TL;DR: the problem was not limited data but wrong methodology.
Okay... which again, is the scientific process at work. Hello peer review. But I still don't see how this is news -- it doesn't change what will happen to the workers, or the care they're receiving, or affect the clean up, or any other aspect of the disaster or after-action activities. The only newsworthy comment is that TEPCO management is obviously incompetent -- in much the same way engineers at NASA repeatedly warned management about the risks in the shuttle program, and management repeatedly ignored them until they started exploding, and then tried very hard to downplay the reported risks with questionable statements and logic that lacked any credibility.
were believed to have been exposed to enough radiation to cause potential problems. The figure is a 10-fold increase on TEPCO's previous estimate
Well, yeah. The original estimates were made during a crisis situation and based on limited data. Let's all act shocked now that more comprehensive data is available and the estimate has been revised by an order of magnitude. And yet people act shocked when they take their car into the mechanic for a "strange noise" and demand a quote on the spot, then get irritated when the number goes up because "strange noise" turned out to be something more serious than a loose fitting.
Sigh. This isn't exactly news. We knew that as time went on and more eyeballs were put on Fukushima we were going to find more problems, and more accurate data. That's nothing more than the result of an application of scientific process... it's been doing the same thing the world over for thousands of years.
Remy typically runs for several hours and produces a congestion-control algorithm that can be implanted into the sender of a TCP implementation, and then run in real-time. Right now, we do not need to modify the TCP receiver.
Now now, don't disturb the man on a tear with rants. My original post was largely correct but as you can see, all you have to do to get a +5 on slashdot is disagree and look convincing doing it.
I mean, sure, it was comparing other QoS methods to this, but of course, it's not QoS! And they were talking about queues, but it's not QoS. And nevermind that QoS is basically congestion-control, but hey, if we call it something else we can make the other person look retarded! Slashdot wins the day again.
This isn't a redesign of TCP. The network is still just as stupid as it was before; It's just that the local router has had QoS tweaked to be more intelligent. By a considerable margin too. Reviewing the material, it seems to me like it's utilizing genetic algorithms, etc., to predict what's coming down the pipe next and then pre-allocating buffer space; Rather like a predictive cache. Current QoS methods do not do this kind of predictive analysis -- they simply bulk traffic into queues based on header data, not payload.
It comes as no surprise to me predictive/adaptive caching beats sequential/rule-based caching. They've been doing it with CPUs and compilers since, uhh... the 80386 processor. TCP/IP was designed before there was much thought being put into pipelining, caching, parallelization, etc. Using modern algorithms and our better understanding of information system design that's come from 30 years of study results in a noticable improvement to performance? Shocking...
That's stupid... you're taking a sample size of 1 and drawing conclusions (voting), as opposed to an experiment with a control of 7 and a sample size of 1... which is only slightly less stupid.
Now that a famous person's name has gotten your attention, please use our website and give us money!
More or less, yeah. It's "Hey, here's a famous artist who could have used something I wrote my thesis about, but didn't." And we're supposed to gloss over the why they didn't. Here's the thing... algorithms and voting mechanics are fine for thesis projects, but this is an author. She makes her living selling books. And the best litmus test for whether it's the name, or the work itself, that people are buying, is to put it on the market under a pseudonym and find out.
Which is what she did. Shame on her for doing the same thing so many famous authors have done for thousands of years instead of opting for little college boy's pet thesis project!
At least removing them from the equation fixes part of the problem, and hopefully prevents New Jersey police from tackling car insurance cases by using the same tools applied to international terrorists.
This is the right attitude. New Jersey is telling the Federal government that there are some lines you just don't cross. They can't stop them from expanding their reach and handing out privacy-invading laws and tools... but they can say no. It's called judicial restraint, and it's neither politically fashionable nor popular right now... which makes it all the more remarkable when it happens.
Just wait for the tech support calls where people complain they can't watch porn anymore... they're setting themselves up for the swiftest kick in the ass ever by the general public. That's the problem with filtering that runs on the connection instead of the computer. But hey, at least some ISPs will benefit: Namely the ones selling VPN accounts. Oh, and Tor looks to boost its numbers some more. Ever since the NSA took a big shit in the information super pool, Tor's seen an explosion of exit nodes and bridges... I gotta say, it's almost reasonably fast now for regular internet, with a few tweaks to your browser to pipeline requests...
Thanks Britain! You're unwittingly supporting terrorism, organized crime, software and multimedia piracy, citizens' right to privacy and managing to piss off over half the internet population by messing with their porn. Bravo! By weeks' end you'll be less popular than the Americans with their NSA surveillance program.
The English have mastered delivering withering insults very politely. Simply being polite does not make you "nice". Is it more "professional" to wrap your disdain for an idea in language that is courteous on the surface? Maybe. Is the emperor going to change? Unlikely.
They got nothing on the French. Voltaire's criticism led to suicides. But regardless, this represents a change in Linus' historical behavior. It could just be stress, or it could hint at the onset of a mental illness. Increased aggression, changes in mood or attitude, impaired judgement, black and white or "us versus them" thinking... while many might chalk this up to poor manners on the internet, it could hint at something more substantial.
Either way, people are focusing on the behavior, but are neglecting to take notice of the fact that while the kernel-dev mailing list has always been, achem, heated... this is still a significant departure from baseline -- it's starting to make headlines in a big way too. People do not simply wake up one day and decide they're going to be abusive assholes -- there are triggers, changes to the person's environment or biology.
Separately, I'm not sure abusive language is ever good for the long-term health of a cooperative project -- it may not be a professional environment, but it's not exactly amateur hour either. Repeated abuse and disrespect is not conducive to a productive and cooperative environment. See also: The reason why there are so many flavors of BSD.
. He worries that social media encourages us to create "surrogate versions" or "celebrity versions" of ourselves
It's common knowledge that in a new relationship, the first year with someone you don't really meet them, just their representative. Everyone puts on a different face in public, or for new people. This isn't news to anyone who isn't Forever Alone guy. Social media doesn't "encourage" us; We already do it anyway. Social media just allows this to be more transparent.
It's no surprise Facebook doesn't have a "dislike" button, or that there's no notification if someone "unfriends" you or blocks you. Even the website itself tries to hide negativity. Everyone lies. Ask any interrogator. Every, mother effing one of you is a liar. Of course, it's mostly small lies, like how girls lie about their age or guys lie about how great they are at sex, or how we lie about how much we're enjoying it anyway... oh and the list goes on... those are just stereotyped examples.
Social media didn't create this trend, Matt. Hop in your TARDIS and fly back a thousand years and you'll have Kings and Queens demanding the painters take a few extra pounds off their royal portraits...
Then around 800 years ago it all seems to have gone wrong. "Trouble in the Middle East" has been a newspaper headline since the invention of the newspaper. Personally I would love to know what changed 800 years ago as it might give a clue as to how to make it right again.
I know I'm going to get mod-bombed to hell and gone for this, but christianity happened. There's an old African proverb, "Once we had the land and the white man had the bible. Now we have the bible and the white man has the land." The Arabs were busy unlocking scientific secrets and storing up knowledge during that time out of necessity -- it's not a forgiving land. It has limited resources, and if you aren't smart about managing it, you die. Generations of resource scarcity meant that their culture stressed history. The first written languages came from the same region. Moving from a barter economy to a cash economy also came from there. And the thing is, this knowledge was shared -- it wasn't kept secret, or considered blasphemous per-se. Not like it was in Europe where the idea that the Earth wasn't the center of the universe nearly got Copernicous nailed to a cross anyway.
The Christians made numerous attempts to send armies into their lands -- and failed each time. But although the military campaign failed, the cultural changes that contact with them brought was ruinous to their civilization in the long-run. Think of it as being a bit like how America reacted to the terrorist attacks of 9/11 -- they really hadn't much exposure to terrorism before, so their first real taste of it caused a massive overreaction that has crippled the economy, sent millions into poverty, and triggered far-reaching changes in their way of life. But in reality, it was just a couple dozen guys who knocked down a few buildings. It did more damage though than fifty hurricanes.
There's plenty of other historical examples too -- Japan and China's isolationist policies, for example. When America steamed into Japan, they forced them to open their borders, and thousands of years of culture caught fire and burned in a matter of years. Similar things have happened to China repeatedly when people have crossed the mountains into their territory.
Cultural contamination is what brought them down -- specifically, from European christians.
Three: If you don't care, go back in your browser. You do not need to click on every link on slashdot! DO NOT CLICK ON THE ONES YOU DON'T CARE ABOUT!
This is the internet, man. Everyone's gotta have an opinion... and worse, they're only a click away from putting it on the screens of thousands. Your advice is falling on deaf ears. Hey look everyone -- a single mother! (grabs pitchfork and runs out of the comment thread)
It doesn't really matter as far as my point is concerned. LA could have slid into the ocean right after, or went right on as if nothing had happened... it has no real bearing on what happened to OJ's career. But kudos on pointing that out. +1, informative. But... -1, redundant too...
You talk about the median but then compare using the mean for some reason. The median of the numbers you gave is 5, which is by definition representative of those numbers.
You really need to check out what Median means. Specifically, "the median is the numerical value separating the higher half of a data sample, a population, or a probability distribution, from the lower half. " So if the lowest number is 1 and the highest number is 100, the median is 50, even if the set is 1,1,1,{...},1,100.
It is the difference between median and mode that I'm trying to illustrate here; It's much more likely you'll be below the median than above it given current personal wealth distribution in the United States.
It's related to the earlier story where an IT guy was fired by the AG office because he called them on not revealing exculpatory evidence during the discovery process. They also photoshopped Zimmerman's image into black and white to make his nose look less severe than it was.
I think the OP was pointing out that Slashdot, while catering to people in Information Technology, still caters to, achem, people. We may have a certain slanted view on the world as a community, but widely publicized events will still be discussed, however tangential they are to our interests. Politics is something everyone has to deal with... and so... unsurprisingly, they talk about it wherever people gather.
It's normal. And yes, I'm aware of the irony of calling a bunch of nerds "normal"...:)
I doubt that. There were a lot of people who were "on his side", "rooting for him", or whatever you want to call it. Probably doesn't hurt either that George Zimmerman is not an unusual name.
Plenty of people were on the side of OJ Simpson as well. L.A. burned after the ruling came out. But he never found a career after that trial... he eventually wound up bankrupt, eeking out a living on the fame of his last memorable act -- being found not guilty.
Except Mr. Wannabe Cop with his CCW chased down an innocent kid for no reason and the encounter led to the kid's death. Morally, he's a murderer.
Morally, we're all guilty. There isn't one among us that hasn't wanted to punch someone in the face who "deserved it". Not one of us who hasn't felt a need for vengance at one point in our lives. We love watching people we dislike get shit on -- turn on the TV for more than 30 minutes... it doesn't take long. Populist "morality," fortunately, has no place in our justice system. If we met out justice based on the whims of a mob, there wouldn't be a civilization to speak of in this country -- it's just be roving bands of tribes engaged in constant warfare. The rule of law took us away from your primitive "morality".
Our justice system is based on proof and evidence of harm to society or others. It is, hopefully, an objective and impartial judgement of ourselves and each other. Many people yell about the "immorality" of gays, but they're not harming society, not in any concrete way. This is the essence of justice -- it is about fairness, equity, and the promotion of the greater good, which is far more important than your morality, or that of any one person or group. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.
And I am thankful each and every day, that people who try to inflict their own moral values onto others are kept well away from our justice system. I only wish they were kept out of our legislative system as well... and I still have debates with myself as to whether or not people like you ought to be crammed into crates and shipped far, far away never to return because of the harm you cause to society... but to date, I haven't been able to justify it because advocating the position of freedom, fairness, and justice means that no matter how hurtful your words, I can only judge you on your actions and to say otherwise would undermine any credibility I might have to claiming to stand for those things. So for now, I'm left defending your freedom of speech, though I detest and revile your kind.
I'm amazed the Media didn't manage to convict him, despite how hard they tried.
Everyone likes to talk about how they'd vote, or what they'd do. The media simply caters to that with show trials and "investigations", showing us distorted and idealized versions of this. It's the same reason why in the middle of a crisis, or when in the presence of a celebrity you'll find plenty of people whipping out their phones, and nobody actually doing anything useful. We feel important when we're around important people... or important events. We try to assure ourselves of our own relevance in whatever situation is placed in front of us. The terrorist attacks on 9/11 didn't directly affect more than a tiny, tiny fraction of the population, but everybody got emotionally involved in it, because it was spectacular, epic, and we wanted to insert ourselves into the story, the conversation, the dialogue. Show trials like this are based on this same emotional need, and the media is only too happy to indulge in it -- it sells more papers, more advertisement, etc.
But the overwhelming majority of it is total shit, and frankly harmful to our way of life. Whether Zimmerman is guilty or not, he'll never have another job. He'll always be "that guy that got away with murder", irrespective of the actual, judiciary merit of that position. There have been many people, for example, accused of rape, and were later proved not just not guilty, but totally and irrefutably innocent of the charges. Their lives were still over all the same.
The founding fathers knew this -- that's why they advocated jury trials in the first place. It was an attempt to remove this mob mentality from the judicial process, and as a balance against populism swaying the government and giving in to the transient emotional outbursts of the crowd, the mob, the public. I don't think, if they were alive today in the age of the internet and instant communication, they would still advocate that these trials be open to the public... I believe they would have wanted a person who, if found not guilty, could go back to the life they had and the community would treat them no differently. Conversely, the country was still a "big" place, in terms of social circles -- someone convicted and having served their time, could move somewhere else, start a new life, and leave their mistake(s) behind them. Neither option is possible nowadays...
Today, our justice system may still beat back the mob mentality and the public's need for vengance, and the corruption of the media, but once a person leaves the system -- guilty or innocent, their lives are irrevocably changed. And rarely is it for the better.
So let's do a bit of analysis: You have to be making over $400,000 per year (or have multiple millions in the bank) to be in the top 1% in the US. Everything under that is, by definition, "the 99%". The median income in the US is about $50,000 which would be "the 50%".
Median income is not representative of what most people would consider 'average' income. Let me illustrate by example; Consider the following 15 numbers --
1,3,2,5,4,2,4,5,7,15,7,5,3,53,74
The average is (rounded up) 13. However, the odds of you making average are better are only 1 in 5. 4 out of 5 times, if you're given one of those random numbers, you're going to be getting a "lower than average" number. This is essentially the heart of the OWS movement, and people like you who argue about "median" income are woefully undereducated about the realities of the wealth inequity distribution problem in the United States.
The rest of your argument is essentially based on this incompetent analysis of the situation -- using the average as though it still has relevance. If income distribution followed a standard gaussian distribution, perhaps, maybe, you could make the argument you're making -- but it isn't. It looks like a bathtub curve -- many at the low-end, diminishing into the middle before falling to nearly nothing from the middle to near the end of the y axis before skyrocketing upwards. It's pretty much the inverse of a gaussian distribution.
And making a "global" versus "local" comparison is apples to oranges. People in America deserve the wealth they are working for -- our economy is still largely closed, despite globalization. That is to say, the majority of what is produced is consumed here, and that our economy imports much more than it exports. What that means is, per unit of labor, the majority of the fruits of said labor remain domestic. However, the fruits of those labors are not being distributed equitably, and this is the heart of the OWS movement's position, and it is one worthy of closer consideration. Our wealth inequity -- that is, the spread between our poor and our rich, is staggeringly high -- higher than almost any other country on the planet.
Saying "People in Africa have it worse than you do, so shut up" is intellectually disengenuous -- it is a strawman argument. You are substituting a complaint about laborers not receiving due compensation with a comparison to people worse off. Well, there will always be someone worse off. That doesn't make what is happening to those "better off" less wrong.
There is no One True Way to learn a language, a piece of technology, etc. It depends on your learning style. One thing a lot of people who come into IT are shocked to discover is the sheer amount of stuff to learn, and the lack of tutorials, classes, etc., that effectively cover it. Many leave for just this reason. The first thing you need to learn in this field is how to teach yourself something, and that means knowing what works best for you. Some people need to write it down. Some people need to hear people talking about it. Some people can just absorb it by osmosis. Some people are global thinkers, others are detail-oriented. Personalities run the gamut in this field, but the one thing everyone who succeeds in this field has in common is that they can learn new information quickly, and on their own.
A lot of people will suggest books here, and that's fine. It may work well for them, and possibly for you. But you need to know what your own learning style is first, before you go much farther, especially if you're branching out into a new field or subfield. The time spent teaching yourself how to learn, and finding your own learning style, will pay for itself far, far more than any book suggested here -- your whole career will benefit.
The employers are very fussy. They are really only interested in a perfect match to their needs. They don't want the cost to develop talent internally. They are even trying to combine positions to save money. I came across one employer trying to combine a mechanical and electrical engineer.
Read between the lines: "We can replace all of them with immigrants, but only if we can prove there's nobody who can fill the position. I know! Let's draft the requirements so they're impossible to fill, then hire the same person we would have anyway at half the price because we had to 'settle'. Brilliant!"
This is a huge backdoor/security issue. This is another bit of proof that proprietary software is never okay.
If by "never" you mean "widely used", then I'm going to go with... nope. Here's the thing -- corporations are what buy most software. Corporations are willing to spend large piles of money on software. And corporations don't want security that cannot be defeated because a malicious person (or a perfectly ordinary employee with an asshole manager they want to get revenge on!) could disable it in a way it cannot be recovered from.
They pay massive amounts of money for support contracts that demand minimal downtime. There's nothing in that contract, or even a single fuck given, to security -- which is why you get convenient fast-recovery options like this... that have the "small" side effect of having giant unpatchable security holes in it. The worst of it is, the patch will probably take some custom (weak) hashing function that generates a unique password based on the serial number of the device... like so many other first responses many other vendors over the years have implimented... and then someone will figure out the hashing function and you'll have to run a 'keygen' then and probe the SNMP interface before doing the exact. same. goddamned. thing.
The balance between security and convenience has always slanted heavily towards convenience. Saying "proprietary software" is to blame for this is disengenuous at best. Open source software tends to be used by people who give at least half a fuck about security -- but look at the projects that have gone mainstream. Firefox, for example, and it's attaching NTFS AD streams to downloaded files (just like internet explorer!) and integration with internet options (just like internet explorer!) control panel... all to please their corporate overlords. Oh, and bonus -- you can't override it. So if your corporate overlords screw up, Firefox is just another target waiting to be exploited. And the list goes on. The reason why open source appears more secure is because the people who use it are somewhat more experienced. It has nothing to do with open source itself -- it is purely the people who are using it that have created a (albeit imperfect) culture of security around the products.
Slashdot Mirror
TL;DR: the problem was not limited data but wrong methodology.
Okay... which again, is the scientific process at work. Hello peer review. But I still don't see how this is news -- it doesn't change what will happen to the workers, or the care they're receiving, or affect the clean up, or any other aspect of the disaster or after-action activities. The only newsworthy comment is that TEPCO management is obviously incompetent -- in much the same way engineers at NASA repeatedly warned management about the risks in the shuttle program, and management repeatedly ignored them until they started exploding, and then tried very hard to downplay the reported risks with questionable statements and logic that lacked any credibility.
TL;DR -- Bureaucracy is the same everywhere.
were believed to have been exposed to enough radiation to cause potential problems. The figure is a 10-fold increase on TEPCO's previous estimate
Well, yeah. The original estimates were made during a crisis situation and based on limited data. Let's all act shocked now that more comprehensive data is available and the estimate has been revised by an order of magnitude. And yet people act shocked when they take their car into the mechanic for a "strange noise" and demand a quote on the spot, then get irritated when the number goes up because "strange noise" turned out to be something more serious than a loose fitting.
Sigh. This isn't exactly news. We knew that as time went on and more eyeballs were put on Fukushima we were going to find more problems, and more accurate data. That's nothing more than the result of an application of scientific process... it's been doing the same thing the world over for thousands of years.
Remy typically runs for several hours and produces a congestion-control algorithm that can be implanted into the sender of a TCP implementation, and then run in real-time. Right now, we do not need to modify the TCP receiver.
Now now, don't disturb the man on a tear with rants. My original post was largely correct but as you can see, all you have to do to get a +5 on slashdot is disagree and look convincing doing it.
I mean, sure, it was comparing other QoS methods to this, but of course, it's not QoS! And they were talking about queues, but it's not QoS. And nevermind that QoS is basically congestion-control, but hey, if we call it something else we can make the other person look retarded! Slashdot wins the day again.
This isn't a redesign of TCP. The network is still just as stupid as it was before; It's just that the local router has had QoS tweaked to be more intelligent. By a considerable margin too. Reviewing the material, it seems to me like it's utilizing genetic algorithms, etc., to predict what's coming down the pipe next and then pre-allocating buffer space; Rather like a predictive cache. Current QoS methods do not do this kind of predictive analysis -- they simply bulk traffic into queues based on header data, not payload.
It comes as no surprise to me predictive/adaptive caching beats sequential/rule-based caching. They've been doing it with CPUs and compilers since, uhh... the 80386 processor. TCP/IP was designed before there was much thought being put into pipelining, caching, parallelization, etc. Using modern algorithms and our better understanding of information system design that's come from 30 years of study results in a noticable improvement to performance? Shocking...
That's stupid... you're taking a sample size of 1 and drawing conclusions (voting), as opposed to an experiment with a control of 7 and a sample size of 1... which is only slightly less stupid.
Now that a famous person's name has gotten your attention, please use our website and give us money!
More or less, yeah. It's "Hey, here's a famous artist who could have used something I wrote my thesis about, but didn't." And we're supposed to gloss over the why they didn't. Here's the thing... algorithms and voting mechanics are fine for thesis projects, but this is an author. She makes her living selling books. And the best litmus test for whether it's the name, or the work itself, that people are buying, is to put it on the market under a pseudonym and find out.
Which is what she did. Shame on her for doing the same thing so many famous authors have done for thousands of years instead of opting for little college boy's pet thesis project!
At least removing them from the equation fixes part of the problem, and hopefully prevents New Jersey police from tackling car insurance cases by using the same tools applied to international terrorists.
This is the right attitude. New Jersey is telling the Federal government that there are some lines you just don't cross. They can't stop them from expanding their reach and handing out privacy-invading laws and tools... but they can say no. It's called judicial restraint, and it's neither politically fashionable nor popular right now... which makes it all the more remarkable when it happens.
You pull out an NSA. We pull out a Supreme Court ruling. THAT's the New Jersey way. You gotta problem with that buddy?
Just wait for the tech support calls where people complain they can't watch porn anymore... they're setting themselves up for the swiftest kick in the ass ever by the general public. That's the problem with filtering that runs on the connection instead of the computer. But hey, at least some ISPs will benefit: Namely the ones selling VPN accounts. Oh, and Tor looks to boost its numbers some more. Ever since the NSA took a big shit in the information super pool, Tor's seen an explosion of exit nodes and bridges... I gotta say, it's almost reasonably fast now for regular internet, with a few tweaks to your browser to pipeline requests...
Thanks Britain! You're unwittingly supporting terrorism, organized crime, software and multimedia piracy, citizens' right to privacy and managing to piss off over half the internet population by messing with their porn. Bravo! By weeks' end you'll be less popular than the Americans with their NSA surveillance program.
The English have mastered delivering withering insults very politely. Simply being polite does not make you "nice". Is it more "professional" to wrap your disdain for an idea in language that is courteous on the surface? Maybe. Is the emperor going to change? Unlikely.
They got nothing on the French. Voltaire's criticism led to suicides. But regardless, this represents a change in Linus' historical behavior. It could just be stress, or it could hint at the onset of a mental illness. Increased aggression, changes in mood or attitude, impaired judgement, black and white or "us versus them" thinking... while many might chalk this up to poor manners on the internet, it could hint at something more substantial.
Either way, people are focusing on the behavior, but are neglecting to take notice of the fact that while the kernel-dev mailing list has always been, achem, heated... this is still a significant departure from baseline -- it's starting to make headlines in a big way too. People do not simply wake up one day and decide they're going to be abusive assholes -- there are triggers, changes to the person's environment or biology.
Separately, I'm not sure abusive language is ever good for the long-term health of a cooperative project -- it may not be a professional environment, but it's not exactly amateur hour either. Repeated abuse and disrespect is not conducive to a productive and cooperative environment. See also: The reason why there are so many flavors of BSD.
Not everybody lies. It's what makes some of us 'socially'' awkward.
Liar. You're socially awkward because you never leave the basement. :D
. He worries that social media encourages us to create "surrogate versions" or "celebrity versions" of ourselves
It's common knowledge that in a new relationship, the first year with someone you don't really meet them, just their representative. Everyone puts on a different face in public, or for new people. This isn't news to anyone who isn't Forever Alone guy. Social media doesn't "encourage" us; We already do it anyway. Social media just allows this to be more transparent.
It's no surprise Facebook doesn't have a "dislike" button, or that there's no notification if someone "unfriends" you or blocks you. Even the website itself tries to hide negativity. Everyone lies. Ask any interrogator. Every, mother effing one of you is a liar. Of course, it's mostly small lies, like how girls lie about their age or guys lie about how great they are at sex, or how we lie about how much we're enjoying it anyway... oh and the list goes on... those are just stereotyped examples.
Social media didn't create this trend, Matt. Hop in your TARDIS and fly back a thousand years and you'll have Kings and Queens demanding the painters take a few extra pounds off their royal portraits...
Then around 800 years ago it all seems to have gone wrong. "Trouble in the Middle East" has been a newspaper headline since the invention of the newspaper. Personally I would love to know what changed 800 years ago as it might give a clue as to how to make it right again.
I know I'm going to get mod-bombed to hell and gone for this, but christianity happened. There's an old African proverb, "Once we had the land and the white man had the bible. Now we have the bible and the white man has the land." The Arabs were busy unlocking scientific secrets and storing up knowledge during that time out of necessity -- it's not a forgiving land. It has limited resources, and if you aren't smart about managing it, you die. Generations of resource scarcity meant that their culture stressed history. The first written languages came from the same region. Moving from a barter economy to a cash economy also came from there. And the thing is, this knowledge was shared -- it wasn't kept secret, or considered blasphemous per-se. Not like it was in Europe where the idea that the Earth wasn't the center of the universe nearly got Copernicous nailed to a cross anyway.
The Christians made numerous attempts to send armies into their lands -- and failed each time. But although the military campaign failed, the cultural changes that contact with them brought was ruinous to their civilization in the long-run. Think of it as being a bit like how America reacted to the terrorist attacks of 9/11 -- they really hadn't much exposure to terrorism before, so their first real taste of it caused a massive overreaction that has crippled the economy, sent millions into poverty, and triggered far-reaching changes in their way of life. But in reality, it was just a couple dozen guys who knocked down a few buildings. It did more damage though than fifty hurricanes.
There's plenty of other historical examples too -- Japan and China's isolationist policies, for example. When America steamed into Japan, they forced them to open their borders, and thousands of years of culture caught fire and burned in a matter of years. Similar things have happened to China repeatedly when people have crossed the mountains into their territory.
Cultural contamination is what brought them down -- specifically, from European christians.
Three: If you don't care, go back in your browser. You do not need to click on every link on slashdot! DO NOT CLICK ON THE ONES YOU DON'T CARE ABOUT!
This is the internet, man. Everyone's gotta have an opinion... and worse, they're only a click away from putting it on the screens of thousands. Your advice is falling on deaf ears. Hey look everyone -- a single mother! (grabs pitchfork and runs out of the comment thread)
Try to get your facts straight.
It doesn't really matter as far as my point is concerned. LA could have slid into the ocean right after, or went right on as if nothing had happened... it has no real bearing on what happened to OJ's career. But kudos on pointing that out. +1, informative. But... -1, redundant too...
You talk about the median but then compare using the mean for some reason. The median of the numbers you gave is 5, which is by definition representative of those numbers.
You really need to check out what Median means. Specifically, "the median is the numerical value separating the higher half of a data sample, a population, or a probability distribution, from the lower half. " So if the lowest number is 1 and the highest number is 100, the median is 50, even if the set is 1,1,1,{...},1,100.
It is the difference between median and mode that I'm trying to illustrate here; It's much more likely you'll be below the median than above it given current personal wealth distribution in the United States.
It's related to the earlier story where an IT guy was fired by the AG office because he called them on not revealing exculpatory evidence during the discovery process. They also photoshopped Zimmerman's image into black and white to make his nose look less severe than it was.
I think the OP was pointing out that Slashdot, while catering to people in Information Technology, still caters to, achem, people. We may have a certain slanted view on the world as a community, but widely publicized events will still be discussed, however tangential they are to our interests. Politics is something everyone has to deal with... and so... unsurprisingly, they talk about it wherever people gather.
It's normal. And yes, I'm aware of the irony of calling a bunch of nerds "normal"... :)
I doubt that. There were a lot of people who were "on his side", "rooting for him", or whatever you want to call it. Probably doesn't hurt either that George Zimmerman is not an unusual name.
Plenty of people were on the side of OJ Simpson as well. L.A. burned after the ruling came out. But he never found a career after that trial... he eventually wound up bankrupt, eeking out a living on the fame of his last memorable act -- being found not guilty.
Except Mr. Wannabe Cop with his CCW chased down an innocent kid for no reason and the encounter led to the kid's death. Morally, he's a murderer.
Morally, we're all guilty. There isn't one among us that hasn't wanted to punch someone in the face who "deserved it". Not one of us who hasn't felt a need for vengance at one point in our lives. We love watching people we dislike get shit on -- turn on the TV for more than 30 minutes... it doesn't take long. Populist "morality," fortunately, has no place in our justice system. If we met out justice based on the whims of a mob, there wouldn't be a civilization to speak of in this country -- it's just be roving bands of tribes engaged in constant warfare. The rule of law took us away from your primitive "morality".
Our justice system is based on proof and evidence of harm to society or others. It is, hopefully, an objective and impartial judgement of ourselves and each other. Many people yell about the "immorality" of gays, but they're not harming society, not in any concrete way. This is the essence of justice -- it is about fairness, equity, and the promotion of the greater good, which is far more important than your morality, or that of any one person or group. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.
And I am thankful each and every day, that people who try to inflict their own moral values onto others are kept well away from our justice system. I only wish they were kept out of our legislative system as well... and I still have debates with myself as to whether or not people like you ought to be crammed into crates and shipped far, far away never to return because of the harm you cause to society... but to date, I haven't been able to justify it because advocating the position of freedom, fairness, and justice means that no matter how hurtful your words, I can only judge you on your actions and to say otherwise would undermine any credibility I might have to claiming to stand for those things. So for now, I'm left defending your freedom of speech, though I detest and revile your kind.
The NRA or Fox News could find a spot for him, I'd wager.
You talk about jobs, I talk about careers. He may be able to find a job here and there, but he'll never have a career again, except as a cruel joke.
I'm amazed the Media didn't manage to convict him, despite how hard they tried.
Everyone likes to talk about how they'd vote, or what they'd do. The media simply caters to that with show trials and "investigations", showing us distorted and idealized versions of this. It's the same reason why in the middle of a crisis, or when in the presence of a celebrity you'll find plenty of people whipping out their phones, and nobody actually doing anything useful. We feel important when we're around important people... or important events. We try to assure ourselves of our own relevance in whatever situation is placed in front of us. The terrorist attacks on 9/11 didn't directly affect more than a tiny, tiny fraction of the population, but everybody got emotionally involved in it, because it was spectacular, epic, and we wanted to insert ourselves into the story, the conversation, the dialogue. Show trials like this are based on this same emotional need, and the media is only too happy to indulge in it -- it sells more papers, more advertisement, etc.
But the overwhelming majority of it is total shit, and frankly harmful to our way of life. Whether Zimmerman is guilty or not, he'll never have another job. He'll always be "that guy that got away with murder", irrespective of the actual, judiciary merit of that position. There have been many people, for example, accused of rape, and were later proved not just not guilty, but totally and irrefutably innocent of the charges. Their lives were still over all the same.
The founding fathers knew this -- that's why they advocated jury trials in the first place. It was an attempt to remove this mob mentality from the judicial process, and as a balance against populism swaying the government and giving in to the transient emotional outbursts of the crowd, the mob, the public. I don't think, if they were alive today in the age of the internet and instant communication, they would still advocate that these trials be open to the public... I believe they would have wanted a person who, if found not guilty, could go back to the life they had and the community would treat them no differently. Conversely, the country was still a "big" place, in terms of social circles -- someone convicted and having served their time, could move somewhere else, start a new life, and leave their mistake(s) behind them. Neither option is possible nowadays...
Today, our justice system may still beat back the mob mentality and the public's need for vengance, and the corruption of the media, but once a person leaves the system -- guilty or innocent, their lives are irrevocably changed. And rarely is it for the better.
So let's do a bit of analysis: You have to be making over $400,000 per year (or have multiple millions in the bank) to be in the top 1% in the US. Everything under that is, by definition, "the 99%". The median income in the US is about $50,000 which would be "the 50%".
Median income is not representative of what most people would consider 'average' income. Let me illustrate by example; Consider the following 15 numbers --
1,3,2,5,4,2,4,5,7,15,7,5,3,53,74
The average is (rounded up) 13. However, the odds of you making average are better are only 1 in 5. 4 out of 5 times, if you're given one of those random numbers, you're going to be getting a "lower than average" number. This is essentially the heart of the OWS movement, and people like you who argue about "median" income are woefully undereducated about the realities of the wealth inequity distribution problem in the United States.
The rest of your argument is essentially based on this incompetent analysis of the situation -- using the average as though it still has relevance. If income distribution followed a standard gaussian distribution, perhaps, maybe, you could make the argument you're making -- but it isn't. It looks like a bathtub curve -- many at the low-end, diminishing into the middle before falling to nearly nothing from the middle to near the end of the y axis before skyrocketing upwards. It's pretty much the inverse of a gaussian distribution.
And making a "global" versus "local" comparison is apples to oranges. People in America deserve the wealth they are working for -- our economy is still largely closed, despite globalization. That is to say, the majority of what is produced is consumed here, and that our economy imports much more than it exports. What that means is, per unit of labor, the majority of the fruits of said labor remain domestic. However, the fruits of those labors are not being distributed equitably, and this is the heart of the OWS movement's position, and it is one worthy of closer consideration. Our wealth inequity -- that is, the spread between our poor and our rich, is staggeringly high -- higher than almost any other country on the planet.
Saying "People in Africa have it worse than you do, so shut up" is intellectually disengenuous -- it is a strawman argument. You are substituting a complaint about laborers not receiving due compensation with a comparison to people worse off. Well, there will always be someone worse off. That doesn't make what is happening to those "better off" less wrong.
There is no One True Way to learn a language, a piece of technology, etc. It depends on your learning style. One thing a lot of people who come into IT are shocked to discover is the sheer amount of stuff to learn, and the lack of tutorials, classes, etc., that effectively cover it. Many leave for just this reason. The first thing you need to learn in this field is how to teach yourself something, and that means knowing what works best for you. Some people need to write it down. Some people need to hear people talking about it. Some people can just absorb it by osmosis. Some people are global thinkers, others are detail-oriented. Personalities run the gamut in this field, but the one thing everyone who succeeds in this field has in common is that they can learn new information quickly, and on their own.
A lot of people will suggest books here, and that's fine. It may work well for them, and possibly for you. But you need to know what your own learning style is first, before you go much farther, especially if you're branching out into a new field or subfield. The time spent teaching yourself how to learn, and finding your own learning style, will pay for itself far, far more than any book suggested here -- your whole career will benefit.
The employers are very fussy. They are really only interested in a perfect match to their needs. They don't want the cost to develop talent internally. They are even trying to combine positions to save money. I came across one employer trying to combine a mechanical and electrical engineer.
Read between the lines: "We can replace all of them with immigrants, but only if we can prove there's nobody who can fill the position. I know! Let's draft the requirements so they're impossible to fill, then hire the same person we would have anyway at half the price because we had to 'settle'. Brilliant!"
This is a huge backdoor/security issue. This is another bit of proof that proprietary software is never okay.
If by "never" you mean "widely used", then I'm going to go with... nope. Here's the thing -- corporations are what buy most software. Corporations are willing to spend large piles of money on software. And corporations don't want security that cannot be defeated because a malicious person (or a perfectly ordinary employee with an asshole manager they want to get revenge on!) could disable it in a way it cannot be recovered from.
They pay massive amounts of money for support contracts that demand minimal downtime. There's nothing in that contract, or even a single fuck given, to security -- which is why you get convenient fast-recovery options like this... that have the "small" side effect of having giant unpatchable security holes in it. The worst of it is, the patch will probably take some custom (weak) hashing function that generates a unique password based on the serial number of the device... like so many other first responses many other vendors over the years have implimented... and then someone will figure out the hashing function and you'll have to run a 'keygen' then and probe the SNMP interface before doing the exact. same. goddamned. thing.
The balance between security and convenience has always slanted heavily towards convenience. Saying "proprietary software" is to blame for this is disengenuous at best. Open source software tends to be used by people who give at least half a fuck about security -- but look at the projects that have gone mainstream. Firefox, for example, and it's attaching NTFS AD streams to downloaded files (just like internet explorer!) and integration with internet options (just like internet explorer!) control panel... all to please their corporate overlords. Oh, and bonus -- you can't override it. So if your corporate overlords screw up, Firefox is just another target waiting to be exploited. And the list goes on. The reason why open source appears more secure is because the people who use it are somewhat more experienced. It has nothing to do with open source itself -- it is purely the people who are using it that have created a (albeit imperfect) culture of security around the products.