If you are having to lie to your wife to get to see a game then I would suggest that you have bigger problems than EZPass. It speaks to a serious relationship problem. On the other issue, criminal evidence, I suppose I just consider whether I'm more likely to be a victim of a crime or a perpetrator. Personally I'd rather the police be able to use something like EZPass (which I don't believe we have here in the UK, although the Oyster card on London Transport is similar from the tracking people point of view) to find me if I get abducted/carjacked before I get killed (or at least catch my killer) or find my car if it gets stolen than try to make some point about an illusion of privacy. Similarly I'm not worried about the government looking at my Loyalty cards records and finding out that I (or more accurately my household) drink up to 12 litres of Cherry Coke a week and eat pork.
Just think though. If that guy had his full DNA fingerprint in the ID database they would have picked up straight away that he wasn't the father and he wouldn't have had to pay anything.
I'd go to the left, myself. But then I'm not a developer. Sure I write the odd shell script and occasionally knock up a little program in C or a procedure (or anonymnous block) in PL/SQL, but coding isn't my job. I quit coding years ago when I discovered that i could get far more satisfaction (and more money) as a DBA.
Outside of certain narrow areas there does seem to be a shortage of 'brilliant' applications on Linux. I say 'brilliant' rather than good as good seems to imply some sort of objective quality whereas I'm more interested in a mixture of objective and subjective. A good application will do what it's expected to do, a brilliant one will do what it's expected to do quickly and easily and will have some degree of 'Wow' factor. Firefox is brilliant, the Gimp isn't, OpenOffice.org is close.
Some of the characteristics of brilliant applications would, in my opinion, be:
Does the job it's supposed to do as quickly as possible (no unnecessary code bloat)
Where possible the UI is familiar to users of similar applications with, in GUI apps, multiple methods to invoke common actions (e.g. button on a button bar, menu entry and key stroke) which will be the same (or as similar as possible) as the methods used by similar apps to do the same actions. This is a combination of comfort (it looks familiar) and learning curve. One effect of the influence of Microsoft Wondows over the past decade or so is that people are familiar with the concept of, for example, ctrl-C being Copy which also appears on the Edit menu and on Button Bars is represented by a graphic of two slightly overlapping pieces of paper. If you use something different then that's something the users have to learn and have to remember when they're going from app to app as they work, small deifferences might not be a problem (for example I use Programmers File Editor which uses a graphic of a camera on the button bar for copy, but keeps everything else the same so that one difference is bearable, for me at least).
A 'WOW' factor. There's got to be something that makes me want to use this software rather than whatever I've been doing so far. In Firefox, for me at least, it's tabbed browsing and some of the extensions (I use Google Browser Sync, Blogger Web Comments and Google Notebook). In OpenOffice.org, for me at least, it's being able to export to PDF. In LaTeX, again for me at least, it's being able to control precisely how the documents will appear when output.
Works with later versions of libraries/compilers/other applications. To be fair this happens on Windows as well (DLL Hell), but not so often anymore, and is not always the fault of the application developer (library/application writers sometimes break backwards compatibility in their API, compiler/tool writers sometimes change the way the compiler/tool works so code that compiled fine before now will not compile). If an application uses a library then it should only use the published API to improve the probability that, should the library be upgraded to a later version during the life of the software, the application will continue to work. This also requires that library writers keep their API consistent between versions unless they have a damned good reason to change it, and then only if they have no option to offer an alternate API call to new functionality whilst maintaining the old API to a version of the functionality that is compatible to the old functionality.
Atomic install/deinstall, no Dependancy Hell. A common 'feature' of Open Source Software on Linux (and other *NIX), and some Closed Source commercial applications I've come accross, is that the install fails due to needing a later (sometime earlier) version of some library or a particular version of another application (I have frequently had problems due to applications requiring a particular version (not necessarily the latest one) of GCC, BISON
Re:One Point For Gmail
on
Gmail vs Pine
·
· Score: 1
I use Gmail through a slow dial up from home (typically 30kbps but goes as low as 20kbps and I quite often am checking my mail whilst something is downloading so the bandwidth is shared with other processes) and haven't noticed any particular speed problems. If anything it's a lot faster than Yahoo! mail or anything else of that ilk.
I don't have any issues with the text ads, I don't tend to notice them unless an ad happens to catch my eye because it's relevant to something I'm thinking about. I get very little spam to my Gmail account, maybe 2 actual spams a day (I have my Bigfoot4Life address redirected to my gmail address, prior to that I was getting 100+ spam mails a day to that address, Gmail now filters them out).
Of those I've actually met and worked with (small sample size, maybe a few dozen) I'd estimate that 80-90% have returned. Probably about a third of them had a family (i.e. a partner and sometimes kids) in their area of origin to return to, others had someone they intended or were commited to marry to return to.
My observation, from having worked for IT employers who heavily used immigrant workers and living in areas where such workers settle, is that it's, now, very rare that said workers contribute more than the absolute minimum to the local economy. In the past it was normal for immigrant workers to come to an area, settle down, buy houses and raise families (by either bringing in others from their area of origin or marrying into the local population). These days, especially in IT, the norm seems to be to move into an area, take over jobs, spend as little as possible whilst saving or sending back to their area of origin as much money as possible then (as soon as they've saved enough) returning to their area of origin. Often the IT work in the developed world isn't a career, it's just a step to raise enough capital to set them up in what they actually want to do. I've had a number of friends working in IT who have come from India and had the stated intention of just working in IT for a few years to earn the money to buy some farmland or a hotel (which they would then hire other people to work for them). Even those in suposedly permanant jobs have treated them like contrator positions.
We make the assumption that in exchange for this temporary monopoly the author will eventually give it up because they will be living off the profits of their next work.
As I recall the current international agreement on copyright is 25 years after the death of the creator. That does raise a question of what constitues the death of the creator. If a person creates something themselves then it's fairly clear. But what if they do it as a 'work for hire' and so the copyright belongs to a corporation? What if it's a collaborative work?
A more likely scenario is that the CEO will replace his reliable and expensive (but the purchase costs were written off 2 years ago and it's well bedded in with minimal support costs so, on paper at least, it's currently close to free) cluster running Oracle for a bunch of over priced blades running Windows 2003 and Microsoft SQL Server (plus have to retrain all their support staff) on the strength of an article in eWeek or a Gartner Report.
And I'd expect someone teaching a class of people who were fluent in Spanish to do so in Spanish and to be fluent in that language. The point isn't that he wasn't fluent specifically in English, it's that he wasn't fluent (or even competant) in the language of the students or class he was teaching. I didn't say that both teacher and students need to be fluent in English, I said that they need to be fluent in the language the class is delivered in.
BTW lose the US-centricity, this was in the UK where the Latin population is quite small. If there's a common other language here it's more likley to be Urdu than Spanish.
If a teacher is hard to understand, they are more likely to tune out that teacher, thus also significantly reducing the quality of education, even at that level.
True, and not just school kids. A few years ago I went on a course about one of the major products we use at work. I was 32, about typical for the class. The trainer we had was supposedly one of the best on the product and had excellent reviews, in Saudi Arabia. His English was awful, made worse by his thick accent anmd the fact that he spoke rather softly (we spent a lot of our time saying "Pardon?" or "Could you speak up a bit more please?"). To be fair, talking to him between sessions it was obvious that he really knew the material and if he was teaching to native Arabic speakers he would probably be brilliant, unfortunately to a classroom full of native English speakers he was incomprehensible.
We, unlike most school pupils, did have a get out though. On day 2 (it was a 5 day course) we basically revolted and demanded that the training centre supply us with an English speaking tutor else we'd quit the course and cancel payment. First thing on the morning of day 3 we had the top English speaking trainer in the country who managed to cover all 5 days of material in the three remaining days.
It seems pretty much axiomic that for teaching to work both teacher and student must be fluent in the language the teaching is going on in
Give control to FIFA! If they can organise the World Cup, and actually remember to invite the rest of the world, then handing out domain names should be easy.
That sounds more like a DTP paradigm than a wordprocessing paradigm. With wordprocessing you're aiming to get the information onto the page and for it to look OK regardless of the output device, you're not too bothered if it doesn't look exactly the same on someone else's screen or printed on their printer compared with your screen and printer, you're not too worried if your table at the bottom of page 7 gets bumped to the top of page 8 &c. With DTP you want the output to look exactly the same regardless of where it it viewed or where it is printed, that table at the bottom of page 7 had better stay at the bottom of page 7 &c. You're comparing Word and OO.o Writer with Publisher, PagePlus and Scribus.
Soldiers, especially commissioned ranks, should know when and how to appropriately question orders. Unquestioning obedience has not really been desireable since World War One, even then officers were expected to understand and interpret the orders they were being given, rather than just mindlessly obey.
What we're talking about here isn't really "Over the top. Take that hill!" type of orders (which tend to be shouted at you by someone you know in the middle of an engagement), more the "Put all the documents about operation XYZ, including the top secret ones, in a big brown envelope and leave it on the bench at the corner of the park at 15:30 tommorrow." type, which people certainly should confirm the veracity and source of.
From: GeorgeB@whitehouse.gov To: SAC_Command@Cheyenne.mil Subject: Nuke Washington
Hi guys,
The evildoerres have taken ovar congres. I want you to launch those nucluar missels at Washington now. Don't bother to call to check, this is legitamut.
Maybe someone should pitch that to Dubbya and imply that the "Evildoers" (tm) are planning to do just that. Within minutes NASA would have more money that they could possibly spend and a mandate to get back into space.
Plus there are many (and increasing) blogs about that do contain useful content. A lot of writers and grassroots pressure groups are using the blog format to present what previously they used a non-blog webpage format for. There's been a fair few times I've come accross a gnarly technical problem, landed up Googling on the error message/symptoms and found that the most useful result was a blog entry that was either someone blogging "I had this problem and this how I fixed it." or "I've got this problem, how do I fix it" and the fix has been in a comment. I'm a member of a few community blogs that exist precisely for that purpose.
Plus the US constitution only really holds sway in, well, the US. Slashdot may be hosted in the US (unless it's been outsourced to a datacentre in India by now) but an increasing portion of the web is outside of the US and US direct jurisdiction, as has been evidenced recently.
My blog (on LiveJournal) started to get a lot of comment spam when it started to appear in Google results, usually on entries that were at least a few days old. The spam was usually vaguely related to the content of the post, so if I wrote an entry about (say) seeing a pretty girl I'd get a spam comment advertising a pron site but if I wrote about a piece of software then I'd get an spam comment advertising "CHEAP MICROSOFT OFFICE CDs **$10**" &c. I guessed they got my blog URL from search engine results. I figure it wouldn't be too hard to write a script that queries a search engine on key words that relate to the site you're trying to promote then get all the blog entries that are listed (look at the URL for blog sites and for anything else that would indicate it's a blog) then feed those URLs in a script that will post the comment. It seems pretty obvious that a search engine (the purpose of blog comment spam being more to get a good search engine response rather than directly promote to people) has a better chance of getting your URL and giving it a good score if it's linked from a page the engine has already spidered and apparently trusts. I stopped it by disabling anonynmous comments and making it so that any comments made by a logged in user who wasn't on my friends list was screened until I unscreened it.
One thing I've noticed litersally in the last few days are spam blog posts to community blogs on LiveJournal, mostly advertising cam-girls.
Quite a bit about freedom. There's been some suggestion about banning pointed kitchen knives but it's half hearted at best, nothing serious, just to keep the whiners quiet till they find something else to complain about. You're about 15 or 20 years out of date on the police advice. Current advice is to do what it takes to get away then get away. People only tend to go to jail for things like shooting other people who are on their property.
As I recall somewhere else in the discussion someone (someone from the US I believe) pointed out that reporting in the US is very much lacking in veracity when it comes to the rest of the world which can give people within it's borders a rather distorted view of the rest of the world.
Another thing we know a lot about is humour. Especially things like irony and, so called, 'deadpan' humour where someone makes an outrageous comment but in a serious manner to make it even funnier for the people who recognise it for what it is.
You get rid of that requirement for Presidents to have been born in the US and be US citzens, then I'd be happy to give it my best efforts. If nothing else it would be a change and might shake some of the more hidebound people out of their complacency.
As I recall the hypothesis was along the lines of being that a society based on the US constitution would provide for greater personal success, liberty and equality than one not so based. In that context 'success' of the experiment would be proving the hypothesis whilst 'failure' would be disproving the hypothesis.
Slashdot Mirror
If you are having to lie to your wife to get to see a game then I would suggest that you have bigger problems than EZPass. It speaks to a serious relationship problem. On the other issue, criminal evidence, I suppose I just consider whether I'm more likely to be a victim of a crime or a perpetrator. Personally I'd rather the police be able to use something like EZPass (which I don't believe we have here in the UK, although the Oyster card on London Transport is similar from the tracking people point of view) to find me if I get abducted/carjacked before I get killed (or at least catch my killer) or find my car if it gets stolen than try to make some point about an illusion of privacy. Similarly I'm not worried about the government looking at my Loyalty cards records and finding out that I (or more accurately my household) drink up to 12 litres of Cherry Coke a week and eat pork.
Stephen
Just think though. If that guy had his full DNA fingerprint in the ID database they would have picked up straight away that he wasn't the father and he wouldn't have had to pay anything.
Stephen
I'd go to the left, myself. But then I'm not a developer. Sure I write the odd shell script and occasionally knock up a little program in C or a procedure (or anonymnous block) in PL/SQL, but coding isn't my job. I quit coding years ago when I discovered that i could get far more satisfaction (and more money) as a DBA.
Outside of certain narrow areas there does seem to be a shortage of 'brilliant' applications on Linux. I say 'brilliant' rather than good as good seems to imply some sort of objective quality whereas I'm more interested in a mixture of objective and subjective. A good application will do what it's expected to do, a brilliant one will do what it's expected to do quickly and easily and will have some degree of 'Wow' factor. Firefox is brilliant, the Gimp isn't, OpenOffice.org is close.
Some of the characteristics of brilliant applications would, in my opinion, be:
I use Gmail through a slow dial up from home (typically 30kbps but goes as low as 20kbps and I quite often am checking my mail whilst something is downloading so the bandwidth is shared with other processes) and haven't noticed any particular speed problems. If anything it's a lot faster than Yahoo! mail or anything else of that ilk.
I don't have any issues with the text ads, I don't tend to notice them unless an ad happens to catch my eye because it's relevant to something I'm thinking about. I get very little spam to my Gmail account, maybe 2 actual spams a day (I have my Bigfoot4Life address redirected to my gmail address, prior to that I was getting 100+ spam mails a day to that address, Gmail now filters them out).
Stephen
Of those I've actually met and worked with (small sample size, maybe a few dozen) I'd estimate that 80-90% have returned. Probably about a third of them had a family (i.e. a partner and sometimes kids) in their area of origin to return to, others had someone they intended or were commited to marry to return to.
Stephen
My observation, from having worked for IT employers who heavily used immigrant workers and living in areas where such workers settle, is that it's, now, very rare that said workers contribute more than the absolute minimum to the local economy. In the past it was normal for immigrant workers to come to an area, settle down, buy houses and raise families (by either bringing in others from their area of origin or marrying into the local population). These days, especially in IT, the norm seems to be to move into an area, take over jobs, spend as little as possible whilst saving or sending back to their area of origin as much money as possible then (as soon as they've saved enough) returning to their area of origin. Often the IT work in the developed world isn't a career, it's just a step to raise enough capital to set them up in what they actually want to do. I've had a number of friends working in IT who have come from India and had the stated intention of just working in IT for a few years to earn the money to buy some farmland or a hotel (which they would then hire other people to work for them). Even those in suposedly permanant jobs have treated them like contrator positions.
Stephen
As I recall the current international agreement on copyright is 25 years after the death of the creator. That does raise a question of what constitues the death of the creator. If a person creates something themselves then it's fairly clear. But what if they do it as a 'work for hire' and so the copyright belongs to a corporation? What if it's a collaborative work?
Stephen
A more likely scenario is that the CEO will replace his reliable and expensive (but the purchase costs were written off 2 years ago and it's well bedded in with minimal support costs so, on paper at least, it's currently close to free) cluster running Oracle for a bunch of over priced blades running Windows 2003 and Microsoft SQL Server (plus have to retrain all their support staff) on the strength of an article in eWeek or a Gartner Report.
Stephen
Oracle has stored XML data in a tree structure and allowed querying via XQuery since version 9.
Stephen
If you think "Miss Congeniality" was bad, you should see "Miss Congeniality 2". That really sucks.
Stephen
And I'd expect someone teaching a class of people who were fluent in Spanish to do so in Spanish and to be fluent in that language. The point isn't that he wasn't fluent specifically in English, it's that he wasn't fluent (or even competant) in the language of the students or class he was teaching. I didn't say that both teacher and students need to be fluent in English, I said that they need to be fluent in the language the class is delivered in.
BTW lose the US-centricity, this was in the UK where the Latin population is quite small. If there's a common other language here it's more likley to be Urdu than Spanish.
Stephen
I believe that is has already been established that these aren't public schools. They may be the cabal (TINC) but they're not the government.
Stephen
True, and not just school kids. A few years ago I went on a course about one of the major products we use at work. I was 32, about typical for the class. The trainer we had was supposedly one of the best on the product and had excellent reviews, in Saudi Arabia. His English was awful, made worse by his thick accent anmd the fact that he spoke rather softly (we spent a lot of our time saying "Pardon?" or "Could you speak up a bit more please?"). To be fair, talking to him between sessions it was obvious that he really knew the material and if he was teaching to native Arabic speakers he would probably be brilliant, unfortunately to a classroom full of native English speakers he was incomprehensible.
We, unlike most school pupils, did have a get out though. On day 2 (it was a 5 day course) we basically revolted and demanded that the training centre supply us with an English speaking tutor else we'd quit the course and cancel payment. First thing on the morning of day 3 we had the top English speaking trainer in the country who managed to cover all 5 days of material in the three remaining days.
It seems pretty much axiomic that for teaching to work both teacher and student must be fluent in the language the teaching is going on in
Stephen
Give control to FIFA! If they can organise the World Cup, and actually remember to invite the rest of the world, then handing out domain names should be easy.
Stephen
That sounds more like a DTP paradigm than a wordprocessing paradigm. With wordprocessing you're aiming to get the information onto the page and for it to look OK regardless of the output device, you're not too bothered if it doesn't look exactly the same on someone else's screen or printed on their printer compared with your screen and printer, you're not too worried if your table at the bottom of page 7 gets bumped to the top of page 8 &c. With DTP you want the output to look exactly the same regardless of where it it viewed or where it is printed, that table at the bottom of page 7 had better stay at the bottom of page 7 &c. You're comparing Word and OO.o Writer with Publisher, PagePlus and Scribus.
Stephen
If you think about it, that's actually factually correct. New Orleans didn't get flooded during the Clinton era.
Stephen
Soldiers, especially commissioned ranks, should know when and how to appropriately question orders. Unquestioning obedience has not really been desireable since World War One, even then officers were expected to understand and interpret the orders they were being given, rather than just mindlessly obey.
What we're talking about here isn't really "Over the top. Take that hill!" type of orders (which tend to be shouted at you by someone you know in the middle of an engagement), more the "Put all the documents about operation XYZ, including the top secret ones, in a big brown envelope and leave it on the bench at the corner of the park at 15:30 tommorrow." type, which people certainly should confirm the veracity and source of.
Stephen
From: GeorgeB@whitehouse.gov
To: SAC_Command@Cheyenne.mil
Subject: Nuke Washington
Hi guys,
The evildoerres have taken ovar congres. I want you to launch those nucluar missels at Washington now. Don't bother to call to check, this is legitamut.
George
(the President)
Maybe someone should pitch that to Dubbya and imply that the "Evildoers" (tm) are planning to do just that. Within minutes NASA would have more money that they could possibly spend and a mandate to get back into space.
Stephen
Plus there are many (and increasing) blogs about that do contain useful content. A lot of writers and grassroots pressure groups are using the blog format to present what previously they used a non-blog webpage format for. There's been a fair few times I've come accross a gnarly technical problem, landed up Googling on the error message/symptoms and found that the most useful result was a blog entry that was either someone blogging "I had this problem and this how I fixed it." or "I've got this problem, how do I fix it" and the fix has been in a comment. I'm a member of a few community blogs that exist precisely for that purpose.
Stephen
Plus the US constitution only really holds sway in, well, the US. Slashdot may be hosted in the US (unless it's been outsourced to a datacentre in India by now) but an increasing portion of the web is outside of the US and US direct jurisdiction, as has been evidenced recently.
Stephen
My blog (on LiveJournal) started to get a lot of comment spam when it started to appear in Google results, usually on entries that were at least a few days old. The spam was usually vaguely related to the content of the post, so if I wrote an entry about (say) seeing a pretty girl I'd get a spam comment advertising a pron site but if I wrote about a piece of software then I'd get an spam comment advertising "CHEAP MICROSOFT OFFICE CDs **$10**" &c. I guessed they got my blog URL from search engine results. I figure it wouldn't be too hard to write a script that queries a search engine on key words that relate to the site you're trying to promote then get all the blog entries that are listed (look at the URL for blog sites and for anything else that would indicate it's a blog) then feed those URLs in a script that will post the comment. It seems pretty obvious that a search engine (the purpose of blog comment spam being more to get a good search engine response rather than directly promote to people) has a better chance of getting your URL and giving it a good score if it's linked from a page the engine has already spidered and apparently trusts. I stopped it by disabling anonynmous comments and making it so that any comments made by a logged in user who wasn't on my friends list was screened until I unscreened it.
One thing I've noticed litersally in the last few days are spam blog posts to community blogs on LiveJournal, mostly advertising cam-girls.
Stephen
Quite a bit about freedom. There's been some suggestion about banning pointed kitchen knives but it's half hearted at best, nothing serious, just to keep the whiners quiet till they find something else to complain about. You're about 15 or 20 years out of date on the police advice. Current advice is to do what it takes to get away then get away. People only tend to go to jail for things like shooting other people who are on their property.
As I recall somewhere else in the discussion someone (someone from the US I believe) pointed out that reporting in the US is very much lacking in veracity when it comes to the rest of the world which can give people within it's borders a rather distorted view of the rest of the world.
Another thing we know a lot about is humour. Especially things like irony and, so called, 'deadpan' humour where someone makes an outrageous comment but in a serious manner to make it even funnier for the people who recognise it for what it is.
Stephen
You get rid of that requirement for Presidents to have been born in the US and be US citzens, then I'd be happy to give it my best efforts. If nothing else it would be a change and might shake some of the more hidebound people out of their complacency.
Stephen
As I recall the hypothesis was along the lines of being that a society based on the US constitution would provide for greater personal success, liberty and equality than one not so based. In that context 'success' of the experiment would be proving the hypothesis whilst 'failure' would be disproving the hypothesis.
I Googled and came up with some interesting results.
Stephen