Let's start by saying that I'm generally up for a day at a shooting range... I also like shooting pool... same principle but one is less noisy and I've never had cuts inflicted by mishandling a pool cue filled with GSR and oil which burns for hours.
So, you honestly think that companies like Colt, S&W, H&K, Glock, etc... given the incentive could not, within a few years develop a smart trigger lock that would equal the reliability of the rest of their firearm? Are these companies operated by a bunch of rednecks that think adding a memory feature to a calculator means tying a string around their finger?
You probably already own multiple "reliable" firearms. Of course, you appropriately exercise gun safety by storing you firearms in one locked safe and your clips and ammunition in another. You're not some fool who lives his entire life in fear and keeps one loaded by the bed because you honestly believe you can awaken, obtain the weapon, disable the safety, identify your target in the dark... because he/she obviously would choose your bedroom window.. and safely discharge your weapon.... from bed. Only a moron would live their life spending every night fearing for their lives as they slept.
You're here on Slashdot. I hope that means you're a technologist of some type. If that's the case, it's obviously appropriate to question whether the complexity of such a smart gun device would in fact make the firearm unreliable. The answer is, of course it will. Then you should consider that a firearm is not really a reliable device to begin with. In addition, humans are extremely unreliable, those who believe they can operate calmly and properly aim and shoot within a high stress environment, knowing they are likely to take a human life... they're either full of crap or precisely the people most of the rest of us fear more than the criminals since it makes us realize our society has completely failed when such people are becoming too common.
The possibility of taking another person's life should always be a bad thing. It should always elevate blood levels... it should always make your hand shake. If it doesn't, you need "putting down" as much as the other guy. It means you lost something that makes you human.
So... let's go a step further, as a technologist, you also believe this will not stop the criminals and it will be like DRM and simply a matter of googling how to disable the lock and pushing some buttons. There's a difference.
DRM on non-PC devices held up pretty well. Sure, there are people who intentionally bought DVD players with the region locks removed, but they either needed to have the tools required to flash the units or had to have a 3rd party who did do it for them. DRM on a device like this requires a person to:
1) Have access to the device
2) Have access to the tools to reach the diagnostic points of the firearm. These are likely beneath some screws at the very least.
3) They need to have access to debugging equipment. Sure, an Arduino and maybe one extra chip is probably good enough... but you still need one.
4) They need to have the ability to build the interface, operate it and get it working.
5) They will also likely need to test it to make sure it works afterwards... that makes noise.
Will someone release "Diagnostics tools" on etsy or ebay or something... sure... they'll be readily available... but like the 7 day waiting period... it gives a person a chance to cool down and think it through. I know as an impulse shopper, I often will buy things I don't need because they're in front of me and easy to get access to. If I have to wait for it or mail order it, I probably will think "Do I really need it" or simply forget about it. Even getting the tools to bypass the lock will add enough delay that it might be enough to let the person's temper cool down.
As for normal criminals, this obviously won't solve that problem... our role is to keep our firearms stored in
The vast majority of humans are idiots. The difference is, Americans and Englishmen feel they have either a god given right or patriotic duty to basque in the glory of their own stupid.
I have traveled to many countries spending a week here and a week there. Only three countries I've experienced have truly combined stupidity with arrogance to an extreme that I simply preferred my own company... and I don't even like myself.
1) India : The worst... these people would lie to your face and not even know they had done so. But if it sounds good to them, they'll say it. It seems that they always assume you're either dumber than they are or that you'll dislike confrontation so much, you'll just do what they want to be rid of them. Outside India, I have almost never encountered this behavior from Indian people... except from the fools who spend an hour painting their social status on their foreheads each morning.
2) US : Close second... this is a place where people glorify all forms of competition to such an extreme that they join religions, political parties, etc... as if they were teams and no matter how stupid their team might be acting at the time, so long as it's their team it must be right no matter how sane and logical the alternative is. 99% of the time, the US can be summarized as "Two wrongs don't make a right, but if your wrong and the other team is wrong, it's your patriotic duty to attempt to dominate the other team and force your wrong on them which in the end makes it right". America is most famous around the world for people who ask "How are you doing?" to be polite but don't bother waiting for an answer. On top of that, America sells the military as if it were a religion and that the soldiers are priests or acolytes.
Where else can you go to in the world, at 18 years old volunteer to sign up for a job which trains you, feeds you, clothes you and places a roof over your head and then also provides you a stipend of disposable cash (ideally for savings, more likely for a car) remaining equal to or exceeding that available to someone who earns $55,000 a year with a university education. In addition, if you wear your military issued clothing everywhere you go, it's not only socially appropriate, but people will treat you like you're some sort of hero and give up business class seats and more to support their troops.
Guys... military is a job... when you sign up, unless you're an absolute idiot (based on the topic of this conversation, most are) you're signing a contract with terms and conditions defining what you are responsible for and what you'll be paid. You have a clearly defined job. If you happen to end up on a battlefield presented with a choice of shooting someone or having them shoot you... or there are bombs bursting in air, this is not heroic... this is as stupid as being on the cast of jack-ass. If you're a fool who believes it's your god given duty to shoot the other guy who also believes it's his god given duty to shoot you, then you're better off sitting down for a cup of coffee and discussing where you went wrong in your thinking and maybe discuss sports or girls.
Let's talk guns... in America it's a religion... a persons right to bare arms is such a fundamental right that to not have at least 5 weapons on you at a given time is simply un-American. What do you expect from a country where people glorify the wild west. I personally enjoy a visit to the shooting range on occasion where I get to try different firearms and spend money for the privilege of wasting extremely expensive bullets to punch holes in sheets of paper at long distances for some inexplicable reason. I can't see ever actually owning a gun as I have no need for one and I don't dislike paper enough to need to punch holes in it at home with NATO rounds. But Americans seem to collect them... it's important to them... their Declaration of Independence demonizes King George the III as a tyrant. This is hilarious because the exact same bullshit they do today. They started a war against an
In 1999 while porting the Opera web browser to Linux, I implemented an option to run Opera as a X window manager an spawn apps via a file:// URL and added an tag for parenting native apps in web pages. In short, a web Linux desktop.
They bounce back and forth between Sweden and Scandinavia. The fact is, I go to Denmark constantly and while I have a few thousand Danish crowns sitting in a drawer at home, I don't bother. I live in Norway and take out a total of about 500NOK in cash a month for my kids to have some spending money. We were going to get the credit cards, but Norway's DnB and Denmark's Danskebank have both released easy payment apps which eliminate the need for cards now... and nearly everywhere which accepts cards also seems to accept app payment now. I also grocery shop in Sweden quite often (2-3 times a month). The problem there is that you need a Swedish 10 crown piece to use a shopping cart. It's not a rental, instead it's to make sure you put the cart back or leave the 10kr in the cart for someone else to claim when they put it back.
The main issue I have with the article is the piss poor writing about the doubling of electronic fraud without properly addessing the obvious. The massive increase in electronic payments will increase the amount of electronic fraud... obviously... but what's been the impact on counterfeiting? I'd imagine that the decrease in counterfeiting paper money has been approximately equal to the increase in electronic fraud.
Then there's the issue about privacy... All that needs to be done is that the Swedish government says "We won't snoop on you without asking first" and that should be good enough. Generally Scandinavia has self-enforced laws. This means, all you have to do is declare something illegal and people will actually stop doing it.
What's the long term strategy for storing the waste products after the lifetime of the battery? Tesla for example intends to close their eyes and stick their fingers in their ears while singing lalala with waste lithium. I assume lots of big blue barrels will be leaking for 100,000 years. This type of disposal is proven to cause decreased intelligence of people living near such disposal sites. Lithium itself is recyclable, but doing so would bankrupt Tesla as opposed to just mining more.
What is the long term environmental impact of waste sulfer?
Porsche could rip off the entire design from the ground up and ship it... hell they could license the Tesla cars and mass produce them and it will still not be a "Tesla competitor".
Just like when you buy and Apple iPhone or Apple Watch, the devices aren't particularly anything real special. It takes a few weeks before 50 other companies ship a damn near clone and often even better devices than that for half the price. And yet, iPhone and Apple Watch still sell like there's no tomorrow.
To make a Tesla competitor, Porsche would have to dump all their other cars and rebuild their company as being a modern "cool" company. They'd have to kill off their dealerships too.
Making a car which is similar and in theory comparable or even superior to a Tesla will never succeed so long as Porsche doesn't bet everything on it.
On the other hand... I guess Porsche has already begun by making new models which are so fat they can't fit in parking spaces. I'm dieing to see all the funny people who will buy the Model X and destroy their doors in parking garages.
Patriotism is a disease that makes a moron believe (s)he's better than someone else because (s)he's better than someone else because they were squeezed from a vagina that either already was a citizen of a country or squeezed from it in said country.
Unless you're ass was the one planted in the pod which landed on the moon, you're the asshole who thinks Armstrong said "On small step for the United States". A man landed and walked on the moon and you make this about national boundaries? This is about what we can accomplish as human beings if we set our minds to it. Using something that barely counts as a computer and communications systems which worked nearly by accident, we sent humans riding on an enormous bomb into space and managed to actually slow them down enough to land on the surface of the moon.
This was a victory for all of the world... not just the U.S. and it sure as hell wasn't a loss for the Soviet Union. The were able to see that their fellow man stood on the surface of the moon and be proud of what we can all accomplish and to know that if we reach for the stars... one day we might just reach them.
Screw your pathetic patriotic nonsense... every day I come here and read Slashdot and see people from all over the world (including Russia and China) talk about popular science together as a common species. I visit sites where people from around the world work to further medicine and we don't consider patents or national boundaries, we consider illnesses. We work together to design new algorithms for pattern detection within ultrasound images to detect anomalies.
I visit other sites where we discuss the mysteries of the Universe and generally find that we like those mysteries. Sometimes we wonder would we like it so much if they weren't mysteries. We speak as humans with no regards for national boundaries and who was squeezed from a vagina in a given place.
Patriotism is for fools. Nationalism is for fools. There is only one reason for national boundaries and that's to have some order to managerial tasks like deciding who should pay for which roads to be built.
I was born an American... when I learned that patriotism is a hoax, I decided to be something far greater... a human instead. My life has been far more fulfilling since.
That said... as someone born in New York, I do take an irrational pride in New York pizza and bagels... it's not a competition, it's an observation... we do it better.
Not generally... there is almost no Semite in modern Jews anymore. There are some left of course, but the blood line is far from being so pure. From thousands of years of mixing the bloodlines during their nomadic movements throughout the world, there's almost nothing left. Chances are, the Jews have far more in common with the Russian, Polish and Germans than with the Arabs. Israeli Jews have practically nothing to do with the ancient Jews. It probably would work.
Of course, you can't dispute this with the Jews... these are people who actually believe in things like the Cohan gene. For people who don't know, Cohans and Levis are bloodlines which probably went extinct 2000 years ago and were extremely rare to begin with as these were the direct descendants of the holiest and the most powerful of people in the Israeli empire. Over history, it has been a great goal for many Jews who were known as Israelites which translates correctly to "The bloodline which designates thee as just another schmuck" to promote themselves to Cohan or Levi by never clearly answering which bloodline they were members of and making enough money to move somewhere else and pretend to be either holy or powerful and change their name to Cohen or Levi in the process. A very important additional benefit of this would be to try and arrange a wife who would make good children for their sons and instead of choosing from the generally short and chubby semetic line, they would somehow stumble upon a man willing to allow his daughter to convert for the right price.
Judaism is one of the more ruthless religions due to their internal conflict... bickering... even hatred of each other. It's as bad as going to Church on Christmas and 95% of the people who go there celebrate the humble life and birth of their lord by dressing up as expensively as possible and showing off their new cars.
So, you believe the issue here is about choosing a side? To a certain extent that might be true. But let's be fair, until the UN renounces Israel's sovereignty, takes over, disarms the entire region and enforces peace.. preferably peacefully while treating all the people fairly and with respect, there will be no right side. I don't give a shit if you favor Israelis or Palestinians. They're both a disgrace and behave like something out of a grapes of wrath type experiment.
The issue here is whether or not a nation like Israel should be allowed to censor "their enemy" on YouTube and other sites. I have no love for anyone who preaches hate like the Palestinians and Israelis do. I have no respect for anyone who would look their brother in the eye and see an animal when what they really see is a mirror. But, for a moment, imagine Israel being able to claim the videos you site as instigating violence... they do... only a fool would disagree with you on this. There are many videos like this and if I believed I had the right to have them taken down, I would.
But, what about the video of a crying child who lost his mother or father or sister to bombings and raids led by the Israelis... when that child cries out in fear and terror and agony that the Israelis did this to him. That he hates the people who took someone he loves from him. Would you also agree that this video would insight violence? Would you not agree that only a heartless man would not want to cry for this child? Would you not agree that a fighter would see this as his duty to avenge? Would you agree that this video should be taken down too? I personally wouldn't. A video like this should be seen.
At which point between these extremes do we decide which video is appropriate and which insights violence and which insights violence and should be seen... and which ones shouldn't.
This IS NOT an issue of black and white. While I sympathize with the Israeli leadership that these videos are easily a weapon being used against them... I also sympathize with the Palestinians who lack better channels to communicate and sadly lack better things to communicate about. What's worse is, I feel deeply for the Israelis and the Palestinians who actually believe they are doing the right thing because some fool in "their leadership" has convinced them that this is how they should think and behave.
Israel is a completely failed experiment and a place which could be a world wide symbol of peace representing some of the biggest religions is a cesspool of steaming shit instead. Quit picking a side like Israel or Palestine. Instead fight to have them both dissolved and if the US and UN are going to pay for "peace keeping" in the region, then treat it like post-was Germany and just take the damn thing over and treat it as a haven instead and bring peace there.
I read the whole article. From what I read, I can summarize this as :
Two people with insane amounts of money and accountable to no one decide to spend their money trying to solve problems by taking a new approach. Their approach spans from :
- Trial and error with greater agility than a government or classic foundation can achieve
- Brute force of attacking illnesses on a gigantic scale hoping to eradicate them and maybe then focus on helping people live healthier following being able to simply live to begin with. They are also accused of being know-it-alls and people can't tell if they're altruistic or if they're evil and trying to take over the world by trying to solve problems governments seem to fail to solve on their own.
I'm sure I missed a few, but whether I'm a fan of the Gateses or note is irrelevent.If they are a bunch of greedy power hungry assholes, it doesn't matter to me. A long as they are in fact trying to solve problems. We need more people who are like them.
BTW... the cure for poverty in my opinion is better education. I believe the small schools effort (probably a bad idea) had a pretty good intent which is that the transition itself would make things like new books and cleaner classrooms available to students. It would disrupt the system and the reversion to the traditional system would require the government to invest to support the transition back. It's not a great answer to any problems, but it did give schools run by generally lethargic administration a kick in the ass for a while. The failure of this experiment probably ended up being part of the solution to the problem itself.
As for Common Core... that's purely political as to what you go with. Common Core was at least an attempt to standardized a system and make better teaching materials available. I'm not in favor of it and I've had to teach my children math properly to compensate for the massive short-comings in the common core way of handling problems. But I didn't simply discount it, I evaluated it, learned it and felt it was a considerable hindrance from my son and daughter learning more advanced mathematics.
In two years, my son will have a confirmation in a church. A Church is a wooden building with a big statue of skinny dead guy (generally believed to be white and British) dangling from a cross run by a man wearing a dress for those of you who didn't know. He will have a confirmation because drinking some wine, eating a cookie and getting paid large sums of money to put on a stage performance where no one sees anything but his back is not a bad gig for a kid if he/she can get it. I remember being in a school play where I pretended to be a great roman leader. I figure my kid can pretend to be a Christian for 10 minutes. Besides, it'll make his grandparents happy and they're very old an deserve to hope for at least one child who might believe in things like Santa Claus and invisible super-beings who can create entire universes in 7 days but can't make British comedy funny.
I am forced to wonder however if the placement of these ads, while harmless in themselves are being rejected mainly for the same reasons the Anglican Church threw a tantrum over Harry Potter. I remember them being hell-bent against Harry Potter because it made witches seem to be good.
Now, a new film which from the trailers leads me to feel like it's a film based heavily on reintroducing the Jedi "religion" to a new generation in a culture of heathens who seem somewhat similar to English pagans. While I'm far to lazy to Google it, I recall reading that the Jedi Church has quite a few members in England. While the majority of members joined it to simply list a religion as their association which wasn't an actual religion, this movie could seem very threatening to the Anglican Church.
To be fair though, watching an advertisement about what I still believe must be the absolute silliest and meaningless tradition of most religions... prayer that is, it's pretty harmless in itself.
I wonder however if we should worry about the next real issue which would be that this would in fact open the door for the English Church of the Jedi sponsored advertisement should be allowed to also remind people to vote... or donate money to charities like Make a Wish. Something like "If you were a member of the Church of the Jedi, instead of paying for wine and cookies and candles, you could direct your tax money to meaningful charities like...."
At the end maybe a silly joke like "You'll still have to pay for men in dresses"
What I don't understand is why anyone with half a brain would want this. It would be like saying "We want more straight guys to consider becoming hair dressers". This is InfoSec, as a career path, it's right up there with used car sales and hair dresser.
I was at a hair dresser in San Diego about a year ago and some whacko woman cutting my hair... and trust me, I've never seen a person take this type of job so seriously, she was religious about it... well she spent half an hour trying to force to to change shampoos. She went on and on about how this one has this chemical and that one has another. I didn't want to be rude, but several times, she was simply naming the chemical with the biggest words and assumed they must be the active ingredients of the shampoos. She didn't really have any idea what each one of them did. She just assumed that if it was the biggest word, it must be important.
This is how I see InfoSec. I've met people who have obtained Ph.D.s in Infosec and they can't tell you about how anything they're trying to secure works. They love to spew off an endless list of big words they use with little regard to their real meanings, but they sound really intelligent when they do so... unless of course you know what it means.
Securing information requires understanding how it is stored and accessed. This means, programmers and network engineers (or ideally someone with genuine experience with both) is required to make a infosec person. But sadly, because of the bad reputation infosec has, I can't think of any people with the skillset that would be interested in such a step down.
The article mentions that women are far better represented in real subjects like science, mathematics and engineering. I regularly tell teenage girls that are looking for career advice they should go for a real science, not computer science or IT... but instead something like chemistry, physics, math, etc... and the reason for this is that they require the benefits of a stereotypical female mind. They are disciplines and in effect require discipline which men rarely have. Men often win all the love and awards for the accomplishments in these fields and often that's because of the reckless nature they take to achieve their results, but the real work in these fields is almost always done by people who can work without insisting on always starting a pissing contest about everything. Testosterone just doesn't really fit in fields that require disciplined intelligence.
Let's also point out that in most cases, InfoSec, IT in general, programming and often electronic engineering almost never (with the exception of bio tech) have any value to the world. It's not like curing diseases or creating a new non-toxic emulsifier for epoxy resin. I know every time I write a line of code, it has absolutely no value to the world in general. Math, science and physics generally tend to make a real difference or at least have a much better chance to make a difference.
Is there some point to this? I'm pretty sure Steam has considerably more and will be shocked if Apple TV doesn't pass that in a few weeks.
Console = archaic device we needed because computers weren't powerful enough to play games and because abstraction layers like game engines targeting other abstraction layers like OpenGL or DirectX wasn't plausible. These devices are now sold primarily to users lacking the brainpower to use a mouse or to people desperate to play a game that only exists on a platform that costs too much and is far too slow.
HP went to hell in a basket because the board of directors keeps hiring McKinsey style business idiots to run the company. As a result, they by or merge with company after company and with the exception of their 20 year forey into the memristor which even today has yet to happen, they have absolutely no concept of innovation or market leadership. They for lack of a better term are a huge beige box vendor which tries to beige box everything they touch.
I think the biggest and most impressive effort they've made in a really long time to be part of something bigger was the Itanium processor project with Intel. But sadly, whether it was them, Intel or both, Itanium failed because developers couldn't afford to get one.
If you look closely at the list of CEOs that HP has had over the past 15 years, every one of them is someone that loves the word "synergize" and was hired by the board of directors to increase the value of their shares with absolutely no respect for the company itself. They probably all hang out on yachts filled with hookers talking about how great HP is without having the first clue as to what HP actually makes.
To be fair, anyone who identifies themselves as leftist or rightist are utter idiots. Intelligent people evaluate each issue individually and make choices (if necessary) to address those issues based on what they believe is the most productive and constructive (or in some cases, the easiest) option.
The real problem isn't the left or the right... it's the left AND the right and every other damn option out there.
While I am entirely aware I risk making the same mistake, you apparently have a gift of making impressively stupid comments without applying thought or reason to what you say and instead simply spout some populist nonsense that is little more than finger pointing.
Take responsibility for yourself, this article identifies a REAL problem. The problem is, we've (I am not even in America, yet I recognize "WE" is accurate) have established a "civilization" that contains some very clear and identifiable problems.
1) There are knuckle-draggers in our higher education system that clearly are in desperate need of an education but are also clearly not likely to obtain one as they have shown they're as ignorant as you by stereotyping based on some trait they believe makes another person less than they are... based on a group... which generally has no actual genuinely common characteristics.
2) There are fools in the higher education system who lack the intelligence to simply ignore the knuckle-draggers and steer clear of them if needed. While I can't identify from the article if the targets of the hate-speech are those who are complaining, I will assume at least a few of them are. The fools (like yourself and likely me for rising to the bait) making the hateful comments are a waste of time, food and air. What they say has utterly no relevance to anything. These fools who take offense to knuckle-draggers making such comments are a major problem.
3) There are fools who seem to believe the solution to the problem is to try and hide it. People who I don't believe are left, right, lib, conservative, etc... but instead are truly the most dangerous people I know, the PC enforcement crowd have identified a long list of causes they "feel strongly about". They want to the be the mommies of us all and instead of attempting to identify and resolve the issues progressively... devising an intelligent solution, they instead want to make us cover our ears and eyes and pretend like it will go away if we just sweep it under the rug and come up with punishments for people who say naughty things.
Fact 1) Thank goodness for the Internet... Racism is 100x better today than it was 10 years ago. Racists who talk on Facebook and Twitter have been learning that they have lots in common with all those people they used to hate for skin color and religion and now have learned that they can hate people no matter what their skin color or religion. So as a result, now a formerly racist person who desperately needs to believe that some group of people must be responsible for why their lives aren't better... they can point fingers at all kinds of other groups of people. It's like Christmas in July.
Fact 2) We don't need mommies and we really don't need PC enforcers. It's better to simply avoid/ignore people who we find offensive. Which leads us to...
Fact 3) People like you are a waste of time to make any effort on. It's just simply built into your system to pick some group to blame without actually even taking the time to identify whether those people are in fact a group or not. There is nothing me or any other person could say to teach you to think intelligently and objectively about each scenario and then make productive recommendations. Which leads us to....
Fact 4) Finger pointers really aren't a necessity and are actually generally not even wanted. We have Fox, CNN, ABC and BBC to do that for us... we don't need anyone else to do it. I tend to find the shows on the news networks tend to spend a lot of time constructing groups of people who agree with e
What I doubt is the appropriateness of choosing to refer to it by stating "narrowly averting what could have been an explosion". While your argument is clearly appropriate, even your explanation states " (a few percent of all hypothetical impact/fire scenarios)". To me, as a person who believes the roulette wheel is mathematically and tested and proven to favor the house by adding only one green slot, until we hit 50/50, I consider such journalism questionable nonsense written by a fool who can't be bothered to research.
I live in Norway where one of the largest banks moved their IT operations out of the country to TCS (think Tata) and I immediately changed banks.
I have some little problems with outsourcing banking... especially to India.
Laws in different countries are different and enforced differently than they are in your own country. If you've ever visited India and spent any time there, you would know that one dishonest person in the flock can grab a bunch of money and run like hell and never be found. India is huge, has language/communications issues between villages and an enterprising criminal would never be caught.
India is also the country which brings us "Windows Care" and other similar companies which are call centers to scam people. They call your house (sometimes up to 5 times a day) and make threats and intentionally misrepresent themselves as Microsoft. After tracking their IP addresses to a registered company (it has changed again) and calling their local police department to report racketeering and international wire fraud charges, I was informed that :
1) Gartner (when paid by Symantec) reported that 90% of all computers are infected by a virus
2) As such, if you're willing to pay the $300 and give them access to your computer to install anti-virus, it's perfectly reasonable to assume there's a 90% chance they're performing a good service for you.
3) It is not illegal in India to claim you're someone you're not unless it infringes the cast system.
4) Thank you for calling... please don't let the door hit you on the ass as you leave.
Would your nations money in the hands of a company located in a country which provides you no recourse against criminal activities taken against you so long as they can provide some convoluted logic as to how they're helping you?
That tends to buy more books because of Google books? I can honestly say that because of Google books, I can find better what I'm looking for.
Sadly, I'm far more freaked about how dependent I've become on Google for DNS, maps, books, translate, etc... than I ever was on Microsoft. I sometimes find myself trying intentionally to use Microsoft just to cut the cord.
U.S. Taxpayer money? Seems to me it wasn't that long ago that Israel begged America fo a bunch of money to buy missiles to level a Palestinian city. If they can't afford bombing people who should be their friends and brothers, what good would they be for helping with space exploration?
I'll start by answering your question. Use GIT. It's the most widely supported system at this time and it works really well.
Next let me be a typical slashdot asshole that makes abrasive comments that may be well intended by will come off as being a dick. I'll explain that I already see endless problems coming from this.
If you're working with a team of 10-15 developers who all lack experience with version control, you have a major problem with out-of-date programmers and you're throwing them into a hell called Python. If you generally accomplish projects using C and LabView, the developers you have more than likely lack a modern development skill set and coding in a language like Python will produce some of the worst code ever written. If C is like shooting yourself in the leg and C++ is like blowing the whole damned leg off, Python is like dropping a nuke. You will have an endless supply of options for writing terribly bad code in the worst ways possible. The only redeeming feature will be it will have nice uniform spacing.
I would highly recommend doing what always works best which is to hire a Python developer with good GIT skills that can lay the majority of the foundation of the project and create a uniform set of standards of coding for the project and then bring the other developers on 3 at a time and perform constant code review. Focus heavily on test driven development and use a system like SCRUM for lifecycle management. If you want to teach old dogs new tricks, don't just throw them in the fire and tell them to figure it out. The programming paradigms are so drastically different between your old method and new that without some sort of leader with experience, it will turn out to be a disaster and jungle of crap code. I personal avoid Python projects not because the language is bad, but instead because they tend to be like this.
You should of course know by now that if you are traditionally a LabView shop, you're going to sacrifice a massive number of really important features to save a buck. Python has great support too multi-threading but it's not an awesome environment for event driven programming like LabView is. You of course can accomplish all the same things, but even with the thousands of toolkits/libraries out there, you'll have to write the entire underlying architecture yourselves and you'll lose almost all visualization you've come to depend on.
I actually had a great rant about this only earlier today while public speaking.
I like to ask a room full of 'engineers' (IT guys) to solve the following :
If a rectangle has a perimeter of 30 and one side is twice as long as another, how long are the sides?
I'm pretty sure I took this question from a story on Slashdot or The Register about how they interview ivy league students and found only 30% could solve it. The reason for this is obviously that once we think we don't need something anymore, we forget it. So once their SATs are passed, all their math pours out of their heads.
The results I get are scary and of course expected. I've had rooms of 20 'engineers', some recent graduates from 'great universities' who actually had to think about it. My son at 11 years old solved it in his head in about 12 seconds and could explain clearly why.
I've use this question to make an obvious point which is that very little of our education after the 4th grade has any meaning at all. Most of it if retained has little value to the overwhelming majority other than trivia. I estimate that 99.995% of all students required to learn polynomials in high school have absolutely no idea how or where to apply them to any applied task. The education in polynomials for the masses is an obscene waste of time. As for history and literature... all one needs to do is what Fox or CNN to realize that even the guys who should have studied these don't have any idea how to apply their educations to their work.
I also brought up that my nephew told me he couldn't take home economics because of lack of teachers. I was highly disappointed since I consider that class possibly the most important class they ever taught in high school. It teaches us how to actually manage our lives, prepare food, control portions, increase our families physical activities, manage our personal finances, repair our clothing... when we did things the proper American way which is all f-ing wrong and way overboard in the 60s and bras were burned and women felt the only way out of the barefoot/pregnant role was to reject all forms of "women's work" instead of the more intelligent method which is "Teach your sons and daughters household management" instead of just your daughters, we actually lost the knowledge required to manage a home and family.
Schools really need to make home ec a 4 year course and include household carpentry,
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Because of people like you.
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Let's start by saying that I'm generally up for a day at a shooting range... I also like shooting pool... same principle but one is less noisy and I've never had cuts inflicted by mishandling a pool cue filled with GSR and oil which burns for hours.
So, you honestly think that companies like Colt, S&W, H&K, Glock, etc... given the incentive could not, within a few years develop a smart trigger lock that would equal the reliability of the rest of their firearm? Are these companies operated by a bunch of rednecks that think adding a memory feature to a calculator means tying a string around their finger?
You probably already own multiple "reliable" firearms. Of course, you appropriately exercise gun safety by storing you firearms in one locked safe and your clips and ammunition in another. You're not some fool who lives his entire life in fear and keeps one loaded by the bed because you honestly believe you can awaken, obtain the weapon, disable the safety, identify your target in the dark... because he/she obviously would choose your bedroom window.. and safely discharge your weapon.... from bed. Only a moron would live their life spending every night fearing for their lives as they slept.
You're here on Slashdot. I hope that means you're a technologist of some type. If that's the case, it's obviously appropriate to question whether the complexity of such a smart gun device would in fact make the firearm unreliable. The answer is, of course it will. Then you should consider that a firearm is not really a reliable device to begin with. In addition, humans are extremely unreliable, those who believe they can operate calmly and properly aim and shoot within a high stress environment, knowing they are likely to take a human life... they're either full of crap or precisely the people most of the rest of us fear more than the criminals since it makes us realize our society has completely failed when such people are becoming too common.
The possibility of taking another person's life should always be a bad thing. It should always elevate blood levels... it should always make your hand shake. If it doesn't, you need "putting down" as much as the other guy. It means you lost something that makes you human.
So... let's go a step further, as a technologist, you also believe this will not stop the criminals and it will be like DRM and simply a matter of googling how to disable the lock and pushing some buttons. There's a difference.
DRM on non-PC devices held up pretty well. Sure, there are people who intentionally bought DVD players with the region locks removed, but they either needed to have the tools required to flash the units or had to have a 3rd party who did do it for them. DRM on a device like this requires a person to
1) Have access to the device
2) Have access to the tools to reach the diagnostic points of the firearm. These are likely beneath some screws at the very least.
3) They need to have access to debugging equipment. Sure, an Arduino and maybe one extra chip is probably good enough... but you still need one.
4) They need to have the ability to build the interface, operate it and get it working.
5) They will also likely need to test it to make sure it works afterwards... that makes noise.
Will someone release "Diagnostics tools" on etsy or ebay or something... sure... they'll be readily available... but like the 7 day waiting period... it gives a person a chance to cool down and think it through. I know as an impulse shopper, I often will buy things I don't need because they're in front of me and easy to get access to. If I have to wait for it or mail order it, I probably will think "Do I really need it" or simply forget about it. Even getting the tools to bypass the lock will add enough delay that it might be enough to let the person's temper cool down.
As for normal criminals, this obviously won't solve that problem... our role is to keep our firearms stored in
The vast majority of humans are idiots. The difference is, Americans and Englishmen feel they have either a god given right or patriotic duty to basque in the glory of their own stupid.
I have traveled to many countries spending a week here and a week there. Only three countries I've experienced have truly combined stupidity with arrogance to an extreme that I simply preferred my own company... and I don't even like myself.
1) India : The worst... these people would lie to your face and not even know they had done so. But if it sounds good to them, they'll say it. It seems that they always assume you're either dumber than they are or that you'll dislike confrontation so much, you'll just do what they want to be rid of them. Outside India, I have almost never encountered this behavior from Indian people... except from the fools who spend an hour painting their social status on their foreheads each morning.
2) US : Close second... this is a place where people glorify all forms of competition to such an extreme that they join religions, political parties, etc... as if they were teams and no matter how stupid their team might be acting at the time, so long as it's their team it must be right no matter how sane and logical the alternative is. 99% of the time, the US can be summarized as "Two wrongs don't make a right, but if your wrong and the other team is wrong, it's your patriotic duty to attempt to dominate the other team and force your wrong on them which in the end makes it right". America is most famous around the world for people who ask "How are you doing?" to be polite but don't bother waiting for an answer. On top of that, America sells the military as if it were a religion and that the soldiers are priests or acolytes.
Where else can you go to in the world, at 18 years old volunteer to sign up for a job which trains you, feeds you, clothes you and places a roof over your head and then also provides you a stipend of disposable cash (ideally for savings, more likely for a car) remaining equal to or exceeding that available to someone who earns $55,000 a year with a university education. In addition, if you wear your military issued clothing everywhere you go, it's not only socially appropriate, but people will treat you like you're some sort of hero and give up business class seats and more to support their troops.
Guys... military is a job... when you sign up, unless you're an absolute idiot (based on the topic of this conversation, most are) you're signing a contract with terms and conditions defining what you are responsible for and what you'll be paid. You have a clearly defined job. If you happen to end up on a battlefield presented with a choice of shooting someone or having them shoot you... or there are bombs bursting in air, this is not heroic... this is as stupid as being on the cast of jack-ass. If you're a fool who believes it's your god given duty to shoot the other guy who also believes it's his god given duty to shoot you, then you're better off sitting down for a cup of coffee and discussing where you went wrong in your thinking and maybe discuss sports or girls.
Let's talk guns... in America it's a religion... a persons right to bare arms is such a fundamental right that to not have at least 5 weapons on you at a given time is simply un-American. What do you expect from a country where people glorify the wild west. I personally enjoy a visit to the shooting range on occasion where I get to try different firearms and spend money for the privilege of wasting extremely expensive bullets to punch holes in sheets of paper at long distances for some inexplicable reason. I can't see ever actually owning a gun as I have no need for one and I don't dislike paper enough to need to punch holes in it at home with NATO rounds. But Americans seem to collect them... it's important to them... their Declaration of Independence demonizes King George the III as a tyrant. This is hilarious because the exact same bullshit they do today. They started a war against an
In 1999 while porting the Opera web browser to Linux, I implemented an option to run Opera as a X window manager an spawn apps via a file:// URL and added an tag for parenting native apps in web pages. In short, a web Linux desktop.
Java on iPhone or Windows phone?
They bounce back and forth between Sweden and Scandinavia. The fact is, I go to Denmark constantly and while I have a few thousand Danish crowns sitting in a drawer at home, I don't bother. I live in Norway and take out a total of about 500NOK in cash a month for my kids to have some spending money. We were going to get the credit cards, but Norway's DnB and Denmark's Danskebank have both released easy payment apps which eliminate the need for cards now... and nearly everywhere which accepts cards also seems to accept app payment now. I also grocery shop in Sweden quite often (2-3 times a month). The problem there is that you need a Swedish 10 crown piece to use a shopping cart. It's not a rental, instead it's to make sure you put the cart back or leave the 10kr in the cart for someone else to claim when they put it back.
The main issue I have with the article is the piss poor writing about the doubling of electronic fraud without properly addessing the obvious. The massive increase in electronic payments will increase the amount of electronic fraud... obviously... but what's been the impact on counterfeiting? I'd imagine that the decrease in counterfeiting paper money has been approximately equal to the increase in electronic fraud.
Then there's the issue about privacy... All that needs to be done is that the Swedish government says "We won't snoop on you without asking first" and that should be good enough. Generally Scandinavia has self-enforced laws. This means, all you have to do is declare something illegal and people will actually stop doing it.
What's the long term strategy for storing the waste products after the lifetime of the battery? Tesla for example intends to close their eyes and stick their fingers in their ears while singing lalala with waste lithium. I assume lots of big blue barrels will be leaking for 100,000 years. This type of disposal is proven to cause decreased intelligence of people living near such disposal sites. Lithium itself is recyclable, but doing so would bankrupt Tesla as opposed to just mining more.
What is the long term environmental impact of waste sulfer?
Gigabit FTTH has been available for nearly a decade in the civilized world.
So they make a website with postings, pictures, links and advertisements. Do they honestly think they will ever be more than that?
Porsche could rip off the entire design from the ground up and ship it... hell they could license the Tesla cars and mass produce them and it will still not be a "Tesla competitor".
Just like when you buy and Apple iPhone or Apple Watch, the devices aren't particularly anything real special. It takes a few weeks before 50 other companies ship a damn near clone and often even better devices than that for half the price. And yet, iPhone and Apple Watch still sell like there's no tomorrow.
To make a Tesla competitor, Porsche would have to dump all their other cars and rebuild their company as being a modern "cool" company. They'd have to kill off their dealerships too.
Making a car which is similar and in theory comparable or even superior to a Tesla will never succeed so long as Porsche doesn't bet everything on it.
On the other hand... I guess Porsche has already begun by making new models which are so fat they can't fit in parking spaces. I'm dieing to see all the funny people who will buy the Model X and destroy their doors in parking garages.
Patriotism is a disease that makes a moron believe (s)he's better than someone else because (s)he's better than someone else because they were squeezed from a vagina that either already was a citizen of a country or squeezed from it in said country.
Unless you're ass was the one planted in the pod which landed on the moon, you're the asshole who thinks Armstrong said "On small step for the United States". A man landed and walked on the moon and you make this about national boundaries? This is about what we can accomplish as human beings if we set our minds to it. Using something that barely counts as a computer and communications systems which worked nearly by accident, we sent humans riding on an enormous bomb into space and managed to actually slow them down enough to land on the surface of the moon.
This was a victory for all of the world... not just the U.S. and it sure as hell wasn't a loss for the Soviet Union. The were able to see that their fellow man stood on the surface of the moon and be proud of what we can all accomplish and to know that if we reach for the stars... one day we might just reach them.
Screw your pathetic patriotic nonsense... every day I come here and read Slashdot and see people from all over the world (including Russia and China) talk about popular science together as a common species. I visit sites where people from around the world work to further medicine and we don't consider patents or national boundaries, we consider illnesses. We work together to design new algorithms for pattern detection within ultrasound images to detect anomalies.
I visit other sites where we discuss the mysteries of the Universe and generally find that we like those mysteries. Sometimes we wonder would we like it so much if they weren't mysteries. We speak as humans with no regards for national boundaries and who was squeezed from a vagina in a given place.
Patriotism is for fools. Nationalism is for fools. There is only one reason for national boundaries and that's to have some order to managerial tasks like deciding who should pay for which roads to be built.
I was born an American... when I learned that patriotism is a hoax, I decided to be something far greater... a human instead. My life has been far more fulfilling since.
That said... as someone born in New York, I do take an irrational pride in New York pizza and bagels... it's not a competition, it's an observation... we do it better.
Not generally... there is almost no Semite in modern Jews anymore. There are some left of course, but the blood line is far from being so pure. From thousands of years of mixing the bloodlines during their nomadic movements throughout the world, there's almost nothing left. Chances are, the Jews have far more in common with the Russian, Polish and Germans than with the Arabs. Israeli Jews have practically nothing to do with the ancient Jews. It probably would work.
Of course, you can't dispute this with the Jews... these are people who actually believe in things like the Cohan gene. For people who don't know, Cohans and Levis are bloodlines which probably went extinct 2000 years ago and were extremely rare to begin with as these were the direct descendants of the holiest and the most powerful of people in the Israeli empire. Over history, it has been a great goal for many Jews who were known as Israelites which translates correctly to "The bloodline which designates thee as just another schmuck" to promote themselves to Cohan or Levi by never clearly answering which bloodline they were members of and making enough money to move somewhere else and pretend to be either holy or powerful and change their name to Cohen or Levi in the process. A very important additional benefit of this would be to try and arrange a wife who would make good children for their sons and instead of choosing from the generally short and chubby semetic line, they would somehow stumble upon a man willing to allow his daughter to convert for the right price.
Judaism is one of the more ruthless religions due to their internal conflict... bickering... even hatred of each other. It's as bad as going to Church on Christmas and 95% of the people who go there celebrate the humble life and birth of their lord by dressing up as expensively as possible and showing off their new cars.
Why would someone kill your wife and children?
So, you believe the issue here is about choosing a side? To a certain extent that might be true. But let's be fair, until the UN renounces Israel's sovereignty, takes over, disarms the entire region and enforces peace.. preferably peacefully while treating all the people fairly and with respect, there will be no right side. I don't give a shit if you favor Israelis or Palestinians. They're both a disgrace and behave like something out of a grapes of wrath type experiment.
The issue here is whether or not a nation like Israel should be allowed to censor "their enemy" on YouTube and other sites. I have no love for anyone who preaches hate like the Palestinians and Israelis do. I have no respect for anyone who would look their brother in the eye and see an animal when what they really see is a mirror. But, for a moment, imagine Israel being able to claim the videos you site as instigating violence... they do... only a fool would disagree with you on this. There are many videos like this and if I believed I had the right to have them taken down, I would.
But, what about the video of a crying child who lost his mother or father or sister to bombings and raids led by the Israelis... when that child cries out in fear and terror and agony that the Israelis did this to him. That he hates the people who took someone he loves from him. Would you also agree that this video would insight violence? Would you not agree that only a heartless man would not want to cry for this child? Would you not agree that a fighter would see this as his duty to avenge? Would you agree that this video should be taken down too? I personally wouldn't. A video like this should be seen.
At which point between these extremes do we decide which video is appropriate and which insights violence and which insights violence and should be seen... and which ones shouldn't.
This IS NOT an issue of black and white. While I sympathize with the Israeli leadership that these videos are easily a weapon being used against them... I also sympathize with the Palestinians who lack better channels to communicate and sadly lack better things to communicate about. What's worse is, I feel deeply for the Israelis and the Palestinians who actually believe they are doing the right thing because some fool in "their leadership" has convinced them that this is how they should think and behave.
Israel is a completely failed experiment and a place which could be a world wide symbol of peace representing some of the biggest religions is a cesspool of steaming shit instead. Quit picking a side like Israel or Palestine. Instead fight to have them both dissolved and if the US and UN are going to pay for "peace keeping" in the region, then treat it like post-was Germany and just take the damn thing over and treat it as a haven instead and bring peace there.
I read the whole article. From what I read, I can summarize this as :
Two people with insane amounts of money and accountable to no one decide to spend their money trying to solve problems by taking a new approach. Their approach spans from :
- Trial and error with greater agility than a government or classic foundation can achieve
- Brute force of attacking illnesses on a gigantic scale hoping to eradicate them and maybe then focus on helping people live healthier following being able to simply live to begin with.
They are also accused of being know-it-alls and people can't tell if they're altruistic or if they're evil and trying to take over the world by trying to solve problems governments seem to fail to solve on their own.
I'm sure I missed a few, but whether I'm a fan of the Gateses or note is irrelevent.If they are a bunch of greedy power hungry assholes, it doesn't matter to me. A long as they are in fact trying to solve problems. We need more people who are like them.
BTW... the cure for poverty in my opinion is better education. I believe the small schools effort (probably a bad idea) had a pretty good intent which is that the transition itself would make things like new books and cleaner classrooms available to students. It would disrupt the system and the reversion to the traditional system would require the government to invest to support the transition back. It's not a great answer to any problems, but it did give schools run by generally lethargic administration a kick in the ass for a while. The failure of this experiment probably ended up being part of the solution to the problem itself.
As for Common Core... that's purely political as to what you go with. Common Core was at least an attempt to standardized a system and make better teaching materials available. I'm not in favor of it and I've had to teach my children math properly to compensate for the massive short-comings in the common core way of handling problems. But I didn't simply discount it, I evaluated it, learned it and felt it was a considerable hindrance from my son and daughter learning more advanced mathematics.
In two years, my son will have a confirmation in a church. A Church is a wooden building with a big statue of skinny dead guy (generally believed to be white and British) dangling from a cross run by a man wearing a dress for those of you who didn't know. He will have a confirmation because drinking some wine, eating a cookie and getting paid large sums of money to put on a stage performance where no one sees anything but his back is not a bad gig for a kid if he/she can get it. I remember being in a school play where I pretended to be a great roman leader. I figure my kid can pretend to be a Christian for 10 minutes. Besides, it'll make his grandparents happy and they're very old an deserve to hope for at least one child who might believe in things like Santa Claus and invisible super-beings who can create entire universes in 7 days but can't make British comedy funny.
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I am forced to wonder however if the placement of these ads, while harmless in themselves are being rejected mainly for the same reasons the Anglican Church threw a tantrum over Harry Potter. I remember them being hell-bent against Harry Potter because it made witches seem to be good.
Now, a new film which from the trailers leads me to feel like it's a film based heavily on reintroducing the Jedi "religion" to a new generation in a culture of heathens who seem somewhat similar to English pagans. While I'm far to lazy to Google it, I recall reading that the Jedi Church has quite a few members in England. While the majority of members joined it to simply list a religion as their association which wasn't an actual religion, this movie could seem very threatening to the Anglican Church.
To be fair though, watching an advertisement about what I still believe must be the absolute silliest and meaningless tradition of most religions... prayer that is, it's pretty harmless in itself.
I wonder however if we should worry about the next real issue which would be that this would in fact open the door for the English Church of the Jedi sponsored advertisement should be allowed to also remind people to vote... or donate money to charities like Make a Wish. Something like "If you were a member of the Church of the Jedi, instead of paying for wine and cookies and candles, you could direct your tax money to meaningful charities like
At the end maybe a silly joke like "You'll still have to pay for men in dresses"
Elledan,
What I don't understand is why anyone with half a brain would want this. It would be like saying "We want more straight guys to consider becoming hair dressers". This is InfoSec, as a career path, it's right up there with used car sales and hair dresser.
I was at a hair dresser in San Diego about a year ago and some whacko woman cutting my hair... and trust me, I've never seen a person take this type of job so seriously, she was religious about it... well she spent half an hour trying to force to to change shampoos. She went on and on about how this one has this chemical and that one has another. I didn't want to be rude, but several times, she was simply naming the chemical with the biggest words and assumed they must be the active ingredients of the shampoos. She didn't really have any idea what each one of them did. She just assumed that if it was the biggest word, it must be important.
This is how I see InfoSec. I've met people who have obtained Ph.D.s in Infosec and they can't tell you about how anything they're trying to secure works. They love to spew off an endless list of big words they use with little regard to their real meanings, but they sound really intelligent when they do so... unless of course you know what it means.
Securing information requires understanding how it is stored and accessed. This means, programmers and network engineers (or ideally someone with genuine experience with both) is required to make a infosec person. But sadly, because of the bad reputation infosec has, I can't think of any people with the skillset that would be interested in such a step down.
The article mentions that women are far better represented in real subjects like science, mathematics and engineering. I regularly tell teenage girls that are looking for career advice they should go for a real science, not computer science or IT... but instead something like chemistry, physics, math, etc... and the reason for this is that they require the benefits of a stereotypical female mind. They are disciplines and in effect require discipline which men rarely have. Men often win all the love and awards for the accomplishments in these fields and often that's because of the reckless nature they take to achieve their results, but the real work in these fields is almost always done by people who can work without insisting on always starting a pissing contest about everything. Testosterone just doesn't really fit in fields that require disciplined intelligence.
Let's also point out that in most cases, InfoSec, IT in general, programming and often electronic engineering almost never (with the exception of bio tech) have any value to the world. It's not like curing diseases or creating a new non-toxic emulsifier for epoxy resin. I know every time I write a line of code, it has absolutely no value to the world in general. Math, science and physics generally tend to make a real difference or at least have a much better chance to make a difference.
Is there some point to this? I'm pretty sure Steam has considerably more and will be shocked if Apple TV doesn't pass that in a few weeks.
Console = archaic device we needed because computers weren't powerful enough to play games and because abstraction layers like game engines targeting other abstraction layers like OpenGL or DirectX wasn't plausible. These devices are now sold primarily to users lacking the brainpower to use a mouse or to people desperate to play a game that only exists on a platform that costs too much and is far too slow.
I guess some people think they're nifty. Strange.
HP went to hell in a basket because the board of directors keeps hiring McKinsey style business idiots to run the company. As a result, they by or merge with company after company and with the exception of their 20 year forey into the memristor which even today has yet to happen, they have absolutely no concept of innovation or market leadership. They for lack of a better term are a huge beige box vendor which tries to beige box everything they touch.
I think the biggest and most impressive effort they've made in a really long time to be part of something bigger was the Itanium processor project with Intel. But sadly, whether it was them, Intel or both, Itanium failed because developers couldn't afford to get one.
If you look closely at the list of CEOs that HP has had over the past 15 years, every one of them is someone that loves the word "synergize" and was hired by the board of directors to increase the value of their shares with absolutely no respect for the company itself. They probably all hang out on yachts filled with hookers talking about how great HP is without having the first clue as to what HP actually makes.
To be fair, anyone who identifies themselves as leftist or rightist are utter idiots. Intelligent people evaluate each issue individually and make choices (if necessary) to address those issues based on what they believe is the most productive and constructive (or in some cases, the easiest) option.
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The real problem isn't the left or the right... it's the left AND the right and every other damn option out there.
While I am entirely aware I risk making the same mistake, you apparently have a gift of making impressively stupid comments without applying thought or reason to what you say and instead simply spout some populist nonsense that is little more than finger pointing.
Take responsibility for yourself, this article identifies a REAL problem. The problem is, we've (I am not even in America, yet I recognize "WE" is accurate) have established a "civilization" that contains some very clear and identifiable problems.
1) There are knuckle-draggers in our higher education system that clearly are in desperate need of an education but are also clearly not likely to obtain one as they have shown they're as ignorant as you by stereotyping based on some trait they believe makes another person less than they are... based on a group... which generally has no actual genuinely common characteristics.
2) There are fools in the higher education system who lack the intelligence to simply ignore the knuckle-draggers and steer clear of them if needed. While I can't identify from the article if the targets of the hate-speech are those who are complaining, I will assume at least a few of them are. The fools (like yourself and likely me for rising to the bait) making the hateful comments are a waste of time, food and air. What they say has utterly no relevance to anything. These fools who take offense to knuckle-draggers making such comments are a major problem.
3) There are fools who seem to believe the solution to the problem is to try and hide it. People who I don't believe are left, right, lib, conservative, etc... but instead are truly the most dangerous people I know, the PC enforcement crowd have identified a long list of causes they "feel strongly about". They want to the be the mommies of us all and instead of attempting to identify and resolve the issues progressively... devising an intelligent solution, they instead want to make us cover our ears and eyes and pretend like it will go away if we just sweep it under the rug and come up with punishments for people who say naughty things.
Fact 1) Thank goodness for the Internet... Racism is 100x better today than it was 10 years ago. Racists who talk on Facebook and Twitter have been learning that they have lots in common with all those people they used to hate for skin color and religion and now have learned that they can hate people no matter what their skin color or religion. So as a result, now a formerly racist person who desperately needs to believe that some group of people must be responsible for why their lives aren't better... they can point fingers at all kinds of other groups of people. It's like Christmas in July.
Fact 2) We don't need mommies and we really don't need PC enforcers. It's better to simply avoid/ignore people who we find offensive. Which leads us to...
Fact 3) People like you are a waste of time to make any effort on. It's just simply built into your system to pick some group to blame without actually even taking the time to identify whether those people are in fact a group or not. There is nothing me or any other person could say to teach you to think intelligently and objectively about each scenario and then make productive recommendations. Which leads us to
Fact 4) Finger pointers really aren't a necessity and are actually generally not even wanted. We have Fox, CNN, ABC and BBC to do that for us... we don't need anyone else to do it. I tend to find the shows on the news networks tend to spend a lot of time constructing groups of people who agree with e
What I doubt is the appropriateness of choosing to refer to it by stating "narrowly averting what could have been an explosion". While your argument is clearly appropriate, even your explanation states " (a few percent of all hypothetical impact/fire scenarios)". To me, as a person who believes the roulette wheel is mathematically and tested and proven to favor the house by adding only one green slot, until we hit 50/50, I consider such journalism questionable nonsense written by a fool who can't be bothered to research.
I live in Norway where one of the largest banks moved their IT operations out of the country to TCS (think Tata) and I immediately changed banks.
I have some little problems with outsourcing banking... especially to India.
Laws in different countries are different and enforced differently than they are in your own country. If you've ever visited India and spent any time there, you would know that one dishonest person in the flock can grab a bunch of money and run like hell and never be found. India is huge, has language/communications issues between villages and an enterprising criminal would never be caught.
India is also the country which brings us "Windows Care" and other similar companies which are call centers to scam people. They call your house (sometimes up to 5 times a day) and make threats and intentionally misrepresent themselves as Microsoft. After tracking their IP addresses to a registered company (it has changed again) and calling their local police department to report racketeering and international wire fraud charges, I was informed that :
1) Gartner (when paid by Symantec) reported that 90% of all computers are infected by a virus
2) As such, if you're willing to pay the $300 and give them access to your computer to install anti-virus, it's perfectly reasonable to assume there's a 90% chance they're performing a good service for you.
3) It is not illegal in India to claim you're someone you're not unless it infringes the cast system.
4) Thank you for calling... please don't let the door hit you on the ass as you leave.
Would your nations money in the hands of a company located in a country which provides you no recourse against criminal activities taken against you so long as they can provide some convoluted logic as to how they're helping you?
That tends to buy more books because of Google books? I can honestly say that because of Google books, I can find better what I'm looking for.
Sadly, I'm far more freaked about how dependent I've become on Google for DNS, maps, books, translate, etc... than I ever was on Microsoft. I sometimes find myself trying intentionally to use Microsoft just to cut the cord.
U.S. Taxpayer money? Seems to me it wasn't that long ago that Israel begged America fo a bunch of money to buy missiles to level a Palestinian city. If they can't afford bombing people who should be their friends and brothers, what good would they be for helping with space exploration?
I'll start by answering your question. Use GIT. It's the most widely supported system at this time and it works really well.
Next let me be a typical slashdot asshole that makes abrasive comments that may be well intended by will come off as being a dick. I'll explain that I already see endless problems coming from this.
If you're working with a team of 10-15 developers who all lack experience with version control, you have a major problem with out-of-date programmers and you're throwing them into a hell called Python. If you generally accomplish projects using C and LabView, the developers you have more than likely lack a modern development skill set and coding in a language like Python will produce some of the worst code ever written. If C is like shooting yourself in the leg and C++ is like blowing the whole damned leg off, Python is like dropping a nuke. You will have an endless supply of options for writing terribly bad code in the worst ways possible. The only redeeming feature will be it will have nice uniform spacing.
I would highly recommend doing what always works best which is to hire a Python developer with good GIT skills that can lay the majority of the foundation of the project and create a uniform set of standards of coding for the project and then bring the other developers on 3 at a time and perform constant code review. Focus heavily on test driven development and use a system like SCRUM for lifecycle management. If you want to teach old dogs new tricks, don't just throw them in the fire and tell them to figure it out. The programming paradigms are so drastically different between your old method and new that without some sort of leader with experience, it will turn out to be a disaster and jungle of crap code. I personal avoid Python projects not because the language is bad, but instead because they tend to be like this.
You should of course know by now that if you are traditionally a LabView shop, you're going to sacrifice a massive number of really important features to save a buck. Python has great support too multi-threading but it's not an awesome environment for event driven programming like LabView is. You of course can accomplish all the same things, but even with the thousands of toolkits/libraries out there, you'll have to write the entire underlying architecture yourselves and you'll lose almost all visualization you've come to depend on.
I actually had a great rant about this only earlier today while public speaking.
I like to ask a room full of 'engineers' (IT guys) to solve the following :
If a rectangle has a perimeter of 30 and one side is twice as long as another, how long are the sides?
I'm pretty sure I took this question from a story on Slashdot or The Register about how they interview ivy league students and found only 30% could solve it. The reason for this is obviously that once we think we don't need something anymore, we forget it. So once their SATs are passed, all their math pours out of their heads.
The results I get are scary and of course expected. I've had rooms of 20 'engineers', some recent graduates from 'great universities' who actually had to think about it. My son at 11 years old solved it in his head in about 12 seconds and could explain clearly why.
I've use this question to make an obvious point which is that very little of our education after the 4th grade has any meaning at all. Most of it if retained has little value to the overwhelming majority other than trivia. I estimate that 99.995% of all students required to learn polynomials in high school have absolutely no idea how or where to apply them to any applied task. The education in polynomials for the masses is an obscene waste of time. As for history and literature... all one needs to do is what Fox or CNN to realize that even the guys who should have studied these don't have any idea how to apply their educations to their work.
I also brought up that my nephew told me he couldn't take home economics because of lack of teachers. I was highly disappointed since I consider that class possibly the most important class they ever taught in high school. It teaches us how to actually manage our lives, prepare food, control portions, increase our families physical activities, manage our personal finances, repair our clothing... when we did things the proper American way which is all f-ing wrong and way overboard in the 60s and bras were burned and women felt the only way out of the barefoot/pregnant role was to reject all forms of "women's work" instead of the more intelligent method which is "Teach your sons and daughters household management" instead of just your daughters, we actually lost the knowledge required to manage a home and family.
Schools really need to make home ec a 4 year course and include household carpentry,