The problem with that mentality is the target audience of developers, not all developers are created equal. Companies like Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft use high dev kit costs to actively discourage the "talented amatuer" market of developers from working on their systems in favor of "big studio" developers. Google, on the other hand (along with Apple on the iPhone), have targeted the "talented amateur" demographic, specificaly, when they created their development kits. The problem with that is that the "talented amateur" is more likely to be operating on a shoe-string budget where they have to rely on their "developer version" of the phone as their primary cellphone. In light of the Open Source/garage developer community that Google has tried to foster around Android, it's wrong for Google to lock those people out of the phone's complete feature set. This is especially true when the only reason they're doing it is that their project lead allowed incompetently programmed DRM to ship with the product and they don't want to be bothered fixing it the right way.
This is one of those situations where a government mandate would go a long way. There should be state and federal laws requiring all government agencies to use OSS whenever possible. Unless a school is giving a class, specifically, in MS software then OSS systems should be used in the classroom. Personally, I do think high schools should maintain a MS Windows based lab (or dual boot) to teach basic workplace skills but that should constitute the only ~30 MS operating system licenses that school district should ever own (per high school).
This has nothing to do with liking or not liking Microsoft. Personally, I run Windows on my home computer and would find it impossible to run Linux because of the things I like to do (games). Even if I didn't game, I would still, probably, stick with Windows for compatibility.
My justification for requiring OSS systems, whenever possible, is based purely on cost. I believe that the schools in this country are horribly under funded. I think we get away with this because we allow upper-middle class and wealthy people in this country to make direct donations to their districts among other ways that school districts in well off areas end up providing an unfairly better educational experience to their students. However, while I do think we should be spending much more on our schools (and controlling how that money gets distributed better) I also think we need to be very smart with how we use the money we have.
Companies like MS will be quick to claim this is unfair competition on the part of government and that this will hurt their bottom line (and the economy by extension). While that might be true, any government money going to such companies represents corporate welfare. Perhaps, we will find it advantageous to provide such welfare but I believe that, if we do, it should be as obvious as possible so we can more easily quantify how much they are getting. We should be working to make government less convoluted, more transparent, and easier to understand. By running our schools in the most cost effective manner possible (in this case, the IT department), while leaving corporate welfare in the hands of other government departments, we help to make the true cost of education more clear without confusing price inflation.
I think that really depends on the school district. When I went to school in NY state (between NYC and Albany) security was pretty lax in most of the computer labs. The only issue we had was with one of the crazier school board members trying to ban internet access from the schools because of the possibility for viewing improper stuff (he actually argued that a 1950's education was good enough to put people on the moon, to which we asked if he was suggesting we go back to using slide-rules). The irony was that a teacher was already required to be present at all times and all the computers faced the center of the room. The idea that a student was going to be viewing porn sites without being noticed was absurd.
Actually, it sounds like he had plenty of reason to be suspicious in that case. Even if the hard drive was hers, it doesn't mean that she wasn't using it to steal confidential data from the system. This may not have even been a standard workplace. If this was a datacenter then that makes it even more suspicious. Just because a stranger walking around your datacenter tells you he/she is an auditor doesn't mean you just take their word for it, that's called social engineering. He might have, even, had a legitimate right to detain her as a "citizen's arrest" as it seems he had good reason to think she was a thief.
It does look like most of the things they are releasing are pure hype to win public opinion. With what you said, the first thing that pops to mind, as far as why she might have called the director rather than 911, was that she was trying to prove her story as an auditor to an admin who was, justifiably, refusing to let her leave without finding out what she was doing there. Detaining someone who may have been committing a crime doesn't represent a threat to her safety, but it does seem like the kind of way you could portray it if you wanted to smear his name.
I agree that the correct venue for this, probably, should have been civil court. However, even there I would tend to think that it would still have nothing to do with returning the actual key/password (not the least of which because by the time the case was heard a replacement key/password would have long been attained). The civil case, as far as I can see, would have more to do with the employer trying to prove that not returning providing the password/key before leaving employment represent malpractice on the part of the network engineer/driver (in order to bring the car analogy in line here the original key would have to have been lost before the driver was fired and he/she would have been fired for not allowing the car's owner to make a copy of the driver's copy).
If they chose to only have one person in their organization that knew the password, that was their own, stupid, mistake. Even if he were still employed by them, the only thing they can punish him with is termination for not giving it up. I suppose that they could sue him in civil court for damages caused by him withholding it (under the premise that it represent malpractice on the part of a network engineer) but even that I'm not sure of. The problem is, they aren't suing him in civil court, they brought charges in criminal court. He may not have been very professional about the whole thing, but that doesn't make it criminal.
Here's an example I used in another post:
Lets say I hire a driver to drive me around in my car. I give him my car key and tell him to go to Home Depot and make a copy using his own money. He returns my original key and then drives me around for a while until something happens and I fire him. There is no law that says he has to give me back that copy of my car key just because he no longer works for me regardless of whether, or not, I happened to loose my original. As long as he never attempts to use the key in my car after he's been fired, he hasn't committed a crime.
The problem with you're analogy is that car keys are a physical object. While they may not be worth much, it is still, at least, a petty offence to steal them.
A better analogy might be if I employ someone as a driver and then require them to take my keys to Home Depot and use their own money to make a copy without reimbursement. At that point, that copy is his/hers. Just because I fire that person doesn't give me the right to demand that key back even if the car's owner happens to loose the original. Of course, you still own the car but, unless that person tries to use that key after being fired, they haven't commited a crime just having it.
The whole thing stinks, but you never know until we see all the facts.
The picture taking incident could have been him flying off the handle like they make it out to be, or it could have been him taking pictures as cya insurance because he was concerned she might mess up (EIther intentionally or unintentionally) some mission-critical systems. One would wonder why she called a director, and not 911, if she was actually concerned for her personal safety. That makes it sound like, to me anyway, some of the hyperbole they were talking about in the article.
The thing about the router paging his work pager sounds like nothing. I see nothing out of the ordinary for an admin to set up a router to page his work pager if it has problems. How does this, in any way, signify him still having access if he no longer has the pager? He either has the pager (and is thus allowed to contact the network as an employee) or the pager is confiscated from him when he is fired (removing his access to the network). There may be more to the story, but that statement means nothing on it's own.
Well, if you're going to be an anal retentive prick about it, the Mediterranian Sea; the Black Sea; the Baltic Sea; the Sea of Japan; etc. The article summart title (the only part of the summary that was less specific than "the Atlantic") specified "ocean". This also suggests that you didn't even bother reading the body of the summary before commenting. Even on Slashdot that's pretty craptastic.
I doubt it has anything to do with payoff, or any other type of corruption. It probably has more to do with them representing the only people available that possess the, extremely specialized, knowledge needed to do the work. A lab worth of scientists and engineers with experience designing/testing cutting edge nuclear weapons isn't something you just pick up on Monster.com.
Actually, both your statements should be given the same, vitually nonexistent, level of creedance. Neither of you provided fact to back up your statements.
Architects and disaster investigators already have far more realistic simulators that they use for this purpose. In the case of major disasters like 9/11, I'm sure they write custom simulators. I've seen documentaries showing the simulators for 9/11 that do exactly the two things you just described (plane impact angle and fire escape sizes). Of course, in the real world of forensic science these simulations are far more scientific and far less flashy looking than games. There is no reason for the special effects and they can even get in the way of determining accurate results.
A good example of this is with military simulators. I used to look at footage of military simulators and wonder why, for all the money they spend on them, the graphics were never as a impressive as in the cutting edge games. Eventually, I learned enough about computer graphics, game design, and human vision (from a friend of mine that studies Color Science) to realize that, very often, the flashy special effects that we love so much in games and movies just aren't true to life. It may make the game/movie more exciting, but if your simulator trains a person to expect a big sound when things happen in the vacuum of space (random example) then they're not going to be prepared for it when they experience dead silence in real life.
In this case, the prof. in the story is simulating something simple. Also, the simulator is designed for use by a general audience where it is harder to keep their attention than an audience of professionals/specialists such as in the military. In this case, many of the flashy special effects can be added in without being a detriment to the skills being taught.
If it were realistic, that would be one boring game. Real life is rarely as "exciting" as the movies tell us. If there were something "dynamic" that those people could have done to save themselves, don't you think they would have? A realistic simulator of either event would probably involve your character trapped, unable to move, in a crush of people until the building falls down or the ship fills with water. Anything more exciting would be pure fantasy built, disrespectfully, in the trappings of a real-world tragedy.
Hrm, if I really stretch my imagination I can see how things like leaning out of cover and climbing might be usefull in real life. What I don't understand is why you'd need to simulate air-strikes and the body armor penetrating power of.223 rounds in a fire evacuation simulator. What college do you attend that makes those things common enough occurences to require routine drills? University of Baghdad? University of Kabul? Seriously though, everything you mentioned would be easy to implement in the Source Engine (as easy as anything is, I've heard rumors that the engine is kinda tough to develop for).
As the othe poster mentioned, modern 3D movie glasses from RealD use circular polarization. Not entirely familiar with ho that works but it sounds like it might do the trick. Also, my understanding is that in the case of costume/club contact lenses, like cat's eyes, they make minor changes to the shape of the contact lenses in order to keep them in the right orientation. I think that it would also be needed in order to make contact lenses to correct some vision problems like Astigmatism but I could be wrong about that.
Yea, it's not the guy with the Bat'leth you have to worry about. Those things aren't the most effectively balanced weapons. It's his two friends with lightsabers, waiting outside, that are the real threat...
Seriously though, this is the smartest course of action in any robbery/mugging whether your a store employee or just walking down the street. No amount of money you have on you or in the til is worth risking your life over. Companies like 7-11 train their employees his way to, for the most part, to avoid liability but even if they didn't, your life is more important than your job.
When I used to take Martial Arts classes, my instructors would define levels of self defence response, based on the seriousness of the situation, in a scale from 1 to 4. 1 was simple moves meant for a friend at a part that got drunk and rowdy (you don't want to injure them but you want to control the situation so they don't hurt you). 4 was for a serious situation where, for instance, you're cornered by an attacker/attackers with weapons and it's life-or-death. That was the "official" system. Unofficially, he would also describe what he called level 0 or "Nike-jutsu" to be used first if at all possible. It involved running away when you could be sure you wouldn't be caught/shot from behind.
My understanding is that Yucca mountain was for everything from spent fuel to incidentally contaminated materials such as reactor parts (which are pretty low grade compared to fuels as far as I know). As for transport, I don't see why you wouldn't just build these systems into existing plants. Right now, since Yucca isn't open, our store of spent fuel is being stored on-site at those plants. Building the new systems on the old sites would eliminate the need to transport fuel until the process is complete (At which point, you'd have bee transporting much larger quantities of the original fuel to Yucca anyway).
Not many people. It was, however, included as a feature in the newer nVidia stereo 3d drivers. It was also, coincidentally, what the OP suggested and what I was responding to.
First off, the image would be an, ugly, red/blue mess. Secondly, even if you used one of the more advanced shutter glasses or polerized 3d techniques you'd still end up looking at someone wearing goofy 3d glasses abscuring eye contact. Don't get me wrong, I have no problem with wearing 3d glasses when playing games or watching a movie but not when I'm trying to converse, face to face, with someone.
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The problem with that mentality is the target audience of developers, not all developers are created equal. Companies like Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft use high dev kit costs to actively discourage the "talented amatuer" market of developers from working on their systems in favor of "big studio" developers. Google, on the other hand (along with Apple on the iPhone), have targeted the "talented amateur" demographic, specificaly, when they created their development kits. The problem with that is that the "talented amateur" is more likely to be operating on a shoe-string budget where they have to rely on their "developer version" of the phone as their primary cellphone. In light of the Open Source/garage developer community that Google has tried to foster around Android, it's wrong for Google to lock those people out of the phone's complete feature set. This is especially true when the only reason they're doing it is that their project lead allowed incompetently programmed DRM to ship with the product and they don't want to be bothered fixing it the right way.
And that, my friends, is how you spur on economic recovery. With one sentence, he managed to save the floral industry in his town.
This is one of those situations where a government mandate would go a long way. There should be state and federal laws requiring all government agencies to use OSS whenever possible. Unless a school is giving a class, specifically, in MS software then OSS systems should be used in the classroom. Personally, I do think high schools should maintain a MS Windows based lab (or dual boot) to teach basic workplace skills but that should constitute the only ~30 MS operating system licenses that school district should ever own (per high school).
This has nothing to do with liking or not liking Microsoft. Personally, I run Windows on my home computer and would find it impossible to run Linux because of the things I like to do (games). Even if I didn't game, I would still, probably, stick with Windows for compatibility.
My justification for requiring OSS systems, whenever possible, is based purely on cost. I believe that the schools in this country are horribly under funded. I think we get away with this because we allow upper-middle class and wealthy people in this country to make direct donations to their districts among other ways that school districts in well off areas end up providing an unfairly better educational experience to their students. However, while I do think we should be spending much more on our schools (and controlling how that money gets distributed better) I also think we need to be very smart with how we use the money we have.
Companies like MS will be quick to claim this is unfair competition on the part of government and that this will hurt their bottom line (and the economy by extension). While that might be true, any government money going to such companies represents corporate welfare. Perhaps, we will find it advantageous to provide such welfare but I believe that, if we do, it should be as obvious as possible so we can more easily quantify how much they are getting. We should be working to make government less convoluted, more transparent, and easier to understand. By running our schools in the most cost effective manner possible (in this case, the IT department), while leaving corporate welfare in the hands of other government departments, we help to make the true cost of education more clear without confusing price inflation.
I think that really depends on the school district. When I went to school in NY state (between NYC and Albany) security was pretty lax in most of the computer labs. The only issue we had was with one of the crazier school board members trying to ban internet access from the schools because of the possibility for viewing improper stuff (he actually argued that a 1950's education was good enough to put people on the moon, to which we asked if he was suggesting we go back to using slide-rules). The irony was that a teacher was already required to be present at all times and all the computers faced the center of the room. The idea that a student was going to be viewing porn sites without being noticed was absurd.
Eh, I did miss the raspberry emote on the first read-through. If it was intended as a joke, then my apologies.
Actually, it sounds like he had plenty of reason to be suspicious in that case. Even if the hard drive was hers, it doesn't mean that she wasn't using it to steal confidential data from the system. This may not have even been a standard workplace. If this was a datacenter then that makes it even more suspicious. Just because a stranger walking around your datacenter tells you he/she is an auditor doesn't mean you just take their word for it, that's called social engineering. He might have, even, had a legitimate right to detain her as a "citizen's arrest" as it seems he had good reason to think she was a thief.
It does look like most of the things they are releasing are pure hype to win public opinion. With what you said, the first thing that pops to mind, as far as why she might have called the director rather than 911, was that she was trying to prove her story as an auditor to an admin who was, justifiably, refusing to let her leave without finding out what she was doing there. Detaining someone who may have been committing a crime doesn't represent a threat to her safety, but it does seem like the kind of way you could portray it if you wanted to smear his name.
I agree that the correct venue for this, probably, should have been civil court. However, even there I would tend to think that it would still have nothing to do with returning the actual key/password (not the least of which because by the time the case was heard a replacement key/password would have long been attained). The civil case, as far as I can see, would have more to do with the employer trying to prove that not returning providing the password/key before leaving employment represent malpractice on the part of the network engineer/driver (in order to bring the car analogy in line here the original key would have to have been lost before the driver was fired and he/she would have been fired for not allowing the car's owner to make a copy of the driver's copy).
Other solutions include:
* payphones in a location away from where they are staying.
* only contacting them through a lawyer or shelter.
* not contacting them ever again if they are, actually, that dangerous.
If they chose to only have one person in their organization that knew the password, that was their own, stupid, mistake. Even if he were still employed by them, the only thing they can punish him with is termination for not giving it up. I suppose that they could sue him in civil court for damages caused by him withholding it (under the premise that it represent malpractice on the part of a network engineer) but even that I'm not sure of. The problem is, they aren't suing him in civil court, they brought charges in criminal court. He may not have been very professional about the whole thing, but that doesn't make it criminal.
Here's an example I used in another post:
Lets say I hire a driver to drive me around in my car. I give him my car key and tell him to go to Home Depot and make a copy using his own money. He returns my original key and then drives me around for a while until something happens and I fire him. There is no law that says he has to give me back that copy of my car key just because he no longer works for me regardless of whether, or not, I happened to loose my original. As long as he never attempts to use the key in my car after he's been fired, he hasn't committed a crime.
The problem with you're analogy is that car keys are a physical object. While they may not be worth much, it is still, at least, a petty offence to steal them.
A better analogy might be if I employ someone as a driver and then require them to take my keys to Home Depot and use their own money to make a copy without reimbursement. At that point, that copy is his/hers. Just because I fire that person doesn't give me the right to demand that key back even if the car's owner happens to loose the original. Of course, you still own the car but, unless that person tries to use that key after being fired, they haven't commited a crime just having it.
The whole thing stinks, but you never know until we see all the facts.
The picture taking incident could have been him flying off the handle like they make it out to be, or it could have been him taking pictures as cya insurance because he was concerned she might mess up (EIther intentionally or unintentionally) some mission-critical systems. One would wonder why she called a director, and not 911, if she was actually concerned for her personal safety. That makes it sound like, to me anyway, some of the hyperbole they were talking about in the article.
The thing about the router paging his work pager sounds like nothing. I see nothing out of the ordinary for an admin to set up a router to page his work pager if it has problems. How does this, in any way, signify him still having access if he no longer has the pager? He either has the pager (and is thus allowed to contact the network as an employee) or the pager is confiscated from him when he is fired (removing his access to the network). There may be more to the story, but that statement means nothing on it's own.
Yea, something that sticks out and is easy to remember like "Chemical Castration".
Well, if you're going to be an anal retentive prick about it, the Mediterranian Sea; the Black Sea; the Baltic Sea; the Sea of Japan; etc. The article summart title (the only part of the summary that was less specific than "the Atlantic") specified "ocean". This also suggests that you didn't even bother reading the body of the summary before commenting. Even on Slashdot that's pretty craptastic.
I doubt it has anything to do with payoff, or any other type of corruption. It probably has more to do with them representing the only people available that possess the, extremely specialized, knowledge needed to do the work. A lab worth of scientists and engineers with experience designing/testing cutting edge nuclear weapons isn't something you just pick up on Monster.com.
Or people, don't forget people.
Actually, both your statements should be given the same, vitually nonexistent, level of creedance. Neither of you provided fact to back up your statements.
Architects and disaster investigators already have far more realistic simulators that they use for this purpose. In the case of major disasters like 9/11, I'm sure they write custom simulators. I've seen documentaries showing the simulators for 9/11 that do exactly the two things you just described (plane impact angle and fire escape sizes). Of course, in the real world of forensic science these simulations are far more scientific and far less flashy looking than games. There is no reason for the special effects and they can even get in the way of determining accurate results.
A good example of this is with military simulators. I used to look at footage of military simulators and wonder why, for all the money they spend on them, the graphics were never as a impressive as in the cutting edge games. Eventually, I learned enough about computer graphics, game design, and human vision (from a friend of mine that studies Color Science) to realize that, very often, the flashy special effects that we love so much in games and movies just aren't true to life. It may make the game/movie more exciting, but if your simulator trains a person to expect a big sound when things happen in the vacuum of space (random example) then they're not going to be prepared for it when they experience dead silence in real life.
In this case, the prof. in the story is simulating something simple. Also, the simulator is designed for use by a general audience where it is harder to keep their attention than an audience of professionals/specialists such as in the military. In this case, many of the flashy special effects can be added in without being a detriment to the skills being taught.
If it were realistic, that would be one boring game. Real life is rarely as "exciting" as the movies tell us. If there were something "dynamic" that those people could have done to save themselves, don't you think they would have? A realistic simulator of either event would probably involve your character trapped, unable to move, in a crush of people until the building falls down or the ship fills with water. Anything more exciting would be pure fantasy built, disrespectfully, in the trappings of a real-world tragedy.
Hrm, if I really stretch my imagination I can see how things like leaning out of cover and climbing might be usefull in real life. What I don't understand is why you'd need to simulate air-strikes and the body armor penetrating power of .223 rounds in a fire evacuation simulator. What college do you attend that makes those things common enough occurences to require routine drills? University of Baghdad? University of Kabul? Seriously though, everything you mentioned would be easy to implement in the Source Engine (as easy as anything is, I've heard rumors that the engine is kinda tough to develop for).
As the othe poster mentioned, modern 3D movie glasses from RealD use circular polarization. Not entirely familiar with ho that works but it sounds like it might do the trick. Also, my understanding is that in the case of costume/club contact lenses, like cat's eyes, they make minor changes to the shape of the contact lenses in order to keep them in the right orientation. I think that it would also be needed in order to make contact lenses to correct some vision problems like Astigmatism but I could be wrong about that.
Yea, it's not the guy with the Bat'leth you have to worry about. Those things aren't the most effectively balanced weapons. It's his two friends with lightsabers, waiting outside, that are the real threat...
Seriously though, this is the smartest course of action in any robbery/mugging whether your a store employee or just walking down the street. No amount of money you have on you or in the til is worth risking your life over. Companies like 7-11 train their employees his way to, for the most part, to avoid liability but even if they didn't, your life is more important than your job.
When I used to take Martial Arts classes, my instructors would define levels of self defence response, based on the seriousness of the situation, in a scale from 1 to 4. 1 was simple moves meant for a friend at a part that got drunk and rowdy (you don't want to injure them but you want to control the situation so they don't hurt you). 4 was for a serious situation where, for instance, you're cornered by an attacker/attackers with weapons and it's life-or-death. That was the "official" system. Unofficially, he would also describe what he called level 0 or "Nike-jutsu" to be used first if at all possible. It involved running away when you could be sure you wouldn't be caught/shot from behind.
My understanding is that Yucca mountain was for everything from spent fuel to incidentally contaminated materials such as reactor parts (which are pretty low grade compared to fuels as far as I know). As for transport, I don't see why you wouldn't just build these systems into existing plants. Right now, since Yucca isn't open, our store of spent fuel is being stored on-site at those plants. Building the new systems on the old sites would eliminate the need to transport fuel until the process is complete (At which point, you'd have bee transporting much larger quantities of the original fuel to Yucca anyway).
Not many people. It was, however, included as a feature in the newer nVidia stereo 3d drivers. It was also, coincidentally, what the OP suggested and what I was responding to.
There's even an open source work-a-like: http://www.free-track.net/english/
First off, the image would be an, ugly, red/blue mess. Secondly, even if you used one of the more advanced shutter glasses or polerized 3d techniques you'd still end up looking at someone wearing goofy 3d glasses abscuring eye contact. Don't get me wrong, I have no problem with wearing 3d glasses when playing games or watching a movie but not when I'm trying to converse, face to face, with someone.