not a "public place" in Massachusetts if they lock their doors at night. In a "public place", you have the right to come and go as you please and they're not allowed to stop you or close and lock the door. A mall is a private place that does business with the public.
That said, you're right, the only thing they can do is throw you out. They have no ability to control your actions (taking pictures, not taking pictures) while you're there, other than that they can threaten to throw you out if you do something they don't like.
Did you send an angry letter to the Transportation Center telling them that their security guards are obnoxious and you won't be coming back and you're telling all your friends plus hundreds of thousands of people on the Internet?
No?
Then you've become part of the problem.
Until you drop one.
Except the labels have caught on to the fact that concerts are where the money is, and if you research back stories on this topic, you'll find that they've started putting it into the contracts that the label organizes the concerts and gets the profits from those too.
But I agree, bands are not obligated to sign with an RIAA label. At the same time, I'm not obligated to support bands that do.
When I was in college, the dean of computer science had a pin that said "With your help, we can stamp out COBOL within our lifetime."
I know a few "old timers" who know COBOL. They've all taken it off their resumes, on the basis that if they put it on, somebody might offer them enough money to tempt them into taking a job dealing with ancient COBOL code, and they don't ever want to see COBOL again. One of them explicitly told me that she thinks she could make a good bit more money if she'd do COBOL, but doesn't want to touch it, the money isn't worth having to spend the remaining years before her retirement dealing with COBOL instead of Oracle.
But I have to disagree with you in that you said:
If it's so easy, people would want to use it. It's not easy. It has simplistic syntax, that's a different thing entirely.
No software anticipates everything that could happen in the future.
The fact that you seem to think you know everything about how the software works and what the problem is tells me you're arrogant and don't know nearly as much as you think you do about software.
That's easy to say because they're true of most software in general.
Dude, it's COBOL. It probably runs on a big box somewhere and gets accessed via terminals, or the software equivalent thereof.
As another poster pointed out, it's one thing to say "we can't make the software pay everyone minimum wage", it's a far different thing to say "we can't make the software temporarily pay everyone minimum wage, then put their pay back to what it was before the change at a later date, while meanwhile adjusting everyone's pay for what they lost in the meantime." It may simply be that what the Governator asked for is simply too oddball for it to have been designed into any pay system, so they'd have to create a bunch of custom code to deal with it. Or it may be that the manager in charge of it is simply lying because he doesn't feel like complying with the Governator's orders.
But you, being on the outside of it all, have no way to tell.
Except, no computer language is anything like as complex as a human language, so the analogy falls down very quickly.
A trojan-horse application is being delivered by email, masquerading as content from a major corporation.
This is news? We're supposed to be surprised?
The government has ALREADY stepped into health care in some way: as a post above yours points out, it's called HIPAA, and selling your medical records would violate it.
Anybody who does sell medical records should be simply sued into the ground, along with whoever from your doctor's office or insurance company released your records to them. We *don't* have to tolerate this.