I don't think a lot of people understand how much large companies and the government already trust other companies and entities with their data. Look at DoD contractors. Now because of the nature of the work they do, many employees of contractors have a security clearance. It could be argued that since they've been vetted by the government directly (something that isn't common in non-DoD or DoE contracts) it's quiet reasonable that they should be given access to government data. That isn't the whole story though. There's lots of "unclassified, but sensitive" government data handled within these companies by uncleared people. Venture outside of DoD, into the DoI, DoT, FDA, or thousands of other government organization that employ uncleared contractors and you're talking literally tons of government data in the hands of non-government employees that the government hasn't even thought about vetting.
Now most of these companies destroy classified documents on site when the need arises. Transporting classified is considered dangerous and unless there's a need to carry specific information from one place to another it's archived in place until the time comes to destroy it. What about unclassified data? Many (all that I'm aware of though I admit I haven't been everywhere) contractors subcontract out the destruction of their government "sensitive, but not classified" and "company sensitive" garbage to other companies (Iron Mountain is by the far the most trusted and well known from what I've seen, but there are others). Many also pay Iron Mountain to stored archived data, both physical and digital (off-site backup tapes and the like, to my knowledge IM doesn't run data centers).
What about outside of Government world? Well, at least two of the other companies I've worked for have also used Iron Mountain (one was a very small company, the other quite large) for archiving and destruction of "company confidential" information. Of the other place I've worked, I don't know. I wasn't in a position to worry about it at most of them. I'd be willing to bet some money that at least half of Fortune 500 companies make use of Iron Mountain or a similar service though.
One Fortune 50 company I've worked for had actually subcontracted their entire IT infrastructure to Dell. Dell ran the servers, our internal help desk calls went to Dell employees, Dell techs came to our desks and replaced the parts in our Dell workstations when something physical died. Below the executive level their was no $company IT. There was simply a Dell $company Division.
It's a freaking figure of speech. Not one (Well, no one who matters) really thinks that divine beings actually take an interest in whether your plane takes off on time. The point is that "act of God" typically refer to matters outside the control of the airline, thus allowing them to make an valid argument that they can't be expected to pay for the result. Maintenance is well within the control of the airline and should not be considered under "acts of God" protection.
Except for the vacation time (which is a definite lifestyle difference - most engineers I know in the US have 1/2 that much, but never use it all anyway), all of those other perks are more than made up for (ie you can pay for them yourself and still be ahead) by the higher salary.
It's a "lifestyle difference" because our corporate culture makes it one. Engineers in the US don't (generally speaking) not take vacation because they abhor time off. They don't take vacation because the company makes it clear to them that vacation time is bad. It's not done in any overt way. People would rebel against a company policy that says "we give you three weeks of vacation, but insist you take only half of it". It's done in the way people who actually use their vacation are treated. The way that you're subtly pushed to not be "that guy".
I've worked in companies where the staff was subtly pushed to avoid time off. I've worked in companies where they weren't. Guess what? In the latter case, everyone finds (perfectly valid and reasonable sounding) excuses not to take time off. In the former, people make use of their vacation time and are happy to do so. I've never really met a fellow worker, engineer or otherwise, who really just liked his/her job SOOO much that they never wanted to take a few days off.
It may very well be true that European countries overdo it. There's probably a reasonable argument there. On the other hand, it seems pretty obvious to me that a lot of American companies underdo it. There's pretty much reams of research showing that productivity at most 60-80 hour a week, never take a break, companies is not significantly different (and depending on the type of work, can even be lower) than productivity at more reasonable companies. Just because you're at work for 16 hours a day and I'm only there 8, does not per se mean you're getting more done than I am.
Yeah I have a nice GPS app for my iPhone (not the one reviewed, but quite effective), but it doesn't have options for the sexy English or Irish voices. It is sad face.
But- if it were not a military conflict, but a sustained occupation/police action, could those civilians wreak nearly as much havok as (non-military) Iraqis have? Why not? Doesn't require a whole lot training/sophistication/technology to foment disorder and fuck shit up.
No, it doesn't, but you're forgetting a lot of factors to make this argument. First, as I pointed out above, insurgent techniques are high on civilian casualties. They also rely heavily on the local populace's silence to allow them to stay hidden. This works in place like Iraq and Afghanistan for several reasons:
1) The populace is willing to put up with more from "freedom fighters" who are trying to drive out the "invaders" than rebels who are trying to drive out what most people here still think of as their lawfully elected government.
2) The insurgents threaten and cajole the populace into silence. "Don't talk or we will kill your family" is a pretty effective threat for all that it's cliche. A high minded idealist like the GGP doesn't seem like the type to use threats and intimidation to keep the populace silent. It makes him not just "as bad as the enemy", but "worse than the enemy".
3) Iraqis have a long history of distrust for authority because of the way Hussein treated them. Thus where an American would likely call the police to report suspicious activity, an Iraqi will ignore it and hope it doesn't affect anyone he knows. The fact that the "authority" and the "invader" are so closely connected doesn't help.
Even with all of this people have mostly gotten tired enough of watching some asshole "freedom fighter" blow up yet another market square, kill yet more women and children, or wipe out yet another family, that insurgents are having a much harder time hiding in Iraq now. Most of the improvements in the military situation there aren't because the government has gotten better or the military (ours or the Iraqi) more effective... they're because normal people have come to the conclusion that for all they don't like us much the Americans are better than the insurgents.
No offense, but it's clear you have no idea what you're talking about. Your lack of military training and experience is obvious. Can a device be rigged to disable a tank using nothing but common household products? Sure. Can such a device be built and employed by a civilian to actually disable a tank? Unlikely in the extreme. First, tanks aren't only armed with the main gun, they have large caliber machine gun mounted on them that can be used at much closer range, and men armed with small arms inside them who can shoot you close up. You're not just going to run up and throw a shape charge at a tank.
The only way to really disable a tank is to plant a charge somewhere you know the tank is going to go and set it off. This is neither as easy nor as certain as people would like to believe. Tanks are very rarely disabled in Iraq (and almost never destroyed, more in a moment on that). So let's say you do manage to disable the tank. Now what? Tanks don't patrol by themselves you know. Minimum patrol size is three vehicles, but often there's more than that. So now you have one tank that is immobile (though probably still has LOTS of guns of varying capabilities), and two or more that are still fully mobile and armed. If you attempt to do anything to the people inside the tank, you'll have to brave the OTHER tanks (not to mention the arms still available on the immobile tank).
So maybe you want to destroy the tank outright. It's been done, to my knowledge (and I admit I haven't been following this stuff as closely since I left theater and the Army in 2005), once in the current conflicts. Basically some insurgents managed to get their hand on a 500 pound aircraft bomb and bury it. Much of what allows insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan to be as effective as they are is the previous government's terrible inventory control on military hardware, and equally terrible infrastructure maintenance. Do you think you could get a hold of a 500 pound aircraft bomb? Do you think you could bury it without its being noticed on a street in a US town?
Then there's the rest of you ideas. Could you rig a mortar? Yes. Could you HIT anything with your rigged mortar without decent artillery tables and knowledge of how to use them? Doubtful. You're also aware that fire finder radar would have counter battery fire on your head in minutes? Currently the insurgents in Iraq point their indirect fire in the right general direction fire off a few round, and run away to avoid counter battery. They hit their own civilians as often as they hit anything of military value... you willing to take that risk? For that matter almost all of your ideas involve explosives and indirect fire. Civilian casualties are likely to be very high. That's not likely to draw people to your cause by the way.
With precision munitions, the military can respond to your clumsy collateral damage causing attacks with pin point strikes that minimize the civilian casualties they cause. They've got lots of practice... believe it or not we tried VERY hard to minimize civilian casualties in Iraq and were generally very successful (of course you always hear about the exceptions and I won't deny they exist, but we killed far fewer Iraqi civilians than the insurgents did, and we called our people to account for their actions unlike insurgent chains of command).
So, long story short: You're unlikely to be able to beat the military in an armed conflict. You are likely to kill lots of civilians in any attempt. This is unlikely to get people on your side.
Luckily for you, our military is... us. Me, people like me, people like you (believe it not there's more than a few anarchists running around in the military. It's a pay check and they get to play with explosives) people like, well, everybody. The biggest check on the Armed Forces is the Armed Forces, and that plus and oath to the defend the Constitution is most of what we need. The military could be corrupted (anything can be), but you're years if not decades away from a force that you could turn on American civilians without mass desertions, and no one is making any moves in that direction.
I stand in a position to know, as I was a battalion staff officer in theater during the transition: Between 2003 and 2005 the money being given out for civilian aide and reconstruction came under *much* tighter scrutiny. I entered theater in the tail end of the "lawless" period, and the transition still wasn't totally complete when I left, but It was a very different system. For the first year or two of the Iraq war, we really were just pretty much shipping money over.
When we first got there our logistics officer used to report to a building once a month and just get issued wads of cash. I think it was like 50K a month in the first month or two (this was a battalion level logistics officer. There are probably hundred of battalions in theater). He had to turn in receipts of course, but the nature of the people we were doing business with meant that even legitimate receipts often looked like something forged. Our S-4 was an honest guy (at least I never saw any evidence to the contrary, and I worked with him all the time), but he and I came up with at least 6 ways wee could have walked off with a good chuck of that money if we'd wanted to.
After a couple months the first wave of "Holy Shit where is all this money going?" had begun to trickle down and our allowance was cut to 15K a month, and the rules tightened significantly on what the money could be used for and how it was to be tracked. The *really* scary part is that the Logistics officer from the unit we replaced told our S-4 that they'd already tightened things considerably from when he first arrived.
There is a huge difference between being "sensitive" and being merely "somewhat human". We're not talking about "normal" porn here; or even gross but "whatever floats your boat" stuff like "Two Girls, One Cup". We're talking about the full level of the depravity of man here. Child Porn, Snuff Porn, videos of people being beaten to death; If you can watch image after image of that and NOT be affected, there was already something wrong with you. Talk to police detectives, they're (relatively) well trained, (reasonably) prepared by beat duty, and (comparatively) well paid and they still have many of these same issues.
It's not a matter of being "tough" or "sensitive", it a matter of having normal human emotional reactions to the extreme degradation or destruction of others. So far as I'm concerned consenting adults can play whatever games they want; but I'm quite certain that a few hours of rape video would have me puking my guts up and looking for a place to cry.
To be fair you don't have to know. that's the nice thing about repositories. You open up the pretty thing that says "Install Software" and it greets you with options for hundreds of things you can install absolutely free. No hassle, no mus, just lots of stuff you can install if it interests you. This is definitely something Linux does better than Windows. A centralized software repository (even if on Windows some of it cost money) would be great for Windows systems (Or Macs for that matter). Obviously you couldn't put EVERYTHING in it, but you could make a slick buy and install interface for a variety of popular titles.
Yeah, Jobs' denial is wroth nothing, but neither is the original rumor. It's all "he said she said" in that regard. It's as likely to have happened as not to have, but basing any argument on either position would be building a house on quicksand.
Well, you may or may not want me, but you'd never get me using this tactic. Anyone who has any kind of decent job isn't going to be willing to quit it for a "working test" unless you're going to pay them outrageously for the short term or the resulting job will so awesome as to be worth the risk. A few top notch money management firms apparently select candidates this way (at least according to Will Smith movies), but in that case you're talking about a pay-off job with a salary in the millions of dollars a year. That's worth taking a few risks for.
The only types of prospective employees I'd see being willing to play this little game with you would be the desperate. Recent college grads or lay-off victims who will take whatever they can get, for as long as they can get it. Since the OPs point was to find mid-career people who know the technology he's working with, this isn't his ideal candidate pool.
That's bullshit. Plenty of competent, even some brilliant, techs and programmers have perfectly adequate social skills. Most of them won't qualify for "Most Interesting Person of the Year", but there's a lot of middle ground between "movie star charisma" and "bridge dwelling troll". My personal experience is that a lot of tech types fill the role of "socially maladjusted teenager" in order to get away with shit that they normally would get in trouble over: "Oh, haha, Bob is a complete ass, but you know how those techs are". I have yet to work anywhere where I wasn't considered among the more competent and capable people on the team (My current employer just gave me a 14% raise to prevent me from switching companies), yet I can hold a reasonable conversation with coworkers or clients.
Are there techs who are socially maladjusted? Yes, there's people in most professions that are. Admittedly technology draws more than its share (the whole working with machines instead of people thing I suspect), but that doesn't mean you should select for social misfits on the assumption that they'll be better. GP stated that everyone sent to the hiring manager had already been screened for tech capability, so if one is a jocular young man who smiles a lot and seems like he'll fit with the team, and the other is surly and mocks your tie, why hire the troll?
Even if the troll is slightly more competent it's often better to have a merely competent person who can perform well in a team environment, than a brilliant person who can't. In larger organizations the ability to work with a team is essential to getting much done; and even with a smaller shop it can be a real Hell when Bob the brilliant systems guy gets replaced after finding a new job and it turns out that he's been keeping the place running on a combination of brilliance, obscure code, duct tape, and bubble gum that no replacement can possibly unravel.
As to the doing assigned tasks without argument thing... well you're both kinda right there. It is reasonable to expect a professional employee to be able to call attention to mistakes or foolish decisions in their areas of expertise. It is also reasonable to expect those employees to facilitate the success of the overall goal that a poor decision was designed to accomplish. If you're told to take down the firewall so employees can access e-mail from home, its perfectly reasonable to point out what a brain dead idea this is. On the other hand be prepared to explain how you can poke strategic holes in the firewall to accomplish the same goal, setup a VPN, or otherwise allow employees to check e-mail from home.
In the final analysis a professional employee should also be willing to do what they are told. Even the smartest and most capaable tech doesn't always understand why a decision was made, and should, when attempts to find a better course of action fail, be willing to do what they're told to do. Of course if my manager insisted on something as boneheaded as above, I'd document the shit out of my objections in e-mail, and probably use my new ability to send e-mail from home to blanket the Internet with my resume, but in the end I'd do what I was told to do. Assuming no laws or moral principles are involved of course.
A dictionary attack using JavaScript in your own browser? Even assuming there is no lockout time for login attempts built into the router that would take fricking forever, and it would be interrupted the moment you closed your browser. This seems like it would be a vector for a firmware bug attack or for an attempt at obvious default passwords. Otherwise it would almost certainly fail.
I believe there was an article on this very site recently about how porn sites are no more likely to infect you than "regular" sites. The fact is most infection vectors on websites are in the ads, and most most site (porn or not) have virtually no control over what advertising is plastered on their pages.
Re:It's not the frontier, but the mass market
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The US government has given up. We're allowed camera phones on-site now. Just can't bring them into secure areas. I used to just leave my phone in the car to be honest with you, couldn't be bothered to limit my choices to camera-less devices. Since most sites won't allow even cameraless models into secure areas, it wasn't all that different to leave it in the car vs. leaving it in my desk.
Except that seems to be a YMMV situation. I get nearly as good performance from the 3G network as I do from WiFi for most applications. I live in a moderate sized Southern city. I understand that in New York City this is not the case, but in many places 3G wireless is perfectly usable. I don't think I'd want to download Linux ISOs, but for everything I do on my phone or even would do day to day on a laptop, it's adequate.
Re:Not end to anything, rather, start of rapid cha
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Because I don't just take notes on my iPhone. iPhone and other current generation smartphones represent what I have been wanting for over a decade and can now see the reality of. A single device that does everything. I can take notes on it (which is convenient in itself because I pretty much always have the device with me, no need to worry about that particular piece of paper), listen to music on it, play games on it, watch videos on it, use it to navigate my car, get my e-mail, fact check via the Internet, talk to my friends, communicate via text with my friends, send my friends the notes I just took, in a pinch I can even manage my servers from it. I could keep going for pages here. The phone is not always the most ideal platform for doing those things, I will grant you, but it's often a very good platform for them. It can also communicate with devices that are much better platforms if I need it to, or want it to.
If my phone were replacing my paper notebook, it would be tremendously overpriced, but it's not. It's replacing my MP3 player, portable car GPS, portable DVD player, DayRunner, outdoor GPS, pedometer (which it is far more accurate than), Gameboy, E-book reader, phone, even my laptop to a limited extent. Oh, and incidentally, my paper notebook. This is a savings in more than one way. These are things that I don't have to buy or replace in the future. I've gone from having dozens of overlapping gadgets and paper records to having one thing that does it all. I've saved paper and money not buying refills for my day planner, I've saved money not buying a new GPS to replace the one that broke I gave my dad my iPod, saving him money on a new MP3 player to replace one he broke.
I spent $200 on the phone, and another $300 on my data plan, so that's $500 first year. Has it saved me $500? No, but calling the $300 for data a pure "fee" for the device is a bit of a misnomer, part of it is, but there really are expenses related to providing data services on the device. Then there's the value of convenience. I know that when I need to take a note, make a calendar entry, find a new place, listen to music, play a game, whatever... I have the thing I need to do that. It's always on my belt. Plus it's backed up to my computer (which is in turned backed up itself) so if anything happens to it, all I have to do is replace the physical hardware.
There's a difference between variation on a theme and slavish copying. With notable exception most 1st person shooters on the market are essentially Wolfenstien3D with steadily improved graphics. Yes there are exceptions, I never said I agreed with Ebert. There are games out there which approach true art. There may even be some that I haven't played which really are great art. There's a lot more Doom clones though. At least as things stand right now.
Who was I to say video games didn't have the potential of becoming Art? Someday?
What I was saying is that video games could not in principle be Art. That was a foolish position to take, particularly as it seemed to apply to the entire unseen future of games. This was pointed out to me maybe hundreds of times. How could I disagree? It is quite possible a game could someday be great Art.
From further in. While I admit the passage you quote seems to contradict this, it seems to me that what he meant (based on the tone of the rest of article) is that he still doesn't think current games are art. Though again, he also admits that he takes this position in ignorance.
Actually he quite specifically, and at length admits the possibility that games may someday develop to the point where even he sees them as art. He also admits, that since he refuses to *play* any current games, his opinion is largely irrelevant. Basically he maintains the opinion that in his largely ignorant and limit experience, games he's seen are not art as he defines it. Which is a pretty fair position really.
As a gamer, there really are a vanishingly small number of games that come close to being "art". The potentially is there, and a few games come close to reaching that potential, but realistically not many. I mean how many variations of "Person with a variety of weapons shoots, blows up, or otherwise destroys various entities intent on destroying the world" have there been in the last 20 years?
For a gamer's view of why video games have such a hard time being taken seriously, I rather like this article on Cracked.com. Put simply, until games companies accept that they are no longer producing exclusively for 17 year olds, and until we gamers start refusing to accept that the vast majority of games are produced for 17 year olds games will have a hard time being seen as artistic.
I'm curious. Did a plain clothes police officer come up to you and politely request that you delete the image in order to help him out, limits his exposure, etc... or did they come an demand that you delete the image as a matter of law. The first seems quite reasonable (and I'd be happy to help), the second quite unreasonable (and I'd be more inclined to be difficult on principle).
I think Stallman is an arrogant prick who's just far enough on the "sane" side of the looney scale to avoid a stay with the men in white coats, but even I wouldn't question his intellectual brilliance. Being arrogant and dogmatic don't disqualify you from being smart.
Do you know that animal rights activists have been persecuted in The Netherlands under anti-terrorism laws?
Some context here would be good. Were they arrested under anti-terrorism laws because they said things the Government and/or industry didn't like and laws were twisted? That would be horrifying abuse. Did they break into a lab and free animals? That would be questionable, certainly, though circumstances may warrant it. Did they blow up a building? Then the charge is wholly appropriate.
On the one hand, terrorism should certainly NOT be defined as anything the government doesn't agree with. On the other hand it is equally inappropriate to say that actions which could be called terrorism are not because we agree with the cause in question. If a violent crime (even a victimless violent crime) is committed in a effort to scare people or companies into behaving a different way, that is terrorism. it doesn't matter if the cause is animal rights, environmentalism, Islam, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
The popular conception (and whether it's accurate or not I don't claim to know, but it's certainly an arguable view point) is that without the carrot of a monopoly in front of them, most companies won't risk the investment in the hardware. Especially to more remote or poorer areas. It costs a lot of money (and takes a lot of time) to do this kind of thing. I'll give you a medium scale example.
In 2003, the city of Lafayette, LA was getting a bit miffed about its communications infrastructure. Cox Cable was the monopoly cable provider, and Bell South was the monopoly phone provider. Neither seemed interested in doing the infrastructure upgrades that the city government wanted to see to turn Lafayette in the cutting edge community they wanted to be. The Parish (counties in Louisiana are called parishes, fun fact) decided to take matters into its own hands. Unlike a lot of medium sized communities, Lafayette continues to own and operate its own utility company. LUS provides power, sewerage, water and trash pickup to every house in the city proper and at a minimum power to every house in the parish. Lafayette decided that it would soon provide fiber optic based communications services to every home in the parish too (or at least, every home would have a hook-up and the option of using LUS instead of either Cox, Bell or both).
When I left Lafayette in 2007 the project was well under way, and the first fiber was expected to light up in 2008. It had taken most of 5 years from inception to the first real hookups, and the cost had run to at least 30 million dollars. It may have been more when all was said and done. The city confidently expects to make the money back in 5 years (I expect they're right, everyone was really excited about the whole thing while I lived there. Unless the roll out was completely FUBAR, I expect it's a popular offering). In the current "Quarterly profit numbers are my Holy Scripture" environment, how many companies do you think will risk 3-5 years of build up and another 3-5 years to profitability without some sort of guarantees?
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I don't think a lot of people understand how much large companies and the government already trust other companies and entities with their data. Look at DoD contractors. Now because of the nature of the work they do, many employees of contractors have a security clearance. It could be argued that since they've been vetted by the government directly (something that isn't common in non-DoD or DoE contracts) it's quiet reasonable that they should be given access to government data. That isn't the whole story though. There's lots of "unclassified, but sensitive" government data handled within these companies by uncleared people. Venture outside of DoD, into the DoI, DoT, FDA, or thousands of other government organization that employ uncleared contractors and you're talking literally tons of government data in the hands of non-government employees that the government hasn't even thought about vetting.
Now most of these companies destroy classified documents on site when the need arises. Transporting classified is considered dangerous and unless there's a need to carry specific information from one place to another it's archived in place until the time comes to destroy it. What about unclassified data? Many (all that I'm aware of though I admit I haven't been everywhere) contractors subcontract out the destruction of their government "sensitive, but not classified" and "company sensitive" garbage to other companies (Iron Mountain is by the far the most trusted and well known from what I've seen, but there are others). Many also pay Iron Mountain to stored archived data, both physical and digital (off-site backup tapes and the like, to my knowledge IM doesn't run data centers).
What about outside of Government world? Well, at least two of the other companies I've worked for have also used Iron Mountain (one was a very small company, the other quite large) for archiving and destruction of "company confidential" information. Of the other place I've worked, I don't know. I wasn't in a position to worry about it at most of them. I'd be willing to bet some money that at least half of Fortune 500 companies make use of Iron Mountain or a similar service though.
One Fortune 50 company I've worked for had actually subcontracted their entire IT infrastructure to Dell. Dell ran the servers, our internal help desk calls went to Dell employees, Dell techs came to our desks and replaced the parts in our Dell workstations when something physical died. Below the executive level their was no $company IT. There was simply a Dell $company Division.
It's a freaking figure of speech. Not one (Well, no one who matters) really thinks that divine beings actually take an interest in whether your plane takes off on time. The point is that "act of God" typically refer to matters outside the control of the airline, thus allowing them to make an valid argument that they can't be expected to pay for the result. Maintenance is well within the control of the airline and should not be considered under "acts of God" protection.
I see it's time once a gain for me to learn to always hit "Preview", because /. thinks an "edit" feature is way to futuristic for a technology site.
Except for the vacation time (which is a definite lifestyle difference - most engineers I know in the US have 1/2 that much, but never use it all anyway), all of those other perks are more than made up for (ie you can pay for them yourself and still be ahead) by the higher salary.
It's a "lifestyle difference" because our corporate culture makes it one. Engineers in the US don't (generally speaking) not take vacation because they abhor time off. They don't take vacation because the company makes it clear to them that vacation time is bad. It's not done in any overt way. People would rebel against a company policy that says "we give you three weeks of vacation, but insist you take only half of it". It's done in the way people who actually use their vacation are treated. The way that you're subtly pushed to not be "that guy".
I've worked in companies where the staff was subtly pushed to avoid time off. I've worked in companies where they weren't. Guess what? In the latter case, everyone finds (perfectly valid and reasonable sounding) excuses not to take time off. In the former, people make use of their vacation time and are happy to do so. I've never really met a fellow worker, engineer or otherwise, who really just liked his/her job SOOO much that they never wanted to take a few days off.
It may very well be true that European countries overdo it. There's probably a reasonable argument there. On the other hand, it seems pretty obvious to me that a lot of American companies underdo it. There's pretty much reams of research showing that productivity at most 60-80 hour a week, never take a break, companies is not significantly different (and depending on the type of work, can even be lower) than productivity at more reasonable companies. Just because you're at work for 16 hours a day and I'm only there 8, does not per se mean you're getting more done than I am.
Yeah I have a nice GPS app for my iPhone (not the one reviewed, but quite effective), but it doesn't have options for the sexy English or Irish voices. It is sad face.
But- if it were not a military conflict, but a sustained occupation/police action, could those civilians wreak nearly as much havok as (non-military) Iraqis have? Why not? Doesn't require a whole lot training/sophistication/technology to foment disorder and fuck shit up.
No, it doesn't, but you're forgetting a lot of factors to make this argument. First, as I pointed out above, insurgent techniques are high on civilian casualties. They also rely heavily on the local populace's silence to allow them to stay hidden. This works in place like Iraq and Afghanistan for several reasons:
1) The populace is willing to put up with more from "freedom fighters" who are trying to drive out the "invaders" than rebels who are trying to drive out what most people here still think of as their lawfully elected government.
2) The insurgents threaten and cajole the populace into silence. "Don't talk or we will kill your family" is a pretty effective threat for all that it's cliche. A high minded idealist like the GGP doesn't seem like the type to use threats and intimidation to keep the populace silent. It makes him not just "as bad as the enemy", but "worse than the enemy".
3) Iraqis have a long history of distrust for authority because of the way Hussein treated them. Thus where an American would likely call the police to report suspicious activity, an Iraqi will ignore it and hope it doesn't affect anyone he knows. The fact that the "authority" and the "invader" are so closely connected doesn't help.
Even with all of this people have mostly gotten tired enough of watching some asshole "freedom fighter" blow up yet another market square, kill yet more women and children, or wipe out yet another family, that insurgents are having a much harder time hiding in Iraq now. Most of the improvements in the military situation there aren't because the government has gotten better or the military (ours or the Iraqi) more effective... they're because normal people have come to the conclusion that for all they don't like us much the Americans are better than the insurgents.
No offense, but it's clear you have no idea what you're talking about. Your lack of military training and experience is obvious. Can a device be rigged to disable a tank using nothing but common household products? Sure. Can such a device be built and employed by a civilian to actually disable a tank? Unlikely in the extreme. First, tanks aren't only armed with the main gun, they have large caliber machine gun mounted on them that can be used at much closer range, and men armed with small arms inside them who can shoot you close up. You're not just going to run up and throw a shape charge at a tank.
The only way to really disable a tank is to plant a charge somewhere you know the tank is going to go and set it off. This is neither as easy nor as certain as people would like to believe. Tanks are very rarely disabled in Iraq (and almost never destroyed, more in a moment on that). So let's say you do manage to disable the tank. Now what? Tanks don't patrol by themselves you know. Minimum patrol size is three vehicles, but often there's more than that. So now you have one tank that is immobile (though probably still has LOTS of guns of varying capabilities), and two or more that are still fully mobile and armed. If you attempt to do anything to the people inside the tank, you'll have to brave the OTHER tanks (not to mention the arms still available on the immobile tank).
So maybe you want to destroy the tank outright. It's been done, to my knowledge (and I admit I haven't been following this stuff as closely since I left theater and the Army in 2005), once in the current conflicts. Basically some insurgents managed to get their hand on a 500 pound aircraft bomb and bury it. Much of what allows insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan to be as effective as they are is the previous government's terrible inventory control on military hardware, and equally terrible infrastructure maintenance. Do you think you could get a hold of a 500 pound aircraft bomb? Do you think you could bury it without its being noticed on a street in a US town?
Then there's the rest of you ideas. Could you rig a mortar? Yes. Could you HIT anything with your rigged mortar without decent artillery tables and knowledge of how to use them? Doubtful. You're also aware that fire finder radar would have counter battery fire on your head in minutes? Currently the insurgents in Iraq point their indirect fire in the right general direction fire off a few round, and run away to avoid counter battery. They hit their own civilians as often as they hit anything of military value... you willing to take that risk? For that matter almost all of your ideas involve explosives and indirect fire. Civilian casualties are likely to be very high. That's not likely to draw people to your cause by the way.
With precision munitions, the military can respond to your clumsy collateral damage causing attacks with pin point strikes that minimize the civilian casualties they cause. They've got lots of practice... believe it or not we tried VERY hard to minimize civilian casualties in Iraq and were generally very successful (of course you always hear about the exceptions and I won't deny they exist, but we killed far fewer Iraqi civilians than the insurgents did, and we called our people to account for their actions unlike insurgent chains of command).
So, long story short: You're unlikely to be able to beat the military in an armed conflict. You are likely to kill lots of civilians in any attempt. This is unlikely to get people on your side.
Luckily for you, our military is... us. Me, people like me, people like you (believe it not there's more than a few anarchists running around in the military. It's a pay check and they get to play with explosives) people like, well, everybody. The biggest check on the Armed Forces is the Armed Forces, and that plus and oath to the defend the Constitution is most of what we need. The military could be corrupted (anything can be), but you're years if not decades away from a force that you could turn on American civilians without mass desertions, and no one is making any moves in that direction.
I stand in a position to know, as I was a battalion staff officer in theater during the transition: Between 2003 and 2005 the money being given out for civilian aide and reconstruction came under *much* tighter scrutiny. I entered theater in the tail end of the "lawless" period, and the transition still wasn't totally complete when I left, but It was a very different system. For the first year or two of the Iraq war, we really were just pretty much shipping money over.
When we first got there our logistics officer used to report to a building once a month and just get issued wads of cash. I think it was like 50K a month in the first month or two (this was a battalion level logistics officer. There are probably hundred of battalions in theater). He had to turn in receipts of course, but the nature of the people we were doing business with meant that even legitimate receipts often looked like something forged. Our S-4 was an honest guy (at least I never saw any evidence to the contrary, and I worked with him all the time), but he and I came up with at least 6 ways wee could have walked off with a good chuck of that money if we'd wanted to.
After a couple months the first wave of "Holy Shit where is all this money going?" had begun to trickle down and our allowance was cut to 15K a month, and the rules tightened significantly on what the money could be used for and how it was to be tracked. The *really* scary part is that the Logistics officer from the unit we replaced told our S-4 that they'd already tightened things considerably from when he first arrived.
There is a huge difference between being "sensitive" and being merely "somewhat human". We're not talking about "normal" porn here; or even gross but "whatever floats your boat" stuff like "Two Girls, One Cup". We're talking about the full level of the depravity of man here. Child Porn, Snuff Porn, videos of people being beaten to death; If you can watch image after image of that and NOT be affected, there was already something wrong with you. Talk to police detectives, they're (relatively) well trained, (reasonably) prepared by beat duty, and (comparatively) well paid and they still have many of these same issues.
It's not a matter of being "tough" or "sensitive", it a matter of having normal human emotional reactions to the extreme degradation or destruction of others. So far as I'm concerned consenting adults can play whatever games they want; but I'm quite certain that a few hours of rape video would have me puking my guts up and looking for a place to cry.
To be fair you don't have to know. that's the nice thing about repositories. You open up the pretty thing that says "Install Software" and it greets you with options for hundreds of things you can install absolutely free. No hassle, no mus, just lots of stuff you can install if it interests you. This is definitely something Linux does better than Windows. A centralized software repository (even if on Windows some of it cost money) would be great for Windows systems (Or Macs for that matter). Obviously you couldn't put EVERYTHING in it, but you could make a slick buy and install interface for a variety of popular titles.
Yeah, Jobs' denial is wroth nothing, but neither is the original rumor. It's all "he said she said" in that regard. It's as likely to have happened as not to have, but basing any argument on either position would be building a house on quicksand.
Well, you may or may not want me, but you'd never get me using this tactic. Anyone who has any kind of decent job isn't going to be willing to quit it for a "working test" unless you're going to pay them outrageously for the short term or the resulting job will so awesome as to be worth the risk. A few top notch money management firms apparently select candidates this way (at least according to Will Smith movies), but in that case you're talking about a pay-off job with a salary in the millions of dollars a year. That's worth taking a few risks for.
The only types of prospective employees I'd see being willing to play this little game with you would be the desperate. Recent college grads or lay-off victims who will take whatever they can get, for as long as they can get it. Since the OPs point was to find mid-career people who know the technology he's working with, this isn't his ideal candidate pool.
That's bullshit. Plenty of competent, even some brilliant, techs and programmers have perfectly adequate social skills. Most of them won't qualify for "Most Interesting Person of the Year", but there's a lot of middle ground between "movie star charisma" and "bridge dwelling troll". My personal experience is that a lot of tech types fill the role of "socially maladjusted teenager" in order to get away with shit that they normally would get in trouble over: "Oh, haha, Bob is a complete ass, but you know how those techs are". I have yet to work anywhere where I wasn't considered among the more competent and capable people on the team (My current employer just gave me a 14% raise to prevent me from switching companies), yet I can hold a reasonable conversation with coworkers or clients.
Are there techs who are socially maladjusted? Yes, there's people in most professions that are. Admittedly technology draws more than its share (the whole working with machines instead of people thing I suspect), but that doesn't mean you should select for social misfits on the assumption that they'll be better. GP stated that everyone sent to the hiring manager had already been screened for tech capability, so if one is a jocular young man who smiles a lot and seems like he'll fit with the team, and the other is surly and mocks your tie, why hire the troll?
Even if the troll is slightly more competent it's often better to have a merely competent person who can perform well in a team environment, than a brilliant person who can't. In larger organizations the ability to work with a team is essential to getting much done; and even with a smaller shop it can be a real Hell when Bob the brilliant systems guy gets replaced after finding a new job and it turns out that he's been keeping the place running on a combination of brilliance, obscure code, duct tape, and bubble gum that no replacement can possibly unravel.
As to the doing assigned tasks without argument thing... well you're both kinda right there. It is reasonable to expect a professional employee to be able to call attention to mistakes or foolish decisions in their areas of expertise. It is also reasonable to expect those employees to facilitate the success of the overall goal that a poor decision was designed to accomplish. If you're told to take down the firewall so employees can access e-mail from home, its perfectly reasonable to point out what a brain dead idea this is. On the other hand be prepared to explain how you can poke strategic holes in the firewall to accomplish the same goal, setup a VPN, or otherwise allow employees to check e-mail from home.
In the final analysis a professional employee should also be willing to do what they are told. Even the smartest and most capaable tech doesn't always understand why a decision was made, and should, when attempts to find a better course of action fail, be willing to do what they're told to do. Of course if my manager insisted on something as boneheaded as above, I'd document the shit out of my objections in e-mail, and probably use my new ability to send e-mail from home to blanket the Internet with my resume, but in the end I'd do what I was told to do. Assuming no laws or moral principles are involved of course.
A dictionary attack using JavaScript in your own browser? Even assuming there is no lockout time for login attempts built into the router that would take fricking forever, and it would be interrupted the moment you closed your browser. This seems like it would be a vector for a firmware bug attack or for an attempt at obvious default passwords. Otherwise it would almost certainly fail.
I believe there was an article on this very site recently about how porn sites are no more likely to infect you than "regular" sites. The fact is most infection vectors on websites are in the ads, and most most site (porn or not) have virtually no control over what advertising is plastered on their pages.
The US government has given up. We're allowed camera phones on-site now. Just can't bring them into secure areas. I used to just leave my phone in the car to be honest with you, couldn't be bothered to limit my choices to camera-less devices. Since most sites won't allow even cameraless models into secure areas, it wasn't all that different to leave it in the car vs. leaving it in my desk.
Except that seems to be a YMMV situation. I get nearly as good performance from the 3G network as I do from WiFi for most applications. I live in a moderate sized Southern city. I understand that in New York City this is not the case, but in many places 3G wireless is perfectly usable. I don't think I'd want to download Linux ISOs, but for everything I do on my phone or even would do day to day on a laptop, it's adequate.
Because I don't just take notes on my iPhone. iPhone and other current generation smartphones represent what I have been wanting for over a decade and can now see the reality of. A single device that does everything. I can take notes on it (which is convenient in itself because I pretty much always have the device with me, no need to worry about that particular piece of paper), listen to music on it, play games on it, watch videos on it, use it to navigate my car, get my e-mail, fact check via the Internet, talk to my friends, communicate via text with my friends, send my friends the notes I just took, in a pinch I can even manage my servers from it. I could keep going for pages here. The phone is not always the most ideal platform for doing those things, I will grant you, but it's often a very good platform for them. It can also communicate with devices that are much better platforms if I need it to, or want it to.
If my phone were replacing my paper notebook, it would be tremendously overpriced, but it's not. It's replacing my MP3 player, portable car GPS, portable DVD player, DayRunner, outdoor GPS, pedometer (which it is far more accurate than), Gameboy, E-book reader, phone, even my laptop to a limited extent. Oh, and incidentally, my paper notebook. This is a savings in more than one way. These are things that I don't have to buy or replace in the future. I've gone from having dozens of overlapping gadgets and paper records to having one thing that does it all. I've saved paper and money not buying refills for my day planner, I've saved money not buying a new GPS to replace the one that broke I gave my dad my iPod, saving him money on a new MP3 player to replace one he broke.
I spent $200 on the phone, and another $300 on my data plan, so that's $500 first year. Has it saved me $500? No, but calling the $300 for data a pure "fee" for the device is a bit of a misnomer, part of it is, but there really are expenses related to providing data services on the device. Then there's the value of convenience. I know that when I need to take a note, make a calendar entry, find a new place, listen to music, play a game, whatever... I have the thing I need to do that. It's always on my belt. Plus it's backed up to my computer (which is in turned backed up itself) so if anything happens to it, all I have to do is replace the physical hardware.
There's a difference between variation on a theme and slavish copying. With notable exception most 1st person shooters on the market are essentially Wolfenstien3D with steadily improved graphics. Yes there are exceptions, I never said I agreed with Ebert. There are games out there which approach true art. There may even be some that I haven't played which really are great art. There's a lot more Doom clones though. At least as things stand right now.
Who was I to say video games didn't have the potential of becoming Art? Someday?
What I was saying is that video games could not in principle be Art. That was a foolish position to take, particularly as it seemed to apply to the entire unseen future of games. This was pointed out to me maybe hundreds of times. How could I disagree? It is quite possible a game could someday be great Art.
From further in. While I admit the passage you quote seems to contradict this, it seems to me that what he meant (based on the tone of the rest of article) is that he still doesn't think current games are art. Though again, he also admits that he takes this position in ignorance.
Actually he quite specifically, and at length admits the possibility that games may someday develop to the point where even he sees them as art. He also admits, that since he refuses to *play* any current games, his opinion is largely irrelevant. Basically he maintains the opinion that in his largely ignorant and limit experience, games he's seen are not art as he defines it. Which is a pretty fair position really.
As a gamer, there really are a vanishingly small number of games that come close to being "art". The potentially is there, and a few games come close to reaching that potential, but realistically not many. I mean how many variations of "Person with a variety of weapons shoots, blows up, or otherwise destroys various entities intent on destroying the world" have there been in the last 20 years?
For a gamer's view of why video games have such a hard time being taken seriously, I rather like this article on Cracked.com. Put simply, until games companies accept that they are no longer producing exclusively for 17 year olds, and until we gamers start refusing to accept that the vast majority of games are produced for 17 year olds games will have a hard time being seen as artistic.
I'm curious. Did a plain clothes police officer come up to you and politely request that you delete the image in order to help him out, limits his exposure, etc... or did they come an demand that you delete the image as a matter of law. The first seems quite reasonable (and I'd be happy to help), the second quite unreasonable (and I'd be more inclined to be difficult on principle).
I think Stallman is an arrogant prick who's just far enough on the "sane" side of the looney scale to avoid a stay with the men in white coats, but even I wouldn't question his intellectual brilliance. Being arrogant and dogmatic don't disqualify you from being smart.
Do you know that animal rights activists have been persecuted in The Netherlands under anti-terrorism laws?
Some context here would be good. Were they arrested under anti-terrorism laws because they said things the Government and/or industry didn't like and laws were twisted? That would be horrifying abuse. Did they break into a lab and free animals? That would be questionable, certainly, though circumstances may warrant it. Did they blow up a building? Then the charge is wholly appropriate.
On the one hand, terrorism should certainly NOT be defined as anything the government doesn't agree with. On the other hand it is equally inappropriate to say that actions which could be called terrorism are not because we agree with the cause in question. If a violent crime (even a victimless violent crime) is committed in a effort to scare people or companies into behaving a different way, that is terrorism. it doesn't matter if the cause is animal rights, environmentalism, Islam, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
The popular conception (and whether it's accurate or not I don't claim to know, but it's certainly an arguable view point) is that without the carrot of a monopoly in front of them, most companies won't risk the investment in the hardware. Especially to more remote or poorer areas. It costs a lot of money (and takes a lot of time) to do this kind of thing. I'll give you a medium scale example.
In 2003, the city of Lafayette, LA was getting a bit miffed about its communications infrastructure. Cox Cable was the monopoly cable provider, and Bell South was the monopoly phone provider. Neither seemed interested in doing the infrastructure upgrades that the city government wanted to see to turn Lafayette in the cutting edge community they wanted to be. The Parish (counties in Louisiana are called parishes, fun fact) decided to take matters into its own hands. Unlike a lot of medium sized communities, Lafayette continues to own and operate its own utility company. LUS provides power, sewerage, water and trash pickup to every house in the city proper and at a minimum power to every house in the parish. Lafayette decided that it would soon provide fiber optic based communications services to every home in the parish too (or at least, every home would have a hook-up and the option of using LUS instead of either Cox, Bell or both).
When I left Lafayette in 2007 the project was well under way, and the first fiber was expected to light up in 2008. It had taken most of 5 years from inception to the first real hookups, and the cost had run to at least 30 million dollars. It may have been more when all was said and done. The city confidently expects to make the money back in 5 years (I expect they're right, everyone was really excited about the whole thing while I lived there. Unless the roll out was completely FUBAR, I expect it's a popular offering). In the current "Quarterly profit numbers are my Holy Scripture" environment, how many companies do you think will risk 3-5 years of build up and another 3-5 years to profitability without some sort of guarantees?