Perspective disclosure regarding my comments: I'm a conservative non-republican who grudgingly voted for Bush.
More or less what I was going to post, but you beat me to it:). What happened to this individual, while unfortunate and in my opinion indefensible, is nowhere near what happens to those "disappeared" under totalitarian regimes. Say what you want, but I seriously doubt he's going to be tortured, killed, and buried in an unmarked mass grave. When people with extreme political views (and this applies to the right, the left, and everyone in between) exaggerate their claims in this manner they completely destroy their credibility, at least with those of us who have an IQ higher than our shoe size and are actually capable of some critical thought.
I'm not terribly comfortable with the way the government is handling this, but I think we need to acknowledge that we are fighting a new type of war (with a group of violent extremists rather than a readily identifiable nation-state) and that some new rules will be necessary. There's no way in hell that putting all of the "enemy combatants" (Padilla) and the "material witnesses" (like the gentleman mentioned in this article - and I think that holding people like this as "material witnesses" is an egregious perversion of the intent of that rule) through the criminal justice system will work. My initial thoughts (and IANAL) regarding American citizens that are caught up in these situations are as follows:
The government must provide sufficient evidence to hold the suspect. If the information cannot be made public (and I absolutely believe there will be many situations where this will legitimately be the case), then there should be a special grand jury that is cleared to view the secret information and decide if the government has sufficient evidence to hold the suspect. The whole "we're the government and we think this person is bad and you'll just have to trust us" is absolutely unacceptable. A federal grand jury comprised of citizens with Top Secret clearance would not be the easiest thing to convene, but far from impossible and a small price to pay for helping to uphold our nation's ideas of justice.
The government must be liable and accountable for any damages caused by false arrests and detentions. They must publicly acknowledge the mistake and clear the person's name, and should be penalized in a manner that creates a significant disincentive for them to arrest people without being very, very sure of what they are doing.
I'm sure that people with far more legal wisdom than I possess can refine these ideas further, but they're a start.
Am I the only person who noticed that they cravenly removed the Mozilla mascot from the splash screen?
This will sound stupid to the Slashdot Crowd, but many of the people that I've switched to Mozilla really, really liked the mascott. I've even had several of the women comment that they used Mozilla because they thought the logo was cute; the guys though it looked cool (these people are not technical types).
Why they would switch to the current bland and antiseptic splash screen is beyond me. I mean, I'm not going to switch browsers or anything, but they do risk alienating at least a fraction of their "joe six-pack" user base. Plus it's just dumb from a marketing standpoint.
Bring back the fire-breathing lizard!!!!
If you agree with me, vote for the bug I submitted to Bugzilla.
It presently costs 13 pesos (~US$1.30) per minute to call from Tijuana to San Diego (right across the border). This is due to the horribly outdated and corrupt monopoly that controls their phone systems down there (and we think we have it bad in the US)...
Anyway, I wouldn't worry about phone spam from our neighbors to the south, at least until they get their telecom act together...
Hypothetically, you could use 64-bit integers to repleace floating point numbers in many places (think physics engines, graphics calculations, etc). You wouldn't have the same accuracy that you would get from using floats, but it's a nice middle-ground between 32-bit ints, floats, and double-precision floats. Generally speaking, dealing with integers is much faster than dealing with floats.
Better yet, sue them for the time it took for your sysadmins, legal staff, etc. to deal with the issue. My (IANAL) advice: make it for $1 less than the maximum amount allowed by your local small claims court (here in San Diego, CA, that's $4999). Explain to the judge the seriousness of their accusation - that the crime they are accusing you of is a felony and that penalties include prison terms of up to 5 years and fines of up to $250,000 plus damages they could be awarded in a civil action ($millions). Because of this, you felt obligated to do extra dilligence to ensure that you were definitely not infringing on their copyrights. However, because it is patently (ha ha) obvious that they did no due dilligence of their own before accusing you of a major felony, you should absolutely be entitlted to reimbursement for your time and expenses.
Aside from humorous attempts such as Office Space, I think the last thing we want to see in movies is accurate portrayal of programmers... The few places I have seen them have made me cringe. For example, the guy in Jurrasic Park that's stealing the dinosaur embryos.
I mean, think about it: how interesting would it be to watch us surf & post on Slashdot all day?
Even if it weren't for ATI's ARB2 performance, there still probably wouldn't be an R300 path for one simple reason - ATI was the company that leaked the Doom 3 alpha, and folks at iD Software were (and probably still are) a bit pissed off at them.
I've been seriously considering (ok, drooling over the possibilities of) upgrading my existing TX-DS838 Onkyo Receiver / Amp to a TX-NR900, which has the Netstream feature built-in. Anyone used one of their Netstream devices and care to comment?
This is not because MS wants to be warm and fuzzy.
on
The Vanishing HailStorm
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Remember: MS's MO when a product starts running horribly behind schedule (see: every version of Windows) to start dropping promised features left and right. I wouldn't read much more into it than that, unless somebody has some inside information that's provably not just more spin.
You pretty much hit the nail on the head. I was fortunate enough to spend most of my high school years (87-89) in a highly functional school district (Richardson, Texas). There were many cool things about this disctrict:
At the time, the district was an "Independant" one (as opposed to a "unified" one) - funded by local taxes, run by a locally elected school board that actually functioned like a board of directors for a corporation (with the citizens of the community being the shareholders).
They would hire business executives to run the district like a business and payed them damned well to do so (and these executives pretty much had the guns to their heads as far as performance was concerned).
Since there wasn't a teacher's union (Texas is a "right to work" state, which discourages unions), underperforming teachers could be given the boot in an expedicious manner. Not that they let anyone without a Master's degree teach there anyway. We even had a few PhD's on the faculty.
School bonds? No such thing. Finances were properly managed, and new schools and other capital improvements were paid for with cash on hand. New computers for the labs every two years. Same for the chemistry and physics departments. The arts departments were well-funded, etc. No money was wasted on interest payments, Wall Street bond salesmen, etc.
Cool classes: how many other public high schools let you take a class in Robotics?
Sadly, it all came to an end. The political-correctness police decided that all of the success that Richardson was having was horribly unfair to districts that didn't have as much money - not that Richardson was by any means a wealthy community - we're talking pretty-much middle class here. They were just willing to pay very high property taxes (~3% annualy, IIRC, just for the schools), and the local citizens had the power to make sure they got the results they were paying for. The community was highly involved, because their involvement actually made a difference. So anyway, after two years of lawsuits it was decided that you couldn't fund schools locally. When the schools became funded by the state, more and more control was ceded to the state beaurocrats over everything else. Honestly, I haven't been back since '89 and I haven't personally witnessed the current state of things, but from what I've heard from friends things have deteriorated significantly.
The moral of this story: Local control allows districts to rise to whatever level they want; state control will guarantee that no one does much better than anyone else (in other words, you get shit). The source of money always dictates who has control; so the money should be obtained as close to home as possible. I have no problem with the state sending funds to poor and / or sparsely populated areas, but the money should come with no strings other than those that make sure that it's not spent fraudulently. Teacher's unions are poison. By ensuring that bad teachers can't be fired and discouraging any standards for teaching quality, they do irreparable harm to students everywhere. They do more to hold down racial minorities and inner-city kids than the Klan or Skinheads ever dreamed of. They were started with good intentions, but they now operate with purely selfish motives - give the teachers more cash, and fuck the kids. I don't have a problem with teachers making a good wage, but they need to be held tightly accountable for their output.
Public schools can work, and they can even be excellent. You just have to provide the proper environment to allow them to flourish.
Try using QuickBooks. They p1mp so many (grossly overpriced) services in their software it's sick. Doing my accounting is about as annoying as browsing pr0n sites with IE. This with software I shelled out ~$200 for, plus the tax table subscription.
Oh no, it's much, much worse. I'm in the exact same boat as the sumitter with my business. My experience with Quicken / Quickbooks updates in the past has been that the software tags the data files (and may make other changes, but I haven't bothered trying to hack them) with the version / patch number currently in use. If you reinstall Quickbooks, it will refuse to use the data file until the software has been patched up the level that the data files were last used at.
I've also been looking for a good OSS solution, but have come up short (I'll post separately on that subject).
Re: (Not So) Pointless
on
New Look at ADSL2
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I would imagine that telcos will start doing more of what they did for my neighborhood - install a box (looks like a large refridgerator on its side) that essentially functions as a mini Central Office. So even though we're 20,000 feet from the actual CO, we get DSL connections that are under 2,000 feet.
The telcos know they have to do something before they get their clocks cleaned by the cable companies and wireless T-1 providers (notwithstanding the limitations of those technologies - they do kick ass on price, which is all 85% of the market cares about). Expect to see more of these remote-CO things (pardon the technical description) in the future....
Slashdot Mirror
Unless you have an ultra-sweet cell phone number along the lines of xxx-xx1-1100
Imagine if you are making another horribly outdated "Someone set up us the bomb!" reference.... (ok, I still find it amusing).
Case in point: What's currently going on with the Big Brother... errr... PATRIOT Act...sl
I can't believe the Iraqi Information Minister would contradict John Walker (Lindh), a known member of the Taliban...
about how a bunch of 1337 h4x0rz from 5l45hd0t trashed the bullitin boards that control the movie industry....
More or less what I was going to post, but you beat me to it
I'm not terribly comfortable with the way the government is handling this, but I think we need to acknowledge that we are fighting a new type of war (with a group of violent extremists rather than a readily identifiable nation-state) and that some new rules will be necessary. There's no way in hell that putting all of the "enemy combatants" (Padilla) and the "material witnesses" (like the gentleman mentioned in this article - and I think that holding people like this as "material witnesses" is an egregious perversion of the intent of that rule) through the criminal justice system will work. My initial thoughts (and IANAL) regarding American citizens that are caught up in these situations are as follows:
The government must provide sufficient evidence to hold the suspect. If the information cannot be made public (and I absolutely believe there will be many situations where this will legitimately be the case), then there should be a special grand jury that is cleared to view the secret information and decide if the government has sufficient evidence to hold the suspect. The whole "we're the government and we think this person is bad and you'll just have to trust us" is absolutely unacceptable. A federal grand jury comprised of citizens with Top Secret clearance would not be the easiest thing to convene, but far from impossible and a small price to pay for helping to uphold our nation's ideas of justice.
The government must be liable and accountable for any damages caused by false arrests and detentions. They must publicly acknowledge the mistake and clear the person's name, and should be penalized in a manner that creates a significant disincentive for them to arrest people without being very, very sure of what they are doing.
I'm sure that people with far more legal wisdom than I possess can refine these ideas further, but they're a start.
Dammit, the one day I don't have mod points. I couldn't have said it better myself.
Am I the only person who noticed that they cravenly removed the Mozilla mascot from the splash screen?
This will sound stupid to the Slashdot Crowd, but many of the people that I've switched to Mozilla really, really liked the mascott. I've even had several of the women comment that they used Mozilla because they thought the logo was cute; the guys though it looked cool (these people are not technical types).
Why they would switch to the current bland and antiseptic splash screen is beyond me. I mean, I'm not going to switch browsers or anything, but they do risk alienating at least a fraction of their "joe six-pack" user base. Plus it's just dumb from a marketing standpoint.
Bring back the fire-breathing lizard!!!!
If you agree with me, vote for the bug I submitted to Bugzilla.
I guess these are the next steps to full-on gargoyle mode (everyone on Slashdot has read Snow Crash, right?)...
Seriously, Benneton has created some of the most annoyingly politically correct advertising I've ever seen... reason enough to avoid it.
It presently costs 13 pesos (~US$1.30) per minute to call from Tijuana to San Diego (right across the border). This is due to the horribly outdated and corrupt monopoly that controls their phone systems down there (and we think we have it bad in the US)...
Anyway, I wouldn't worry about phone spam from our neighbors to the south, at least until they get their telecom act together...
Hypothetically, you could use 64-bit integers to repleace floating point numbers in many places (think physics engines, graphics calculations, etc). You wouldn't have the same accuracy that you would get from using floats, but it's a nice middle-ground between 32-bit ints, floats, and double-precision floats. Generally speaking, dealing with integers is much faster than dealing with floats.
Better yet, sue them for the time it took for your sysadmins, legal staff, etc. to deal with the issue. My (IANAL) advice: make it for $1 less than the maximum amount allowed by your local small claims court (here in San Diego, CA, that's $4999). Explain to the judge the seriousness of their accusation - that the crime they are accusing you of is a felony and that penalties include prison terms of up to 5 years and fines of up to $250,000 plus damages they could be awarded in a civil action ($millions). Because of this, you felt obligated to do extra dilligence to ensure that you were definitely not infringing on their copyrights. However, because it is patently (ha ha) obvious that they did no due dilligence of their own before accusing you of a major felony, you should absolutely be entitlted to reimbursement for your time and expenses.
He's probably just like us... too busy deleting spam from his inbox...
Aside from humorous attempts such as Office Space, I think the last thing we want to see in movies is accurate portrayal of programmers... The few places I have seen them have made me cringe. For example, the guy in Jurrasic Park that's stealing the dinosaur embryos.
I mean, think about it: how interesting would it be to watch us surf & post on Slashdot all day?
Even if it weren't for ATI's ARB2 performance, there still probably wouldn't be an R300 path for one simple reason - ATI was the company that leaked the Doom 3 alpha, and folks at iD Software were (and probably still are) a bit pissed off at them.
Dude's name sounds like a boxing match...
I've been seriously considering (ok, drooling over the possibilities of) upgrading my existing TX-DS838 Onkyo Receiver / Amp to a TX-NR900, which has the Netstream feature built-in. Anyone used one of their Netstream devices and care to comment?
Remember: MS's MO when a product starts running horribly behind schedule (see: every version of Windows) to start dropping promised features left and right. I wouldn't read much more into it than that, unless somebody has some inside information that's provably not just more spin.
At the time, the district was an "Independant" one (as opposed to a "unified" one) - funded by local taxes, run by a locally elected school board that actually functioned like a board of directors for a corporation (with the citizens of the community being the shareholders).
They would hire business executives to run the district like a business and payed them damned well to do so (and these executives pretty much had the guns to their heads as far as performance was concerned).
Since there wasn't a teacher's union (Texas is a "right to work" state, which discourages unions), underperforming teachers could be given the boot in an expedicious manner. Not that they let anyone without a Master's degree teach there anyway. We even had a few PhD's on the faculty.
School bonds? No such thing. Finances were properly managed, and new schools and other capital improvements were paid for with cash on hand. New computers for the labs every two years. Same for the chemistry and physics departments. The arts departments were well-funded, etc. No money was wasted on interest payments, Wall Street bond salesmen, etc.
Cool classes: how many other public high schools let you take a class in Robotics?
Sadly, it all came to an end. The political-correctness police decided that all of the success that Richardson was having was horribly unfair to districts that didn't have as much money - not that Richardson was by any means a wealthy community - we're talking pretty-much middle class here. They were just willing to pay very high property taxes (~3% annualy, IIRC, just for the schools), and the local citizens had the power to make sure they got the results they were paying for. The community was highly involved, because their involvement actually made a difference. So anyway, after two years of lawsuits it was decided that you couldn't fund schools locally. When the schools became funded by the state, more and more control was ceded to the state beaurocrats over everything else. Honestly, I haven't been back since '89 and I haven't personally witnessed the current state of things, but from what I've heard from friends things have deteriorated significantly.
The moral of this story: Local control allows districts to rise to whatever level they want; state control will guarantee that no one does much better than anyone else (in other words, you get shit). The source of money always dictates who has control; so the money should be obtained as close to home as possible. I have no problem with the state sending funds to poor and / or sparsely populated areas, but the money should come with no strings other than those that make sure that it's not spent fraudulently. Teacher's unions are poison. By ensuring that bad teachers can't be fired and discouraging any standards for teaching quality, they do irreparable harm to students everywhere. They do more to hold down racial minorities and inner-city kids than the Klan or Skinheads ever dreamed of. They were started with good intentions, but they now operate with purely selfish motives - give the teachers more cash, and fuck the kids. I don't have a problem with teachers making a good wage, but they need to be held tightly accountable for their output.
Public schools can work, and they can even be excellent. You just have to provide the proper environment to allow them to flourish.
Try using QuickBooks. They p1mp so many (grossly overpriced) services in their software it's sick. Doing my accounting is about as annoying as browsing pr0n sites with IE. This with software I shelled out ~$200 for, plus the tax table subscription.
Oh no, it's much, much worse. I'm in the exact same boat as the sumitter with my business. My experience with Quicken / Quickbooks updates in the past has been that the software tags the data files (and may make other changes, but I haven't bothered trying to hack them) with the version / patch number currently in use. If you reinstall Quickbooks, it will refuse to use the data file until the software has been patched up the level that the data files were last used at.
I've also been looking for a good OSS solution, but have come up short (I'll post separately on that subject).
I would imagine that telcos will start doing more of what they did for my neighborhood - install a box (looks like a large refridgerator on its side) that essentially functions as a mini Central Office. So even though we're 20,000 feet from the actual CO, we get DSL connections that are under 2,000 feet.
The telcos know they have to do something before they get their clocks cleaned by the cable companies and wireless T-1 providers (notwithstanding the limitations of those technologies - they do kick ass on price, which is all 85% of the market cares about). Expect to see more of these remote-CO things (pardon the technical description) in the future....
With a large hydrogen canister, your runtime is significantly (as in an order of magnitude - YMMV) longer.