1. All the documents are authentic and expose illegal activity.
In which case, claiming forged documents would solve to PR problem.
2. All the documents are forged.
In which case, claiming forged documents would solve the Pr problem.
3. Some of the documents or document information is real some if forged.
In which case, claiming forged documents would solve the PR problem.
What of the other problems. Like the rich, connected, possibly made clients
exposed through the documents real or forged. Or the prospect of any future
clients.
Senarios 1,2,3.
Flee to Switzerland, oh, already there.
Get the documents taken down, impeach the information (claim forged).
If the documents were real or forged, the only way to get any legal action
against Wikileaks other than civil defamation would be to claim that some
of the documents were real and stolen, then it becomes a criminal act (I
assume).
So what we may be seeing is just legal lying to try and make the law serve
the Bank, not actual facts about the documents.
The courts action seems like it violates rights in that not all the
information posted had to do with the bank. That would be like sealing
up a store full of people because someone went in and was claimed to
have made a speeding violation and the store did not cooperate with the
security guard in handing over the suspect. Remember we do not have any
convictions or violations here, at least not that I saw.
There is not war on terrorism. War is the wrong word. There are military actions against disparate groups around the world, and there certainly was a war against Iraq which we won but had nothing to do with terrorism, before or during, now there is a threat of Terroism from the mistakes made in that war such that an Al Qauda group has formed in Iraq that was not there before. There is an occupation in Iraq but it is not a war. Iraq has a civil war going on and has groups resistant to the occupation but it is not a War.
So I hate to see the Republican Fear Marketing slogan War on Terror used. It is really like the 1984 war with the Northeast (if I remember right). That continuous war that keeps the population under martial law and rallied around the flag. For what, for accumlation of power.
So the War against Terror is just like the War against Poverty or the War against Aids. Its not a war, its a slogan, lets not forget that. It should not invoke war powers for the Executive branch. Actually it did not, the war powers were granted to go to war against Iraq because they were claimed (falsely and brazenly and seemingly with full knowledge of that falsness) have weapons of mass destruction. Valerie Elise Plame Wilson was outed as a CIA agent because that lie was being exposed by her husband.
Lets not forget the War on Terror is just a marketing slogan and get on with the business of cleaning up the mess in Iraq and the mess in Afganistan.
Terrists exist, there are terrorist who are targeting the US and other countries as well, but giving up our Constitutional rights and protections isn't the way to go. The Executive has lead us into improsonment with no charges, lack of due process, torture, rendition, wiretapping,... and we dont know the entire extent. This blossoming of illegal unconstitional behavior is unprecedented and I feel unwarranted and the scope and type of those behaviors does not make me trust the ones doing those behaviors.
Marketing slogans should be reserved for those selling soap.
"serves no legitimate purpose, that would cause a reasonable person to suffer substantial emotional distress, and that actually causes substantial emotional distress to that person",
This is the foot in the door for crazy religious zealots to bring lawsuits or try to get criminal action againt anyone the voices opinions that go against thier world view.
Case in point, the Islamic fundementalist attacks on Salman Rushdie.
or the attacks on Doctors and patients of Abortion clinics.
Not to mention the furvor over Creationist vs Evolution.
This law if framed this way and passed could lead to anyone who states that the idea's expressed cause me "suffer substantial emotional distress". The only thing they would have to prove is that they were a "reasonable" person. In many juristictions this would be hard to say no, that good church going (temple going) God fearing person was not "reasonable" because they held "protected" religious views. It would be a really, really bad thing to have on the books.
You might say, no one would do that. That is not the intent of the law! Well if you look at the Child protection laws, they were passed originally using the cruelty to animal laws. Back then you could torture your children but not a horse. The law is a tool for lawyers and people with agenda's to use in creative ways to obtain their ends.
I like it, but lets look at some other tweeks on that. First decide what the goal is of the site. If the goal is to get membership revenue then the above scheme will reduce the number of people on the site (the 80% not judged pretty would say why bother and leave). With the remaining 20% all of a sudden 80% of those are now on the bottom and they would say why bother and leave the system. (its a recursive problem much like the current economy with the richer getting richer...). So there has to be some other business model.
Either you dont tell people how their pictures rate. or you take other goodness criteria into the mix like bank balance or amount of hair (on the head only, one choice), and figure a different attractiveness score. That would give people some more hope and keep them paying.
Or you can figure that other services or ad revenues being a big part of your revenues. In which case you could, like the suggestion, reduce the fee for a member not judged as attractive. Now the question is where that line crosses the axis. Maybe if they are judged not attractive enough you pay them to be on the site (a little). It is probably true that these people spend a lot of time on the puter and would contribute to ad click through revenues, esp while they were waiting for replies from all those other people on site. That way you could have a sliding population of paying members and ad click through members. Then there are all the other services and entertainments you would want to provide to "build community" (keep people on your site clicking through ad's).
But then Yahoo and others are all trying to do the AOL thing, attracting with honey instead of a client environment.
Maybe the best way is just to have a service that analyzes and matches on pheromone compatibility.
As in the Bono extension to the copyright act in the US to save Steamboat Willy from becoming public domain. The issue here has very little to do with the individual artists. That is only the emotional appeal. What it has to do with is big corporations that buy those copyrights and have those as paying assests. They want to preserve the gravy train.
Now its true that some artists maintain their rights but I think if you look at the vast majority of copyrights they are owned not by the artist or creator but by a company, some companies I understand only hold copyrights and get revenues from them.
I fully think artists should benefit from their creation and that copyright protects them. But for copyrights to live so long and become a commodity I think is wrong. I think we should change the law so that the copyright is not transferable and that only individuals would hold copyrights not corporations.
If you look at some of the standard agreements you sign on employment. Your creative work is usually asigned to the corporation you are working for. Just because they payed for it I am not sure they should own exclusive rights to individuals work. They obviously benefit from that work but just the salary paid to an individual seems like cheating the creator out of his own creation.
What if we had copyrights and patents owned by only individuals, non-transferable, non-sellable. Then the businesses would have more incentive to retain creative people and creative people would have incentives to ally themselves with business in a synergistic way.
I think the length of 95 years probably stifles additional creative work as someone can rest on their laurels.
I understand the song Happy Birthday will be copyrighted until 2030 (the orginal creators are dead and the copyright was gotten in 1935 even though the tune was written in 1893. So that is why in a resturant you don't hear the staff sing Happy Birthday, because they would have to pay a royalty.
This news story is from Nov 1 2007, and it shows up here now. I was not impressed by the questions asked, and Mitt did say he had positions on some topics but failed to elucidate exactly what those were. H1-b visa's more important than the topic of Net Neutrality. I think not. Well he got a forum here, must have been one of his supporters that posted the topic.
The red flag for me in this article is that demand for these good jobs is down. That is a direct result of the MBA objectification of business to the point that people are resources and if you can make more money in the short term by abandoning research, well do it. That was followed by the Regan era changes that made those same people say, well lets just move the manufacturing to Mexico and Taiwan and eventually China. I can make more money that way. The jobs we used to have for scientists to support the companies that did manufacturing and the engineers that turned that science into product have left the building. That is the problem here.
I think it in our best short, mid and long term interest to convince our business community that they live here, this is a democracy and we need as a country to have a strong manufacturing base and an research base to support them and as a people to have a strong base of manufacturing so we can all make a decent living and raise kids and own a home.
Remember that time when one salary could provide a good living for most people. Someone is now getting all the profit from those double salaries, because the living standard hasn't gone up that much. Someone is stealing our good lives. Who are these people and what can we do to get balance back to the economy and back a good base of industry with good science and engineering jobs.
On the contrary, our elected representatives are trying to bring things back from the brink as this story suggests, by calling back to find out if and why they were lied to. They make laws and take other government action based on the expert testimony of industry leaders that come before them to testify. When they point out through tough swift action to those who treat that process lightly, the process starts to work better. They are not a symbol of a state or governing body, but the reality of one of our governing bodies that is trying to distance itself and clarify that difference from the executive branch, which does have a corrupt (no bid contracts, political appointees where someone with skill or experience should be, lying, retribution against political appointiee, even when they are undercover CIA agents... the list is long) history. They are trying to say here, no, its not business as executively usual, there will be oversight, you will be accountable. This has changed since the last election I might add. What we had with the Republic party (notice no democracy or representive gov here) was no questioning, no oversight, no accountability.
I applaud this new direction and hope it will bring back the glimmer of hope for out representaive 3 branch of gov. democracy.
You must be kidding! Lying to Congress under oath. You are just suggesting that a different lie would have gotten Yang off the hook. You are suggesting a safer lie for him. But that core issue here is what does it mean to "be under oath" esp to Congress who is trying to get at the "Truth". That is what you swear and oath to, to tell the "Truth". If we have no way to get at the truth, or have a way to compel a person to tell the truth, then we in deep trouble. Right now it is fines and jail time that is the penalty if you lie under oath.
If as you suggest that lying under oath is OK and desirable then as a liar you would need to come up with a way to, at some point, when you needed to actually get the truth, (because you were in some position of authority, say Congress, the courts, the police, the army, the IRS) you would have to fall back on some other form of getting at the truth that did not rely on the persons morality or ethics or consent. Especially if you were a liar yourself you would assume the worst in a person and that they would not willingly tell the truth unless it benefitted them. Well that would leave only torture and other forms of coersion, such as "rendition" and detention without Habius Corpus. Now where have we seen that sort of behaviour pop up. Maybe that is because the people doing it would not tell the truth themselves unless it benefitted them.
As this being a non-story. I think not. I think it is a central story about where the business community and our leadership has gotten to, and we need to keep the heat on to try and turn this Titanic around before those lies sink this constitutional ship.
Fancy toy gagets that distract, Just like my computer classes taught in a computer lab, the pc's are more of a distraction than an aid to focus and learning. The screens on those tiny devices do not provide the expanse and freedom of expression afforded by the sweep of chalk on the chalk board. It is more a matter of teaching ideas, showing ideas, and the time focusing on those ideas. Not sure that technological toys have a positive role to play in the classroom.
Hey these kids are also into skateboards and text messaging. I can just see it now, haveing the class skating around the room texting each other about the lesson being taught. Sorry the bandwitdth of information on a text message is much too small for the amount of information that needs to be taught.
I was given a Night hawk watch, (for aviators) with a circular slide rule bezel on it and an instruction book. I was so excited, I started playing with it until I discovered that they had stretched the scale around the low end so the characters would look nice and calculations were off by 2%. Totally unacceptable. I just hope the fuel calculations made by some aviators with it did not drop out of the sky. Alas it died on me about 1 1/2 weeks ago and I missed a flight from Minneapolis to Chicago. So there were at least 2 flight risks involved with having it.
P.S. when I was in engineering school you would see slide rules on the belts of ping pong playing students, 15 years later, I went back to school, the same ping pong table had students playing with scientific calculators hanging from thier belts. Some things never change.
I don't know, which is worse. Someone that tries to steal your identity and possibly get caught and go to prison and/or pay fines, or someone that posts your personal identifying information on a hugely public site so hundreds maybe thousands of people can take and use that information. I would guess that the information got out in the hacker community quickly and they all made copies of that information.
This kind of behaviour is reprehensible. If you wanted to let EBay know they have a security problem, tell them, anonomously if you must, but posting other peoples indentifying information is like shooting an automatic weapon into a crowd of innocent people. I think along with fines, restrictions and imprisonment, spanking should be added to the list of punishments for this type of behavior.
Where to begin. If what is said is true about global warming in that it is right now out of the range that has supported life on this planet by a large margin (I think we are talking about many million years. And if what is said is also true that human activity (mostly industries and automobiles and farming) are major contributing factors to this unusual, unprecedented global rise in temperatures, then it seems just a little bit crazy to even suggest that "well it might be good, you don't know, it might, we might all like living on one big barren beach, it will spark new industries (that pollute) to make beach umbrella's.". It seems that the major benefitters from all this industrial activity are the owners of those industries and they certainly don't want to pay any more expense that would come out of their profits, so they try to sell this idea of "well it might be better". Try telling that to your kids when you run out of food and tell them that well this extreme diet your going on not might be healthy for you. Its calling blowing smoke up someone's.. well you know. But this is an article about bacteria.
It is good that they are looking at the bacteria because if it is moving out of the glaciers into the water as it has forever then it is good to know what new (old) is coming into the environment, just in case all the whales suddenly start to die, which would cause blooms of krill which would cascade down the food chain, and maybe hasten our demise, or find a new different equilibrium (who's to say we would be part of that equilibrium).
But they haven't seen these very old bacteria in the wild before I am taking it from the article which may mean that actually the waters they flow into may not be a good growth medium for them. Well then our scientists may be bringing back something new (old). That needs to be done with great caution. Who knows some of these might be responsible for mass extinctions in the past, after all there was only one bacteria found at that level. Suspicious.
I take issue with the comments that well its alright because sea bacteria seldom effect humans. A very narrow view. I am recalling the story that was in the Silent Spring I believe of hunters killing wolves which allowed the dear population to explode that damaged the trees the beavers needed, so the beavers died or left and beaver dams were not repaired over years and a heavy rain broke one dam that broke another until an entire town of HUMANS were wiped out. Again someone who has selfish reasons for doing their work and is ignoring possible effects or at the very least blowing smoke up our a..s.
Lets recall that this administration has the motto "Classify everything now, and will sort out the bodies later". They like to kill information. A public in the dark is more easily controllable. In this instance it is an examaple of bringing this policy to a rediculous new level, so ridiculous in fact that it should be pointed out, and enough presure brought to bear to have them re-think and back off this trend towards "Government knows best" rather than the NASA is non-military science for the good of all humanity.
I think they just want to own everything, all the information, all the money, all your emails, all your phone calls, all your financial records... what ever happened to Government for and by the people?
Actually not, a cell phone has a different use profile than a toothbrush, say a IT professional on call. There was a post about having the second back up battery so when you were out away from a charger you would not be in a position where your phone was not available. A practical business argument. If however you just see it like your IPod and if it doesn't work, you just aren't listening to your favorite tunes, big fing deal.
This is one of the reasons that IPhones have been not recommended for use as critical business applications or for corporate use. Its not designed for continuity of service.
Its slim, and modern and oh so trendy but it falls short of being the phone that your business will buy for you to carry. So like an IPod a personal device for the personal device market. But then Apple has always sorted to tend towards that market and away from the business market from the beginning.
They may have to just put a, "Warning, Not ready for commercial use" label like McDonalds had to on their Hot Coffee cups.
Impeachment is not a political tool as much as a constitutional check and balance that the legistlative body of the government has on other branches of government.
The issue is not whether it is winnable as much as whether High Crimes and Misdemeanders have been perpetrated on the American people.
I think it clear and the 50 odd investigations ongoing in Congress indicate that there are things the Republican controlled Congress should have been providing oversight and checks and balances. Not to mention the press not investigating the "evidence" for the war in Iraq.
I have heard a theory that the impeachment of Clinton which was politically motivated (look at all the failed attempts by Ken Starr to find something prior to the the final impeachment which was for lying to Congress) with the idea that then when they got in office and allegedly lied, detained, spied, tortured, kidnapped, fired,... for political and corporate purposes at the cost of Billions if not trillions of dollars, 3000 of out citizens lives, 10's of thousands wounded, many more Iraq's dead and wounded, and our constutional guaretees erroded and civil liberties trampled on. Well I think that even though there may not be enough votes today for impeachment of Channey that after more and more comes to light, it may be hard for even the Republican lawmakers to not take a stand against that sort of alleged malfeasance.
I certainly support the process of the investigations to substantiate the facts involved. If the facts support the charges (impeachment) then that should happen.
This is not a new search technique and is actually a very wise one. I remember hearing a story of mathematitians in WWII that were pressed into service by the Air Force to analyze returning planes damage. They mapped all the damage on the planes and they found blank spots on there composite maps of damage. These blank spots were the critical areas that if there was damage, the plane did not return.
They were looking at for the spots on the planes that needed armor, they only wanted to put armor where it was critical to do so because the minimum weight means maximum range.
This exploration for missing patterns is the same logic. Because of mutations many sequences will have variations. But if some areas never show mutations or some sequences never come up then these life forms cant sustain life (probably). This would help answer the question what is necesary and sufficient in DNA for a viable life form.
Yes the same argument for torture. Remember Watergate and the abuse of power in this current White House, torture, illegal survialence. Power corrupts and power wants to stay in power by any means. That is why we are suppose to have warrants and checks and balances. Beware the errosion of freedoms.
CS ciriculum are like law degrees in that they teach the basic first principles of programming, and why and how we do things, at least in the courses I teach. As in a Law degree program, or an architectual program, much of the day to day courtroom and building code information is left up to an apprenticship in the industry. One reason for that is that the building codes and court room proceedures vary from State to State (city to city for the building codes).
The practices of project managment and software design vary from company to company and language environment to language envirionment. This is a big problem.
For an acedemic program to be relevant and successful it needs to have some software engineering in its curriculum for completeness, but not at the expense of other more important topics, such as data structures, networking, and touches on the various flavors of computing, business, engineering, operating systems, web, GUI...
If you put a strong component of Software development in an undergraduate cirriculum it is at the sacrifice of more core first principle courses. How can you do software development if you don't know how to develop software. So any large dose of software development should be done as a product workshop, a professional training seminar, or possibly part of a software engineering Master degree track.
Certainly one size does not fit all. Look at all the different models of Software development. How do you choose? The methodology so strongly effects what you turn out, if you stick to a methodoloyg you may be generating very inappropriate code. This I have seen with Software Development methodologies being used by those that only new one methodology and sometimes were managaging projects when they could not program. Then the bureaucracies start to take over and common sense and appropriatness go out the window. Lets not talk about ISO9000.
Should the methodology wars be fought in the Universities or out in the Marketplace?
All the reviewing sight has to do is buy the hardware (a business expense) and make the review, being straightforward and fair. Also include in the review the experience asking the company for hardware.
The company will learn quickly, especially if the reveiw is unfavorable that trying to fool the public is a bad idea and any strategy for fooling the public to make money will be exposed, and should be in the consumers information when the go to buy a product.
But I am talking about a fair and unbiased review. It's true it might be hard to do when the company had such a bad/vindictive approach.
This would add street cred's to the reviewer and take it away from the manufacturer. Seem fair doesn't it. And seems like proper approach.
Think about it. The top jobs are political payback and friends and it is the underscretaries and other "minor" functionaries that actually do the work and do most of the harm.
Slashdot Mirror
There seem to be several possible senarios here.
1. All the documents are authentic and expose illegal activity.
In which case, claiming forged documents would solve to PR problem.
2. All the documents are forged.
In which case, claiming forged documents would solve the Pr problem.
3. Some of the documents or document information is real some if forged.
In which case, claiming forged documents would solve the PR problem.
What of the other problems. Like the rich, connected, possibly made clients
exposed through the documents real or forged. Or the prospect of any future
clients.
Senarios 1,2,3.
Flee to Switzerland, oh, already there.
Get the documents taken down, impeach the information (claim forged).
If the documents were real or forged, the only way to get any legal action
against Wikileaks other than civil defamation would be to claim that some
of the documents were real and stolen, then it becomes a criminal act (I
assume).
So what we may be seeing is just legal lying to try and make the law serve
the Bank, not actual facts about the documents.
The courts action seems like it violates rights in that not all the
information posted had to do with the bank. That would be like sealing
up a store full of people because someone went in and was claimed to
have made a speeding violation and the store did not cooperate with the
security guard in handing over the suspect. Remember we do not have any
convictions or violations here, at least not that I saw.
There is not war on terrorism. War is the wrong word. There are military actions against disparate groups around the world, and there certainly was a war against Iraq which we won but had nothing to do with terrorism, before or during, now there is a threat of Terroism from the mistakes made in that war such that an Al Qauda group has formed in Iraq that was not there before. There is an occupation in Iraq but it is not a war. Iraq has a civil war going on and has groups resistant to the occupation but it is not a War.
... and we dont know the entire extent. This blossoming of illegal unconstitional behavior is unprecedented and I feel unwarranted and the scope and type of those behaviors does not make me trust the ones doing those behaviors.
So I hate to see the Republican Fear Marketing slogan War on Terror used. It is really like the 1984 war with the Northeast (if I remember right). That continuous war that keeps the population under martial law and rallied around the flag. For what, for accumlation of power.
So the War against Terror is just like the War against Poverty or the War against Aids. Its not a war, its a slogan, lets not forget that. It should not invoke war powers for the Executive branch. Actually it did not, the war powers were granted to go to war against Iraq because they were claimed (falsely and brazenly and seemingly with full knowledge of that falsness) have weapons of mass destruction. Valerie Elise Plame Wilson was outed as a CIA agent because that lie was being exposed by her husband.
Lets not forget the War on Terror is just a marketing slogan and get on with the business of cleaning up the mess in Iraq and the mess in Afganistan.
Terrists exist, there are terrorist who are targeting the US and other countries as well, but giving up our Constitutional rights and protections isn't the way to go. The Executive has lead us into improsonment with no charges, lack of due process, torture, rendition, wiretapping,
Marketing slogans should be reserved for those selling soap.
"serves no legitimate purpose, that would cause a reasonable person to suffer substantial emotional distress, and that actually causes substantial emotional distress to that person",
This is the foot in the door for crazy religious zealots to bring lawsuits or try to get criminal action againt anyone the voices opinions that go against thier world view.
Case in point, the Islamic fundementalist attacks on Salman Rushdie.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article1948375.ece
or the attacks on Doctors and patients of Abortion clinics.
Not to mention the furvor over Creationist vs Evolution.
This law if framed this way and passed could lead to anyone who states that the idea's expressed cause me "suffer substantial emotional distress". The only thing they would have to prove is that they were a "reasonable" person. In many juristictions this would be hard to say no, that good church going (temple going) God fearing person was not "reasonable" because they held "protected" religious views. It would be a really, really bad thing to have on the books.
You might say, no one would do that. That is not the intent of the law! Well if you look at the Child protection laws, they were passed originally using the cruelty to animal laws. Back then you could torture your children but not a horse. The law is a tool for lawyers and people with agenda's to use in creative ways to obtain their ends.
Are you sure your not making the same mistake they did with the Mars probe and mixing inches and centimeters? Better check.
I like it, but lets look at some other tweeks on that. First decide what the goal is of the site. If the goal is to get membership revenue then the above scheme will reduce the number of people on the site (the 80% not judged pretty would say why bother and leave). With the remaining 20% all of a sudden 80% of those are now on the bottom and they would say why bother and leave the system. (its a recursive problem much like the current economy with the richer getting richer...). So there has to be some other business model.
Either you dont tell people how their pictures rate. or you take other goodness criteria into the mix like bank balance or amount of hair (on the head only, one choice), and figure a different attractiveness score. That would give people some more hope and keep them paying.
Or you can figure that other services or ad revenues being a big part of your revenues. In which case you could, like the suggestion, reduce the fee for a member not judged as attractive. Now the question is where that line crosses the axis. Maybe if they are judged not attractive enough you pay them to be on the site (a little). It is probably true that these people spend a lot of time on the puter and would contribute to ad click through revenues, esp while they were waiting for replies from all those other people on site. That way you could have a sliding population of paying members and ad click through members. Then there are all the other services and entertainments you would want to provide to "build community" (keep people on your site clicking through ad's).
But then Yahoo and others are all trying to do the AOL thing, attracting with honey instead of a client environment.
Maybe the best way is just to have a service that analyzes and matches on pheromone compatibility.
Tell that to all the virus and worm makers that have found ways to get around all existing system protections. Time after time.
If the mechanism exists, it will be compromised. Haven't you leaned anything yet? Better design a system that can't process a worm.
The temptation if this became a strategy, i.e. the system can run Microsoft Worms only, would in a very short time, run Microsoft like worms.
This seems more like and admission that their systems can't be secured.
Or "Who's finger is in the dike? Dammit, thats not my dike!"
As in the Bono extension to the copyright act in the US to save Steamboat Willy from becoming public domain. The issue here has very little to do with the individual artists. That is only the emotional appeal. What it has to do with is big corporations that buy those copyrights and have those as paying assests. They want to preserve the gravy train.
Now its true that some artists maintain their rights but I think if you look at the vast majority of copyrights they are owned not by the artist or creator but by a company, some companies I understand only hold copyrights and get revenues from them.
I fully think artists should benefit from their creation and that copyright protects them. But for copyrights to live so long and become a commodity I think is wrong. I think we should change the law so that the copyright is not transferable and that only individuals would hold copyrights not corporations.
If you look at some of the standard agreements you sign on employment. Your creative work is usually asigned to the corporation you are working for. Just because they payed for it I am not sure they should own exclusive rights to individuals work. They obviously benefit from that work but just the salary paid to an individual seems like cheating the creator out of his own creation.
What if we had copyrights and patents owned by only individuals, non-transferable, non-sellable. Then the businesses would have more incentive to retain creative people and creative people would have incentives to ally themselves with business in a synergistic way.
I think the length of 95 years probably stifles additional creative work as someone can rest on their laurels.
I understand the song Happy Birthday will be copyrighted until 2030 (the orginal creators are dead and the copyright was gotten in 1935 even though the tune was written in 1893. So that is why in a resturant you don't hear the staff sing Happy Birthday, because they would have to pay a royalty.
http://www.snopes.com/music/songs/birthday.asp
So my point is that the 95 years mostly serves corporations (or privately held pirates).
Lets just be clear about who is getting the majority of the money's here.
This news story is from Nov 1 2007, and it shows up here now. I was not impressed by the questions asked, and Mitt did say he had positions on some topics but failed to elucidate exactly what those were. H1-b visa's more important than the topic of Net Neutrality. I think not. Well he got a forum here, must have been one of his supporters that posted the topic.
I was in the branch, Now what the ... do I do?
The red flag for me in this article is that demand for these good jobs is down. That is a direct result of the MBA objectification of business to the point that people are resources and if you can make more money in the short term by abandoning research, well do it. That was followed by the Regan era changes that made those same people say, well lets just move the manufacturing to Mexico and Taiwan and eventually China. I can make more money that way. The jobs we used to have for scientists to support the companies that did manufacturing and the engineers that turned that science into product have left the building. That is the problem here.
I think it in our best short, mid and long term interest to convince our business community that they live here, this is a democracy and we need as a country to have a strong manufacturing base and an research base to support them and as a people to have a strong base of manufacturing so we can all make a decent living and raise kids and own a home.
Remember that time when one salary could provide a good living for most people. Someone is now getting all the profit from those double salaries, because the living standard hasn't gone up that much. Someone is stealing our good lives. Who are these people and what can we do to get balance back to the economy and back a good base of industry with good science and engineering jobs.
On the contrary, our elected representatives are trying to bring things back from the brink as this story suggests, by calling back to find out if and why they were lied to. They make laws and take other government action based on the expert testimony of industry leaders that come before them to testify. When they point out through tough swift action to those who treat that process lightly, the process starts to work better. They are not a symbol of a state or governing body, but the reality of one of our governing bodies that is trying to distance itself and clarify that difference from the executive branch, which does have a corrupt (no bid contracts, political appointees where someone with skill or experience should be, lying, retribution against political appointiee, even when they are undercover CIA agents... the list is long) history. They are trying to say here, no, its not business as executively usual, there will be oversight, you will be accountable. This has changed since the last election I might add. What we had with the Republic party (notice no democracy or representive gov here) was no questioning, no oversight, no accountability.
I applaud this new direction and hope it will bring back the glimmer of hope for out representaive 3 branch of gov. democracy.
"This is a non-story."
You must be kidding! Lying to Congress under oath. You are just suggesting that a different lie would have gotten Yang off the hook. You are suggesting a safer lie for him. But that core issue here is what does it mean to "be under oath" esp to Congress who is trying to get at the "Truth". That is what you swear and oath to, to tell the "Truth". If we have no way to get at the truth, or have a way to compel a person to tell the truth, then we in deep trouble. Right now it is fines and jail time that is the penalty if you lie under oath.
If as you suggest that lying under oath is OK and desirable then as a liar you would need to come up with a way to, at some point, when you needed to actually get the truth, (because you were in some position of authority, say Congress, the courts, the police, the army, the IRS) you would have to fall back on some other form of getting at the truth that did not rely on the persons morality or ethics or consent. Especially if you were a liar yourself you would assume the worst in a person and that they would not willingly tell the truth unless it benefitted them. Well that would leave only torture and other forms of coersion, such as "rendition" and detention without Habius Corpus. Now where have we seen that sort of behaviour pop up. Maybe that is because the people doing it would not tell the truth themselves unless it benefitted them.
As this being a non-story. I think not. I think it is a central story about where the business community and our leadership has gotten to, and we need to keep the heat on to try and turn this Titanic around before those lies sink this constitutional ship.
Fancy toy gagets that distract, Just like my computer classes taught in a computer lab, the pc's are more of a distraction than an aid to focus and learning. The screens on those tiny devices do not provide the expanse and freedom of expression afforded by the sweep of chalk on the chalk board. It is more a matter of teaching ideas, showing ideas, and the time focusing on those ideas. Not sure that technological toys have a positive role to play in the classroom.
Hey these kids are also into skateboards and text messaging. I can just see it now, haveing the class skating around the room texting each other about the lesson being taught. Sorry the bandwitdth of information on a text message is much too small for the amount of information that needs to be taught.
I was given a Night hawk watch, (for aviators) with a circular slide rule bezel on it and an instruction book. I was so excited, I started playing with it until I discovered that they had stretched the scale around the low end so the characters would look nice and calculations were off by 2%. Totally unacceptable. I just hope the fuel calculations made by some aviators with it did not drop out of the sky. Alas it died on me about 1 1/2 weeks ago and I missed a flight from Minneapolis to Chicago. So there were at least 2 flight risks involved with having it.
P.S. when I was in engineering school you would see slide rules on the belts of ping pong playing students, 15 years later, I went back to school, the same ping pong table had students playing with scientific calculators hanging from thier belts. Some things never change.
I don't know, which is worse. Someone that tries to steal your identity and possibly get caught and go to prison and/or pay fines, or someone that posts your personal identifying information on a hugely public site so hundreds maybe thousands of people can take and use that information. I would guess that the information got out in the hacker community quickly and they all made copies of that information.
This kind of behaviour is reprehensible. If you wanted to let EBay know they have a security problem, tell them, anonomously if you must, but posting other peoples indentifying information is like shooting an automatic weapon into a crowd of innocent people. I think along with fines, restrictions and imprisonment, spanking should be added to the list of punishments for this type of behavior.
Where to begin. If what is said is true about global warming in that it is right now out of the range that has supported life on this planet by a large margin (I think we are talking about many million years. And if what is said is also true that human activity (mostly industries and automobiles and farming) are major contributing factors to this unusual, unprecedented global rise in temperatures, then it seems just a little bit crazy to even suggest that "well it might be good, you don't know, it might, we might all like living on one big barren beach, it will spark new industries (that pollute) to make beach umbrella's.". It seems that the major benefitters from all this industrial activity are the owners of those industries and they certainly don't want to pay any more expense that would come out of their profits, so they try to sell this idea of "well it might be better". Try telling that to your kids when you run out of food and tell them that well this extreme diet your going on not might be healthy for you. Its calling blowing smoke up someone's .. well you know. But this is an article about bacteria.
It is good that they are looking at the bacteria because if it is moving out of the glaciers into the water as it has forever then it is good to know what new (old) is coming into the environment, just in case all the whales suddenly start to die, which would cause blooms of krill which would cascade down the food chain, and maybe hasten our demise, or find a new different equilibrium (who's to say we would be part of that equilibrium).
But they haven't seen these very old bacteria in the wild before I am taking it from the article which may mean that actually the waters they flow into may not be a good growth medium for them. Well then our scientists may be bringing back something new (old). That needs to be done with great caution. Who knows some of these might be responsible for mass extinctions in the past, after all there was only one bacteria found at that level. Suspicious.
I take issue with the comments that well its alright because sea bacteria seldom effect humans. A very narrow view. I am recalling the story that was in the Silent Spring I believe of hunters killing wolves which allowed the dear population to explode that damaged the trees the beavers needed, so the beavers died or left and beaver dams were not repaired over years and a heavy rain broke one dam that broke another until an entire town of HUMANS were wiped out. Again someone who has selfish reasons for doing their work and is ignoring possible effects or at the very least blowing smoke up our a..s.
Lets recall that this administration has the motto "Classify everything now, and will sort out the bodies later". They like to kill information. A public in the dark is more easily controllable. In this instance it is an examaple of bringing this policy to a rediculous new level, so ridiculous in fact that it should be pointed out, and enough presure brought to bear to have them re-think and back off this trend towards "Government knows best" rather than the NASA is non-military science for the good of all humanity.
I think they just want to own everything, all the information, all the money, all your emails, all your phone calls, all your financial records... what ever happened to Government for and by the people?
Actually not, a cell phone has a different use profile than a toothbrush, say a IT professional on call. There was a post about having the second back up battery so when you were out away from a charger you would not be in a position where your phone was not available. A practical business argument. If however you just see it like your IPod and if it doesn't work, you just aren't listening to your favorite tunes, big fing deal.
This is one of the reasons that IPhones have been not recommended for use as critical business applications or for corporate use. Its not designed for continuity of service.
Its slim, and modern and oh so trendy but it falls short of being the phone that your business will buy for you to carry. So like an IPod a personal device for the personal device market. But then Apple has always sorted to tend towards that market and away from the business market from the beginning.
They may have to just put a, "Warning, Not ready for commercial use" label like McDonalds had to on their Hot Coffee cups.
Impeachment is not a political tool as much as a constitutional check and balance that the legistlative body of the government has on other branches of government.
The issue is not whether it is winnable as much as whether High Crimes and Misdemeanders have been perpetrated on the American people.
I think it clear and the 50 odd investigations ongoing in Congress indicate that there are things the Republican controlled Congress should have been providing oversight and checks and balances. Not to mention the press not investigating the "evidence" for the war in Iraq.
I have heard a theory that the impeachment of Clinton which was politically motivated (look at all the failed attempts by Ken Starr to find something prior to the the final impeachment which was for lying to Congress) with the idea that then when they got in office and allegedly lied, detained, spied, tortured, kidnapped, fired,... for political and corporate purposes at the cost of Billions if not trillions of dollars, 3000 of out citizens lives, 10's of thousands wounded, many more Iraq's dead and wounded, and our constutional guaretees erroded and civil liberties trampled on. Well I think that even though there may not be enough votes today for impeachment of Channey that after more and more comes to light, it may be hard for even the Republican lawmakers to not take a stand against that sort of alleged malfeasance.
I certainly support the process of the investigations to substantiate the facts involved. If the facts support the charges (impeachment) then that should happen.
This is not a new search technique and is actually a very wise one. I remember hearing a story of mathematitians in WWII that were pressed into service by the Air Force to analyze returning planes damage. They mapped all the damage on the planes and they found blank spots on there composite maps of damage. These blank spots were the critical areas that if there was damage, the plane did not return.
They were looking at for the spots on the planes that needed armor, they only wanted to put armor where it was critical to do so because the minimum weight means maximum range.
This exploration for missing patterns is the same logic. Because of mutations many sequences will have variations. But if some areas never show mutations or some sequences never come up then these life forms cant sustain life (probably). This would help answer the question what is necesary and sufficient in DNA for a viable life form.
Yes the same argument for torture. Remember Watergate and the abuse of power in this current White House, torture, illegal survialence. Power corrupts and power wants to stay in power by any means. That is why we are suppose to have warrants and checks and balances. Beware the errosion of freedoms.
CS ciriculum are like law degrees in that they teach the basic first principles of programming, and why and how we do things, at least in the courses I teach. As in a Law degree program, or an architectual program, much of the day to day courtroom and building code information is left up to an apprenticship in the industry. One reason for that is that the building codes and court room proceedures vary from State to State (city to city for the building codes).
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The practices of project managment and software design vary from company to company and language environment to language envirionment. This is a big problem.
For an acedemic program to be relevant and successful it needs to have some software engineering in its curriculum for completeness, but not at the expense of other more important topics, such as data structures, networking, and touches on the various flavors of computing, business, engineering, operating systems, web, GUI
If you put a strong component of Software development in an undergraduate cirriculum it is at the sacrifice of more core first principle courses. How can you do software development if you don't know how to develop software. So any large dose of software development should be done as a product workshop, a professional training seminar, or possibly part of a software engineering Master degree track.
Certainly one size does not fit all. Look at all the different models of Software development. How do you choose? The methodology so strongly effects what you turn out, if you stick to a methodoloyg you may be generating very inappropriate code. This I have seen with Software Development methodologies being used by those that only new one methodology and sometimes were managaging projects when they could not program. Then the bureaucracies start to take over and common sense and appropriatness go out the window. Lets not talk about ISO9000.
Should the methodology wars be fought in the Universities or out in the Marketplace?
All the reviewing sight has to do is buy the hardware (a business expense) and make the review, being straightforward and fair. Also include in the review the experience asking the company for hardware.
The company will learn quickly, especially if the reveiw is unfavorable that trying to fool the public is a bad idea and any strategy for fooling the public to make money will be exposed, and should be in the consumers information when the go to buy a product.
But I am talking about a fair and unbiased review. It's true it might be hard to do when the company had such a bad/vindictive approach.
This would add street cred's to the reviewer and take it away from the manufacturer. Seem fair doesn't it. And seems like proper approach.
Think about it. The top jobs are political payback and friends and it is the underscretaries and other "minor" functionaries that actually do the work and do most of the harm.
Be afraid, be very afraid.