Your boss must read/. I can't think of any other reason for being such a sycophant.
The real truth, Michael, is that the average CEO is indeed a hard working individual, but not so hard that he deserves to make hundreds of times the rate of pay of his line employees. His hard work, after all, is one component of the job. If any CEO is doing it all himself, he either is a company of one employee, or he needs to learn to delegate.
Oh, and about it being damned hard to make money? Not really; you just have to have the insight needed to supply a demand that will support it. And that insight usually arrives as a result of lightning flash, rather than being laboriously crafted from nothing.
As a CNI who had to leave the training sector when the Novell market went ice-cold here in Madison, WI (that's what happens in the capital when the state government commits to deploying a pure Microsoft environment), and had the unhappy duty of pulling the plug on my current employer's last NetWare server a year ago, I have to tell you that I haven't been this excited about Novell's direction in a long, long time.
I picked up Linux on my own about 5 years ago, and have always felt that Novell should have developed its own desktop distro, to allow it to offer an end-to-end solution to businesses. After all, I personally witnessed that strategy used by MS reps: "Hey, you've got 50 machines in this building running Windows, and two machines running something else. Your TCO would be lower if they were all running the same thing," they'd say. So I'm very, very happy that Novell is picking up with Linux.
There is one thing I'd love to see, though: The Novell rights scheme. The ACL on NetWare was the best: granular, inheritable to a T, and it made sense... "Everyone" does not get full access to a file system unless we say they do. Any chance we might see that rights assignment system for Linux?
I personally have a hard time picturing my mom installing and maintaining Linux on her home computer.
All right, that was the last straw on this kind of comment! I have had it clear up to my neck on this kind of straw man, where desktop OS is concerned.
Let's all clue in to something, shall we? The average home user, Mom or not, will not install their own OS on their home PC. They will use the OS that machine is sold with. Period. Get it??
The ridiculous idea that a desktop OS isn't ready for mainstream use if it cannot be installed and configured by the mythical Mom has been used for far too long to pooh-pooh the idea that Linux is a viable choice. How about MacOS? Think your Mom could truly handle the installation? WinXP?
"Sure!" I hear some of you saying. "Installing WinXP is rather easy, just drop the CD in the drive and accept the defaults." Yeah, right! Right up until something doesn't work. Mind you, she'll never get even that far, because most home users are too frightened of the "brain box" to even attempt something as "high-level" as an OS install. Even under WinME, when the Recovery CDs returned everything to their factory-install state, was too much for most of the non-geeks I know. And I'm sure my experience wasn't unique.
I will maintain that the mythical Mom, placed in front of a machine that is:
running Red Hat, SUSE or Mandrake,
is using Mozilla (standard or Firebird) for a browser,
is using the included email client, or Thunderbird,
has all the peripherals already configured,
and she is given instructions on the logon/logoff process, and minimal training on the apps, then she will be just as capable as she would be if the machine were running WinXP.
Asking the OS be simple to install from scratch is asking more of Linux than is asked of any other desktop OS.
If I get too fat, I die. If I drive way too fast, I have an accident and die.
And does one person becoming so obese that they die going to prevent another person from doing it? Experience shows us that it does not. So no, obesity is not self-limiting.
As for driving "too fast", that is also solved by technology, and not at the cost of speed. In my grandfather's day, any fool who traveled 75mph for a period of 6 straight hours was a fool. His tires wouldn't hold up under the strain, nor would the fuel supply hold out. Today, I routinely visit my mother 9 hours away on a single fueling stop and often exceed 75mph on the freeway, and barely blink. Steering is no problem either, unlike for my grandfather, who had to contend with a car with the aerodynamics of a rounded brick and a steering system unassisted by any power.
What's really depressing is that no matter how badly this turns out for SCO or their VC backers, when and if they fail, someone will be turning to the government for a bailout. Which they will get, I'm sure.
... but doesn't *everyone* disable/uninstall messenger service?
You're crazy. You shouldn't be, but the fact is that a huge number of MS shops are run by undertrained sysadmins who, through very little fault of their own, remain unaware of these little issues. I'm a certified engineer (Novell) with a lot of experience with MS products, and I read constantly trying to stay ahead of the curve. My company refuses to part with the money to send me to some proper training, or hire a mentor for a short while. And without that cash, there's only so much I can do on my own. I'm one of those folks that doesn't learn as well from reading books as I do from having guided hands-on training. How much worse is it for the guy who, a few years ago, got told by his boss, "Hey. You've got a computer at home. You're going to be our sysadmin for this new Microsoft server we're putting in. Don't worry, the sales rep told me it's all point-and-click stuff anyway." And yes... that's a true story about a friend of mine for whom I act as unofficial tech support. A case of the mostly blind leading the blind.
For those that didn't RTFM, the patent is about customising content (which may include weather reports).
Uh. Yes. Precisely. The use of the "weather report" example was to highlight exactly how extensive the patent could be. In patents, as in most of the law, precedent is everything. If Microsoft has received a patent for delivering customized content to a user based on a cookie-delivered user ID which enables the server to push back customized content based on that user ID, then MS could potentially use this patent as a precedent for further, more exploitive claims later. This is precisely why we need to a) reform the USPTO, and b) cast a very jaundiced eye on patents of web-based procedures.
There is no law, I believe, that gives any penalty to saying a pledge that might be different then the established norm.
That's true, insofar as I know. And it does happen. My brother, attending a Republican party gig in Northern VA, was rather shocked to hear a small group of folks that were attending add a few words to the pledge that was spoken before the start of the meeting. They ended the pledge by saying, "...with liberty and justice for all, born and unborn." [emphasis mine]
My brother was not amused, and took his concerns to the party chair for the area, as he will continue to do until the practice is halted. His position is that he supports the speaking of the pledge, but will not support unsanctioned additions to it. Of course, at the moment, he can't bring legal force against them for putting anti-choice verbage in their performance of the pledge, but he can (and does) register his disapproval... directly with the offenders, as well. It's all he can do.
You are, of course, failing to recognize a few small matters, without which it might be easy to misinterpret the words of those founding fathers.
First, by and large, they were Deists. Deism is a logical (literally) progression of Christianity as seen by men of the Age of Enlightenment, when the most valued faculty a man could have was his Reason, his ability to think and discern the truth. To a Deist, no written work was necessary. As the logic of the time went, man could best determine the existence of a Creator by studying His creation, much the same as the study of a clock allowed one to determine, by reason, the existence of a clock maker. The concept of faith by means of revelation wasn't nearly as important as faith by the use of Reason, which was thought to be surely one of the Creator's finest gifts to man, along with his immortal soul.
So why the references to the Bible? And why the insistence that God be acknowledged? The answer to that lies not in the religious persuasions of the founders, but in their common beliefs, their fraternity. The fact that many of them were Freemasons.
Freemasonry had become a public fraternity in 1717 in London, England. From there it spread quite quickly to all parts of the British Empire, and easily to the Colonies (leading some to wonder if perhaps there weren't already Freemasons here in America, just hidden until after the formation of the Grand Lodge of England). George Washington was a Freemason, quite respected in his day and still held in high esteem by modern Masons. He is the only President of the United States to serve in that office while simultaneously serving as Master of a Lodge (Alexandria Lodge No. 39 [now No. 22], December 1788-December, 1789). A central requirement of entry into a Masonic Lodge was then (as it is now) belief in a Supreme Being, and in the immortality of the soul. Note the use of the term "Supreme Being"; the specific nature of that Being is left to each man to determine for himself, as is his method of worship of that Being. Also central to Freemasonry is that no man should ever engage in any "great or important undertaking, without first invoking the blessing of Deity." Again, specifics as to who that Deity is, precisely, is left to the individual. The Bible which in the Lodge is referred to as "holy writings", "a Great Light in Masonry" just as often as it is called "the Bible" is often thought to be indicative of all holy writings, and are to be taken and used as guides for upright living. In Muslim countries, it can be replaced by the Koran, for example.
If these were the feelings harbored by the general public today, I would support the inclusion of the term "under God" into the Pledge wholeheartedly. But they do not, and I cannot. Today, the term "God" has been co-opted by Christians when uttered in a general sense, and hearing "under God" spoken, calls to mind the blind obedience so often asked for by those who constantly decry the intrusion of the government when that government seeks to curtail the display of the 10 Commandments, or the use of the Bible in a public context. Those same people would howl twice as loudly if they were asked to accept the words "under Gods" instead, or to permit the prominent display of a triple-moon sign in the Capitol's Rotunda for the holiday of Beltane.
Until this society is as open as our Founders intended (why do you think they deliberately chose the words "endowed by their Creator", as opposed to "blessed by the Son of God"?), then I must also agree that our government must act to protect those of us who are not so vociferous in our insistence that the law support and require our terminology, our beliefs or our practices.
...could best be served by simply dropping support for MSN. Who uses it, anyway?
I do. Or at least, I use the MSN protocol to speak to other users who do use MSN Messenger because they already have it installed. So when the block goes into effect, my Gaim will lose the ability to talk tothose folks, and I have no other outs, as I use Linux for the desktop. Unless someone's had luck getting Messenger to work under Wine.
Two years ago, the Wisconsin Capitol Building completed a renovation project that has left the building absolutely beautiful. The dome is only a few feet shorter than the National Capitol in DC, and the building is infinitely more accessible. Tours run all the time, and in this weather, you can still get out to the observation decks for a view across the isthmus that makes up the downtown. State Street (the local college crawl) runs from the Capitol to the University, an easy walk. And if you're in town the right night, MADLug is meeting at the Steep and Brew on State.
This is an amazing comment on the ineffectiveness of spam.
Only if you don't complete the math. I haven't priced a spam-campaign, personally, but I have seen adverts for software you can "run from home" that retail for as little $75.
So let's play a numbers game. Let's suppose I want to sell narfing-irons. I can manufacture them cheaply in India, so I have a good supply, and can make a 60% profit if I sell them for $35 a pair. I want to use a spam campaign, because I know how effective they are. I buy a service for $350, and they will send spam out to 4 million addresses. Just 2% will result in page views. That's 80,000 hits. Let's assume we get a sales rate of.5%. That's right, one-half of one percent. That's 400 sales. Or, total revenues of $14,000. Around $8000 of that is profit, from which my $350 spam-campaign is taken.
And that was only one run of spam. If I run, say, 10 or 12 campaigns from different services, with similar rates of return, my narfing-iron business will net me in the vicinity of $80K-$100K in profit from Internet-based sales alone. And I didn't lift a finger, other than to ship the product.
NOW do you see where they get people who will pay for this service?
Ok... now what if I told you that "she" is really a "he", and that the picture "she" game you was off some amateur porn site. Anyone else you'd like to know your real location?
Actually, the one I'd be more concerned about are the real "she"'s. In American society,according to the US DOJ's National Crime Victimiztion Survey data, a woman is raped or sexually assaulted somewhere in the US every 2 to 5 minutes. Although the total number of such assaults has dropped (10% between 1996 and 2001, according to the DOJ), anything that a woman does to expose herself to predation increases her odds on being one of the thousands listed.
"Average users" want things to just work. They want zero learning curve. They DEMAND things to work the like the way they used to.
Your first sentence I agree with completely, and it is upheld by a myriad of studies and polls.
Your second statement, I also agree with completely, and anyone who's ever tried to use a software package for the purpose of getting work done (as opposed to being interested in the process of doing the work) would agree. I won't make any comment on whether someone who doesn't want to learn something new at the moment is a good thing or a bad thing.
Your third statement, however, doesn't follow. Although it could be considered true, I've found that it would be more accurate to say that they want things to work in a way that makes sense to them. They don't mind something new, so long as it makes at least as much sense to them as the previous software/procedure/policy did. The black art of creating an intuitive design (whether it be software, or anything) depends on understanding how most people would approach a subject, then catering to their dominant point of view. It also explains why you can't please everyone; there will always be POVs that are diametrically opposed to the dominant one.
Nothing happens to your privacy when tracked from floor to door, as long as it ends there.
That's precisely the point. Do we trust corporate and/or government entities to stop tracking the items after they leave the store?
Now.. if the RFID tags follow you home.. thats another issue. But the show I saw on it. (Tech Tv? Might have been?) Did not seem to think that was possible.. they are a direct scan sort of thing, rather than a "scan from black helicopter" sort of thing.
Another reply already mentioned the case of the tires with the embedded chips that can be read from sensors embedded in the road. Those folks learned that they could create an antennae that could be read at a height of close to 24"... through heavy rubber. So you see, it's not the helicopter scan that should be worrying you. It's the door frame.
Reports in the NYT last year revealed how many cameras were installed in the Big Apple alone. Installing sensors in doorways of all publicly accessible buildings (including public transit) would allow you to scan quite a bit of the population. Before you know it, you have advertising a la Minority Report. That's where the privacy concerns begin.
1. Unless the receiver can determine the distance to the RFID tag (and this is usually not the case), the tag's location cannot be determined with any greater accuracy that the distance to the nearest receiver. To "locate" a tag, there must be many expensive receivers no how many cheap tags there are. Remember, we live in three dimensions.
2. The range of passively powered tags is only a few meters, and they all tend to reply at the same time when a bunch are pinged, causing interference.
And both of these points can be easily dealt with by limiting the data collection points to a very common location: a doorway.
Locate your receivers in the doorways of several public and private places, and you could track movements for the majority of the population across the majority of their day. In cities, you could wire the public transit, as well. Minority Report should be seen as a preview of things to come, if we aren't very, very careful. And to do that, the average citizen needs to wake up.
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An excellent suggestion. And you were the first to make it, though not the last. Thank you.
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/me slaps forehead.
WHY did I not think of library? Thank you. I clearly needed a kick in that direction. I'll look into it.
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"Bollocks", he says. OK, let's take your point apart, shall we?
So.. Every user in a system needs to be told 'This is the sysadmin who accidentally deleted someone's files years ago, and didn't have things on backup', so they can use a different sysadmin?
Well, of course! If I found out that a prospective sysadmin's carelessness with the delete key coincided with his cavalier attitude towards data security, I'd fire him and replace him. The delete might been an accident, but the lack of backup was most certainly not. And that's the difference between an honest mistake that wouldn't get a doctor blackballed and culpable negligence that would.
This checkout attendant once shortchanged..
Let me get this straight: you're actually comparing a clerk who short-changes someone once, with a doctor that kills or maims a patient due to negligent behavior? I don't think I need to address this point any further, other than to suggest you might want to be better armed in this arena. That one was pathetically weak.
Of course they would never make a mistake, but everyone else needs to be open and honest, and let them know all their little failings..
Causing severe injury, maiming, or death of a patient is not a "little failing". You're trivializing a life, which I'm sure is easy for you, since you seem to be having difficulty understanding that we're not talking about simple mistakes. We're talking about the willingness to cover up negligence.
The world is a big bad place. Bad things happen. Nothing is infallible.
False, half-true, and true, in that order. The world is a place, period. Things happen that can be viewed as good or bad, depending on perspective, and we finally have agreement on one point: nothing is infallible. Incidentally, I don't know where you're from, but I have a guaranteed right to speak my mind, even if it's to cast stones. I neither asked for nor need your permission. And since you have no idea what I do with my life, I'll just ignore your implication that I don't do anything as "profound as a doctor". I will say this: I certainly don't worship them, and I don't think the "D" in "M.D." stands for "Deity".
My counter story is that each member of my immediate family have at some point had accidents that would have been fatal, if not for some person who trained and knew enough about the body to fix them, and they lived.
Would it have helped to know that these same doctors had lost patients on the table, or the ward days before?
As I said in my original post, crisis medicine is what western medicine is all about. Among many other reasons why, it gives the doctor that ability to be an action hero. Most of our western societies like that image. It's why TV shows like "ER" are so popular.
But to answer your question, the answer is Yes, although seeing how narrowly you're trying to frame the commentary, I can see why you missed the correct answer. Would it have mattered to your family, no... at the time of the accident. Would it matter to the larger society of which you're a part that a given doctor has a mortality rate three times higher than his colleagues? Hell, yes, it matters. And we, as a society, deserve to know why. If it's a string of bad luck, well... that happens. Maybe we find out it's the doctor, using bad hygeine. Maybe he's careless. Or maybe we find out that this doctor is using the training he's received perfectly, and the training itself was in error! But without the full disclosure, we won't know.
Slashdot Mirror
Your boss must read /. I can't think of any other reason for being such a sycophant.
The real truth, Michael, is that the average CEO is indeed a hard working individual, but not so hard that he deserves to make hundreds of times the rate of pay of his line employees. His hard work, after all, is one component of the job. If any CEO is doing it all himself, he either is a company of one employee, or he needs to learn to delegate.
Oh, and about it being damned hard to make money? Not really; you just have to have the insight needed to supply a demand that will support it. And that insight usually arrives as a result of lightning flash, rather than being laboriously crafted from nothing.
You accept that a company provides a router product that by design, periodically fails to perform as expected?
I certainly hope you're never in a position to affect my company's data stream.
Remember the scene in Minority Report, after John Anderton is on the run, where the authorities take control of the maglev car he's riding in?
As a CNI who had to leave the training sector when the Novell market went ice-cold here in Madison, WI (that's what happens in the capital when the state government commits to deploying a pure Microsoft environment), and had the unhappy duty of pulling the plug on my current employer's last NetWare server a year ago, I have to tell you that I haven't been this excited about Novell's direction in a long, long time.
I picked up Linux on my own about 5 years ago, and have always felt that Novell should have developed its own desktop distro, to allow it to offer an end-to-end solution to businesses. After all, I personally witnessed that strategy used by MS reps: "Hey, you've got 50 machines in this building running Windows, and two machines running something else. Your TCO would be lower if they were all running the same thing," they'd say. So I'm very, very happy that Novell is picking up with Linux.
There is one thing I'd love to see, though: The Novell rights scheme. The ACL on NetWare was the best: granular, inheritable to a T, and it made sense... "Everyone" does not get full access to a file system unless we say they do. Any chance we might see that rights assignment system for Linux?
All right, that was the last straw on this kind of comment! I have had it clear up to my neck on this kind of straw man, where desktop OS is concerned.
Let's all clue in to something, shall we? The average home user, Mom or not, will not install their own OS on their home PC. They will use the OS that machine is sold with. Period. Get it??
The ridiculous idea that a desktop OS isn't ready for mainstream use if it cannot be installed and configured by the mythical Mom has been used for far too long to pooh-pooh the idea that Linux is a viable choice. How about MacOS? Think your Mom could truly handle the installation? WinXP?
"Sure!" I hear some of you saying. "Installing WinXP is rather easy, just drop the CD in the drive and accept the defaults." Yeah, right! Right up until something doesn't work. Mind you, she'll never get even that far, because most home users are too frightened of the "brain box" to even attempt something as "high-level" as an OS install. Even under WinME, when the Recovery CDs returned everything to their factory-install state, was too much for most of the non-geeks I know. And I'm sure my experience wasn't unique.
I will maintain that the mythical Mom, placed in front of a machine that is:
- running Red Hat, SUSE or Mandrake,
- is using Mozilla (standard or Firebird) for a browser,
- is using the included email client, or Thunderbird,
- has all the peripherals already configured,
and she is given instructions on the logon/logoff process, and minimal training on the apps, then she will be just as capable as she would be if the machine were running WinXP.Asking the OS be simple to install from scratch is asking more of Linux than is asked of any other desktop OS.
And does one person becoming so obese that they die going to prevent another person from doing it? Experience shows us that it does not. So no, obesity is not self-limiting.
As for driving "too fast", that is also solved by technology, and not at the cost of speed. In my grandfather's day, any fool who traveled 75mph for a period of 6 straight hours was a fool. His tires wouldn't hold up under the strain, nor would the fuel supply hold out. Today, I routinely visit my mother 9 hours away on a single fueling stop and often exceed 75mph on the freeway, and barely blink. Steering is no problem either, unlike for my grandfather, who had to contend with a car with the aerodynamics of a rounded brick and a steering system unassisted by any power.
What's really depressing is that no matter how badly this turns out for SCO or their VC backers, when and if they fail, someone will be turning to the government for a bailout. Which they will get, I'm sure.
You're crazy. You shouldn't be, but the fact is that a huge number of MS shops are run by undertrained sysadmins who, through very little fault of their own, remain unaware of these little issues. I'm a certified engineer (Novell) with a lot of experience with MS products, and I read constantly trying to stay ahead of the curve. My company refuses to part with the money to send me to some proper training, or hire a mentor for a short while. And without that cash, there's only so much I can do on my own. I'm one of those folks that doesn't learn as well from reading books as I do from having guided hands-on training. How much worse is it for the guy who, a few years ago, got told by his boss, "Hey. You've got a computer at home. You're going to be our sysadmin for this new Microsoft server we're putting in. Don't worry, the sales rep told me it's all point-and-click stuff anyway." And yes... that's a true story about a friend of mine for whom I act as unofficial tech support. A case of the mostly blind leading the blind.
Uh. Yes. Precisely. The use of the "weather report" example was to highlight exactly how extensive the patent could be. In patents, as in most of the law, precedent is everything. If Microsoft has received a patent for delivering customized content to a user based on a cookie-delivered user ID which enables the server to push back customized content based on that user ID, then MS could potentially use this patent as a precedent for further, more exploitive claims later. This is precisely why we need to a) reform the USPTO, and b) cast a very jaundiced eye on patents of web-based procedures.
I wholeheartedly concur. As does he.
That's true, insofar as I know. And it does happen. My brother, attending a Republican party gig in Northern VA, was rather shocked to hear a small group of folks that were attending add a few words to the pledge that was spoken before the start of the meeting. They ended the pledge by saying, "...with liberty and justice for all, born and unborn." [emphasis mine]
My brother was not amused, and took his concerns to the party chair for the area, as he will continue to do until the practice is halted. His position is that he supports the speaking of the pledge, but will not support unsanctioned additions to it. Of course, at the moment, he can't bring legal force against them for putting anti-choice verbage in their performance of the pledge, but he can (and does) register his disapproval... directly with the offenders, as well. It's all he can do.
You are, of course, failing to recognize a few small matters, without which it might be easy to misinterpret the words of those founding fathers.
First, by and large, they were Deists. Deism is a logical (literally) progression of Christianity as seen by men of the Age of Enlightenment, when the most valued faculty a man could have was his Reason, his ability to think and discern the truth. To a Deist, no written work was necessary. As the logic of the time went, man could best determine the existence of a Creator by studying His creation, much the same as the study of a clock allowed one to determine, by reason, the existence of a clock maker. The concept of faith by means of revelation wasn't nearly as important as faith by the use of Reason, which was thought to be surely one of the Creator's finest gifts to man, along with his immortal soul.
So why the references to the Bible? And why the insistence that God be acknowledged? The answer to that lies not in the religious persuasions of the founders, but in their common beliefs, their fraternity. The fact that many of them were Freemasons.
Freemasonry had become a public fraternity in 1717 in London, England. From there it spread quite quickly to all parts of the British Empire, and easily to the Colonies (leading some to wonder if perhaps there weren't already Freemasons here in America, just hidden until after the formation of the Grand Lodge of England). George Washington was a Freemason, quite respected in his day and still held in high esteem by modern Masons. He is the only President of the United States to serve in that office while simultaneously serving as Master of a Lodge (Alexandria Lodge No. 39 [now No. 22], December 1788-December, 1789). A central requirement of entry into a Masonic Lodge was then (as it is now) belief in a Supreme Being, and in the immortality of the soul. Note the use of the term "Supreme Being"; the specific nature of that Being is left to each man to determine for himself, as is his method of worship of that Being. Also central to Freemasonry is that no man should ever engage in any "great or important undertaking, without first invoking the blessing of Deity." Again, specifics as to who that Deity is, precisely, is left to the individual. The Bible which in the Lodge is referred to as "holy writings", "a Great Light in Masonry" just as often as it is called "the Bible" is often thought to be indicative of all holy writings, and are to be taken and used as guides for upright living. In Muslim countries, it can be replaced by the Koran, for example.
If these were the feelings harbored by the general public today, I would support the inclusion of the term "under God" into the Pledge wholeheartedly. But they do not, and I cannot. Today, the term "God" has been co-opted by Christians when uttered in a general sense, and hearing "under God" spoken, calls to mind the blind obedience so often asked for by those who constantly decry the intrusion of the government when that government seeks to curtail the display of the 10 Commandments, or the use of the Bible in a public context. Those same people would howl twice as loudly if they were asked to accept the words "under Gods" instead, or to permit the prominent display of a triple-moon sign in the Capitol's Rotunda for the holiday of Beltane.
Until this society is as open as our Founders intended (why do you think they deliberately chose the words "endowed by their Creator", as opposed to "blessed by the Son of God"?), then I must also agree that our government must act to protect those of us who are not so vociferous in our insistence that the law support and require our terminology, our beliefs or our practices.
I do. Or at least, I use the MSN protocol to speak to other users who do use MSN Messenger because they already have it installed. So when the block goes into effect, my Gaim will lose the ability to talk tothose folks, and I have no other outs, as I use Linux for the desktop. Unless someone's had luck getting Messenger to work under Wine.
Two years ago, the Wisconsin Capitol Building completed a renovation project that has left the building absolutely beautiful. The dome is only a few feet shorter than the National Capitol in DC, and the building is infinitely more accessible. Tours run all the time, and in this weather, you can still get out to the observation decks for a view across the isthmus that makes up the downtown. State Street (the local college crawl) runs from the Capitol to the University, an easy walk. And if you're in town the right night, MADLug is meeting at the Steep and Brew on State.
- This is an amazing comment on the ineffectiveness of spam.
Only if you don't complete the math. I haven't priced a spam-campaign, personally, but I have seen adverts for software you can "run from home" that retail for as little $75.So let's play a numbers game. Let's suppose I want to sell narfing-irons. I can manufacture them cheaply in India, so I have a good supply, and can make a 60% profit if I sell them for $35 a pair. I want to use a spam campaign, because I know how effective they are. I buy a service for $350, and they will send spam out to 4 million addresses. Just 2% will result in page views. That's 80,000 hits. Let's assume we get a sales rate of .5%. That's right, one-half of one percent. That's 400 sales. Or, total revenues of $14,000. Around $8000 of that is profit, from which my $350 spam-campaign is taken.
And that was only one run of spam. If I run, say, 10 or 12 campaigns from different services, with similar rates of return, my narfing-iron business will net me in the vicinity of $80K-$100K in profit from Internet-based sales alone. And I didn't lift a finger, other than to ship the product.
NOW do you see where they get people who will pay for this service?
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OK, this was an amusing method of dealing with the Slashdot Effect.
I'll say 8, total.
Oh my GODS, Taco repeated a story! He's having a stroke, folks!!
Actually, the one I'd be more concerned about are the real "she"'s. In American society,according to the US DOJ's National Crime Victimiztion Survey data, a woman is raped or sexually assaulted somewhere in the US every 2 to 5 minutes. Although the total number of such assaults has dropped (10% between 1996 and 2001, according to the DOJ), anything that a woman does to expose herself to predation increases her odds on being one of the thousands listed.
Your first sentence I agree with completely, and it is upheld by a myriad of studies and polls.
Your second statement, I also agree with completely, and anyone who's ever tried to use a software package for the purpose of getting work done (as opposed to being interested in the process of doing the work) would agree. I won't make any comment on whether someone who doesn't want to learn something new at the moment is a good thing or a bad thing.
Your third statement, however, doesn't follow. Although it could be considered true, I've found that it would be more accurate to say that they want things to work in a way that makes sense to them. They don't mind something new, so long as it makes at least as much sense to them as the previous software/procedure/policy did. The black art of creating an intuitive design (whether it be software, or anything) depends on understanding how most people would approach a subject, then catering to their dominant point of view. It also explains why you can't please everyone; there will always be POVs that are diametrically opposed to the dominant one.
That's precisely the point. Do we trust corporate and/or government entities to stop tracking the items after they leave the store?
Another reply already mentioned the case of the tires with the embedded chips that can be read from sensors embedded in the road. Those folks learned that they could create an antennae that could be read at a height of close to 24"... through heavy rubber. So you see, it's not the helicopter scan that should be worrying you. It's the door frame.
Reports in the NYT last year revealed how many cameras were installed in the Big Apple alone. Installing sensors in doorways of all publicly accessible buildings (including public transit) would allow you to scan quite a bit of the population. Before you know it, you have advertising a la Minority Report. That's where the privacy concerns begin.
2. The range of passively powered tags is only a few meters, and they all tend to reply at the same time when a bunch are pinged, causing interference.
And both of these points can be easily dealt with by limiting the data collection points to a very common location: a doorway.
Locate your receivers in the doorways of several public and private places, and you could track movements for the majority of the population across the majority of their day. In cities, you could wire the public transit, as well. Minority Report should be seen as a preview of things to come, if we aren't very, very careful. And to do that, the average citizen needs to wake up .
An excellent suggestion. And you were the first to make it, though not the last. Thank you.
WHY did I not think of library? Thank you. I clearly needed a kick in that direction. I'll look into it.
Well, of course! If I found out that a prospective sysadmin's carelessness with the delete key coincided with his cavalier attitude towards data security, I'd fire him and replace him. The delete might been an accident, but the lack of backup was most certainly not. And that's the difference between an honest mistake that wouldn't get a doctor blackballed and culpable negligence that would.
Let me get this straight: you're actually comparing a clerk who short-changes someone once, with a doctor that kills or maims a patient due to negligent behavior? I don't think I need to address this point any further, other than to suggest you might want to be better armed in this arena. That one was pathetically weak.
Causing severe injury, maiming, or death of a patient is not a "little failing". You're trivializing a life, which I'm sure is easy for you, since you seem to be having difficulty understanding that we're not talking about simple mistakes. We're talking about the willingness to cover up negligence.
False, half-true, and true, in that order. The world is a place, period. Things happen that can be viewed as good or bad, depending on perspective, and we finally have agreement on one point: nothing is infallible. Incidentally, I don't know where you're from, but I have a guaranteed right to speak my mind, even if it's to cast stones. I neither asked for nor need your permission. And since you have no idea what I do with my life, I'll just ignore your implication that I don't do anything as "profound as a doctor". I will say this: I certainly don't worship them, and I don't think the "D" in "M.D." stands for "Deity".
Would it have helped to know that these same doctors had lost patients on the table, or the ward days before?
As I said in my original post, crisis medicine is what western medicine is all about. Among many other reasons why, it gives the doctor that ability to be an action hero. Most of our western societies like that image. It's why TV shows like "ER" are so popular.
But to answer your question, the answer is Yes, although seeing how narrowly you're trying to frame the commentary, I can see why you missed the correct answer. Would it have mattered to your family, no... at the time of the accident. Would it matter to the larger society of which you're a part that a given doctor has a mortality rate three times higher than his colleagues? Hell, yes, it matters. And we, as a society, deserve to know why. If it's a string of bad luck, well... that happens. Maybe we find out it's the doctor, using bad hygeine. Maybe he's careless. Or maybe we find out that this doctor is using the training he's received perfectly, and the training itself was in error! But without the full disclosure, we won't know.