I dislike that kind of thought experiment because it explicitly dissuades you from even trying to find a way to get both, or in general thinking critically..
The original way you phrased it, it is implicit that the people who are trying to interview you are going to be not only inflexible to absolutely inflexible. If the thirty seconds it would take you to apologize, scribble a telephone number, and run off, would completely ruin the interview, then the person on the other side is a completely OCD asshole. Alternately, if the woman was in such a position that you would never ever ever ever ever meet her again if you turned her down now, or if she could skin you alive if you came back after running off--even with a good excuse--then it probably wouldn't work, and if you could make it work, is it really worth it?
The "two doors" method is pretty much the same. Rarely does one actually find a situation where things really are that clear cut, and if you do, it's probably something you wouldn't want anyway; if someone "put the job of my dreams" and "put the woman of my dreams" behind doors, then I would know they were gaming me and I wouldn't trust either of their choices; I'd simply walk away. And again, as the GP said, if the "woman of my dreams" was someone I already knew but who was not going to accept that I needed a job, screw her. And if it's someone I didn't know, why should I trust someone who's trying to make me decide?
I'm not saying that things never turn out analogously in real life--they do. But if running into a situation like that causes your brain to shut down and makes you only see two mutually exclusive options, then you pretty much already lost.
The idea is to start with the really easy profit niches like space tourism and precious material mining and go from there. We don't need to bring back ore from the asteroids, just the finished processed materials.
Yes, there is that. Once we have viable live-in space stations, then positioning them further and further from earth becomes mostly a question of logistics; and once they grow large enough, internal industrial facilities aren't out of the question. But it will take a long while to get to that point.
The single largest problem in terms of colonizing space is getting from Earth's surface to LEO. The trip from there is relatively easy using solar/nuclear powered alternative engines like plasma, ion etc.
I'm not too sure about that one. Getting ships to low earth orbit isn't significantly different from getting a reliable, seaworthy vessel. You may notice we still don't have any cities entirely at sea, although the first person circumnavigated the entire globe almost half a millenia ago. Granted, we have cruise ships, and some people are always thinking of how, but you know what I mean.
It's just a matter of doing it all in several small, manageable steps.
I do agree. It isn't going to be easy, though, and most of the small steps in between aren't very profitable on their own.
Indeed. A quick google search on the distance from earth to mars puts it between 3 and 23 light-minutes, depending on their location in their orbits. This ignores something like a huge EM emitter in between the two named Sol. Without a (fragile and expensive) array of lower-ping satellites in between, that puts the roundtime on a single SYN/ACK at six to fourty-five minutes, to say nothing of error correction. With the satellites, you could probably at least send a single http fetch request all at once and simply come back in an hour or so to get the results.
Most likely, any content in high demand would be mirrored on either side of the split and updated at invervals, and the rest either wouldn't be available or would be batch-downloaded. Probably won't be much in the way of logins across that boundary, however. Server side scripting will also be right out. This will of course rule out a lot of interesting places, but... oh well. Maybe someone on the other side will open a pay service to mirror the site internals and send diffs back and forth to keep the databases updated.
This is all assuming that there is a large colony on, say, mars. If it's a few people, they'll just beam the porn internet content that they ask for in batches, to be cached locally. They probably won't have access to, say, Digg or Stumbleupon or Facebook or anything, unless it's cherrypicked pretty well.
Shoplifter's aren't pirates by sheer force of scale. A person who stowed away on a merchant ship and stole and ate apples wasn't a pirate, either.
Again, one of the big pieces of piracy is that the same goods that are being lost are showing up again on the marketplace, but without the people who produced them being given their (presumably) due rewards. And you're right; copyright infringement is NOT stealing, unless they can decompile the code and put out a "brand new" product that's nothing but the same product and new labels. It is, however, piracy, as the company's goods are being "sold" without their permission (even if it's for free).
This is without challenging the (IMO ludicrous) assumption that "their content isn't the product, DVDs are". If it was produced, it is a product. If you want to argue that the people stamping it on DVDs per se aren't the ones producing the movie--yes, correct, but they are contractually bound to try to sell someone else's product, and counteracting piracy is quickly becoming part of that job.
I know; I chose my words carefully. The goods are being "acquired" but not "sold"; the "market" I refer to is the internet as a whole (from their point of view, anyway) or more specifically, the Pirate Bay et al.
The fact that "pirates" are not getting paid for their end of the bargain, like the lack of violence, doesn't mean the analogy doesn't stand in other ways.
I don't see how piracy is an idiotic term, especially from the standpoint of the people whose products are being stolen.
Pirates sailed the high seas, yes, they murdered and stole, yes. However, of note to the people who 1)produced the goods and 2)bought them, the goods were being stolen, not merely destroyed. Entire markets sprung up where people could acquire LARGE amounts of stolen goods, no questions asked. The people selling were mum about their sources. The people who did the act were difficult to pin down. Often somewhat honest tradesmen were the only people the enforcers could find who had any connection to the theft. People who wanted legitimate goods or who placed a special order would pay higher prices to make up for the drop in sales and the efforts to find the culprits. Granted, there were other expenses not happening here, such as loss of ships, etc.
What we have now are markets where large amounts of stolen goods being acquired, no questions asked. The people distributing them are mum about their sources. The people who did the act are difficult to pin down, lost in the vast ocean--a metaphoric one, but it's a good metaphor. People who want legitimate goods are paying high prices (whether this would not be true if there were no pirates is another question) and forced to deal with DRM. Honest tradesmen, and now unfortunately honest consumers, are being forced to deal with the wrath of the producers. Granted the distribution of a single image is of no cost because the MARGINAL production cost is almost nil, but that fact doesn't mean that the people producing software didn't have large amounts invested in the project.
If you're going to argue that the whole of the argument is how much software should cost, don't. When coders are sponsored by the state and producing software is free, then it will be reasonable to expect to get software for free. Until then you either will or won't get it for free by the whim of whomever made it.
"There's profit in it" generally means "There's profit that we can expect to see in a reasonably near timeframe."
There are hundreds of billions of dollars tied up in the space shuttles. The Apollo program took similar investment. Neither of those programs was ambitious enough to do return with any resources in greater quantity than is useful for research. How many thousands of tons of rocks would you have to return from the astroid belt to be worth a single, solitary, measly billion dollars? This discounts the much higher amounts of fuel necesary to transfer your ship to and from the astroid belt, let alone with that same tonnage of cargo.
This is not to say that it can't be done or that it can't be done for a profit but until there is significant investment in the means to get there and back, or some amazing advance in energy storage/generation and thruster capability, or both, it can only be done by someone who doesn't have to sheepishly return to investors for more money.
I'm 24. The typical age for someone to seriously be saying "In my day" is probably twice that at least. And yet, "In my day", kids weren't supposed to be brought up by electronic babysitters. I'm still not sure they're supposed to be. Kids grow up to be whatever they're taught to be, and if you teach them to spend their whole lives wrapped up in the digital world, hey presto, it's probably gonna happen.
Is the GP really saying "The only way for a group of people to share the same space is for each to be lost in their own world, hiding from the despair that is any attempt to actually enjoy each others' company"?
I think that the point of the Cloud as being anything more than a buzzword comes down to one idea and one idea only, and that is specialization of labor.
I don't grown my own wheat, tomatoes, or cows, nor process any of those components, but I like Pizza. We have the culture we have in America because there are people who not only make their living DOING these things, but also figuring out how BEST to do them. They are regulated to make sure that your bulk-grown beef doesn't have diseases or other obvious dangers in it, and they are regulated to some extent so you know what kind of crap they're using to make them grow big, or at least what they AREN'T. All of this means that it's reasonably safe to go down to the market, grab a slab of beef off the rack, and cook it up at home. (Paying for it on the way out is recommended to avoid criminal charges as well.)
The idea that net-borne applications and data storage can work on a similar model ain't new, and anyone who suggests otherwise is blowing out their butthole. Server farms are aptly named; people are just finally figuring out exactly what their business model does, can, and should imply. Frankly, I'd rather lose all the cloud data in the world than all the bulk-grown food in the world, and that's not to say I have my own "backup" garden for self-sufficiency. Rather, it's just pointing out that this sort of thing has been done, and it's just because it's now "cool" that we're all ooh-ing and aah-ing and buzz-wording and anti-buzz-wording.
I'm not sure you understand the potential that any particular astronaut has to ruin hundreds of billions of dollars of government investment. If an astronaut meant to, or just screwed up at something that may have seemed inconsequential at the time, the deaths of the people onboard would be, while publicly tear-jerking, relatively inconsequential compared to the gross loss of capital for the agency. (Less now that they're intending to stop using the shuttles altogether, but to some degree still.)
The fact that he made it through training and became an astronaut means that he was worthy of being trusted with a hundred-billion-plus dollar space ship. That's what the training is for. That's why we pay their training, and why we pay them. Not only could they die in a spectacular fireball if they make the wrong mistake--or if someone else does--but it's possible they could completely ruin NASA's chances of ever being useful again by swaying public opinion. A single person could--or could have--singlehandedly set back mankind's exploration of space by decades or longer.
And you've really got the balls to say that spending the money that he got as part of that trust to keep advancing something he loves and believes in is less respectable than if he had taken his money, gambled with it on the stock market, and taken whatever gains he had and spent them on this as an outsider?
Disclosure: I am related to a former high-ranking NASA employee, and while that doesn't make me an expert, I do have at least SOME sense of scale about the damned thing.
I disagree completely. I think that the GP is spot on.
You have a point that there is a line of professionalism that some people cross and others don't, but I think you have its location wrong. I think that the difference is between people who are able to make their own decisions and people who are forced into a corner, usually by money issues (where "promotions" counts as the same), or in particular by being backed into a corner, especially by the spectre of unemployment (again, money).
Feeling helpless triggers animal instincts, even if they are controlled on the surface. If a person is being forced, he will be complete crap to others. He will be rude. He will be bitter. He will have no respect for anyone or anything unless giving that respect seems like it will get them out his situation. I'm sure you can imagine and I'd bet you can look at pretty much every sleazy salesman on the floor and know that they resent the fact that they're doing it.
The problem is, the corporation isn't aware, and is probably never going to be aware at any useful level that its policies are forcing the people on the front lines to choose between a happy, ethical lifestyle and a paycheck. The top and middle are goal-oriented facets of the corporation, and I'll be damned if there's a single corporation anywhere whose stated premise is to pay its own workers the money they're worth, down to the last slime-covered janitor. That's not the goal of the people above, and realistically speaking, it's never going to be one of them. The marginal cost to the company for transitioning from a "minimum cost" mindset to a reasonable and empathic one is 1)completely unknown and 2)assumed to be pretty high; and considering the people doing such calculations would never themselves see any change in the corporation except perhaps anecdotally, it's a but much to expect them to correctly weight thousands of workers' frustrations against an unknown and presumably scary cost, especially when it might simply cause the workers to get uppity and stop working altogether.
All that said, in the meantime, you simply cannot leave the whole situation as-is and suggest that it's unrealistic to try to stop fraud. The rise of law and the rise of civilization aren't idly correlated. If a company is knowingly employing people who defraud customers, then they are aiding and abetting criminals, whether the law says so yet or not. If it is doing so in ignorance, then it needs to be very publicly brought to their attention. I don't see how this is either unrealistic or impractical.
I think that a big difference between you and the Fed'ral Government, or even a store owner, is that in your case, the security system is, ostensibly, optional; aside from that one twat, your chances of being burgled are reasonably low. Beacuse of that twat, you have some expectation that he, at least, will be coming back, and possibly anyone else who now know that you were, at one point, more vulnerable than the average Joe. Security by obscurity and all that.
When it comes to a store, or government computers, there is no longer the argument that "We didn't really think we would be targeted." I don't know statistics, but I think I can safely say that more quickly a thief or hacker will think of you as a target, the more likely you will be one. Federal Government? Going to be hit. State? Probably pretty often. Local? From time to time. Store full of shinies? I have to believe they get hit from time to time, and if they don't, they probably get profiled to see if a thief could get away with it.
Securing themselves is an expected cost of being that visible. The lawyer in question is just (IMHO) being a weenie. If there was a sense of trust in their security which was misplaced, it lies with one of the following: a) Incompetent in-house security/administration b) Incompetent third-party software (trusting which may fall under A if it was known already) c) Software mistake that just wasn't caught yet
If it's B or C, it's the software developer's cost to pay. If it's A, or possibly B, it's the target's cost to pay. If the hacker was being malicious and making moolah on his crimes, then taking that money away and using it to pay restitution is fair. If he's providing a service and just being kind of a brat about it (or perceived as such) then the victim needs to stop acting like a child and own up to the responsibilities of his position.
I have not RTFA and I'm not really aware of the issue as a whole, but that's my opinion.
I was going to make a more spiteful reply, but I think you touched on what I wanted to say, so I'll forgo the scorn and just come out and say it.
Programming...is an art. That's what we want to tell management and they don't want to hear. They see a product come out, and that's what the programmer develops, and that product can be made by anyone. The product will exist whether it's produced by a crack team of programmers, the very best, or whether it's produced by Joe's Codeshack & Office Supplies Warehouse.
What a programmer wants to believe is that the artistry is valuable to the company. I have never worked on a company project, but I have to imagine that if you're just another guy in the line, no, it never will be. If you're a manager and can drive the course of even part of the project, then maybe; otherwise, you are filling a part that is by its very design supposed to be interchangeable. Programming is by its very nature solving a problem; there is a way to solve the problem (or there isn't), and it WILL be solved, whether it's by one person in one day or ten people in twenty. You may be better than them, but it's all relative, so you're trying to argue marginal value to people that don't care. In the meantime you're someone who was hired to be a gear, never rose above it, and is crying because you're a cog in the machine.
What makes a person valuable to the company? Crap, I don't know, ask someone with more experience. But what makes you LESS valuable to the company as a whole? * Being faceless to everyone who makes the decisions (being friends with people on the same level doesn't help much) * Not reporting what you did * Not reporting what you CAN and CAN'T do * Not explaining things others will need to know * Creating more problems by being incompatable with the others * Being an angsty, emo "Management is PAIN" type who truly believes and acts like the company is supposed to be psychic and always pick the best of the litter even when the "best of the litter" (ie, yourself) just sits in their cubicle being oblivious to the world and thinking they're such a blasted genius and that nobody else could do it.
America seems to have a very educated, very angsty caste of people whom the last point describes too clearly. "If you do your job well, you will be rewarded" is rather cliche; if you are VALUABLE, you will be rewarded. I don't know where the meme that keeping your head down and nose to the grindstone is more valuable than contributing meaningfully to the company--or the country--came from, but it's crap. If you want them to care, make them care. Don't just keep a wish in your heart like a teenager with a crush and hope someday middle management will suddenly admit she loved you all along and come on let's retire to Hawaii and you can write all of our code and we'll never be angry at you again or make you work overtime and have a donut and some coffee.
I guess I didn't manage to get rid of the spiteful commentary after all. Oh well.
Disclaimer: I'm young, unemployed, have never been a manager, but golly gee whiz, some people act like children.
Because that's what that phrase means. It interprets data meaningfully and delivers it to your brain so you can use it, or not, at your discretion. You switch between using it and not using it trivially, as opposed to...
Is a handheld compass also an "on-body" circuit?
Do you have to take an action to use it? Yes? Then no.
How about a handheld electronic compass that beeps when you're pointing north?
Yes, but it would be a much less useful one.
The writer would have experienced the same revelations of orientation with dashboard GPS.
Only assuming that they were continually aware of said GPS every moment, or could be (especially without feeling that they look stupid, which would stop people from doing so under many circumstances). They would then, as did the writer (I assume, I have not RTFA), have to integrate that into their memory, which for a GPS device, would probably be "Look at GPS. Look back up at building. Look back down at GPS to make sure. Puzzle over the matter. Look at building again. I guess that's north, huh." However, since the device doesn't require taking a critical sense away from examining the issue at hand (or foot), but uses touch instead, it would be more like "Stare at the building in puzzlement, while walking past and simultaneously double-checking your ankle-meter, and yup, that's north alright, huh."
Important? It isn't really. It's a neat experiment though.
So I'm not the only one who selects their definitions, am I? You. Are. An. Astroturfer.
Sorry, but by that logic, wouldn't you--explicitly--be one as well? "You X, just like I do, so you're Y."...
And also a troll. Because frankly, if you want to actually make a point (and at this point you really aren't) the whole ad hominem thing is something to stay away from. Who employs him, even in theory, has so astoundingly little to do with whether or not his statements are accurate that nobody's going to listen once the argument gets to that point--including the person you're talking to.
Like the need to keep it constantly clean of dirt, mud, rubber reside from hard braking, spilled oil, other miscellaneous stains, etc? Like potentially melting the surface whenever there's a car-fire? Like giant fricking gouges in the surface every time a poorly maintained car loses a tire--or police throw out the spike strips? Like the cost of constantly replacing the glass every time it's damaged? Like sharp edges being formed in the glass by accidents which then go on to tear up tires, causing more of the gouges mentioned before?
I like the solar panel idea but not at all as a road surface, unless it's roads that aren't usually in use, such as in deserts. If they were deployed over the road, as a sun and rain shield, or something, I wouldn't object, although I can see that some people would.
Slashdot Mirror
So... you're thinking that using lasers to etch fruit labels on Iraqi nuclear scientists is a BAD solution, then?
I dislike that kind of thought experiment because it explicitly dissuades you from even trying to find a way to get both, or in general thinking critically..
The original way you phrased it, it is implicit that the people who are trying to interview you are going to be not only inflexible to absolutely inflexible. If the thirty seconds it would take you to apologize, scribble a telephone number, and run off, would completely ruin the interview, then the person on the other side is a completely OCD asshole. Alternately, if the woman was in such a position that you would never ever ever ever ever meet her again if you turned her down now, or if she could skin you alive if you came back after running off--even with a good excuse--then it probably wouldn't work, and if you could make it work, is it really worth it?
The "two doors" method is pretty much the same. Rarely does one actually find a situation where things really are that clear cut, and if you do, it's probably something you wouldn't want anyway; if someone "put the job of my dreams" and "put the woman of my dreams" behind doors, then I would know they were gaming me and I wouldn't trust either of their choices; I'd simply walk away. And again, as the GP said, if the "woman of my dreams" was someone I already knew but who was not going to accept that I needed a job, screw her. And if it's someone I didn't know, why should I trust someone who's trying to make me decide?
I'm not saying that things never turn out analogously in real life--they do. But if running into a situation like that causes your brain to shut down and makes you only see two mutually exclusive options, then you pretty much already lost.
The idea is to start with the really easy profit niches like space tourism and precious material mining and go from there. We don't need to bring back ore from the asteroids, just the finished processed materials.
Yes, there is that. Once we have viable live-in space stations, then positioning them further and further from earth becomes mostly a question of logistics; and once they grow large enough, internal industrial facilities aren't out of the question. But it will take a long while to get to that point.
The single largest problem in terms of colonizing space is getting from Earth's surface to LEO. The trip from there is relatively easy using solar/nuclear powered alternative engines like plasma, ion etc.
I'm not too sure about that one. Getting ships to low earth orbit isn't significantly different from getting a reliable, seaworthy vessel. You may notice we still don't have any cities entirely at sea, although the first person circumnavigated the entire globe almost half a millenia ago. Granted, we have cruise ships, and some people are always thinking of how, but you know what I mean.
It's just a matter of doing it all in several small, manageable steps.
I do agree. It isn't going to be easy, though, and most of the small steps in between aren't very profitable on their own.
Indeed. A quick google search on the distance from earth to mars puts it between 3 and 23 light-minutes, depending on their location in their orbits. This ignores something like a huge EM emitter in between the two named Sol. Without a (fragile and expensive) array of lower-ping satellites in between, that puts the roundtime on a single SYN/ACK at six to fourty-five minutes, to say nothing of error correction. With the satellites, you could probably at least send a single http fetch request all at once and simply come back in an hour or so to get the results.
Most likely, any content in high demand would be mirrored on either side of the split and updated at invervals, and the rest either wouldn't be available or would be batch-downloaded. Probably won't be much in the way of logins across that boundary, however. Server side scripting will also be right out. This will of course rule out a lot of interesting places, but... oh well. Maybe someone on the other side will open a pay service to mirror the site internals and send diffs back and forth to keep the databases updated.
This is all assuming that there is a large colony on, say, mars. If it's a few people, they'll just beam the porn internet content that they ask for in batches, to be cached locally. They probably won't have access to, say, Digg or Stumbleupon or Facebook or anything, unless it's cherrypicked pretty well.
Shoplifter's aren't pirates by sheer force of scale. A person who stowed away on a merchant ship and stole and ate apples wasn't a pirate, either.
Again, one of the big pieces of piracy is that the same goods that are being lost are showing up again on the marketplace, but without the people who produced them being given their (presumably) due rewards. And you're right; copyright infringement is NOT stealing, unless they can decompile the code and put out a "brand new" product that's nothing but the same product and new labels. It is, however, piracy, as the company's goods are being "sold" without their permission (even if it's for free).
This is without challenging the (IMO ludicrous) assumption that "their content isn't the product, DVDs are". If it was produced, it is a product. If you want to argue that the people stamping it on DVDs per se aren't the ones producing the movie--yes, correct, but they are contractually bound to try to sell someone else's product, and counteracting piracy is quickly becoming part of that job.
I know; I chose my words carefully. The goods are being "acquired" but not "sold"; the "market" I refer to is the internet as a whole (from their point of view, anyway) or more specifically, the Pirate Bay et al.
The fact that "pirates" are not getting paid for their end of the bargain, like the lack of violence, doesn't mean the analogy doesn't stand in other ways.
I don't see how piracy is an idiotic term, especially from the standpoint of the people whose products are being stolen.
Pirates sailed the high seas, yes, they murdered and stole, yes. However, of note to the people who 1)produced the goods and 2)bought them, the goods were being stolen, not merely destroyed. Entire markets sprung up where people could acquire LARGE amounts of stolen goods, no questions asked. The people selling were mum about their sources. The people who did the act were difficult to pin down. Often somewhat honest tradesmen were the only people the enforcers could find who had any connection to the theft. People who wanted legitimate goods or who placed a special order would pay higher prices to make up for the drop in sales and the efforts to find the culprits. Granted, there were other expenses not happening here, such as loss of ships, etc.
What we have now are markets where large amounts of stolen goods being acquired, no questions asked. The people distributing them are mum about their sources. The people who did the act are difficult to pin down, lost in the vast ocean--a metaphoric one, but it's a good metaphor. People who want legitimate goods are paying high prices (whether this would not be true if there were no pirates is another question) and forced to deal with DRM. Honest tradesmen, and now unfortunately honest consumers, are being forced to deal with the wrath of the producers. Granted the distribution of a single image is of no cost because the MARGINAL production cost is almost nil, but that fact doesn't mean that the people producing software didn't have large amounts invested in the project.
If you're going to argue that the whole of the argument is how much software should cost, don't. When coders are sponsored by the state and producing software is free, then it will be reasonable to expect to get software for free. Until then you either will or won't get it for free by the whim of whomever made it.
"There's profit in it" generally means "There's profit that we can expect to see in a reasonably near timeframe."
There are hundreds of billions of dollars tied up in the space shuttles. The Apollo program took similar investment. Neither of those programs was ambitious enough to do return with any resources in greater quantity than is useful for research. How many thousands of tons of rocks would you have to return from the astroid belt to be worth a single, solitary, measly billion dollars? This discounts the much higher amounts of fuel necesary to transfer your ship to and from the astroid belt, let alone with that same tonnage of cargo.
This is not to say that it can't be done or that it can't be done for a profit but until there is significant investment in the means to get there and back, or some amazing advance in energy storage/generation and thruster capability, or both, it can only be done by someone who doesn't have to sheepishly return to investors for more money.
That's no good. If there were three bad laws for every politician...
Well, that would be fewer, but it's still too many!
This got modded funny? Really?
I'm 24. The typical age for someone to seriously be saying "In my day" is probably twice that at least. And yet, "In my day", kids weren't supposed to be brought up by electronic babysitters. I'm still not sure they're supposed to be. Kids grow up to be whatever they're taught to be, and if you teach them to spend their whole lives wrapped up in the digital world, hey presto, it's probably gonna happen.
Is the GP really saying "The only way for a group of people to share the same space is for each to be lost in their own world, hiding from the despair that is any attempt to actually enjoy each others' company"?
I called the interplanetary date line, but apparently nobody out there is interested in dating me...
I think that the point of the Cloud as being anything more than a buzzword comes down to one idea and one idea only, and that is specialization of labor.
I don't grown my own wheat, tomatoes, or cows, nor process any of those components, but I like Pizza. We have the culture we have in America because there are people who not only make their living DOING these things, but also figuring out how BEST to do them. They are regulated to make sure that your bulk-grown beef doesn't have diseases or other obvious dangers in it, and they are regulated to some extent so you know what kind of crap they're using to make them grow big, or at least what they AREN'T. All of this means that it's reasonably safe to go down to the market, grab a slab of beef off the rack, and cook it up at home. (Paying for it on the way out is recommended to avoid criminal charges as well.)
The idea that net-borne applications and data storage can work on a similar model ain't new, and anyone who suggests otherwise is blowing out their butthole. Server farms are aptly named; people are just finally figuring out exactly what their business model does, can, and should imply. Frankly, I'd rather lose all the cloud data in the world than all the bulk-grown food in the world, and that's not to say I have my own "backup" garden for self-sufficiency. Rather, it's just pointing out that this sort of thing has been done, and it's just because it's now "cool" that we're all ooh-ing and aah-ing and buzz-wording and anti-buzz-wording.
I'm not sure you understand the potential that any particular astronaut has to ruin hundreds of billions of dollars of government investment. If an astronaut meant to, or just screwed up at something that may have seemed inconsequential at the time, the deaths of the people onboard would be, while publicly tear-jerking, relatively inconsequential compared to the gross loss of capital for the agency. (Less now that they're intending to stop using the shuttles altogether, but to some degree still.)
The fact that he made it through training and became an astronaut means that he was worthy of being trusted with a hundred-billion-plus dollar space ship. That's what the training is for. That's why we pay their training, and why we pay them. Not only could they die in a spectacular fireball if they make the wrong mistake--or if someone else does--but it's possible they could completely ruin NASA's chances of ever being useful again by swaying public opinion. A single person could--or could have--singlehandedly set back mankind's exploration of space by decades or longer.
And you've really got the balls to say that spending the money that he got as part of that trust to keep advancing something he loves and believes in is less respectable than if he had taken his money, gambled with it on the stock market, and taken whatever gains he had and spent them on this as an outsider?
Disclosure: I am related to a former high-ranking NASA employee, and while that doesn't make me an expert, I do have at least SOME sense of scale about the damned thing.
I disagree completely. I think that the GP is spot on.
You have a point that there is a line of professionalism that some people cross and others don't, but I think you have its location wrong. I think that the difference is between people who are able to make their own decisions and people who are forced into a corner, usually by money issues (where "promotions" counts as the same), or in particular by being backed into a corner, especially by the spectre of unemployment (again, money).
Feeling helpless triggers animal instincts, even if they are controlled on the surface. If a person is being forced, he will be complete crap to others. He will be rude. He will be bitter. He will have no respect for anyone or anything unless giving that respect seems like it will get them out his situation. I'm sure you can imagine and I'd bet you can look at pretty much every sleazy salesman on the floor and know that they resent the fact that they're doing it.
The problem is, the corporation isn't aware, and is probably never going to be aware at any useful level that its policies are forcing the people on the front lines to choose between a happy, ethical lifestyle and a paycheck. The top and middle are goal-oriented facets of the corporation, and I'll be damned if there's a single corporation anywhere whose stated premise is to pay its own workers the money they're worth, down to the last slime-covered janitor. That's not the goal of the people above, and realistically speaking, it's never going to be one of them. The marginal cost to the company for transitioning from a "minimum cost" mindset to a reasonable and empathic one is 1)completely unknown and 2)assumed to be pretty high; and considering the people doing such calculations would never themselves see any change in the corporation except perhaps anecdotally, it's a but much to expect them to correctly weight thousands of workers' frustrations against an unknown and presumably scary cost, especially when it might simply cause the workers to get uppity and stop working altogether.
All that said, in the meantime, you simply cannot leave the whole situation as-is and suggest that it's unrealistic to try to stop fraud. The rise of law and the rise of civilization aren't idly correlated. If a company is knowingly employing people who defraud customers, then they are aiding and abetting criminals, whether the law says so yet or not. If it is doing so in ignorance, then it needs to be very publicly brought to their attention. I don't see how this is either unrealistic or impractical.
I think that a big difference between you and the Fed'ral Government, or even a store owner, is that in your case, the security system is, ostensibly, optional; aside from that one twat, your chances of being burgled are reasonably low. Beacuse of that twat, you have some expectation that he, at least, will be coming back, and possibly anyone else who now know that you were, at one point, more vulnerable than the average Joe. Security by obscurity and all that.
When it comes to a store, or government computers, there is no longer the argument that "We didn't really think we would be targeted." I don't know statistics, but I think I can safely say that more quickly a thief or hacker will think of you as a target, the more likely you will be one. Federal Government? Going to be hit. State? Probably pretty often. Local? From time to time. Store full of shinies? I have to believe they get hit from time to time, and if they don't, they probably get profiled to see if a thief could get away with it.
Securing themselves is an expected cost of being that visible. The lawyer in question is just (IMHO) being a weenie. If there was a sense of trust in their security which was misplaced, it lies with one of the following:
a) Incompetent in-house security/administration
b) Incompetent third-party software (trusting which may fall under A if it was known already)
c) Software mistake that just wasn't caught yet
If it's B or C, it's the software developer's cost to pay. If it's A, or possibly B, it's the target's cost to pay. If the hacker was being malicious and making moolah on his crimes, then taking that money away and using it to pay restitution is fair. If he's providing a service and just being kind of a brat about it (or perceived as such) then the victim needs to stop acting like a child and own up to the responsibilities of his position.
I have not RTFA and I'm not really aware of the issue as a whole, but that's my opinion.
Not on you, really, on the GP; sorry for being imprecise
I was going to make a more spiteful reply, but I think you touched on what I wanted to say, so I'll forgo the scorn and just come out and say it.
Programming ...is an art. That's what we want to tell management and they don't want to hear. They see a product come out, and that's what the programmer develops, and that product can be made by anyone. The product will exist whether it's produced by a crack team of programmers, the very best, or whether it's produced by Joe's Codeshack & Office Supplies Warehouse.
What a programmer wants to believe is that the artistry is valuable to the company. I have never worked on a company project, but I have to imagine that if you're just another guy in the line, no, it never will be. If you're a manager and can drive the course of even part of the project, then maybe; otherwise, you are filling a part that is by its very design supposed to be interchangeable. Programming is by its very nature solving a problem; there is a way to solve the problem (or there isn't), and it WILL be solved, whether it's by one person in one day or ten people in twenty. You may be better than them, but it's all relative, so you're trying to argue marginal value to people that don't care. In the meantime you're someone who was hired to be a gear, never rose above it, and is crying because you're a cog in the machine.
What makes a person valuable to the company? Crap, I don't know, ask someone with more experience. But what makes you LESS valuable to the company as a whole?
* Being faceless to everyone who makes the decisions (being friends with people on the same level doesn't help much)
* Not reporting what you did
* Not reporting what you CAN and CAN'T do
* Not explaining things others will need to know
* Creating more problems by being incompatable with the others
* Being an angsty, emo "Management is PAIN" type who truly believes and acts like the company is supposed to be psychic and always pick the best of the litter even when the "best of the litter" (ie, yourself) just sits in their cubicle being oblivious to the world and thinking they're such a blasted genius and that nobody else could do it.
America seems to have a very educated, very angsty caste of people whom the last point describes too clearly. "If you do your job well, you will be rewarded" is rather cliche; if you are VALUABLE, you will be rewarded. I don't know where the meme that keeping your head down and nose to the grindstone is more valuable than contributing meaningfully to the company--or the country--came from, but it's crap. If you want them to care, make them care. Don't just keep a wish in your heart like a teenager with a crush and hope someday middle management will suddenly admit she loved you all along and come on let's retire to Hawaii and you can write all of our code and we'll never be angry at you again or make you work overtime and have a donut and some coffee.
I guess I didn't manage to get rid of the spiteful commentary after all. Oh well.
Disclaimer: I'm young, unemployed, have never been a manager, but golly gee whiz, some people act like children.
Ah, whew. I misread the summary; I was afraid that not brushing my teeth was going to kill me one of these days.
Why is this a different "sense" organ?
Because that's what that phrase means. It interprets data meaningfully and delivers it to your brain so you can use it, or not, at your discretion. You switch between using it and not using it trivially, as opposed to...
Is a handheld compass also an "on-body" circuit?
Do you have to take an action to use it? Yes? Then no.
How about a handheld electronic compass that beeps when you're pointing north?
Yes, but it would be a much less useful one.
The writer would have experienced the same revelations of orientation with dashboard GPS.
Only assuming that they were continually aware of said GPS every moment, or could be (especially without feeling that they look stupid, which would stop people from doing so under many circumstances). They would then, as did the writer (I assume, I have not RTFA), have to integrate that into their memory, which for a GPS device, would probably be "Look at GPS. Look back up at building. Look back down at GPS to make sure. Puzzle over the matter. Look at building again. I guess that's north, huh." However, since the device doesn't require taking a critical sense away from examining the issue at hand (or foot), but uses touch instead, it would be more like "Stare at the building in puzzlement, while walking past and simultaneously double-checking your ankle-meter, and yup, that's north alright, huh."
Important? It isn't really. It's a neat experiment though.
So I'm not the only one who selects their definitions, am I? You. Are. An. Astroturfer.
Sorry, but by that logic, wouldn't you--explicitly--be one as well? "You X, just like I do, so you're Y." ...
And also a troll. Because frankly, if you want to actually make a point (and at this point you really aren't) the whole ad hominem thing is something to stay away from. Who employs him, even in theory, has so astoundingly little to do with whether or not his statements are accurate that nobody's going to listen once the argument gets to that point--including the person you're talking to.
It's not the un-tarring, that bothers me, it's the feathers...
(Which isn't to say I didn't get the joke, so zip it)
In your starship, of course. I hear transparent aluminum does wonders as far as structural integrity is concerned.
Personally, I save the planet every day. By putting air and dirt in jars, but hey, someone's gotta do it! (Disclaimer: Joke)
Doesn't the body have its own electric field? How much amperage is this device going to draw?
Why so serious?
Some other consequence I havent thought of yet.
Like the need to keep it constantly clean of dirt, mud, rubber reside from hard braking, spilled oil, other miscellaneous stains, etc? Like potentially melting the surface whenever there's a car-fire? Like giant fricking gouges in the surface every time a poorly maintained car loses a tire--or police throw out the spike strips? Like the cost of constantly replacing the glass every time it's damaged? Like sharp edges being formed in the glass by accidents which then go on to tear up tires, causing more of the gouges mentioned before?
I like the solar panel idea but not at all as a road surface, unless it's roads that aren't usually in use, such as in deserts. If they were deployed over the road, as a sun and rain shield, or something, I wouldn't object, although I can see that some people would.
Whatever.