..this solicitation will be reviewed to ensure the path forward appropriately meets our operational needs.
Translation: "We'll put this aside for now because you caught us out and pitched a fit about it like the little criminals we believe you all to be, and we'll wait until you inevitably forget about it, then we'll re-word it, hide it in some other, completely unassociated legislation, where it'll be voted on in the middle of the night and passed, then signed into law quietly without so much as a whisper from the media."
How about telling people "no cameras allowed on board for any reason and you'll be put off at the next intersection if you break this rule"? Be nice and let them have their phones so long as they're kept in a pocket or purse, or at worst put a piece of electrical tape over the camera lens on their phones so they don't work?
If ISPs had been spending all these excessive profits from charging the living shit out of everyone involved for years and years now on building more capacity instead of crying poor and overbooking the capacity they have, there'd be more than enough bandwidth for everyone and everything and there'd be no need for throttling or prioritizing.
I actually greatly enjoyed DS9 when it was on, more so after Michael Dorn/Worf joined the cast, and especially when the whole Gamma Quadrant thing started up.
..but yes, you saw quite a bit more of what I consider to be real human nature and human failings in that show, compared to the other incarnations of Trek -- although Janeway certainly made at least her share of contributions in that area.
You know, concepts like socialism and even communism actually sound pretty good.. on paper, but in reality they forget one ineffable truth: Human beings like power and being in control. Money is just a way of gathering power and control. The rich always want to get richer, and the powerful just want to become more powerful. Of course, there are people who are exceptions to this, but let's be honest about them, too: even they are getting something out of the transaction when they spend their money and power for the benefit of others, even if what they're getting is a warm, fuzzy feeling of having 'done good'. Cynical as I am, I unfortunately believe that even in the fictional reality of the Federation where energy and posessions are easy to come by and essentially free, there's always going to be a group of people who want all the power and control they can amass. If someday the human race evolves past the need to be so transactional in nature and past the need to screw everyone else over if they can just so they can have all the sex, power, and money possible, then maybe we'll have a society where everyone makes sure everyone else is taken care of, but unfortunately I don't see that happening anytime soon.
Apparently you didn't read my entire comment because you missed shortly after that where I said that I don't know who or what should be shaping the Internet in the future.
Right now, everyone is in an uproar over Net Neutrality, how (at the moment) we don't have it, and how the few big ISPs are going to ruin the Internet, turning it into another version of the Walled Gardens of the pre-Internet era. However we, once again, are just being distracted by this from the real threat: the rest of the world. We here in the U.S. need to remember: We're just a single-digit percentage of the world's total population, yet we've got (at the moment, anyway) an inordinate amount of power of the shape and direction of the Internet as a whole. In a moment of lucidity, one must ask the oneself: How long can this go on? It's not just possible, but probable, that the rest of the world will eventually have a say in the shape and nature of the Internet as a whole. What will it look like in 20 years? I personally don't think that the U.N. is the body that should have control over the course and form of the Internet any more than I think that the Olympics are just about athletic competition and not politics -- a comparison I'm making on purpose because that's what the Olympics are about: politics, and having the United Nations in control of the Internet would turn the Internet into just another political tool. I do not have the vision to know who (or what) should shape the future of the Internet, but I do recognize what a critical time in the Internet's history this moment in time is.
Sounds to me like the OP's boss is just trying to find a way to pay his software engineers/programmers less money while making them do more work. It also sounds like this particular boss doesn't know how to do the job of the people he's managing and therefore doesn't understand the problems they can be faced with. Unexpected things happen, and playing the Blame Game instead of focusing on fixing the problem is not only counter-productive, but terrible for morale. Seriously, I think it's better to fire someone with a consistent pattern of screwing things up rather than punishing them constantly, which is what this could amount to.
I'm going to (attempt to) reply to all four of you at once:
http://slashdot.org/~bunkymag Bookstore. "It's a magical place..";-)
http://slashdot.org/~Kasar Friend, I gotta tell you: I used to be involved in the largest standing militia group in the U.S., so I've already got a file with my name on it at the FBI, couldn't give a rat's ass what they think about my choices in reading material.
http://slashdot.org/~Burz Go home, you are drunk.
http://slashdot.org/~Virtucon You're alluding to a membership much higher up in the Tinfoil Hat Club than I posess or aspire to. Also, I know there are still plenty of us out there that prefer printed books, so I have no fear that bookstores that sell them will be going away during at least the remainder of my lifetime.
I think it's even worse than you think it is. Much of the Republican party are also bible-thumpers, believe the Earth is only 6000 years old, that God put it here for our use (and, apparently, abuse), that the Apocalypse is coming soon anyway, so why bother trying to keep the environment clean? Of course it becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. When the environment has been so thoroughly fucked by pollution and raped by industry that it'll never recover, then they'll say "See, the bible was right! The End Days are here!". Fuck them sideways with a rusty chainsaw, I say.
All that having been said, transparency in the EPA could be a good thing -- but any review of the science behind their policy decisions needs to be reviewed only by authoritative sources carefully chosen for their complete neutrality and incorruptibility, if there can even be such a thing.
Also: FUCK BETA XD/. is fine the way it is, don't need no fuckin' facelift.
No, it's not a new concept (someone above mentioned their car having it in 2004, but I know for a fact that some Japanese auto manufacturer had a dead-reckoning nav system even back in the 1980's or 1990's), and it's not new for U-Blox either (I worked at a defense contractor, and we used U-Blox GPS receivers, I personally worked with them, and knew of their dead-reckoning technology, and this was almost 10 years ago now), but U-Blox makes GPS receivers for high-end embedded applications, not so much for consumer-level applications, and automobiles are consumer-level, so I'm not so surprised that it's taken this long for someone to step up and close that gap. As a sidebar it's a fairly small gap compared to what it used to be, GPS receivers are amazingly more sensitive than they used to be when companies like Trimble and Garmin were the only games in town, cutting-edge GPS receivers can pull satellite signals out from all the way down to a few dB above the noise floor now, even in "urban canyon" locations where signal is blocked by buildings as well as being muddled.
..and of course, my being properly paranoid, this technology also means that it's going to be that much harder to defeat the GPS in your car so that the government and nosy corporations can't track our every move when driving. I suppose even if you disconnected the antenna, it'd eventually ask you to enter your co-ordinates so D.R. would work, but I suppose you could put in "Barrow, Alaska" or something and let it try to figure out how you're driving across the ocean..
I keep saying the technology is bad because it is bad; any technology that makes it easier for people to spy on and monitor people is a misuse of technology, plain and simple, and should be discouraged at every opportunity. You come off as extremely naive: you state " it wasn't the case in the US from the 50s-80s", which is completely wrong, that's when it all started. You seem to believe that Japanese businessmen are so wonderful and would never do anything to improve their bottom line at the expense of their workers or their workers' human rights, which I also dispute, because humans are humans, and regardless of which continent (or island in this case) they're on, there are always those who want to control everything and everyone around them. I see no reason to believe that Japanese bosses are any better in that regard than anyone anywhere else, especially in this day and age where things are so bad everywhere that you find out what people are really like.
As a side note, I wouldn't at all be surprised if you're one of those people who have no problem with the government and corporations monitoring you 24/7/365 and who says "I have nothing to hide so I have nothing to fear" when anyone asks you why you don't seem to care about your privacy being violated.
If it's so great then why do you have Japanese workers who commit suicide over their jobs? How is that 'normal' in any sense of the word? How can any set of circumstances, cultural or otherwise, be a good thing if it's ever causing people to feel the need to end their lives?
Whether Japanese business models are 'misunderstood' or not isn't relevant. I'm sure that many Japanese bosses are very respectful of their workers, and as you say, treat them like family, but that's not 100% the case and I think you know that. If it was 100% true then technology like this wouldn't have been developed in the first place because it wouldn't be considered necessary. If you don't trust your employees, then what's the point in employing them in the first place? Furthermore, doesn't it make much more sense to judge the value and efficiency of your employees based on their productivity, achievements, and the quality of their work rather than micro-managing them down to the level of how many minutes they spend in the bathroom relieving themselves and recordings of their conversations with other employees? Furthermore I really don't think that people like or want to be treated like 'assets' by their employer, at least not in the sense of being 'property of the Company', but they do like being treated as 'assets' in the sense that they're valuable and appreciated by their employers. Finally who can say they would enjoy being treated like an errant child or a convicted felon where they work, monitored constantly?
The ruling party doesn't like that you voted for the competition? Your car is now disabled. You spoke out against the government? Your car is now disabled. We don't have any specific reason to detain you but want to anyway? Your car is now disabled. Oh, and don't forget this one: Criminals hack the system so they can kick you out of your car and steal it, or rob you, or rape you, or kill you, or kidnap you? Your car is now disabled. Great idea fucktarded EU politicians!
I look at it this way: It could be very, very good, or very, very bad for the U.S. that this man is ex military brass. To elaborate, he's either going to be above-average when it comes to being honorable, law-abiding, and respectful of citizens' rights, incapable of having his core values compromised, or he's going to be an overgrown Boy Scout who thinks that blindly carrying out the orders and directives of his superiors is the highest calling he can aspire to. Only time will tell which this man turns out to be. Incidentally the true colors this man shows will also tell us quite a bit about Mr. Obama.
Slashdot Mirror
..this solicitation will be reviewed to ensure the path forward appropriately meets our operational needs.
Translation: "We'll put this aside for now because you caught us out and pitched a fit about it like the little criminals we believe you all to be, and we'll wait until you inevitably forget about it, then we'll re-word it, hide it in some other, completely unassociated legislation, where it'll be voted on in the middle of the night and passed, then signed into law quietly without so much as a whisper from the media."
The White House response to this really just uses a lot of words to say "No comment".
How about telling people "no cameras allowed on board for any reason and you'll be put off at the next intersection if you break this rule"? Be nice and let them have their phones so long as they're kept in a pocket or purse, or at worst put a piece of electrical tape over the camera lens on their phones so they don't work?
If ISPs had been spending all these excessive profits from charging the living shit out of everyone involved for years and years now on building more capacity instead of crying poor and overbooking the capacity they have, there'd be more than enough bandwidth for everyone and everything and there'd be no need for throttling or prioritizing.
Wouldn't this just actually work out to make it easier for the EU to spy on it's own citizens while keeping the NSA out of the loop?
Why yes, I'm cynical as hell, why do you ask?
"Water Is Still Wet"
"Sky Is Still Blue"
"Politicians Are Still All Lying Crooks"
"Death, Taxes Still A 100% Certainty"
At least capitalism is more honest about it.
I actually greatly enjoyed DS9 when it was on, more so after Michael Dorn/Worf joined the cast, and especially when the whole Gamma Quadrant thing started up.
..but yes, you saw quite a bit more of what I consider to be real human nature and human failings in that show, compared to the other incarnations of Trek -- although Janeway certainly made at least her share of contributions in that area.
You know, concepts like socialism and even communism actually sound pretty good.. on paper, but in reality they forget one ineffable truth: Human beings like power and being in control. Money is just a way of gathering power and control. The rich always want to get richer, and the powerful just want to become more powerful. Of course, there are people who are exceptions to this, but let's be honest about them, too: even they are getting something out of the transaction when they spend their money and power for the benefit of others, even if what they're getting is a warm, fuzzy feeling of having 'done good'. Cynical as I am, I unfortunately believe that even in the fictional reality of the Federation where energy and posessions are easy to come by and essentially free, there's always going to be a group of people who want all the power and control they can amass. If someday the human race evolves past the need to be so transactional in nature and past the need to screw everyone else over if they can just so they can have all the sex, power, and money possible, then maybe we'll have a society where everyone makes sure everyone else is taken care of, but unfortunately I don't see that happening anytime soon.
..so you're implying that "Hinterhof" is what the kids are calling it these days?
It's Germany, fool! "Nicht in meinem Hinterhof" :-)
I'm going to have to assume your question is rhetorical or aimed at anyone but me since I've said "I don't know, I don't have the answers".
Apparently you didn't read my entire comment because you missed shortly after that where I said that I don't know who or what should be shaping the Internet in the future.
Right now, everyone is in an uproar over Net Neutrality, how (at the moment) we don't have it, and how the few big ISPs are going to ruin the Internet, turning it into another version of the Walled Gardens of the pre-Internet era. However we, once again, are just being distracted by this from the real threat: the rest of the world. We here in the U.S. need to remember: We're just a single-digit percentage of the world's total population, yet we've got (at the moment, anyway) an inordinate amount of power of the shape and direction of the Internet as a whole. In a moment of lucidity, one must ask the oneself: How long can this go on? It's not just possible, but probable, that the rest of the world will eventually have a say in the shape and nature of the Internet as a whole. What will it look like in 20 years? I personally don't think that the U.N. is the body that should have control over the course and form of the Internet any more than I think that the Olympics are just about athletic competition and not politics -- a comparison I'm making on purpose because that's what the Olympics are about: politics, and having the United Nations in control of the Internet would turn the Internet into just another political tool. I do not have the vision to know who (or what) should shape the future of the Internet, but I do recognize what a critical time in the Internet's history this moment in time is.
Sounds to me like the OP's boss is just trying to find a way to pay his software engineers/programmers less money while making them do more work. It also sounds like this particular boss doesn't know how to do the job of the people he's managing and therefore doesn't understand the problems they can be faced with. Unexpected things happen, and playing the Blame Game instead of focusing on fixing the problem is not only counter-productive, but terrible for morale. Seriously, I think it's better to fire someone with a consistent pattern of screwing things up rather than punishing them constantly, which is what this could amount to.
I'm going to (attempt to) reply to all four of you at once: http://slashdot.org/~bunkymag ;-)
Bookstore. "It's a magical place.."
http://slashdot.org/~Kasar
Friend, I gotta tell you: I used to be involved in the largest standing militia group in the U.S., so I've already got a file with my name on it at the FBI, couldn't give a rat's ass what they think about my choices in reading material.
http://slashdot.org/~Burz
Go home, you are drunk.
http://slashdot.org/~Virtucon
You're alluding to a membership much higher up in the Tinfoil Hat Club than I posess or aspire to. Also, I know there are still plenty of us out there that prefer printed books, so I have no fear that bookstores that sell them will be going away during at least the remainder of my lifetime.
Turn off computer. Call and cancel internet service. Spend internet money on more books to read. /thread
I think it's even worse than you think it is. Much of the Republican party are also bible-thumpers, believe the Earth is only 6000 years old, that God put it here for our use (and, apparently, abuse), that the Apocalypse is coming soon anyway, so why bother trying to keep the environment clean? Of course it becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. When the environment has been so thoroughly fucked by pollution and raped by industry that it'll never recover, then they'll say "See, the bible was right! The End Days are here!". Fuck them sideways with a rusty chainsaw, I say.
/. is fine the way it is, don't need no fuckin' facelift.
All that having been said, transparency in the EPA could be a good thing -- but any review of the science behind their policy decisions needs to be reviewed only by authoritative sources carefully chosen for their complete neutrality and incorruptibility, if there can even be such a thing.
Also: FUCK BETA XD
No, it's not a new concept (someone above mentioned their car having it in 2004, but I know for a fact that some Japanese auto manufacturer had a dead-reckoning nav system even back in the 1980's or 1990's), and it's not new for U-Blox either (I worked at a defense contractor, and we used U-Blox GPS receivers, I personally worked with them, and knew of their dead-reckoning technology, and this was almost 10 years ago now), but U-Blox makes GPS receivers for high-end embedded applications, not so much for consumer-level applications, and automobiles are consumer-level, so I'm not so surprised that it's taken this long for someone to step up and close that gap. As a sidebar it's a fairly small gap compared to what it used to be, GPS receivers are amazingly more sensitive than they used to be when companies like Trimble and Garmin were the only games in town, cutting-edge GPS receivers can pull satellite signals out from all the way down to a few dB above the noise floor now, even in "urban canyon" locations where signal is blocked by buildings as well as being muddled.
..and of course, my being properly paranoid, this technology also means that it's going to be that much harder to defeat the GPS in your car so that the government and nosy corporations can't track our every move when driving. I suppose even if you disconnected the antenna, it'd eventually ask you to enter your co-ordinates so D.R. would work, but I suppose you could put in "Barrow, Alaska" or something and let it try to figure out how you're driving across the ocean..
I keep saying the technology is bad because it is bad; any technology that makes it easier for people to spy on and monitor people is a misuse of technology, plain and simple, and should be discouraged at every opportunity. You come off as extremely naive: you state " it wasn't the case in the US from the 50s-80s", which is completely wrong, that's when it all started. You seem to believe that Japanese businessmen are so wonderful and would never do anything to improve their bottom line at the expense of their workers or their workers' human rights, which I also dispute, because humans are humans, and regardless of which continent (or island in this case) they're on, there are always those who want to control everything and everyone around them. I see no reason to believe that Japanese bosses are any better in that regard than anyone anywhere else, especially in this day and age where things are so bad everywhere that you find out what people are really like.
As a side note, I wouldn't at all be surprised if you're one of those people who have no problem with the government and corporations monitoring you 24/7/365 and who says "I have nothing to hide so I have nothing to fear" when anyone asks you why you don't seem to care about your privacy being violated.
If it's so great then why do you have Japanese workers who commit suicide over their jobs? How is that 'normal' in any sense of the word? How can any set of circumstances, cultural or otherwise, be a good thing if it's ever causing people to feel the need to end their lives?
You just pretty much ignored anything I had to say and just launched into another pro-Japanese business practices infomercial.
Whether Japanese business models are 'misunderstood' or not isn't relevant. I'm sure that many Japanese bosses are very respectful of their workers, and as you say, treat them like family, but that's not 100% the case and I think you know that. If it was 100% true then technology like this wouldn't have been developed in the first place because it wouldn't be considered necessary. If you don't trust your employees, then what's the point in employing them in the first place? Furthermore, doesn't it make much more sense to judge the value and efficiency of your employees based on their productivity, achievements, and the quality of their work rather than micro-managing them down to the level of how many minutes they spend in the bathroom relieving themselves and recordings of their conversations with other employees? Furthermore I really don't think that people like or want to be treated like 'assets' by their employer, at least not in the sense of being 'property of the Company', but they do like being treated as 'assets' in the sense that they're valuable and appreciated by their employers. Finally who can say they would enjoy being treated like an errant child or a convicted felon where they work, monitored constantly?
The ruling party doesn't like that you voted for the competition? Your car is now disabled. You spoke out against the government? Your car is now disabled. We don't have any specific reason to detain you but want to anyway? Your car is now disabled. Oh, and don't forget this one: Criminals hack the system so they can kick you out of your car and steal it, or rob you, or rape you, or kill you, or kidnap you? Your car is now disabled. Great idea fucktarded EU politicians!
I look at it this way: It could be very, very good, or very, very bad for the U.S. that this man is ex military brass. To elaborate, he's either going to be above-average when it comes to being honorable, law-abiding, and respectful of citizens' rights, incapable of having his core values compromised, or he's going to be an overgrown Boy Scout who thinks that blindly carrying out the orders and directives of his superiors is the highest calling he can aspire to. Only time will tell which this man turns out to be. Incidentally the true colors this man shows will also tell us quite a bit about Mr. Obama.