As a fellow american, I wholeheartedly disagree with you.
The united states was founded on the core principles of liberty, justice, freedom, and the soverignty of its people.
The current us government pays halfassed lipservice to half of that, and blatantly flaunts the other half.
Assange can be a dickhead, that it his perogative. I don't mind that he is a dickhead. However, the sanitizing light he shines on the canerous boils of our ntion ARE in our nation's best interest. Jingoism, and blind adoration are what turned an innocent germany into a stage of obscene abuses of power. This can, has, and always will happen where money, power, corruption hide beneath a gleaming vaneer of propaganda and nationalistic fervor. (Be it ancient rome, with senators gobbling up resources and lands, making the whole population destitute, or us senators doing the same using BoA as a proxy to illegally forclose on people in good credit standing as a common practice.)
While I might see assange, the man, as a foolish platinum haired egotist, there is no law against being an asshole. Wikileaks, the organization, has done wonders to upset the consolodation of power that has been trending away from common citizens like you or I. Personally, I feel that if our soldiers are commiting attrocities, the people they have victimized under the guise of war deserve the justice they demand. Our armed forces are not magical just because they are american in origin. Calling out our government for covering up attrocities, either foriegn or domestic, militarily or financially, DOES tarnish the veneer of golden splenor that was painted on by the propganda machine, but in doing so it permits us to see the horrible rot going on beneath.
If the appearance of that rot angers you, the action to take is to destroy the rot, not to shoot the messenger and ostridge-plant your face in the dirt and shout about libel so as to shoot the messenger. It is only libel when it is untrue, and so far, as far as I know, the leaked cables and documents have panned out legitimate every time.
You are right, something does reek of treachery, but it isn't assange or wikileaks. It is our cocksucjing beholdenness to the choad of multinational interests, banks, and domestic corruptions that they thrive in.
America has sucked on that diseased organ, and now our nation has ghonorrhea of the mouth. No amount of breathmint is going to make it stop stinking and being inflamed. To do that, we have to stopb giving BJs to multinationals, and use heavy use of antibiotics in the form of radical transparancy. The quaint notions of our country as a fragile virgin are long past. The expose' of our nation as a crackwhore sucking dick to curry favor is not a surprise to anyone but our own deluded populace.
Again, if this angers you, the correct action is to solve the problem, and not to accuse the messenger of libel, especially when said messenger has the equivalent of the clinic's pathology report on hand to prove the charge.
America is no longer a great country, and has not been for quite awhile, and the reason it has ceased to be so is because we have allowed our leaders to sell it into prostitution.
Get over yourself, and get off your self riteous ass, and do something about the actual problem, and stop pretending that if we all just ignore the problem, that the blisters in our mouths will go away on their own.
What is good for the goose is good for the gander.
Allowing corporations to make use of 10 year old code as public domain would spur adoption of innovative ideas, which bolsters progress, and diminishes stagnation.
Currently, with the rapid evolution permitted (and enforced) by the gpl, many radical ideas come to light. Does it matter to the consumer if one agent or another invests in that public good? (This is naturally only true when things remain unencumbered by patents.)
The idea that gpl was created to be a sacred cow is wrong headed. Gpl was created as a hack, to permit and protect the free sharing ideology that is idealized by a healthy and robust public domain. It is a hack to prevent a tradgedy of the commons.
(This is going to sound like first rate trolling, but that is not the intent. The intent is to over-emphasize the dangerous spin found in many business magazines, and the underlying messages about "success" they pander. As such, it should be viewed as semi-satiritical, and not as troll food.)
Like pretty much every "business" and "finance" rag on the shelf right now practically licks the shit from Mark Zuckerberg's corn studded asshole, and treats is like it was gourmet chocolate?
"Look at this young sociopath! He spun a business that routinely lies to the common rabble about privacy policies into a billion dollar firm! Now the fools line up in droves for the pleasure of having their personal information sold to unscrupulous advertisers, just so they can use his new service! This young man is the preeminent model of our new breed of businessman, and everyone should aspire to be like him, as he has finally succeded where so many other aspiring ceos have failed to deliver in the market of institutionalied resale of the common rabble's visciously hoarded secret reserve of "personal Information, which up until now has been jealously guarded and withheld from our lucrative advertising ambitions! May his rein be a long and profitable, (and influential!) one!"
That's the message I see everytime I see a "business" article on facebook or zuckerberg.
Steve jobs was the old "wonderchild ceo sociopath" of the 80s and 90s. Zuckerberg is the new one, and the new media darling.
Every time I saw a steve jobs story, the message I took was this:
"Apple did a silly thing when they kicked our own good old boy steve jobs out of his own corporate kingdom, but our hero has returned triumphant to put down those rebelious peasant masses, and to lead his people (and stock holders) to glory! His powerful and decisive action in ensuring the profitability of his company's products through the use of the patent system (at the expense of stifling nasty innovations that would steal his thunder, and those heretics in the so called "free software" movment.) has brought the sagging ruins of the computing empire he helped found back to the forefront of profitability and power. Let us give this heroic king triumphant several token op eds in recognition of his mighty victory over those patheric common masses that want to devalue products with free innovation, and free ideas, and the cunning sneak attack he struck by using their own works against them when he released OSX! His latest accumen in seeking the holy grail of completely corporatized computing has grown by strides with his commisioning of his mighty iPod, iPhone, and iPad(d) products, each of which strives to lock the rabble of the little people into an endless and futile chain of planned obsolesence and costly upgrades, while sanitizing the content and products they can use with them in true Rupert Murdock fashion! We hear that pornographic applications and flash videos are only the beginning, and best of all, he has managed to do this while simultaneously winning the actual adoration of the peasantry! Truly this is a giant among men, who has seen the golden light that will open the purses of the masses and make them joyfully dump their wealth into our coffers, as he has done the impossible, and made those fools to see that they simply cannot create a viable future in the chaos of the modern computing age by themselves, due to their own stupidity and lack of creativity that so commonly plagues the masses. He has shown them that only strong leadership can give them the simplified, and streamlined "one size fits all" solution that they have secretly yearned for, because they lacked the insight to see that they cannot be trusted to think and invent for themselves."
And then, when he died:
"Tradgedy has struck today, as the herioc king of apple, and savior of personal, computing steve jobs has been found dead in his room. He was taken from us too soon, as he was still but a child of 56ish years of age, and had an evil cancer not taken him, could surely
I personally prefer the "it's this world allright, but there is something sinister/secret you don't know about it." Types.
Lovecraft was good for that part, but I eventually wanted yo scoop out my eyes after the umpteenbillionth time I read the word "cyclopean." (That and "fungoid". Really, what's so scary about fungi? Well.. other than the 9ft tall 'stuff your brain in a jar' kind anyway.)
To me, good fantasy and good science fiction do all they can to obey the normal world around the reader, but with a plot that is engaging. If there is a radically overboard hidden detail about the world, it had better be explained why people don't see or report it. (Eg, harry potter's universe has the ministry of magic tampering with memories quite regularly.)
Good science fiction should use technically plausible plot devices, avoid the use of jargon and technobabble (reverse the polarity! That should do it!) and avoid explaining things overtly. Frankenstien is a story that skirts the border between fantasy and science fiction. The monster being revived by electricity was considered possible at the time, due to observations that severed tissues responded to electrical stimulation, but this is not heavily stated in the story.
The trope of "in the future anything can happen!" Should be avoided.
If you are going to use time travel in your sf story, try to follow prevailing wisdom on the science of it. Eg, your "time machine" is really your little spaceship getting caught in orbit of a black hole for a few passes, before using a controlled gravity shot to escape (and subesquently being subjected to highly distorted spacetime, followed by a significan fraction of C in velocity.) Result: you end up in "the future".
If you use some trickery, like "negative energy" to create a time machine that can go into the past (say, via a wormhole), then you should, through the use of the narrative, either establish that your character has lost free will due to a closed time like curve, or that the many worlds hypothesis holds sway. (Rather than preempting your own light cone, you actually landed in a different universe, in order to preserve causality.)
For hard sf with ftl, your ftl should be plausible. It shouldn't be run on magic crystals, for instance. As such, ftl capable vehicles should be large enough to contain the energy source large enough to affect space in the proscribed manner. (For instance, you could have an ablucair (however you spell that) warp drive like system, where you create a linear accelleration field by manipulating the density of vacuum fluctuations. (Even a small deviation from random distribution would create a tiny spacetime ripple, from the difference in the mass of the vacuum. Virtual particles have mass, which is why hawking radiation should work.) Start going fast enough, and you will naturally drag some of your reference frame with you as a result of GR treating accelleration the same as gravity.
The less handvavium in the story the better, but at the same time, you shouldn't get all cerebral about the how's and why's of the plot device. It's a delicate thing many authors screw up.
I had a random idea several days ago, concerning venus.
You could theoretically punctuate the runaway greenhouse effects in that planet's atmosphere using custom engineered microbes. This technology is well within our grasp.
What the microbes need to do, is create small atmospheric colonies held together with "fluff", similar to dandilion fluff. The microbes themselves should be chemoallotrophs, using a sulfur hydrogen cycle. The kicker is what kind of fluff they should produce.
The poblem with venus is that it had absurd amounts of co2 and other dangerous greenhouse gasses. We need a way to sequester carbon and nitrogen compounds in a highly thermally stable form, to reduce thoe levels. Such a material needs to withstand temperatures over 2000 degrees F. Amusingly, the petrochemical industry has already created such a substance, called "amarid." It is used to make bullet proof vests, and thermal insulation walls where previously abspestos was required. It does not melt, and strongly resists ignition. It is formed into fiber using a chemical solvent process.
Using atmospheric bacteria to produce amarid fibers would create a biological process that would slowly rain that fluff onto the planet's surface, inceasing surface albedo, and simultaneously redusing atmospheric co2 and nitrogen compound levels (like ammonia).
The hard work would be designing the custom microbes; something that would have industrial uses here on earth. (Amarid is currently expensive to produce. A biological process for synthesis would greatly reduce production costs.) Delivery via a lander would be quite easy (compared to safely landing scientific equipment) as it just be a ballistic aerosol can, and having it land by crashing would be a non issue.
Granted, cleaning up all the amarid all over the planet's surface after the temperatures drop would be a long term project for a colony to undertake, but the fibers themselves would make fantastic construction materials. It is one of the strongest and most durable plastics in existence.
I suspect it could be created using an enzamatic process, since it bears a strong chemical resemblence to protein molecules.
Considering that in 100 years we have causes a pollution crisis on earth, runaway proliferation of such microbes could work the inverse, if they are aggressive replicators.
IIRC, 13h was a 64k window from the adaptor itself mapped into the adaptor rom region at A000. The memory was native to the vga adaptor and writes to it were "live" at the next vertical retrace. Calling the vertical retrace function was not explicitly needed, but helped reduce snow on garbage vga chips.
But was the publisher gaining exclusive rights to the civil war love story, or exclusive rights to "the author herself"?
Was the publisher asserting that it had contracted *all* intellectualy proprty from the author for a paltry 20k? Surely only in our radical world of absurd intellectual property law could such a moronic position gain any traction.
As pointed out, the author published a totally different body of work, totally unrelated to the civil war love story she signed the advance contract for.
This would be like apple buying a software package meant to change themes on an ipad, then aggressively suing the author of that software for daring to release a fart app under the gpl.
Only an IP lawyer could even begin to conflate the two works as being the same, and therefor as breach of contract, unless the publisher had willfully engaged in disequitable practices to force the contract to be over all works created by the author, be it past, present, or future. Last I checked, disequitable and one sided contracts were of dubious legality.
I see this as little more than barratry from the publisher.
This is essentially an argument based on reaping what you sew. In most cases I would agree with you, but most of these students lack realworld experiences that would alert them that debt in any form can be crippling.
I learned about the value of money the hard way as a child. (Despite mom having 3 degrees, she was a woman. She got her degrees concurrently, and paid for them simmilarly to how I did, but she worked as a sheet press operator at a local laundry. As a woman, there was a glass ceiling preventing her using them in a powerful way. Dad's pay wasn't too great, as he was a police officer. My childhood was quite meager.)
Most college students first learn about fiscal responsibility while in college. Arguing that they should be culpable for horrifying debt because they agreed to it without realizing what they were agreeing to and without realising there are always options (if you are willing to work for them), is a bit like saying toddlers first learning about gravity while playing on a balcony deserve to have traumatic brain injury by choosing to try to come down to mommy by jumping.
I don't hold the students at fault for this failure, I hold the parents in that capacity.
While my childhood sucked, and I essentially wore rags, it did teach me the value of looking for the malt-o-meal bag, when surrounded by colorful boxes.
Having been impoverished, I am not so quick to ascribe the label of "lazy" to them. Not everyone is as fortunate as I am.
I'm not so sure. I started in the job market as an IT professional before the dotcom bubble burst. At the time, computing and computer science related industries looked lucrative and promising. After the burst I was laid off and became hopelessly unemployed. I am lucky that there is a local major industry (aerospace), and used what money I did have to return to school and study to become an engineer. (A feat I would not habe been able to accomplish withou being very clever and creative.)
I currently have what many would consider to be a dead end job that I took to build career experience, but I have been exercising "people connections" to advance to better employment. (I am not lazy, and take pride in my work. I am not in the job I am in because of lack of quality, but because I lacked industry experience. That is no longer the case.)
I am fortunate that my employer can afford to hire low experience engineers due to his being an old tightwad.
If I had been saddled with obscene debt I would not have been able to take this job, as I wouldn't have been able to pay my bills. I was very adamant against taking any such loans, despite fairly constant pressure from student affairs at the local university. (I wasy paying my tuition by killing myself with moonlighting as a student assistant, donating plasma, and by holding paid study sessions in "hard" classes like chemistry. Having a mom with 3 degrees in hard sciences has some advantages it seems. Many students don't know how to actually study, and helping them do so for a fee paid off for me.)
I barely pulled my entrylevel job out of my rabbit hole. I can only imagine what the kids in SF have to deal with considering the H1B visa problems there.
It is also important to take the elapsed time since your "success" into account. The situation the protesters are protesting is the situation in the now, while the situation that gave rise to your success story is in the "then."
I agree that the movement seems nebulous. I attribute it to a total constellation of several effects, including but not limited to the following things:
The american school system sucks balls to the point that higher education is essential to become gainfully employed. The number of institutions offering that service has not appreciably grown to meet demand, causing prices to rise. Students leave colleges with thousands of dollars in debt for a slip of paper that essentially just says "I can finish what I start and am not an idiot who can't write his own name." Given the actual value of their degree in the job market, they are naturally angry to have been forced into having to take on mountains of debt to accomplish this simple milestone when a simple core competencies test would have sufficed.
Coupled with the proclevity for large corporations to offshore inexpensive and low training jobs to places like mexico, china, and india, there is a stark lack of entry level jobs for these debt laiden college grads to take to gain the much needed work histories they need to create careers.
The reasons why these trends are occuring is indeed because of systemic greed at many levels, so protesting against institutionalized greed sorta does make sense.
The greed of the accredation institutions motivates them to maintain the status quo of very high student tuition.
The greed of the public school system, coupled with absurd laws, makes it originate the need to require a degree for janitorial work.
The greed of multinationals makes them seek every possible means of squeezing profit from the market.
The greed of stockholders (and by proxy, wallstreet) drives the corporations to be ever more greedy to satisfy the already horribly unrealistic expectations of those stock holders. (Purpetual gains in profitability are not sustainable.)
So, the protest message as I can see it is "I have been victimized by the system you created. I had to sell many years of my life in the form of intractible debt JUST to be ABLE to work, only to have to fight for scraps with what are essentially slave laborers in other countries because of your insatiable greed. We want to be released from the burden of our unfair debts, and have the possibility of finding work without competing with HIB visas and slaves from china."
When you think about it, that doesn't really sound like such a terrible demand.
The problem is that this is SF. There are emmissions control laws against such petrol generators. Many inhabitants don't even have petrol powered lawn mowers. Many even use old fashioned mechanical push powered rotary mowers, due to the taxes on owning gas mowers.
Perhaps for some. For others it might be better explained as a desire to be free from the defacto serfdom that comes with bearing the label of "consumer."
Say for instance, with "owning" a ps3, but being dictated to about what you can use it for, or what services you connect it to.
Or perhaps in regard to being held hostage by the fallout of the market manipulation that comes about by driving speculation trends by wallstreet? (Eg, perhaps some people might not like having the equities in their 401k devalue radically after some random wallstreet firm shorts millions in stock based on a tiny deviation from expected value.)
The protest appears to be about this radical imbalance of power, and the flagrant diregard these organizations and individuals have for the consequences of their greed motivated activities.
Oh my! My webpost parser jammed up bad on this one! Either you are horribly deluded about the present situation and woefully ignorant of why freedom to assemble to address grievances is a constitutionally protected right, or you are a serious troll doing serious trolling.
In the case of the former, the problem is that the "american dream" you are alluding to no longer exists in the form you are implying; it is no longer possible to "pull one's self up by one's bootstraps" as you put it, due to artificial barriers to entry that are strongly enforced by power of law.
Beating the protesters to disperse them is a violation of their civil liberties, and the fact that their protest irritates you is simply a sign that it is working. A protest that does not illicit a reaction is a protest that means nothing. Simply because somebody is doing something you don't like is not reason to lynch them. Under that logic the protesters should drop their signs, and instead pick up ball bats and molotov cocktails and start firebombing rich people's houses and beating them bloody when they run out screaming from the fire.
So, as far as I can tell, the only whiny bitch I see here is the one whining about the protesters.
I can clearly see a need for the researcher to collect "unauthorized data".
Say for instance, white hats had to pen test only their own systems. A whitehat determines that XYZ corp's client accounts package exhibits a vulnerability when $Foo conditions are true. He sends this finding to XYZ, and also to $MultinationalCorp who uses XYZ.
$MultinationalCorp responds to the private disclosure, thanking them for the effort, and "affirming" that their implementation of XYZ client portal is not configured $Foo, and so does not have that vulnerability.
Without directly testing $MultinationalCorp, and pulling some "secret sauce" as proof, $MultinationalCorp can simply deny, and do nothing. (Which is what they usually do.)
This is why pulling some secret sauce is necessary, because it indisputibly shows that they are vulnerable. (Else, how would you get the secret sauce?)
Then there is the issue of "how do you locally pen test your own copy of $ClientSoftware, when $ClientSoftware is not available for purchase because it is a totally homebrew solution that is not distributed outside of $MultinationalCorp?"
The ONLY way to test the security of such a system is to test the live system. For the same reason above, you need to collect some secret sauce, otherwise they will just ignore the report and pretend you are a crank.
"Unauthorised access, with full disclosure, and without intent to illegally make use of accessed data, should not be illegal."
Say for instance, somebody pen tested sony before the PSN hack-a-thon, pulled some demonstration data to prove the exploit was live, and forwarded it to sony's IT staff, asking them to inform the impacted users of the breach and to please fix the exploit.
That should be legal.
If they did the above, but neglected to mention that they vacuumed up 10,000 credit cards and identities and sold them on the internet, and then reported-- THAT should not receive any form of legal protection.
You are supposed to use the gasket sealer as the high temperature interface skin, and reinforce it with some other mold material. Since we are talking minis, you should use an evertable mold material, like silicone. (You can use the cheap silicone for the support mold. Cheap silicone doesn't handle the temperatures needed for the interface layer, but makes great support.)
The most terrifying thing anyone can hear is "I am from the government and I am here to help you." The reason is because government tries to paint with a very wide "one size fits all" brush that can deal a terrible amount of collateral damage. I am not saying that government regulation is bad, I am saying it is every bit as mixed a bag as is that for unions.
Perhaps you would like a name, and place then? Perhaps a news report?
On the one hand, unions keep management from forcing unhealthy and unsafe working conditions on their labor pool to save money. (Chained to sewing machines, latex gloves instead of neoprine while using mek, etc.)
On the other, unions are a potentially unchecked power that can quickly overwhelm an employer. (Demands for 6 figure incomes for installing rivets, pension plans to rival those of politicians, increased difficulties in termination of unproductive or poor quality workers, etc.)
Unions are a necessary evil, barring very strict government involvement in private enterprise. (Arguably, having the government mandate work conditions is the single scariest thing a worker can hear...) however, when unions themselves become too large and too powerful, they can have a seriously negative effect on not only the industries they work in, but also for everyone else.
For instance, the intractible 26 page proceedure to fire a union teacher in a public school enables a shocking amount of unsavory and unacceptable behavior to go on in those institutions. A policy enacted to help protect teachers from vindictive parents ends up being a mighty shield behind which people with no businss being educators hide to do deplorable things.
(An example would be the events that transpired a few years ago in a nearby public school, concerning a computer science teacher touching female students inappropriately. Since physical evidence could be collected to prove the allegations, his teaching career didn't even miss a beat... until a few years later when he stopped just touching, and got a student pregnant. Even then, I understand it was still difficult to fire him.)
Unions are a good thing when they are kept on the smaller side. When they grow up, they become dangerous, self-serving monstrocities in their own right.
The GP appears to be referring to this latter stage of development in the maturation of unions, not the younger, where they serve an important and essential function.
Much like medication, a little is good for the patient, but more isn't always better, and at a certain threshold more becomes downright deadly. The same is true of unions.
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As a fellow american, I wholeheartedly disagree with you.
The united states was founded on the core principles of liberty, justice, freedom, and the soverignty of its people.
The current us government pays halfassed lipservice to half of that, and blatantly flaunts the other half.
Assange can be a dickhead, that it his perogative. I don't mind that he is a dickhead. However, the sanitizing light he shines on the canerous boils of our ntion ARE in our nation's best interest. Jingoism, and blind adoration are what turned an innocent germany into a stage of obscene abuses of power. This can, has, and always will happen where money, power, corruption hide beneath a gleaming vaneer of propaganda and nationalistic fervor. (Be it ancient rome, with senators gobbling up resources and lands, making the whole population destitute, or us senators doing the same using BoA as a proxy to illegally forclose on people in good credit standing as a common practice.)
While I might see assange, the man, as a foolish platinum haired egotist, there is no law against being an asshole. Wikileaks, the organization, has done wonders to upset the consolodation of power that has been trending away from common citizens like you or I. Personally, I feel that if our soldiers are commiting attrocities, the people they have victimized under the guise of war deserve the justice they demand. Our armed forces are not magical just because they are american in origin. Calling out our government for covering up attrocities, either foriegn or domestic, militarily or financially, DOES tarnish the veneer of golden splenor that was painted on by the propganda machine, but in doing so it permits us to see the horrible rot going on beneath.
If the appearance of that rot angers you, the action to take is to destroy the rot, not to shoot the messenger and ostridge-plant your face in the dirt and shout about libel so as to shoot the messenger. It is only libel when it is untrue, and so far, as far as I know, the leaked cables and documents have panned out legitimate every time.
You are right, something does reek of treachery, but it isn't assange or wikileaks. It is our cocksucjing beholdenness to the choad of multinational interests, banks, and domestic corruptions that they thrive in.
America has sucked on that diseased organ, and now our nation has ghonorrhea of the mouth. No amount of breathmint is going to make it stop stinking and being inflamed. To do that, we have to stopb giving BJs to multinationals, and use heavy use of antibiotics in the form of radical transparancy. The quaint notions of our country as a fragile virgin are long past. The expose' of our nation as a crackwhore sucking dick to curry favor is not a surprise to anyone but our own deluded populace.
Again, if this angers you, the correct action is to solve the problem, and not to accuse the messenger of libel, especially when said messenger has the equivalent of the clinic's pathology report on hand to prove the charge.
America is no longer a great country, and has not been for quite awhile, and the reason it has ceased to be so is because we have allowed our leaders to sell it into prostitution.
Get over yourself, and get off your self riteous ass, and do something about the actual problem, and stop pretending that if we all just ignore the problem, that the blisters in our mouths will go away on their own.
What is good for the goose is good for the gander.
Allowing corporations to make use of 10 year old code as public domain would spur adoption of innovative ideas, which bolsters progress, and diminishes stagnation.
Currently, with the rapid evolution permitted (and enforced) by the gpl, many radical ideas come to light. Does it matter to the consumer if one agent or another invests in that public good? (This is naturally only true when things remain unencumbered by patents.)
The idea that gpl was created to be a sacred cow is wrong headed. Gpl was created as a hack, to permit and protect the free sharing ideology that is idealized by a healthy and robust public domain. It is a hack to prevent a tradgedy of the commons.
(This is going to sound like first rate trolling, but that is not the intent. The intent is to over-emphasize the dangerous spin found in many business magazines, and the underlying messages about "success" they pander. As such, it should be viewed as semi-satiritical, and not as troll food.)
Like pretty much every "business" and "finance" rag on the shelf right now practically licks the shit from Mark Zuckerberg's corn studded asshole, and treats is like it was gourmet chocolate?
"Look at this young sociopath! He spun a business that routinely lies to the common rabble about privacy policies into a billion dollar firm! Now the fools line up in droves for the pleasure of having their personal information sold to unscrupulous advertisers, just so they can use his new service! This young man is the preeminent model of our new breed of businessman, and everyone should aspire to be like him, as he has finally succeded where so many other aspiring ceos have failed to deliver in the market of institutionalied resale of the common rabble's visciously hoarded secret reserve of "personal Information, which up until now has been jealously guarded and withheld from our lucrative advertising ambitions! May his rein be a long and profitable, (and influential!) one!"
That's the message I see everytime I see a "business" article on facebook or zuckerberg.
Steve jobs was the old "wonderchild ceo sociopath" of the 80s and 90s. Zuckerberg is the new one, and the new media darling.
Every time I saw a steve jobs story, the message I took was this:
"Apple did a silly thing when they kicked our own good old boy steve jobs out of his own corporate kingdom, but our hero has returned triumphant to put down those rebelious peasant masses, and to lead his people (and stock holders) to glory! His powerful and decisive action in ensuring the profitability of his company's products through the use of the patent system (at the expense of stifling nasty innovations that would steal his thunder, and those heretics in the so called "free software" movment.) has brought the sagging ruins of the computing empire he helped found back to the forefront of profitability and power. Let us give this heroic king triumphant several token op eds in recognition of his mighty victory over those patheric common masses that want to devalue products with free innovation, and free ideas, and the cunning sneak attack he struck by using their own works against them when he released OSX! His latest accumen in seeking the holy grail of completely corporatized computing has grown by strides with his commisioning of his mighty iPod, iPhone, and iPad(d) products, each of which strives to lock the rabble of the little people into an endless and futile chain of planned obsolesence and costly upgrades, while sanitizing the content and products they can use with them in true Rupert Murdock fashion! We hear that pornographic applications and flash videos are only the beginning, and best of all, he has managed to do this while simultaneously winning the actual adoration of the peasantry! Truly this is a giant among men, who has seen the golden light that will open the purses of the masses and make them joyfully dump their wealth into our coffers, as he has done the impossible, and made those fools to see that they simply cannot create a viable future in the chaos of the modern computing age by themselves, due to their own stupidity and lack of creativity that so commonly plagues the masses. He has shown them that only strong leadership can give them the simplified, and streamlined "one size fits all" solution that they have secretly yearned for, because they lacked the insight to see that they cannot be trusted to think and invent for themselves."
And then, when he died:
"Tradgedy has struck today, as the herioc king of apple, and savior of personal, computing steve jobs has been found dead in his room. He was taken from us too soon, as he was still but a child of 56ish years of age, and had an evil cancer not taken him, could surely
Sadly for you, patent law has requirements for obviousness and prior art, but not "subjective quality".
Simply because you like steve's version better does not give his company superior position to litigate.
I'll pass. With that lot i'd catch an std for sure!
I personally prefer the "it's this world allright, but there is something sinister/secret you don't know about it." Types.
Lovecraft was good for that part, but I eventually wanted yo scoop out my eyes after the umpteenbillionth time I read the word "cyclopean." (That and "fungoid". Really, what's so scary about fungi? Well.. other than the 9ft tall 'stuff your brain in a jar' kind anyway.)
To me, good fantasy and good science fiction do all they can to obey the normal world around the reader, but with a plot that is engaging. If there is a radically overboard hidden detail about the world, it had better be explained why people don't see or report it. (Eg, harry potter's universe has the ministry of magic tampering with memories quite regularly.)
Good science fiction should use technically plausible plot devices, avoid the use of jargon and technobabble (reverse the polarity! That should do it!) and avoid explaining things overtly. Frankenstien is a story that skirts the border between fantasy and science fiction. The monster being revived by electricity was considered possible at the time, due to observations that severed tissues responded to electrical stimulation, but this is not heavily stated in the story.
The trope of "in the future anything can happen!" Should be avoided.
If you are going to use time travel in your sf story, try to follow prevailing wisdom on the science of it. Eg, your "time machine" is really your little spaceship getting caught in orbit of a black hole for a few passes, before using a controlled gravity shot to escape (and subesquently being subjected to highly distorted spacetime, followed by a significan fraction of C in velocity.) Result: you end up in "the future".
If you use some trickery, like "negative energy" to create a time machine that can go into the past (say, via a wormhole), then you should, through the use of the narrative, either establish that your character has lost free will due to a closed time like curve, or that the many worlds hypothesis holds sway. (Rather than preempting your own light cone, you actually landed in a different universe, in order to preserve causality.)
For hard sf with ftl, your ftl should be plausible. It shouldn't be run on magic crystals, for instance. As such, ftl capable vehicles should be large enough to contain the energy source large enough to affect space in the proscribed manner. (For instance, you could have an ablucair (however you spell that) warp drive like system, where you create a linear accelleration field by manipulating the density of vacuum fluctuations. (Even a small deviation from random distribution would create a tiny spacetime ripple, from the difference in the mass of the vacuum. Virtual particles have mass, which is why hawking radiation should work.) Start going fast enough, and you will naturally drag some of your reference frame with you as a result of GR treating accelleration the same as gravity.
The less handvavium in the story the better, but at the same time, you shouldn't get all cerebral about the how's and why's of the plot device. It's a delicate thing many authors screw up.
Really, less is more. That's about the sum of it.
We need to explore our own solar system first.
I had a random idea several days ago, concerning venus.
You could theoretically punctuate the runaway greenhouse effects in that planet's atmosphere using custom engineered microbes. This technology is well within our grasp.
What the microbes need to do, is create small atmospheric colonies held together with "fluff", similar to dandilion fluff. The microbes themselves should be chemoallotrophs, using a sulfur hydrogen cycle. The kicker is what kind of fluff they should produce.
The poblem with venus is that it had absurd amounts of co2 and other dangerous greenhouse gasses. We need a way to sequester carbon and nitrogen compounds in a highly thermally stable form, to reduce thoe levels. Such a material needs to withstand temperatures over 2000 degrees F. Amusingly, the petrochemical industry has already created such a substance, called "amarid." It is used to make bullet proof vests, and thermal insulation walls where previously abspestos was required. It does not melt, and strongly resists ignition. It is formed into fiber using a chemical solvent process.
Using atmospheric bacteria to produce amarid fibers would create a biological process that would slowly rain that fluff onto the planet's surface, inceasing surface albedo, and simultaneously redusing atmospheric co2 and nitrogen compound levels (like ammonia).
The hard work would be designing the custom microbes; something that would have industrial uses here on earth. (Amarid is currently expensive to produce. A biological process for synthesis would greatly reduce production costs.) Delivery via a lander would be quite easy (compared to safely landing scientific equipment) as it just be a ballistic aerosol can, and having it land by crashing would be a non issue.
Granted, cleaning up all the amarid all over the planet's surface after the temperatures drop would be a long term project for a colony to undertake, but the fibers themselves would make fantastic construction materials. It is one of the strongest and most durable plastics in existence.
I suspect it could be created using an enzamatic process, since it bears a strong chemical resemblence to protein molecules.
Considering that in 100 years we have causes a pollution crisis on earth, runaway proliferation of such microbes could work the inverse, if they are aggressive replicators.
Is this a thinly vieled "all your base" reference?
"In the year 2101, war was behinning..." and all that?
IIRC, 13h was a 64k window from the adaptor itself mapped into the adaptor rom region at A000. The memory was native to the vga adaptor and writes to it were "live" at the next vertical retrace. Calling the vertical retrace function was not explicitly needed, but helped reduce snow on garbage vga chips.
Surely you could place an IR transmitter circuit on the programming interface header? An IR light is just a digital pulse code emitter.
Or did you want it to be a programmable universal remote, where you need a full blown IR tranciever so you can capture your OEM remote's pulse codes?
You've never used vga mode 0x13h?
It's an 8bit framebuffer mode, 64k in size...
Must not be very old to have NEVER played with it...
But was the publisher gaining exclusive rights to the civil war love story, or exclusive rights to "the author herself"?
Was the publisher asserting that it had contracted *all* intellectualy proprty from the author for a paltry 20k? Surely only in our radical world of absurd intellectual property law could such a moronic position gain any traction.
As pointed out, the author published a totally different body of work, totally unrelated to the civil war love story she signed the advance contract for.
This would be like apple buying a software package meant to change themes on an ipad, then aggressively suing the author of that software for daring to release a fart app under the gpl.
Only an IP lawyer could even begin to conflate the two works as being the same, and therefor as breach of contract, unless the publisher had willfully engaged in disequitable practices to force the contract to be over all works created by the author, be it past, present, or future. Last I checked, disequitable and one sided contracts were of dubious legality.
I see this as little more than barratry from the publisher.
Can we use something like IBM's Watson to realtime parse and evaluate political rhetoric?
A "Psyco Score" at the bottom of the screen during election debates would be quite novel...
This is essentially an argument based on reaping what you sew. In most cases I would agree with you, but most of these students lack realworld experiences that would alert them that debt in any form can be crippling.
I learned about the value of money the hard way as a child. (Despite mom having 3 degrees, she was a woman. She got her degrees concurrently, and paid for them simmilarly to how I did, but she worked as a sheet press operator at a local laundry. As a woman, there was a glass ceiling preventing her using them in a powerful way. Dad's pay wasn't too great, as he was a police officer. My childhood was quite meager.)
Most college students first learn about fiscal responsibility while in college. Arguing that they should be culpable for horrifying debt because they agreed to it without realizing what they were agreeing to and without realising there are always options (if you are willing to work for them), is a bit like saying toddlers first learning about gravity while playing on a balcony deserve to have traumatic brain injury by choosing to try to come down to mommy by jumping.
I don't hold the students at fault for this failure, I hold the parents in that capacity.
While my childhood sucked, and I essentially wore rags, it did teach me the value of looking for the malt-o-meal bag, when surrounded by colorful boxes.
Having been impoverished, I am not so quick to ascribe the label of "lazy" to them. Not everyone is as fortunate as I am.
I'm not so sure. I started in the job market as an IT professional before the dotcom bubble burst. At the time, computing and computer science related industries looked lucrative and promising. After the burst I was laid off and became hopelessly unemployed. I am lucky that there is a local major industry (aerospace), and used what money I did have to return to school and study to become an engineer. (A feat I would not habe been able to accomplish withou being very clever and creative.)
I currently have what many would consider to be a dead end job that I took to build career experience, but I have been exercising "people connections" to advance to better employment. (I am not lazy, and take pride in my work. I am not in the job I am in because of lack of quality, but because I lacked industry experience. That is no longer the case.)
I am fortunate that my employer can afford to hire low experience engineers due to his being an old tightwad.
If I had been saddled with obscene debt I would not have been able to take this job, as I wouldn't have been able to pay my bills. I was very adamant against taking any such loans, despite fairly constant pressure from student affairs at the local university. (I wasy paying my tuition by killing myself with moonlighting as a student assistant, donating plasma, and by holding paid study sessions in "hard" classes like chemistry. Having a mom with 3 degrees in hard sciences has some advantages it seems. Many students don't know how to actually study, and helping them do so for a fee paid off for me.)
I barely pulled my entrylevel job out of my rabbit hole. I can only imagine what the kids in SF have to deal with considering the H1B visa problems there.
It is also important to take the elapsed time since your "success" into account. The situation the protesters are protesting is the situation in the now, while the situation that gave rise to your success story is in the "then."
I agree that the movement seems nebulous. I attribute it to a total constellation of several effects, including but not limited to the following things:
The american school system sucks balls to the point that higher education is essential to become gainfully employed. The number of institutions offering that service has not appreciably grown to meet demand, causing prices to rise. Students leave colleges with thousands of dollars in debt for a slip of paper that essentially just says "I can finish what I start and am not an idiot who can't write his own name." Given the actual value of their degree in the job market, they are naturally angry to have been forced into having to take on mountains of debt to accomplish this simple milestone when a simple core competencies test would have sufficed.
Coupled with the proclevity for large corporations to offshore inexpensive and low training jobs to places like mexico, china, and india, there is a stark lack of entry level jobs for these debt laiden college grads to take to gain the much needed work histories they need to create careers.
The reasons why these trends are occuring is indeed because of systemic greed at many levels, so protesting against institutionalized greed sorta does make sense.
The greed of the accredation institutions motivates them to maintain the status quo of very high student tuition.
The greed of the public school system, coupled with absurd laws, makes it originate the need to require a degree for janitorial work.
The greed of multinationals makes them seek every possible means of squeezing profit from the market.
The greed of stockholders (and by proxy, wallstreet) drives the corporations to be ever more greedy to satisfy the already horribly unrealistic expectations of those stock holders. (Purpetual gains in profitability are not sustainable.)
So, the protest message as I can see it is "I have been victimized by the system you created. I had to sell many years of my life in the form of intractible debt JUST to be ABLE to work, only to have to fight for scraps with what are essentially slave laborers in other countries because of your insatiable greed. We want to be released from the burden of our unfair debts, and have the possibility of finding work without competing with HIB visas and slaves from china."
When you think about it, that doesn't really sound like such a terrible demand.
The problem is that this is SF. There are emmissions control laws against such petrol generators. Many inhabitants don't even have petrol powered lawn mowers. Many even use old fashioned mechanical push powered rotary mowers, due to the taxes on owning gas mowers.
Generators would be hard to own in SF
Perhaps for some. For others it might be better explained as a desire to be free from the defacto serfdom that comes with bearing the label of "consumer."
Say for instance, with "owning" a ps3, but being dictated to about what you can use it for, or what services you connect it to.
Or perhaps in regard to being held hostage by the fallout of the market manipulation that comes about by driving speculation trends by wallstreet? (Eg, perhaps some people might not like having the equities in their 401k devalue radically after some random wallstreet firm shorts millions in stock based on a tiny deviation from expected value.)
The protest appears to be about this radical imbalance of power, and the flagrant diregard these organizations and individuals have for the consequences of their greed motivated activities.
Oh my! My webpost parser jammed up bad on this one! Either you are horribly deluded about the present situation and woefully ignorant of why freedom to assemble to address grievances is a constitutionally protected right, or you are a serious troll doing serious trolling.
In the case of the former, the problem is that the "american dream" you are alluding to no longer exists in the form you are implying; it is no longer possible to "pull one's self up by one's bootstraps" as you put it, due to artificial barriers to entry that are strongly enforced by power of law.
Beating the protesters to disperse them is a violation of their civil liberties, and the fact that their protest irritates you is simply a sign that it is working. A protest that does not illicit a reaction is a protest that means nothing. Simply because somebody is doing something you don't like is not reason to lynch them. Under that logic the protesters should drop their signs, and instead pick up ball bats and molotov cocktails and start firebombing rich people's houses and beating them bloody when they run out screaming from the fire.
So, as far as I can tell, the only whiny bitch I see here is the one whining about the protesters.
Syphillis is not viral. It too is bacterial, caused by spirochetes.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syphilis
I can clearly see a need for the researcher to collect "unauthorized data".
Say for instance, white hats had to pen test only their own systems. A whitehat determines that XYZ corp's client accounts package exhibits a vulnerability when $Foo conditions are true. He sends this finding to XYZ, and also to $MultinationalCorp who uses XYZ.
$MultinationalCorp responds to the private disclosure, thanking them for the effort, and "affirming" that their implementation of XYZ client portal is not configured $Foo, and so does not have that vulnerability.
Without directly testing $MultinationalCorp, and pulling some "secret sauce" as proof, $MultinationalCorp can simply deny, and do nothing. (Which is what they usually do.)
This is why pulling some secret sauce is necessary, because it indisputibly shows that they are vulnerable. (Else, how would you get the secret sauce?)
Then there is the issue of "how do you locally pen test your own copy of $ClientSoftware, when $ClientSoftware is not available for purchase because it is a totally homebrew solution that is not distributed outside of $MultinationalCorp?"
The ONLY way to test the security of such a system is to test the live system. For the same reason above, you need to collect some secret sauce, otherwise they will just ignore the report and pretend you are a crank.
No, it should be this:
"Unauthorised access, with full disclosure, and without intent to illegally make use of accessed data, should not be illegal."
Say for instance, somebody pen tested sony before the PSN hack-a-thon, pulled some demonstration data to prove the exploit was live, and forwarded it to sony's IT staff, asking them to inform the impacted users of the breach and to please fix the exploit.
That should be legal.
If they did the above, but neglected to mention that they vacuumed up 10,000 credit cards and identities and sold them on the internet, and then reported-- THAT should not receive any form of legal protection.
Criminal intent MUST be required.
Well... yeah. Lol
You are supposed to use the gasket sealer as the high temperature interface skin, and reinforce it with some other mold material. Since we are talking minis, you should use an evertable mold material, like silicone. (You can use the cheap silicone for the support mold. Cheap silicone doesn't handle the temperatures needed for the interface layer, but makes great support.)
First question:
The most terrifying thing anyone can hear is "I am from the government and I am here to help you." The reason is because government tries to paint with a very wide "one size fits all" brush that can deal a terrible amount of collateral damage. I am not saying that government regulation is bad, I am saying it is every bit as mixed a bag as is that for unions.
Perhaps you would like a name, and place then? Perhaps a news report?
Local news reports of the initial complaint:
http://www.kake.com/mobi?storyid=1369501
http://www.kake.com/mobi?storyid=1345467
Is it data now?
Unions are a mixed bag.
On the one hand, unions keep management from forcing unhealthy and unsafe working conditions on their labor pool to save money. (Chained to sewing machines, latex gloves instead of neoprine while using mek, etc.)
On the other, unions are a potentially unchecked power that can quickly overwhelm an employer. (Demands for 6 figure incomes for installing rivets, pension plans to rival those of politicians, increased difficulties in termination of unproductive or poor quality workers, etc.)
Unions are a necessary evil, barring very strict government involvement in private enterprise. (Arguably, having the government mandate work conditions is the single scariest thing a worker can hear...) however, when unions themselves become too large and too powerful, they can have a seriously negative effect on not only the industries they work in, but also for everyone else.
For instance, the intractible 26 page proceedure to fire a union teacher in a public school enables a shocking amount of unsavory and unacceptable behavior to go on in those institutions. A policy enacted to help protect teachers from vindictive parents ends up being a mighty shield behind which people with no businss being educators hide to do deplorable things.
(An example would be the events that transpired a few years ago in a nearby public school, concerning a computer science teacher touching female students inappropriately. Since physical evidence could be collected to prove the allegations, his teaching career didn't even miss a beat... until a few years later when he stopped just touching, and got a student pregnant. Even then, I understand it was still difficult to fire him.)
Unions are a good thing when they are kept on the smaller side. When they grow up, they become dangerous, self-serving monstrocities in their own right.
The GP appears to be referring to this latter stage of development in the maturation of unions, not the younger, where they serve an important and essential function.
Much like medication, a little is good for the patient, but more isn't always better, and at a certain threshold more becomes downright deadly. The same is true of unions.