Much maligned for his business practices, is this proof that sometimes the ends justify the means?
How do you feel about criminals who say, "I only steal to feed my family?"
You may be saying, "for one brief moment, some tiny fraction of Gates' perversion of the free market has been justified by a humanitarian act." That would be entirely valid. Or you might (with a different post) take a Hayek-like position that since the MS monopoly is enforced by the need for interoperability (and not government guns) that it is not a bad thing.
But supposing, as your post does, that even if his business practices do subvert the economy they are justified because some of the ill-gotten booty is used for humanitarian ends is ridiculous. You would have to show that the monopoly profits are exceeded by the effective output of the charitable contributions. Microsoft brings in about 7.5 billion per year, of which about 2.5 billion is profit. If Gates gives three times this one contribution every year, and it is used with 100% efficiency, that would still be one one thousandth of Microsoft's annual profit. I think even Hayek would grant that Microsoft's monopoly garners more than a $0.20 monopoly price increase over the free market price of Windows XP.
The bureau is no longer saying when the project, originally scheduled for completion by the end of 2003, might be finished....
A prototype of the Virtual Case File was delivered to the FBI last month by Science Applications International Corp. of San Diego. But bureau officials consider it inadequate and already outdated, and are using it mainly on a trial basis to glean information from users that will be incorporated in a new design.
Science Applications has received about $170 million from the FBI for its work on the project....
A spokesman for Science Applications, Ron ollars, said via e-mail that the company had "successfully completed" delivery of the initial version of the Virtual Case File software last month.
The stripped-down prototype will be running for three months. The bureau plans to then "shut it down, take all the lessons learned and incorporate them in a future case management system," a person familiar with the bureau's plans said....
An outside computer analyst who has studied the FBI's technology efforts said the agency's problem is that its officials thought they could get it right the first time. "That never happens with anybody," he said.
Some sources sympathetic to the FBI defended the process, and said that what has been learned in designing the software has given the bureau valuable design and user information.
The first time they saw the software was a year after the delivery date. So they must have been using waterfall. Then they defend the process by saying the only good thing they got out of it was the information for the next pass of iterative development. So the best thing about waterfall is that when it fails you can turn it into iterative. Pure genius.
Okay, at the risk of pissing off the tin foil hat crowd, I have to ask: what's the problem here?
Two problems:
1. The GPS didn't automatically turn off when he turned the car onto private property. Thus the argument that he didn't have a reasonable expectation of privacy when on public roads is incomplete.
2. Technological surveillance measures drop the cost of surveillance to arbitrarily low levels. Thus, not restricting their use effectively means that soon everyone will be under constant police supervision when not in their home (and perhaps even then, since the sound waves escape the boundaries of their domicile and thus exit the boundaries of their expectation of privacy). The problem with this is the chilling effect it has on freedom of action, and the consequent side effect on freedom of thought. People who know they are under surveillance do not act or speak freely. My understanding of consciousness implies that without the ability to speak freely, one's freedom of thought is also at least somewhat impinged.
2b. An additional side effect that I believe is already occuring as a result is that the perception of "police as constant chaperone" increases the disassociation between a person and their responsibility for their actions. They don't feel like they have sufficient freedom, and thus don't feel accountable for their choices. This is contributing to the rise in victimhood and complacency in the US over the past few decades.
It's up to you whether those things are problems, and if they are problems, whether they are sufficiently offset by the benefit of more thorough law enforcement. But those are what we, the tin foil hat people, see as the problems.
Tiwana and Keil were asking MIS directors what *they* thought, not project managers or developers, leading me to believe that this is more based on client perception than someone with experience working on said projects.
Moreover, Tiwana and Keil have more business than science in their background, and neither appears to have practical experience implementing large systems.
Now, while a lack of any sort of methodology is a disaster waiting to happen, I have a difficult time believing that a bad fit for a project creates more risk than project complexity and shifting requirements combined, as they suggest.
In addition, in the section on fitting method to project, they claim that the best place for waterfall is, "... for managing larger projects where requirements are better understood." Contrast this with some little organizations like TRW, IBM, DoD, et al who have found that waterfall is the number one cause of failure of large projects. (see Iterative and Incremental Development: A Brief History)
How did these chimps get their snakeoil published in ACM Queue?
the construction industry has been doing huge projects of equal complexity for centuries.
What's the most complex mechanical device you can think of? As far as dealing with human input goes, about the most complex, common, purely mechanical device I can think of is an adding machine (or maybe a cash register). A damned site less common would be Babbage's Analytical Engine or the Bombes from WWII, but those could hardly be said to have been around for centuries, and still don't touch the complexity of even a relatively simple modern CRM system (for example).
This may be a simple failing in my imagination - can you name some complex mechanical devices? A jet engine? Handles extremes, but not complicated. A mechanical wrist watch? Lots of very fine tolerances, but quite simple to understand. What am I missing?
WTF is this "neo"-con business? I mean, isn't the whole point of being conservative an attempt to (a) maintain the status quo or (b) revert something to a previous form? I don't get the "neo" prefix.
The following is an attempt to be as lacking in judgement about the right or wrong of it as possible. Use your own judgement.
Neo-conservative is distinguished from traditional conservative by its global policy agenda and fiscal policy. Traditional conservatives follow the "walk softly and carry a big stick" agenda militarily, neo-conservatives believe we have a duty to bring democracy to other nations. Traditional conservatives believe in fiscal conservancy (IE: zero deficit), neo-conservatives believe in deficit spending to promote future growth.
There's more info on neo-conservatism, in their own words, here.
On the liberal / conservative / left / right / democrat / republican / neo-conservative / other thing, I haven't much of an opinion. I'm too busy trying to convince people that hacker and cracker are different.:)
but when you run into something that's wrong, it's really wrong.
I'm curious what is really wrong about the Fox News piece. There are a couple of other replies asking the same question that appear to indicate a bias against Fox News, and I want to make clear that I'm not railing against Fox. I host a highly politically charged mailing list with extremists and moderates from the full spectrum. While there is strong disagreement on whether Fox News presents the views of the majority of the US, those from both the left and the right concur that, overall, it is presented with a neo-conservative perspective. Likewise, members of the list from both the left and right concur that The New York Times presents things from a liberal perspective. I hasten to add that the fact that those people concur does not make the content of the allegations fact, but it does make the allegations themselves worthy of inclusion in a proper analysis of current events.
If the Fox News piece were reflective of some bias in Wikipedia, I would not expect to see reports of left bias allegations in the article on The New York Times - but, indeed, the entry for The New York Times includes a similar section on allegations of bias.
This strikes me as being about stating the facts. There are allegations of bias, and it's not Wikipedia's job to decide that those allegations are correct (and state them as fact) or that they are incorrect (and not state them). The role of an encyclopedia, at least in the context of current events, and where made possible by the technological capabilities of Wikipedia, is to state the facts, and make clear when those facts are allegations (IE: the allegation itself is a fact, the truth of the content of the allegation may be questionable).
I agree with your sentiment, but is "communism" the correct word? I'm just asking if RMS indeed indeed calls himself a communist, or is that your word?
Definitely my word. I neither know nor think that RMS has ever used it (it's not a politically correct term in the United States). Also, I base my understanding of the terms "communism" and "socialism" on their roots, "commune" and "society" (IE: communism benefits primarily those who participate in the community, socialism benefits everyone in the society regardless of participation; thus military ~= socialist, GPL ~= communist), not on the works of Marx, Lenin, or any of the other far left philosophers, so my use of those terms may also be flawed.
Considering the billions and man-centuries now tied up in GPL'ed software, this all scares me.
This is one of the great things about capitalism, about the amount of capital flowing into GPL and LGPL software, and about the amount of capital flow that now depends on GPL and LGPL software. Since a very large number of very large companies are now making money from the GPL and LGPL (some directly, some indirectly), it is far more likely that, eventually, they will be upheld in the legal system. Either by court decision based on well funded legal teams (as in SCO v. Lots of Big Companies), or by court cases that go the wrong way and result in the creation of new legislation.
Ultimately, the legal system (at least in the US) is intended largely to support the freedom of the people to pursue happiness. For many, that pursuit involves producing and consuming goods and services. As such, the legal system must support the efficient production and distribution of goods and services (wealth). As such, if lots of wealth is being efficiently created and distributed as a result of GPL and LGPL software, the legal system will defend those licenses (though it may take several attempts and failures along the way).
As much as you have been criticized for being an extremist in these matters,
I'd like to add my 2 cents:
To the extent that you have been, thank you for being an extremist in these matters. We have visionary extremists on the other side of the argument (eg: Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison), so we need somebody who can articulate the extremist communist view. Many institutions in the world function best in a communist or socialist structure; for example, US military defense, which is funded according to ones ability and provided equally to all citizens(*). Given that information has a zero cost of reproduction, we have to at least have someone hypothesizing: "Communism may be more efficient in this case."
* and occasionally provided to other countries, both willing and unwilling, haha. (it's a joke. laugh.)
Be afraid. Be very afraid. The "Consultation Document on Data Retention" (the directive that will be used by the commission in establishing the rules) contains the requirement, "ensure that the data is only retained for a limited period of time." As we know from copyright law in the US, that currently means, "100 years plus automatic increases for the next 25 years then we'll decide how much further to extend it." And it has been argued by former congressman Sonny Bono that it really means, "forever minus a day."
How exactly do you compete against the government?
The same way FedEx and UPS compete with the USPS.
When was the last time you heard of the government offering new, innovative services?
Interstates, police, military, courts - all those are socialist services provided by the US, state, and local governments. And they are more efficient as public services than as private services. Capitalism is great, but there are some things at which it is not as efficient as socialism - things which the US currently uses and which work pretty darned well. We have a socialist military - it's funded by the people through taxation, and is provided equally to all. We have socialist police, roads, and courts.
Now, I'm not saying that a socialist WiFi infrastructure necessarily is one of the things which is more efficient if run socialistically than capitalistically, but the US definitely has both capitalist and socialist institutions, and has examples of both that work well and examples of both that work poorly.
Sorry if I'm repeating something already said by someone else, but, umm, don't cars already have a "distance travelled" device that must, by law, not be tampered with? I think it's called the odometer. WTF do they need a GPS for? That just reports location - calculating distance is a side effect. Were they just trying to come up with a more expensive way to track something that is already being tracked by every car in the state, or are they, idunno, trying to slip a tracking device through on the back of seemingly innocuous legislation?
Tin foil hat? No. Either they're stupid and wasting money (for not using the odometer), or they're lying.
they may also promote an inaccurate view of science: prosecutors throughout the country now worry about juries that refuse to accept eyewitness accounts or even outright confessions, and instead exclusively demand the kind of forensic evidence they see on CSI.
Hmmm, if our society is at the point where fictional entertainment alters the very nature of the justice process, perhaps the accuracy of CSI doesn't really matter much at all. Some delightful little half-connection in my mind is causing me to think of the bumper sticker out in the parking lot that reads, "Evolution is Science Fiction." Seriously - the quality of the content of any single show is completely meaningless when compared to the fact that a huge chunk of America takes things like television and religion as largely unbiased representations of fact.
Sorry to be a downer, I like CSI. Pretty people pretending to be scientists rock.
Ok, let's hear some ideas. I'm a teacher, so I'll be ecstatic to get some help in this area.
There is nothing practical that can help. I was going to say, "Punish the parents when the kids grades turn south, and reward them when they turn north, relative to the mean." But that's not practical. There is nothing practical that can help in this day of total lack of personal accountability.
However, further removing the sense of personal accountability (by making a little RF device responsible for attendance instead of the child/teacher) is not an improvement. So please don't use "there's no other option" as an equivalent to "this option won't make things worse."
Seriously, most proponents of RFID technology site its benefits in stock and supply line management only, and keep assurring us that RFID tags embedded in products will never be used to track people. And yet we're now seeing instances of the middleman, i.e the product tag, being bypassed altogether and people being tagged outright.
Good morning, nice to see you're awake. Did you sleep well? Good. Now join us in yelling, "WAKE UP!" at the other 99% of America that still think we're wearing tin-foil hats.
We're already much safer from terrorism than we are from getting eaten by sharks, so "safe" is not an issue.
Actually, there aren't many deaths from sharks in the US each year. However, over the past ten years more Americans have been killed by the combined evils of horses and domestic electrical wiring than by terrorists.
http://www.anapsid.org/pdv-boid.html
If we don't pass PATRIOT 2, then the horses and toasters have already won.
could be the call to arms of MS gettingready to start trying to collect/stifle with their patent suite. . . . Thank heavens that IBM can fight this one toe-to-toe.
I wholeheartedly agree with you, and think it is far more one-sided. MS could file suit against five million Linux users. IBM could file suit against one hundred million Windows users. MS would get nuked... *if there were any grounds for suing the users of products for that product's IP infringement*. But there is none - this is entirely about media attention and the gullability of Joe Public and Joe Media (the stupor twins).
8 million firefox users (as of spreadfirefox.com) all hitting mozilla.org as their default start page must generate quite a lot of traffic, and the start page wasn't that useful other than telling you what you just downloaded and installed.
I think Karl Rove tampered with a bunch of MSIE machines to switch their home page to mozilla.org.
The problem is, the further you get from the first layer, the more distorted the original facts get.
While this is true in many non-comment blogs, and on blogs with a small audience, it is clearly untrue on blogs with a large and resourceful audience that is free to comment and submit stories. Groklaw and Slashdot are perfect examples. The original story posting is rarely the meat of the story - the meat is in the correlary evidence and analysis that occurs when the hive-mind of the audience takes the story on. A sufficiently large hive-mind is one helluva lot more powerful than any newsroom+reporters for many (if not most) topics. The ability for a few thousand people to find evidence, debate, analyze, critique, and spin should not be taken lightly.
Blackboxvoting.org is a non-profit supported by donations. Screw the FSF and the EFF.
Better yet, give to them all. If you don't worship one of the traditional deities, then, like me, consider giving the 10% you're saving to these orgs. It makes me feel just as good about myself as church used to, and it makes a difference here in the secular plane.
I'm a professional software developer and I can't think of any reason to include the system described. Maybe in a testing environment, but in a critical system like this I'd forgoe simpler testing in favor of more complete, and insist that testing be done on "release" versions of the software, and that none of the sort of debugging hacks developers like to add be permitted.
That's precisely the reason that Diebold's version is done and broken, and the computer scientists' version isn't ready yet.
Just like the business world, the managers reward the first people to get the product out the door, then when it dies they say, "all software sucks."
Slashdot Mirror
Before anyone else points this out - my math is way off. I slipped 3 decimal places.
Much maligned for his business practices, is this proof that sometimes the ends justify the means?
How do you feel about criminals who say, "I only steal to feed my family?"
You may be saying, "for one brief moment, some tiny fraction of Gates' perversion of the free market has been justified by a humanitarian act." That would be entirely valid. Or you might (with a different post) take a Hayek-like position that since the MS monopoly is enforced by the need for interoperability (and not government guns) that it is not a bad thing.
But supposing, as your post does, that even if his business practices do subvert the economy they are justified because some of the ill-gotten booty is used for humanitarian ends is ridiculous. You would have to show that the monopoly profits are exceeded by the effective output of the charitable contributions. Microsoft brings in about 7.5 billion per year, of which about 2.5 billion is profit. If Gates gives three times this one contribution every year, and it is used with 100% efficiency, that would still be one one thousandth of Microsoft's annual profit. I think even Hayek would grant that Microsoft's monopoly garners more than a $0.20 monopoly price increase over the free market price of Windows XP.
The bureau is no longer saying when the project, originally scheduled for completion by the end of 2003, might be finished. ...
...
...
A prototype of the Virtual Case File was delivered to the FBI last month by Science Applications International Corp. of San Diego. But bureau officials consider it inadequate and already outdated, and are using it mainly on a trial basis to glean information from users that will be incorporated in a new design.
Science Applications has received about $170 million from the FBI for its work on the project.
A spokesman for Science Applications, Ron ollars, said via e-mail that the company had "successfully completed" delivery of the initial version of the Virtual Case File software last month.
The stripped-down prototype will be running for three months. The bureau plans to then "shut it down, take all the lessons learned and incorporate them in a future case management system," a person familiar with the bureau's plans said.
An outside computer analyst who has studied the FBI's technology efforts said the agency's problem is that its officials thought they could get it right the first time. "That never happens with anybody," he said.
Some sources sympathetic to the FBI defended the process, and said that what has been learned in designing the software has given the bureau
valuable design and user information.
The first time they saw the software was a year after the delivery date. So they must have been using waterfall. Then they defend the process by saying the only good thing they got out of it was the information for the next pass of iterative development. So the best thing about waterfall is that when it fails you can turn it into iterative. Pure genius.
Okay, at the risk of pissing off the tin foil hat crowd, I have to ask: what's the problem here?
Two problems:
1. The GPS didn't automatically turn off when he turned the car onto private property. Thus the argument that he didn't have a reasonable expectation of privacy when on public roads is incomplete.
2. Technological surveillance measures drop the cost of surveillance to arbitrarily low levels. Thus, not restricting their use effectively means that soon everyone will be under constant police supervision when not in their home (and perhaps even then, since the sound waves escape the boundaries of their domicile and thus exit the boundaries of their expectation of privacy). The problem with this is the chilling effect it has on freedom of action, and the consequent side effect on freedom of thought. People who know they are under surveillance do not act or speak freely. My understanding of consciousness implies that without the ability to speak freely, one's freedom of thought is also at least somewhat impinged.
2b. An additional side effect that I believe is already occuring as a result is that the perception of "police as constant chaperone" increases the disassociation between a person and their responsibility for their actions. They don't feel like they have sufficient freedom, and thus don't feel accountable for their choices. This is contributing to the rise in victimhood and complacency in the US over the past few decades.
It's up to you whether those things are problems, and if they are problems, whether they are sufficiently offset by the benefit of more thorough law enforcement. But those are what we, the tin foil hat people, see as the problems.
Tiwana and Keil were asking MIS directors what *they* thought, not project managers or developers, leading me to believe that this is more based on client perception than someone with experience working on said projects.
Moreover, Tiwana and Keil have more business than science in their background, and neither appears to have practical experience implementing large systems.
Now, while a lack of any sort of methodology is a disaster waiting to happen, I have a difficult time believing that a bad fit for a project creates more risk than project complexity and shifting requirements combined, as they suggest.
In addition, in the section on fitting method to project, they claim that the best place for waterfall is, "... for managing larger projects where requirements are better understood." Contrast this with some little organizations like TRW, IBM, DoD, et al who have found that waterfall is the number one cause of failure of large projects. (see Iterative and Incremental Development: A Brief History)
How did these chimps get their snakeoil published in ACM Queue?
the construction industry has been doing huge projects of equal complexity for centuries.
What's the most complex mechanical device you can think of? As far as dealing with human input goes, about the most complex, common, purely mechanical device I can think of is an adding machine (or maybe a cash register). A damned site less common would be Babbage's Analytical Engine or the Bombes from WWII, but those could hardly be said to have been around for centuries, and still don't touch the complexity of even a relatively simple modern CRM system (for example).
This may be a simple failing in my imagination - can you name some complex mechanical devices? A jet engine? Handles extremes, but not complicated. A mechanical wrist watch? Lots of very fine tolerances, but quite simple to understand. What am I missing?
WTF is this "neo"-con business? I mean, isn't the whole point of being conservative an attempt to (a) maintain the status quo or (b) revert something to a previous form? I don't get the "neo" prefix.
:)
The following is an attempt to be as lacking in judgement about the right or wrong of it as possible. Use your own judgement.
Neo-conservative is distinguished from traditional conservative by its global policy agenda and fiscal policy. Traditional conservatives follow the "walk softly and carry a big stick" agenda militarily, neo-conservatives believe we have a duty to bring democracy to other nations. Traditional conservatives believe in fiscal conservancy (IE: zero deficit), neo-conservatives believe in deficit spending to promote future growth.
There's more info on neo-conservatism, in their own words, here.
On the liberal / conservative / left / right / democrat / republican / neo-conservative / other thing, I haven't much of an opinion. I'm too busy trying to convince people that hacker and cracker are different.
but when you run into something that's wrong, it's really wrong.
I'm curious what is really wrong about the Fox News piece. There are a couple of other replies asking the same question that appear to indicate a bias against Fox News, and I want to make clear that I'm not railing against Fox. I host a highly politically charged mailing list with extremists and moderates from the full spectrum. While there is strong disagreement on whether Fox News presents the views of the majority of the US, those from both the left and the right concur that, overall, it is presented with a neo-conservative perspective. Likewise, members of the list from both the left and right concur that The New York Times presents things from a liberal perspective. I hasten to add that the fact that those people concur does not make the content of the allegations fact, but it does make the allegations themselves worthy of inclusion in a proper analysis of current events.
If the Fox News piece were reflective of some bias in Wikipedia, I would not expect to see reports of left bias allegations in the article on The New York Times - but, indeed, the entry for The New York Times includes a similar section on allegations of bias.
This strikes me as being about stating the facts. There are allegations of bias, and it's not Wikipedia's job to decide that those allegations are correct (and state them as fact) or that they are incorrect (and not state them). The role of an encyclopedia, at least in the context of current events, and where made possible by the technological capabilities of Wikipedia, is to state the facts, and make clear when those facts are allegations (IE: the allegation itself is a fact, the truth of the content of the allegation may be questionable).
> Studies have shown that developers believe Microsoft is the top vendor in addressing their interoperability concerns.
Which developers? Windows developers?
And furthermore:
I agree with your sentiment, but is "communism" the correct word? I'm just asking if RMS indeed indeed calls himself a communist, or is that your word?
Definitely my word. I neither know nor think that RMS has ever used it (it's not a politically correct term in the United States). Also, I base my understanding of the terms "communism" and "socialism" on their roots, "commune" and "society" (IE: communism benefits primarily those who participate in the community, socialism benefits everyone in the society regardless of participation; thus military ~= socialist, GPL ~= communist), not on the works of Marx, Lenin, or any of the other far left philosophers, so my use of those terms may also be flawed.
Considering the billions and man-centuries now tied up in GPL'ed software, this all scares me.
This is one of the great things about capitalism, about the amount of capital flowing into GPL and LGPL software, and about the amount of capital flow that now depends on GPL and LGPL software. Since a very large number of very large companies are now making money from the GPL and LGPL (some directly, some indirectly), it is far more likely that, eventually, they will be upheld in the legal system. Either by court decision based on well funded legal teams (as in SCO v. Lots of Big Companies), or by court cases that go the wrong way and result in the creation of new legislation.
Ultimately, the legal system (at least in the US) is intended largely to support the freedom of the people to pursue happiness. For many, that pursuit involves producing and consuming goods and services. As such, the legal system must support the efficient production and distribution of goods and services (wealth). As such, if lots of wealth is being efficiently created and distributed as a result of GPL and LGPL software, the legal system will defend those licenses (though it may take several attempts and failures along the way).
As much as you have been criticized for being an extremist in these matters,
I'd like to add my 2 cents:
To the extent that you have been, thank you for being an extremist in these matters. We have visionary extremists on the other side of the argument (eg: Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison), so we need somebody who can articulate the extremist communist view. Many institutions in the world function best in a communist or socialist structure; for example, US military defense, which is funded according to ones ability and provided equally to all citizens(*). Given that information has a zero cost of reproduction, we have to at least have someone hypothesizing: "Communism may be more efficient in this case."
* and occasionally provided to other countries, both willing and unwilling, haha. (it's a joke. laugh.)
Be afraid. Be very afraid. The "Consultation Document on Data Retention" (the directive that will be used by the commission in establishing the rules) contains the requirement, "ensure that the data is only retained for a limited period of time." As we know from copyright law in the US, that currently means, "100 years plus automatic increases for the next 25 years then we'll decide how much further to extend it." And it has been argued by former congressman Sonny Bono that it really means, "forever minus a day."
How exactly do you compete against the government?
The same way FedEx and UPS compete with the USPS.
When was the last time you heard of the government offering new, innovative services?
Interstates, police, military, courts - all those are socialist services provided by the US, state, and local governments. And they are more efficient as public services than as private services. Capitalism is great, but there are some things at which it is not as efficient as socialism - things which the US currently uses and which work pretty darned well. We have a socialist military - it's funded by the people through taxation, and is provided equally to all. We have socialist police, roads, and courts.
Now, I'm not saying that a socialist WiFi infrastructure necessarily is one of the things which is more efficient if run socialistically than capitalistically, but the US definitely has both capitalist and socialist institutions, and has examples of both that work well and examples of both that work poorly.
Sorry if I'm repeating something already said by someone else, but, umm, don't cars already have a "distance travelled" device that must, by law, not be tampered with? I think it's called the odometer. WTF do they need a GPS for? That just reports location - calculating distance is a side effect. Were they just trying to come up with a more expensive way to track something that is already being tracked by every car in the state, or are they, idunno, trying to slip a tracking device through on the back of seemingly innocuous legislation?
Tin foil hat? No. Either they're stupid and wasting money (for not using the odometer), or they're lying.
they may also promote an inaccurate view of science: prosecutors throughout the country now worry about juries that refuse to accept eyewitness accounts or even outright confessions, and instead exclusively demand the kind of forensic evidence they see on CSI.
Hmmm, if our society is at the point where fictional entertainment alters the very nature of the justice process, perhaps the accuracy of CSI doesn't really matter much at all. Some delightful little half-connection in my mind is causing me to think of the bumper sticker out in the parking lot that reads, "Evolution is Science Fiction." Seriously - the quality of the content of any single show is completely meaningless when compared to the fact that a huge chunk of America takes things like television and religion as largely unbiased representations of fact.
Sorry to be a downer, I like CSI. Pretty people pretending to be scientists rock.
Ok, let's hear some ideas. I'm a teacher, so I'll be ecstatic to get some help in this area.
There is nothing practical that can help. I was going to say, "Punish the parents when the kids grades turn south, and reward them when they turn north, relative to the mean." But that's not practical. There is nothing practical that can help in this day of total lack of personal accountability.
However, further removing the sense of personal accountability (by making a little RF device responsible for attendance instead of the child/teacher) is not an improvement. So please don't use "there's no other option" as an equivalent to "this option won't make things worse."
Seriously, most proponents of RFID technology site its benefits in stock and supply line management only, and keep assurring us that RFID tags embedded in products will never be used to track people. And yet we're now seeing instances of the middleman, i.e the product tag, being bypassed altogether and people being tagged outright.
Good morning, nice to see you're awake. Did you sleep well? Good. Now join us in yelling, "WAKE UP!" at the other 99% of America that still think we're wearing tin-foil hats.
We're already much safer from terrorism than we are from getting eaten by sharks, so "safe" is not an issue.
Actually, there aren't many deaths from sharks in the US each year. However, over the past ten years more Americans have been killed by the combined evils of horses and domestic electrical wiring than by terrorists.
http://www.anapsid.org/pdv-boid.html
If we don't pass PATRIOT 2, then the horses and toasters have already won.
could be the call to arms of MS gettingready to start trying to collect/stifle with their patent suite. . . . Thank heavens that IBM can fight this one toe-to-toe.
... *if there were any grounds for suing the users of products for that product's IP infringement*. But there is none - this is entirely about media attention and the gullability of Joe Public and Joe Media (the stupor twins).
I wholeheartedly agree with you, and think it is far more one-sided. MS could file suit against five million Linux users. IBM could file suit against one hundred million Windows users. MS would get nuked
but probably a solid 90% of the bill accomplished SORELY needed reforms.
If I were offered a drink that was 90% fruit juice and vitamins, and 10% stricnine, I would choose not to drink it.
Hmmm.. a couple of theories..
8 million firefox users (as of spreadfirefox.com) all hitting mozilla.org as their default start page must generate quite a lot of traffic, and the start page wasn't that useful other than telling you what you just downloaded and installed.
I think Karl Rove tampered with a bunch of MSIE machines to switch their home page to mozilla.org.
The problem is, the further you get from the first layer, the more distorted the original facts get.
While this is true in many non-comment blogs, and on blogs with a small audience, it is clearly untrue on blogs with a large and resourceful audience that is free to comment and submit stories. Groklaw and Slashdot are perfect examples. The original story posting is rarely the meat of the story - the meat is in the correlary evidence and analysis that occurs when the hive-mind of the audience takes the story on. A sufficiently large hive-mind is one helluva lot more powerful than any newsroom+reporters for many (if not most) topics. The ability for a few thousand people to find evidence, debate, analyze, critique, and spin should not be taken lightly.
Blackboxvoting.org is a non-profit supported by donations. Screw the FSF and the EFF.
Better yet, give to them all. If you don't worship one of the traditional deities, then, like me, consider giving the 10% you're saving to these orgs. It makes me feel just as good about myself as church used to, and it makes a difference here in the secular plane.
I'm a professional software developer and I can't think of any reason to include the system described. Maybe in a testing environment, but in a critical system like this I'd forgoe simpler testing in favor of more complete, and insist that testing be done on "release" versions of the software, and that none of the sort of debugging hacks developers like to add be permitted.
That's precisely the reason that Diebold's version is done and broken, and the computer scientists' version isn't ready yet.
Just like the business world, the managers reward the first people to get the product out the door, then when it dies they say, "all software sucks."