The idea of an "illegal combatant" was only recently invented by the US. There is no such distinction in any Geneva or similar conventions.
The Geneva Convention covers soldiers in uniform acting under the orders of a government in a formally declared war.
Know what it allows, say, for saboteurs caught prosecuting hostilities out of uniform? Summary execution. That the US bothered to imprison them at all speaks volumes about its restraint.
I'm hard-pressed to come up with any non-personal uses for IM in the workplace.
Round here, we often use IM as a means to communicate hard-to-say items while on the phone - shell commands, lines from.ini files, SQL queries, code snippets. Another good use is to check if it's a convenient time to phone. Another is to leave time-sensitive notes "it will be ready in 5 minutes". Or to leave notes for people "so and so called" since everything is timestamped.
Basically, IM is ultra-lightweight email, and once you're used to it, it's a great time saver. Now we just use email for things that are expected to persist or for things that need to be refined before being sent.
Now it's not uncommon for students to graduate without a complete grasp of the English language -- much less math, foreign language, or anything else.
In his book "Silicon Snake Oil", Clifford Stoll makes a convincing case that computers are actually detrimental in education from the ages of 6 to 16. They divert both money and teacher time away from things that actually matter, such as basic numeracy and literacy. I've seen a few posters say words to the effect of "numeracy is obsolete now that we have calculators". Yeah, I saw people like that even at college studying Mech Eng. They'd just write down whatever number the computer came back with. But those of us who'd studied the old-fashioned way could quickly spot a number that didn't make sense - a computer can solve the equations you give it, but it can't tell you whether those equations will give you the answer you actually wanted.
Computers are only really useful to people who could manage without them. For everyone else, they just help you to make mistakes faster.
Well, XMPP is orders of magnitude more popular, or at least more visible, among small businesses and end-users.
That's because you're only thinking about IM. SIP, on the other hand, is designed to be used for IM, VoIP, videoconverencing, shared whiteboards, anything else you can think of that's point-to-point. SIP has the backing of all the major telcos and telco equipment manufacturers. Sure Jabber might be useful for text-based IM but they've painted themselves into a corner by only being able to do that. Sure you could wrap voice packets in XML... but why would you want to?
For example, the messenger service isn't used by anyone by spam senders
The messenger service has been around a lot longer than TCP/IP was the de facto standard. Its intended use is exactly the same as the wall command on Unix, for sysadmins to make announcements to all users.
e-mail scripting was never a useful device to anyone
Sure it is. You can use the Outlook/Exchange combination to build workflow systems routing forms around. Lots of companies do things like travel booking and expense approval with such systems (altho' less now that the web is so ubiquitous)
a fragile, naked file system doesn't lend itself to easy usage anyway
FAT is ancient - shall we compare it to Unix' first filesystem? And NTFS is really very good - NT systems have had ACLs on the filesystem and journalling for over a decade now - Linux is only just getting them.
A web browser that can be told to run arbitrary code due to a buffer overflow is not vulnerable because it is easy to use, but because it is poorly written
OK, I'll agree with this one. So, out of the 4 points you raised, 3 can be dismissed as evidence of your own ignorance, and 1 is so obvious as to be barely worth stating.
Google needs to separate commercial pages from purely informational pages. Anyone searching for information (not sales products) gets inundated with e-commerce sites. It's a waste of time, building complex queries that weed out dominant company names. affiliate sites, and words like "cart."
You know, back in the day there were people who thought like that. They said,.com sites are for commerce,.net for infrastructure,.org for nonprofits,.tv for sites located in Tuvalu, etc etc. Unfortunately, marketing geniuses - the same people who whine about Google's ranking - decided that system wasn't good enough for them, and starting buying domain names without thought for their intended uses.
Advertisers are the only ones that Google has to answer to. If they do something that makes their advertisers go away, you can bet that they will quickly reverse that decision. And, the only thing that will make advertisers go away is whatever makes end-users go away.
We did a case study about this in one of my MSc classes. The example was Guinness: its end users are obviously drinkers, but it has no direct commercial relationship with them. Rather, it sells via pubs, which are owned by brewers, and Guinness competes with brewers. So, Guinness has to walk a fine line between keeping its end users happy while not pissing off its delivery channel. Ultimately, there is a "sweet spot" where Guinness markets to end users, end users go to pubs to buy Guinness, the brewers and Guinness itself split the profits. But if either Guinness or the brewers who own the pubs gets too competitive, the synergy evaporates and everyone including the end users loses out.
Forget the money, follow the technology. Or rather, trace the technology back to its origins. Sure, India does a lot of tech work... using Western technology on behalf of Western organizations for Western money. It's not politically correct to say this, but for hundreds of years, the only significant technological work has been done by people working in or at least educated by Western (or Western-style, like Japan) nations. I really don't see why nations that have accomplished very, very little should have any say in the running of the Internet at all. Instead they should be grateful that we let them use it!
Modular installation = better able to match requirements without having to build entire system from scratch = more cost effective solution for some (most?) customers.
SGI's Origin 3000 product range works like this. It's built from bricks, which have different capabilities like processor, I/O bandwidth, storage, etc. You buy the bricks you need to fit your application, and as you need more, you add more bricks. It's a very cool system, and SGI are ahead of the pack when it comes to packing a lot of compute power for little heat waste into small volumes.
To a historian often the most interesting stuff is the ephemera, the diary of an ordanary person gives a view of every day life you will never get looking at 'formal' archives (ie newspaper, film librarys etc etc) which only covers 'important' stuff
If you like that, you might like the books by the historian Fernand Braudel. Rather than the "kings and battles" of most histories, he focusses on how very simple things like the foods people ate, the weather, etc, and the relationships between long-term trends and the emergent properties of those interactions (i.e. over decades or centuries) are responsible for shaping the course of history.
And its the governments job to see they don't get it.
Really? Then how do explain that governments create monopolies all the time? Until relatively recently even in the UK, it was illegal to compete with British Telecom. It is still illegal to compete with Royal Mail for deliveries costing under a pound. A lot of deregulation happened in the 80s, breaking up the old monopolies in telecoms, gas, steel, etc and forcing them to compete.
In fact, no company can become a monopoly, or sustain a monopoly without government intervention to outlaw competition. That is a historical fact.
Why do some think it is so important to follow up the Apollo boondoggle with a Mars boondoggle? No thanks. These big time, one shot spectaculars just so a few folks in portable ecosystems can galavant around another world are what got us into this rut in the first place.
No, no, no. The Zubrin faction (of which I am one) advocate full-on industrial-scale colonization of Mars. Zubrin's work illustrates that colonizing Mars is actually easier that colonizing the moon or building giant orbital space stations. The thing that Mars has that those don't is that it has local resources that can be exploited with a little thought.
Example: a simple chemical reaction can be used to extract rocket fuel from Mars' atmosphere, provided you can start it with a little hydrogen feedstock. Zubrin has run a device here on Earth in a Mars-equivalent atmosphere that does just that. So, you don't need to carry fuel for the return journey, and you don't need complex equipment to provide heating and motive power on the surface. That's just one example (there are many more in his books).
Even if you want to do zero-G engineering, that's easier to do in Mars orbit with all the support infrastructure on Mars itself - a shallower gravity well. Plenty of fuel is available on Mars to send the products back to Earth in bulk.
I'm afraid that it is the space-station camp who are the misguided fanatics:-)
Ellison is no genius, his core business was actually built on the infinite resources of U.S. Military Black Ops contracts.
The original Oracle project - storing data on mylar strips for the CIA - was small and didn't get very far before it was cancelled. The thing that really did it for Oracle was that they had a government contract at all - they showed it to IBM to prove they were a serious company, and IBM sold them a mainframe to develop on. That was the leg up they needed.
I've always wondered how DEC transformed itself from a great computer company (PDP-8, PDP-10, PDP-11, VAX, Alpha) to a historical footnote.
From a engineering perspective, DEC did nothing wrong. Their technology was excellent, hell, is excellent - VMS clustering still blows anything Unix can do out of the water, no-one on Slashdot will deny that the Alpha is a superb processor, etc etc.
DECs mistake was that they thought great products would sell themselves - in other words, they assumed that everyone in the markets they sold into had perfect knowledge of all the competing products in the market and would naturally choose theirs. That is because the company was run by engineers.
Other companies - notably Sun, among the direct DEC competitors - understood that market participants do not have perfect knowledge, and with smart marketing it was possible to exploit that. Now, Sun's products at the time were good, but neither their hardware nor their software was as good as DECs. But it didn't matter, because Sun's sales force was aggressively visiting customers, their technology evangelists were giving away kit to ISVs, their marketing people were filling the trade press with ads, their education division was selling kit at cost to universities, etc.
People ignored DEC because DEC expected their customers to come to them, whereas every other vendor expected to go to their customers. People started saying, huh, what's up with these DEC people anyway? The rest - like DEC itself - is history.
Truth is that Wind power is a hard paying proposition - cheap energy, doable today, without all the headaches that comewith nuclear.. In what sense is that "anti-capitalist"?
I didn't say anything about wind power... it has its place too.
What I said was, the idea that nuclear waste is near-impossible to deal with is a lie, and it is spread by people who aren't interested in economic reality. If you can refute that (perhaps by proving that a breeder reactions are impossible, which will be hard, since the reactors actually exist) I will be interested to hear that.
Even if you make it relatively "meltdown-safe", you still have huge issues as to what to do with the waste. The plutonium generated by the reactor described has to be stored for thousands of years, guarded against terrorist use. That is a massive hidden future cost, financial & risk-wise.
That is a myth spread by the anti-nuclear lobby, who are really anti-industry, as a side-effect of being anti-capitalist. Think about it logically for a minute. Why is spent fuel dangerous? Because it emits radiation. What is radiation? It is energy. What is the point of any fuel? That you can extract energy from it.
The problem of what to do with nuclear waste has already been solved: just loaded it into another type of reactor (called a "fast breeder reactor") and continue to use it. Nuclear waste simply is not a significant reason not to use nuclear power. The only problem is what to do with old, worn-out reactors.
Re:View from a government agency
on
Does IT Matter?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Wait until people discover the new 'terminals' are tempremental flaky substitutes for those 'green screens' that you could turn on, like a shredder, the telephone, or an electric stapler and just use, for years at a time, with only routine maintenance.
Why would they care? From the perspective of the organization the technology cost nothing, and from the point of view of the employees a crashed system means the afternoon off.
"Now, let's see that chess-playing program write a book that explains how to play chess to other people."
I don't remember which novel this was in, but they knew they had a real AI when it refused to take any more Turing tests, claiming that they were pointless:-)
The thing is, in the desktop it will take longer for machines to require more than 4/8 GB of memory.
Yes and no. There are plenty of scientific/engineering/financial apps now that can take advantage of as much memory as you can give them on the desktop. Sun sells a dual-processor workstation with 8Gb of memory for about $6000. People are using them right now - you can't (yet) buy a PC that can do that at any price.
Do you *still* believe that "only capitalist democracies are ever their targets"?
With stuff like this it's hard not to:
the MST has emerged as one of the most powerful players in the mounting global challenge to international financial institutions and their corporate agenda.
I must admit I was surprised that the word "imperialist" didn't appear, even once...
Slashdot Mirror
Adding to this, unfortunatly, we have been pushed down onto the list of violators of human rights by the UN.
Ummm, yes, by a human rights commission that includes such notable supporters of human rights such as Libya and Syria?
You can ignore anything the UN says on human rights, given that it has appointed these countries to monitor others.
The idea of an "illegal combatant" was only recently invented by the US. There is no such distinction in any Geneva or similar conventions.
The Geneva Convention covers soldiers in uniform acting under the orders of a government in a formally declared war.
Know what it allows, say, for saboteurs caught prosecuting hostilities out of uniform? Summary execution. That the US bothered to imprison them at all speaks volumes about its restraint.
I'm hard-pressed to come up with any non-personal uses for IM in the workplace.
.ini files, SQL queries, code snippets. Another good use is to check if it's a convenient time to phone. Another is to leave time-sensitive notes "it will be ready in 5 minutes". Or to leave notes for people "so and so called" since everything is timestamped.
Round here, we often use IM as a means to communicate hard-to-say items while on the phone - shell commands, lines from
Basically, IM is ultra-lightweight email, and once you're used to it, it's a great time saver. Now we just use email for things that are expected to persist or for things that need to be refined before being sent.
Now it's not uncommon for students to graduate without a complete grasp of the English language -- much less math, foreign language, or anything else.
In his book "Silicon Snake Oil", Clifford Stoll makes a convincing case that computers are actually detrimental in education from the ages of 6 to 16. They divert both money and teacher time away from things that actually matter, such as basic numeracy and literacy. I've seen a few posters say words to the effect of "numeracy is obsolete now that we have calculators". Yeah, I saw people like that even at college studying Mech Eng. They'd just write down whatever number the computer came back with. But those of us who'd studied the old-fashioned way could quickly spot a number that didn't make sense - a computer can solve the equations you give it, but it can't tell you whether those equations will give you the answer you actually wanted.
Computers are only really useful to people who could manage without them. For everyone else, they just help you to make mistakes faster.
c) run my computer and cook
You have an AMD, right?
Well, XMPP is orders of magnitude more popular, or at least more visible, among small businesses and end-users.
That's because you're only thinking about IM. SIP, on the other hand, is designed to be used for IM, VoIP, videoconverencing, shared whiteboards, anything else you can think of that's point-to-point. SIP has the backing of all the major telcos and telco equipment manufacturers. Sure Jabber might be useful for text-based IM but they've painted themselves into a corner by only being able to do that. Sure you could wrap voice packets in XML... but why would you want to?
For example, the messenger service isn't used by anyone by spam senders
The messenger service has been around a lot longer than TCP/IP was the de facto standard. Its intended use is exactly the same as the wall command on Unix, for sysadmins to make announcements to all users.
e-mail scripting was never a useful device to anyone
Sure it is. You can use the Outlook/Exchange combination to build workflow systems routing forms around. Lots of companies do things like travel booking and expense approval with such systems (altho' less now that the web is so ubiquitous)
a fragile, naked file system doesn't lend itself to easy usage anyway
FAT is ancient - shall we compare it to Unix' first filesystem? And NTFS is really very good - NT systems have had ACLs on the filesystem and journalling for over a decade now - Linux is only just getting them.
A web browser that can be told to run arbitrary code due to a buffer overflow is not vulnerable because it is easy to use, but because it is poorly written
OK, I'll agree with this one. So, out of the 4 points you raised, 3 can be dismissed as evidence of your own ignorance, and 1 is so obvious as to be barely worth stating.
Google needs to separate commercial pages from purely informational pages. Anyone searching for information (not sales products) gets inundated with e-commerce sites. It's a waste of time, building complex queries that weed out dominant company names. affiliate sites, and words like "cart."
.com sites are for commerce, .net for infrastructure, .org for nonprofits, .tv for sites located in Tuvalu, etc etc. Unfortunately, marketing geniuses - the same people who whine about Google's ranking - decided that system wasn't good enough for them, and starting buying domain names without thought for their intended uses.
You know, back in the day there were people who thought like that. They said,
And here we are today.
Advertisers are the only ones that Google has to answer to. If they do something that makes their advertisers go away, you can bet that they will quickly reverse that decision. And, the only thing that will make advertisers go away is whatever makes end-users go away.
We did a case study about this in one of my MSc classes. The example was Guinness: its end users are obviously drinkers, but it has no direct commercial relationship with them. Rather, it sells via pubs, which are owned by brewers, and Guinness competes with brewers. So, Guinness has to walk a fine line between keeping its end users happy while not pissing off its delivery channel. Ultimately, there is a "sweet spot" where Guinness markets to end users, end users go to pubs to buy Guinness, the brewers and Guinness itself split the profits. But if either Guinness or the brewers who own the pubs gets too competitive, the synergy evaporates and everyone including the end users loses out.
That's that, then.
Forget the money, follow the technology. Or rather, trace the technology back to its origins. Sure, India does a lot of tech work... using Western technology on behalf of Western organizations for Western money. It's not politically correct to say this, but for hundreds of years, the only significant technological work has been done by people working in or at least educated by Western (or Western-style, like Japan) nations. I really don't see why nations that have accomplished very, very little should have any say in the running of the Internet at all. Instead they should be grateful that we let them use it!
Modular installation = better able to match requirements without having to build entire system from scratch = more cost effective solution for some (most?) customers.
SGI's Origin 3000 product range works like this. It's built from bricks, which have different capabilities like processor, I/O bandwidth, storage, etc. You buy the bricks you need to fit your application, and as you need more, you add more bricks. It's a very cool system, and SGI are ahead of the pack when it comes to packing a lot of compute power for little heat waste into small volumes.
To a historian often the most interesting stuff is the ephemera, the diary of an ordanary person gives a view of every day life you will never get looking at 'formal' archives (ie newspaper, film librarys etc etc) which only covers 'important' stuff
If you like that, you might like the books by the historian Fernand Braudel. Rather than the "kings and battles" of most histories, he focusses on how very simple things like the foods people ate, the weather, etc, and the relationships between long-term trends and the emergent properties of those interactions (i.e. over decades or centuries) are responsible for shaping the course of history.
And its the governments job to see they don't get it.
Really? Then how do explain that governments create monopolies all the time? Until relatively recently even in the UK, it was illegal to compete with British Telecom. It is still illegal to compete with Royal Mail for deliveries costing under a pound. A lot of deregulation happened in the 80s, breaking up the old monopolies in telecoms, gas, steel, etc and forcing them to compete.
In fact, no company can become a monopoly, or sustain a monopoly without government intervention to outlaw competition. That is a historical fact.
Why do some think it is so important to follow up the Apollo boondoggle with a Mars boondoggle? No thanks. These big time, one shot spectaculars just so a few folks in portable ecosystems can galavant around another world are what got us into this rut in the first place.
:-)
No, no, no. The Zubrin faction (of which I am one) advocate full-on industrial-scale colonization of Mars. Zubrin's work illustrates that colonizing Mars is actually easier that colonizing the moon or building giant orbital space stations. The thing that Mars has that those don't is that it has local resources that can be exploited with a little thought.
Example: a simple chemical reaction can be used to extract rocket fuel from Mars' atmosphere, provided you can start it with a little hydrogen feedstock. Zubrin has run a device here on Earth in a Mars-equivalent atmosphere that does just that. So, you don't need to carry fuel for the return journey, and you don't need complex equipment to provide heating and motive power on the surface. That's just one example (there are many more in his books).
Even if you want to do zero-G engineering, that's easier to do in Mars orbit with all the support infrastructure on Mars itself - a shallower gravity well. Plenty of fuel is available on Mars to send the products back to Earth in bulk.
I'm afraid that it is the space-station camp who are the misguided fanatics
Ellison is no genius, his core business was actually built on the infinite resources of U.S. Military Black Ops contracts.
The original Oracle project - storing data on mylar strips for the CIA - was small and didn't get very far before it was cancelled. The thing that really did it for Oracle was that they had a government contract at all - they showed it to IBM to prove they were a serious company, and IBM sold them a mainframe to develop on. That was the leg up they needed.
If it weren't for Apple, who would Microsoft steal user interface ideas from?
Umm, the same place that Apple did/does, Xerox.
Apple is great at packaging ideas into products - but it would be a mistake to say that it is particularly good at having ideas.
And when Jobs left to found NeXT, that too was based on ideas (OO) that he got from Xerox.
I've always wondered how DEC transformed itself from a great computer company (PDP-8, PDP-10, PDP-11, VAX, Alpha) to a historical footnote.
From a engineering perspective, DEC did nothing wrong. Their technology was excellent, hell, is excellent - VMS clustering still blows anything Unix can do out of the water, no-one on Slashdot will deny that the Alpha is a superb processor, etc etc.
DECs mistake was that they thought great products would sell themselves - in other words, they assumed that everyone in the markets they sold into had perfect knowledge of all the competing products in the market and would naturally choose theirs. That is because the company was run by engineers.
Other companies - notably Sun, among the direct DEC competitors - understood that market participants do not have perfect knowledge, and with smart marketing it was possible to exploit that. Now, Sun's products at the time were good, but neither their hardware nor their software was as good as DECs. But it didn't matter, because Sun's sales force was aggressively visiting customers, their technology evangelists were giving away kit to ISVs, their marketing people were filling the trade press with ads, their education division was selling kit at cost to universities, etc.
People ignored DEC because DEC expected their customers to come to them, whereas every other vendor expected to go to their customers. People started saying, huh, what's up with these DEC people anyway? The rest - like DEC itself - is history.
Nope I'm not. I have a lower ID than you.
:-)
I don't mean to be pedantic, but I'm user 1359 and you're user 556006
You guys just can't see what's really going on, and only believe that the Linux community is full of zealots because you *want* to believe that.
You assume that Slashdot is representative of Linux as a whole. The Linux community might not be full of zealots, but Slashdot certainly is.
I was using Linux professionally in '96, so I do know what I'm talking about...
You're talking as if the Linux community is full of zealots who can't be objective. That's completely wrong.
I guess you're new around here...
Truth is that Wind power is a hard paying proposition - cheap energy, doable today, without all the headaches that comewith nuclear.. In what sense is that "anti-capitalist"?
I didn't say anything about wind power... it has its place too.
What I said was, the idea that nuclear waste is near-impossible to deal with is a lie, and it is spread by people who aren't interested in economic reality. If you can refute that (perhaps by proving that a breeder reactions are impossible, which will be hard, since the reactors actually exist) I will be interested to hear that.
Even if you make it relatively "meltdown-safe", you still have huge issues as to what to do with the waste. The plutonium generated by the reactor described has to be stored for thousands of years, guarded against terrorist use. That is a massive hidden future cost, financial & risk-wise.
That is a myth spread by the anti-nuclear lobby, who are really anti-industry, as a side-effect of being anti-capitalist. Think about it logically for a minute. Why is spent fuel dangerous? Because it emits radiation. What is radiation? It is energy. What is the point of any fuel? That you can extract energy from it.
The problem of what to do with nuclear waste has already been solved: just loaded it into another type of reactor (called a "fast breeder reactor") and continue to use it. Nuclear waste simply is not a significant reason not to use nuclear power. The only problem is what to do with old, worn-out reactors.
Wait until people discover the new 'terminals' are tempremental flaky substitutes for those 'green screens' that you could turn on, like a shredder, the telephone, or an electric stapler and just use, for years at a time, with only routine maintenance.
Why would they care? From the perspective of the organization the technology cost nothing, and from the point of view of the employees a crashed system means the afternoon off.
This is a government department, remember.
"Now, let's see that chess-playing program write a book that explains how to play chess to other people."
:-)
I don't remember which novel this was in, but they knew they had a real AI when it refused to take any more Turing tests, claiming that they were pointless
The thing is, in the desktop it will take longer for machines to require more than 4/8 GB of memory.
Yes and no. There are plenty of scientific/engineering/financial apps now that can take advantage of as much memory as you can give them on the desktop. Sun sells a dual-processor workstation with 8Gb of memory for about $6000. People are using them right now - you can't (yet) buy a PC that can do that at any price.
With stuff like this it's hard not to:
I must admit I was surprised that the word "imperialist" didn't appear, even once...