I've read claims that the school policy was to keep the machines on 24/7 and the tech department's proposal to automate shutting down the machines overnight (to the tune of saving $90K/year) was rejected. If that's true, the school is standing on one foot (having shot themselves in the other).
You should probably re-read the article too. Some of the money apparently includes a new building. Unless the tech supervisor was moonlightning as a demolitions expert, I doubt he's responsible for that. And some of the comments in the article by the locals are very... interesting... as well.
There are also 3 months out of the year where there is little to nothing happening, when all of this should be taken care of.
If it's anything at all like Queensland state schools when I worked there, some PHB would've seen there were no classes and eyed the IT department... yeah. I was expected to work during school hours only. "You're still here? Go home, we can't pay you." The IT motto when I worked at EQ was "doing everything on nothing". Meanwhile, four hundred million dollars on a new stadium for the state's capital city? No problem.
Removing SETI@home from 5,000 machines will cost in the neighborhood of $50,000-$100,000, though he may have fucked up the computers bad enough that they decide to start with a fresh build, save everyone's data off, and re-build all the computers.
Seriously? Open text editor, write small shell script, tell group policy to run script on all machines... done. If however the school is running 5,000 machines with no imaging, network booting, group policy or central user storage - which I find bloody unlikely in this day and age - yeah, somebody should definitely be getting fired. Just maybe not the guy in the article.
GP presumably means the fine (conviction) to the pub, not the customer. IE, if Fred uses the pub's payphone to commit CC fraud, without the pub's knowledge, should the pub be fined (jailed)?
I suggest worrying less about the climate data and more about the anthropological data. Population at 6.8 billion and growing; resources used per capita growing; deforestation far in excess of natural regrowth; plateaued oil production despite demand and the continued growth of heavy industry. Herd mentality, tendency to promote demagogues and sociopaths, pollutes its own nests. Large segments controlled / manipulated by corporate and political sociopathic interests with strong focus on short-term profit and survival at the expense of subordinates and peers.
TLDR version: barring unexpected miracles, plan for interesting times.
Disney would do well to remember that "everyone else in the business" includes its customers. They don't want to trust me? S'okay. I can live without them.
Alas, the OP and I were discussing Blu-Ray, which dvd::rip does not handle; I think Amazon just called it a "DVD" for the sake of convenience/laziness. Blu-Ray: extra resolution, but extra DRM too.:p
Wall-E on Blu-Ray for $18? Awesome! Oh, wait, Amazon's warning me about something:
Please note: Your order contains at least one Region 1 (Canada and U.S.) encoded DVD. Region 1 DVDs might not play in DVD players sold in the country where this order is being shipped. Please also note that some Region 1 DVDs contain a Regional Coding Enhancement. Some of our international customers have had problems playing these enhanced discs on their “region-free” DVD players. Learn more about DVD region encoding and formats. To modify your order, edit the quantities below.
Hmm. It also seems the DRM on the disc won't let me make a backup in case of the kids wrecking it either. What was that you were saying about Disney's confidence in its customers?
You know, I used to think this to be too radical to rationally consider in the past, but, the more I think of it, especially in terms of what you mentioned, perhaps it is time to change the laws to prohibit those on the dole from voting.
I've seen how governments can manipulate unemployment figures. "The records say you're only working a twenty hour week / not employed by a Fortune 5000 / you resigned and your new job doesn't start until tomorrow. No, I don't care that the records are wrong / out of date / we've mixed up your SSID with somebody else. Officially, you're unemployed. No vote for you."
Perhaps it IS time to look into this being a reasonable method to put control back in the hands of people who contribute to society. If you don't pay taxes, and are on welfare/, you don't get to vote. Maybe only working tax payers should be the ones that vote so that policies affecting the money they put into government, are in their best interest.
I've a simpler solution. It starts with the following: Only citizens may vote. Every citizen who pays tax must vote. No non-honorary member, current or former, of the judiciary can be listed on the ballot. Voting must allow alternate preferences. Voting must allow write-ins. "None of the above" is a valid vote. Furthermore: Only citizens may contribute politically. All monetary contributions are registered. Contribution cannot exceed the declared taxable income of the contributor.
The problem is not that people can vote (!), the problem is that the vote is diluted and subverted by money and power. Case in point, the whole idea of "separation of powers" fails at the ballot box, because lawyers - members of the judiciary - can be elected into the legislature and the executive. That's a glaring failure.
Finally, I'll just tack on that if sparklines are so great and this is all so obvious, then surely there's an open source version that predates this application.
There very likely is one. Of course, since it wouldn't have involved attempts to monetise somebody else's shoulders, it might involve actual work (hah) tracking it down.
Patents have become a broken window. The system was intended to reward what was once the rare spark of applied creative genius - it does not scale to cope with billions of educated individuals possessing both time and resources to advance the useful arts.
What I find bemusing is that they can spend the time to phone your employer and have a whinge, but somehow not have the time to phone and ask "hey, does X work for you? so he's a local? kthxbye!":)
When a conventional bike's front wheel hits an object like the side of a car, the bike's natural tendency is to pitch forwards, as it's center of gravity is higher than the impact point. As a result, the rider is thrown forward. If you get lucky, you'll be pitched over the car, but all too often that means the rider hits upper part of the car almost as soon as the impact occurs, with very little of his momentum being absorbed by the bike.
Tell me something Lt Cook, if someone cheated you out of $200 would you spend $15,000 trying to get it back?
I'm not Lt Cook. But my answer would be it depends - would my not pursuing a case send a message that you can flout the law if you're rich enough to fight it? That the law only applies to poor people? That's a message I'd not want to send, especially if enough idiots adopted it.
TLDR version - if I thought it'd save me >$15,000 in the long term? Certainly.
Actually it does satisfy privacy concerns - it's not what you see, it's why you saw it and what you do about it. That's why a peeping tom is violating privacy and the (butler/doctor/masseuse/sysadmin) who sees the (employer/patient/customer/email) naked in the course of doing their job - and remains professional about it - is not.
That our privacy is a social construct doesn't make it any less important.
Australian here. We have a few corporate-run prisons, and even though they've been put on a much tighter leash than the corporate-owned prisons in the US - and that leash IMO is exactly because of seeing what happened in the US - many of us still see it as the thin end of the wedge. It's a bloody stupid idea.
I take "in the ordinary course of business" to mean "the machines are doing their job and coping with the mail". And when they don't, as admins we still have a professional/ethical/legal obligation not to disclose the contents to third parties, yes?
That got an insightful? None of those servers actually read your email. None of them understand the human context behind those ones and zeroes.
And even if something goes pearshaped and a human has to go so far as to read a text dump to figure out what went wrong, there remains the professional and ethical obligation to maintain customer confidentiality.
That our privacy is significantly illusory doesn't make respecting it any less important.
Pretty much it's the difference between "self-incriminating" and "tainted". Say thief A robs homeowner B, discovers evidence that B is a serial killer, and decides it's better to confess to the cops than let B continue killing. Did the police break any laws? No, so they can apply for a warrant.
I was under the impression your Amendment rights are only between you and your government. So if I'm passing by, get curious, open your bag, go OMG at the contents and snap photos to give to the police - well, whether or not I committed a crime in messing with your stuff, I haven't violated your amendment rights and the police now have enough to get a warrant from a judge to check out my claims.
As for the police hinting at me to take photos - I should think that it's not allowed, but they'd also probably be hinting that I'd better not mention that part to the judge...
As a Washingtonian I am here to say what they are doing is not wrong. Responsibility lies on law makers to make this practice illegal.
As an Australian I am here to call your spade a bloody small shovel. Wrong is wrong, no matter how many weasels you have to chorus that what you're doing is legal - and if we RTFA, even that's unlikely (yeah, IMO, IANAL, etc). And law makers have the responsibility to make a practice illegal only if somebody flouts their own responsibility to be a good citizen - there's no need to make laws about something if nobody is doing it!
Crap like this - and there's a lot of it going on - undermines the social contract. I know it, you better know it, and I damn well hope your government figures it out. Because falling doesn't hurt near as much as the sharp sudden stop at the end, and I don't want to find out the hard way if America's blast radius is big enough to take my country with it.
Tera: the SI prefix for one (short-scale) trillion, 10e12. Terabyte: 10e12 bytes. And yeah, I know you're referring to 2^40 = 1 099 511 627 776, but just because an apple is a fruit doesn't mean an orange isn't.
WTF? Seriously, blow a minute of your precious slashdot time to look the CSIRO up before you throw stones from the comfort of your glass house. They're not some slimy shell company with a patent vault, they're an actual research-and-development organisation with thousands of employees - actual scientists and actual laboratories doing actual scientific work - and they've made a real impact on our way of life.
Yes, patents have become a corrupted abomination of their original nature, but if you're going to blacklist the CSIRO you are totally at the wrong end of the carpark. We can only dream that more companies would spend on real science the way that organisations like the CSIRO do.
Slashdot Mirror
I've read claims that the school policy was to keep the machines on 24/7 and the tech department's proposal to automate shutting down the machines overnight (to the tune of saving $90K/year) was rejected. If that's true, the school is standing on one foot (having shot themselves in the other).
Wouldn't it depend on the CPU? The old ones had no power throttling, IIRC.
You should probably re-read the article too. Some of the money apparently includes a new building. Unless the tech supervisor was moonlightning as a demolitions expert, I doubt he's responsible for that. And some of the comments in the article by the locals are very... interesting... as well.
If it's anything at all like Queensland state schools when I worked there, some PHB would've seen there were no classes and eyed the IT department... yeah. I was expected to work during school hours only. "You're still here? Go home, we can't pay you." The IT motto when I worked at EQ was "doing everything on nothing". Meanwhile, four hundred million dollars on a new stadium for the state's capital city? No problem.
Seriously? Open text editor, write small shell script, tell group policy to run script on all machines... done. If however the school is running 5,000 machines with no imaging, network booting, group policy or central user storage - which I find bloody unlikely in this day and age - yeah, somebody should definitely be getting fired. Just maybe not the guy in the article.
GP presumably means the fine (conviction) to the pub, not the customer. IE, if Fred uses the pub's payphone to commit CC fraud, without the pub's knowledge, should the pub be fined (jailed)?
I suggest worrying less about the climate data and more about the anthropological data. Population at 6.8 billion and growing; resources used per capita growing; deforestation far in excess of natural regrowth; plateaued oil production despite demand and the continued growth of heavy industry. Herd mentality, tendency to promote demagogues and sociopaths, pollutes its own nests. Large segments controlled / manipulated by corporate and political sociopathic interests with strong focus on short-term profit and survival at the expense of subordinates and peers.
TLDR version: barring unexpected miracles, plan for interesting times.
Disney would do well to remember that "everyone else in the business" includes its customers. They don't want to trust me? S'okay. I can live without them.
Alas, the OP and I were discussing Blu-Ray, which dvd::rip does not handle; I think Amazon just called it a "DVD" for the sake of convenience/laziness. Blu-Ray: extra resolution, but extra DRM too. :p
Wall-E on Blu-Ray for $18? Awesome! Oh, wait, Amazon's warning me about something:
Hmm. It also seems the DRM on the disc won't let me make a backup in case of the kids wrecking it either. What was that you were saying about Disney's confidence in its customers?
I've seen how governments can manipulate unemployment figures. "The records say you're only working a twenty hour week / not employed by a Fortune 5000 / you resigned and your new job doesn't start until tomorrow. No, I don't care that the records are wrong / out of date / we've mixed up your SSID with somebody else. Officially, you're unemployed. No vote for you."
I've a simpler solution. It starts with the following: Only citizens may vote. Every citizen who pays tax must vote. No non-honorary member, current or former, of the judiciary can be listed on the ballot. Voting must allow alternate preferences. Voting must allow write-ins. "None of the above" is a valid vote. Furthermore: Only citizens may contribute politically. All monetary contributions are registered. Contribution cannot exceed the declared taxable income of the contributor.
The problem is not that people can vote (!), the problem is that the vote is diluted and subverted by money and power. Case in point, the whole idea of "separation of powers" fails at the ballot box, because lawyers - members of the judiciary - can be elected into the legislature and the executive. That's a glaring failure.
There very likely is one. Of course, since it wouldn't have involved attempts to monetise somebody else's shoulders, it might involve actual work (hah) tracking it down.
Patents have become a broken window. The system was intended to reward what was once the rare spark of applied creative genius - it does not scale to cope with billions of educated individuals possessing both time and resources to advance the useful arts.
What I find bemusing is that they can spend the time to phone your employer and have a whinge, but somehow not have the time to phone and ask "hey, does X work for you? so he's a local? kthxbye!" :)
Just check that the manufacturer hasn't been stupid enough to ship it with a internet-accessible backdoor built in.
Example: http://hardware.slashdot.org/hardware/04/06/05/1250244.shtml
Crumple zone.
Excerpt from http://www.gizmag.com/vfr1200-tourer-worlds-safest-bike/13201/
I'm not Lt Cook. But my answer would be it depends - would my not pursuing a case send a message that you can flout the law if you're rich enough to fight it? That the law only applies to poor people? That's a message I'd not want to send, especially if enough idiots adopted it.
TLDR version - if I thought it'd save me >$15,000 in the long term? Certainly.
Actually it does satisfy privacy concerns - it's not what you see, it's why you saw it and what you do about it. That's why a peeping tom is violating privacy and the (butler/doctor/masseuse/sysadmin) who sees the (employer/patient/customer/email) naked in the course of doing their job - and remains professional about it - is not.
That our privacy is a social construct doesn't make it any less important.
Now what was that joke again, about someone being completely accurate but still completely missing the point? :)
Australian here. We have a few corporate-run prisons, and even though they've been put on a much tighter leash than the corporate-owned prisons in the US - and that leash IMO is exactly because of seeing what happened in the US - many of us still see it as the thin end of the wedge. It's a bloody stupid idea.
I take "in the ordinary course of business" to mean "the machines are doing their job and coping with the mail". And when they don't, as admins we still have a professional/ethical/legal obligation not to disclose the contents to third parties, yes?
That got an insightful? None of those servers actually read your email. None of them understand the human context behind those ones and zeroes.
And even if something goes pearshaped and a human has to go so far as to read a text dump to figure out what went wrong, there remains the professional and ethical obligation to maintain customer confidentiality.
That our privacy is significantly illusory doesn't make respecting it any less important.
Pretty much it's the difference between "self-incriminating" and "tainted". Say thief A robs homeowner B, discovers evidence that B is a serial killer, and decides it's better to confess to the cops than let B continue killing. Did the police break any laws? No, so they can apply for a warrant.
I was under the impression your Amendment rights are only between you and your government. So if I'm passing by, get curious, open your bag, go OMG at the contents and snap photos to give to the police - well, whether or not I committed a crime in messing with your stuff, I haven't violated your amendment rights and the police now have enough to get a warrant from a judge to check out my claims.
As for the police hinting at me to take photos - I should think that it's not allowed, but they'd also probably be hinting that I'd better not mention that part to the judge...
As an Australian I am here to call your spade a bloody small shovel. Wrong is wrong, no matter how many weasels you have to chorus that what you're doing is legal - and if we RTFA, even that's unlikely (yeah, IMO, IANAL, etc). And law makers have the responsibility to make a practice illegal only if somebody flouts their own responsibility to be a good citizen - there's no need to make laws about something if nobody is doing it!
Crap like this - and there's a lot of it going on - undermines the social contract. I know it, you better know it, and I damn well hope your government figures it out. Because falling doesn't hurt near as much as the sharp sudden stop at the end, and I don't want to find out the hard way if America's blast radius is big enough to take my country with it.
Tera: the SI prefix for one (short-scale) trillion, 10e12. Terabyte: 10e12 bytes. And yeah, I know you're referring to 2^40 = 1 099 511 627 776, but just because an apple is a fruit doesn't mean an orange isn't.
WTF? Seriously, blow a minute of your precious slashdot time to look the CSIRO up before you throw stones from the comfort of your glass house. They're not some slimy shell company with a patent vault, they're an actual research-and-development organisation with thousands of employees - actual scientists and actual laboratories doing actual scientific work - and they've made a real impact on our way of life.
Yes, patents have become a corrupted abomination of their original nature, but if you're going to blacklist the CSIRO you are totally at the wrong end of the carpark. We can only dream that more companies would spend on real science the way that organisations like the CSIRO do.