Sorry, I must have missed the bit in the Human rights Act where it talks about your right to have a mobile phone and carry it with you everywhere. I think that you must have a pretty whacked idea of what personal liberty is to write that.
He also has people sending him stories about things that happen in their work place which he incorporates. I'm considering sending him something about what happened to me today. I needed to raise a support call with Sun, so I called Sun. I gave them the serial number of the box and they looked up the support contract. Then they said that as the contract had been bought through SCC I'd have to raise the call through them then it would get passed to Sun. So I call SCC. SCC take my details then say that they can't act on the call unless it comes via our helpdesk. So I call our helpdesk who tell me to put it into an email and then they'll raise the call.
So I've had to write an email detailing the situation that our helpdesk will copy and paste into our helpdesk system and into an email to SCC who will then copy and paste the text into their helpdesk system and an email to Sun who will then copy and paste the text into their helpdesk system and phone me.
The purpose of the call? I need to download a package (SNMP agent installation package) and it seems to be missing from the web site so I need help finding it (often packages ont eh Sun web site are availabe to download but aren't linked so you need someone who knows the URL to give it to you so you can download it). I've actually called Sun twice today, the first time I was put through to pre-sales who told me to to hang up, call back and raise a support call.
I can't speak for everywhere but I do know that everywhere I've been in UK where there's been fixed CCTV cameras there have also been signs advising you that they're there and that you could be recorded. The police have mobile camera vans, which are distinctively marked and have warning posted on them as to what they are.
Some agencies almost certainly do do covert recording but the nature of the work they do means that before they record you they will have at least a reasonable suspicion that you are involved in illegal activity and are recording you to gather evidence.
You therefore seem to not know much about most students then. IME it's rare to find a student who will bother to find a second source to corroborate the first one they find, even rarer that they will check that the sources are independant and it isn't just a case of one source citing the other or both citing a single source. I've seen many school pupils who will just take whatever the first hit on Google says as gospel. The idea of double checking is alien to them.
You would also, presumably, hope that the teacher would identify any errors resulting from inaccurate sources and point them out to the student. That is also similarly rare. I have several times come across tutors passing on inaccurate information because they had not bothered to confirm that it was infact correct.
He was 'quibbling' over a disputed birthdate because that heppened to be one of the inaccuracies he found in the article he used as an example article. If he had closen the article about, say, Uranium and found an error in the atomic weights of the isotopes and pointed that out would you call that quibbling as well? If you see an inaccuracy in a reference text then ppinting it out is fair comment. He picked an example he was familiar with and cited a number of inaccuracies of which the date of birth was one. Sure he could have corrected it, but would his corrections have survived the next edit?
I hate George W. Bush. A lot. I hate him. I wish bad things would happen to him.
Not quite what you wrote.
Stephen
Re:Isn't Murdoch Australian?
on
Press freedom
·
· Score: 1
RTFC. I said under threat, not censored. Although, now you come to mention it, if someone has to edit their own work (or restrict it's distribution) for fear of visits from the Secret Services/FBI/CIA/MI5/KGB/Tufty Club or what ever cabal rules our lives then that seems to be a case of censorship. Whether it's censorship by government asshole, by religeous asshole or by total asshole.
Stephen
Re:Americans talk about freedom
on
Press freedom
·
· Score: 1
You could write that again with UK and US changing places and you'd be closer to being correct.
I sincerely doubt that. I'm not just going on comments from one or two biased people but on information from dozens of people I know personally, various mainstream news media sources and plenty of not so mainstream news sources. It's true that I haven't been to the US yet, I do hope to some day but there's that whole problem of getting a work permit or green card. A lot of US companies that used to be interested in hiring UK citizens are now either restricting themselves to within the borders of the US or offshoring to Asia. From what I gather, in recent years the hassle associated with hiring from overseas (partly due to the post 9/11 paranoia but other influences as well) has gone up such that many companies will knowingly hire a less able candidate (who may require signifcant training before they can start doing actual work) from within the US in preference to a much more able candidate (who could pretty much 'hit the ground running') from Europe. This happened to me earlier this year and the company were quite candid in admitting that the person they hired was far less able than me and had been hired on the basis that he didn't need a workpermit so was less hassle.
I might pay less taxes in the US but I'd also lose out on free (or heavily subsidised) healthcare at point of delivery and various other benefits of living in the UK. For example there's a medication I have to take every day. In the UK a two month supply costs the equivalent of $10 thanks to subsidy through the NHS, the same medication in the US would cost between $20 and $25 a week. Same chemical from the same supplier even in the same packaging.
I currently make about $50k pa of which about $12k goes in taxes, how much less would I pay in the US? Not enough I suspect, especially taking account of the fact that I'd have to keep paying for my home in the UK as well as paying for somewhere to live in the US, unless I knew I was going to be there for several years at least so could justify moving lock, stock and barrel.
Stephen
Re:Free Speech in the US
on
Press freedom
·
· Score: 1
Point # 1: They did not threaten the President, or even you. They had to take the original entry, that caused the trouble, down so you can't see how innocuous it was, or maybe you wouldn't.
Point #2: Hearsay is where you hear someone say something and you repeat it. "Hear say", get it? The linked journal entry is someone reporting what happened to them. That is wittness testimony or first person reporting.
Point #3: The troll mod is very subjective on slashdot. One person's troll is another wacko's well thought out and insightful contribution.
Stephen
Re:Americans talk about freedom
on
Press freedom
·
· Score: 1
United Kingdom. We can say what we want (within the bounds of profanity laws and so long as we're prepared to stand by them if we get sued for defamation), can go anywhere (within the bounds of privacy/trepassing laws and security requirements) without getting shot at and don't get branded terrorists based simply on the color of our skin (although DWB still rears it's head periodically). I've frequently protested various things I disagreed with but have never been arrested (those that do get arrested tend to be doing things other than protesting that breach laws on assault and theft). I frequently write things about various political groups in my blog but have never had a visit from the Secret Services. Based on what friends who live in the US have told me I've come to believe that we're more free here in the UK than those in the US.
Murdoch was born Australian but left there for the UK where he started News International and aquired 'The Sun', amongst other newspapers. He later moved to the US where he gained US citzenship to get around certain restrictions on non-US citizens or corporations owning media companies.
The nearest to a free press these days is the blogosphere, but even that is under threat.
Most of the internet cafes I've used in the last 5 years do this. The workstations do a network boot when you log out which results in the disk being overwritten with an image of a clean system. This not only removes users data but also wipes out viruses and spyware. An added advantage is that when you want to add a new piece of software or apply a patch/upgrade you just have to do it to one workstation and recreate the image, it automatically gets rolled out to every workstation.
Here in the UK we have legislation that says that work areas cannot be any colder than 16 degrees C for most types of work (for work that involves 'severe physical effort' it can drop to 13 degrees); "Workplace Health, Safety and Welfare Regulations" (1993), Regulation 7. If it drops below that then not only can you quit work and leave the premises (and they have to keep paying you) until the temperature rises buit you actually have a legal duty to do so. Personally I like around 17-19 degrees (given the choice I'll work in the server room that is air connect to 19 degrees).
You missed out some really important words from that quote. As I recall the quote is: "Those who saccrifice an essential liberty for some temporary security deserve neither." It comes down to what you feel is essential and how short temporary is. Not all liberty is essential and not all security is temporary. Some things even fall under both banners.
It's not so much a technical problem (anymore than anything based on a lookup would be) as a socialiological/political one. You have to be aware that your data domains are likely to change and design with that in mind. As a local government authority we have to be seen to be more equal ops than anyone else (weather we are more equal ops is a different matter, we have to be seen to be) but also due to the sheer scale of our systems combinations that are very low probability for other organisations are virtual certainties (if not actual certanties) for us. Supposing in the general population one in 10,000 people are in some way transgendered (I suspect it'd be more common than that but it's a good enough guess to illustrate the point) that means we'd have about 500 of them in our CRM database. Also because of the nature of the services we provide it's more likely that we'd need to know. Your local supermarket doesn't care if you're transgendered, they only care about what you put in your shopping trolley each week. We have to care if it means you're more or less likely to need certain services from us or if that might influence services those around them might need.
I think designing databases has taught me more about life and human diversity than anything else I've ever done, it's something you can do in isolation.
On the number of genders, that includes things like "Don't Know" and "Declined To Say". Welcome to the world of public sector databases! IIRC the original list was:
Don't Know
Declined To Say
Male
Female
Androgynous
Female To Male Transexual (post op)
Male To Female Transsexual (post op)
From what I've heard the others (that bring us up to 11) relate to people at the different stages of gender reassignment. I've heard talk of adding some more in to cover people who are biologically male but identify with the female gender but haven't begun (and may never begin) gender reassignment and people who are genetically female but identify with the male gender but haven't begun (and may never begin) gender reassignment. There has been some debate as to whether a person who is genetically male or female but identifes with the opposite gender but is sexually attracted to that opposite gender is the same gender as someone who is genetically male or female, identifies with the opposite gender but is attracted to their genetic gender. Personally I believe that they are as I think that gender identity is a separate issue to sexuality. Although, to be honest, I hadn't really given any of this much thought until I started working with systems where we had to take it into account.
There are similar issues around race and ethnicity, indeed, for sometime there was a debate as to whether race and ethnicity were the same or different things.
I think his solution is more down to a rabid hatred of nulls rather than having a rational, real world, issues.
As it stands at the moment, this would break many thousands of applications.
As I noted in my comment. I actually don't that that that would be a desirable change in many situations even without the application breakage. Null means no value, it works in practice.
I've been an Oracle DBA for 8 years now and have yet to come accross a production situation where nulls cause a problem. The nearest I've ever seen was in a CRM system for a person gender column where the question was raised about if we didn't know a person's gender was that because they hadn't been asked or because they had declined to tell us. It was rapidly pointed out that as we had to provide a lookup table on gender any way and would just store a code in the person table with a foriegn key to the look up table (for legislative/equal-ops reasons we had to identify more than just Male and Female as possible genders; at the time there were 7 legally recognised genders, I believe we're up to 11 now) we'd just make the field not null and create codes for "Not Known" and "Declined To Say".
Your idea of a separate table is similar to his initial reccomendation of separate tables, just without the supplementary tables to identify rows that would have had null values in them for that column.
I found a presentation that Hugh Darwen gave to Warwick University in 2003 on how to avoid Nulls, entitled "How to handle missing information without using nulls". It seems the reccomendation is to split every table up into separate tables (minimum of one per column in the original table) each of two columns, a key column and a data column. For any column that could potentially contain a null create a further one (or more) tables of one column (the key) each (for simplicity I'll refer to these as flag tables). If the column has a value in it for a particular record in the original table then record that value along side the key value in the data table. If it has no value (was null) in the original table then record the key value in the flag table. Where a null could have different meanings create a flag table for each meaning. The example he gives is a salary where someone can have a known salary, unknown salary or be unsalaried. This would result is some pretty horrendous queries as you would have to take account that the values for one column are spread accross two or more tables and that, depending on the data, one insert statement would have to insert into multiple tables and make decisions as to which tables to insert into. Foriegn key enforcement would also be pretty scary as you'd be enforcing rules like "If a value exists in table1 then the key must also exist in (one and only one of tables 2a, 2b, or 2c) and (one and only one of tables 3a or 3b) and (one and only one of tables 4a, 4b, 4c, 4d...4zzzz)...".
An alternative suggestion he gives is to instead of leaving the column null for the row, insert a text value explaining the reason there is no value. So, in the above example of salries, there will either be a numeric value, 'Salary Unknown' or 'Unsalaried'. This implies that all of your columns would have to be text as whatever the type of your actual data you'd need to provide for the possibility that you'd want to store a text string in there.
Neither option strikes me as being sensible. If you felt that null values not being picked up by clauses like "x != 'y'" then you can always lobby for an ammendment to the SQL standard to define Null as a value that does not equal anything, i.e. "x != 'y'" returns true when x is Null. Since that would result in a major change in behaviour (and so break a lot of application code) I don't think it would get through, or is desirable.
Hostilities (and 'terrorist' acts) were initiated by the colonials before the declaration of independance. It helps if you look at things in date order.
They supported, led and participated in an armed insurrection against the legal rulers. That action included attacks on civilian trade vessels, covert attacks on military and civilian establishments and transports with no legal declaration of war and acted in contravention with the established procedures and rules of warfare of the time. If that happened now they'd be called terrorists.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, I must have missed the bit in the Human rights Act where it talks about your right to have a mobile phone and carry it with you everywhere. I think that you must have a pretty whacked idea of what personal liberty is to write that.
Stephen
He also has people sending him stories about things that happen in their work place which he incorporates. I'm considering sending him something about what happened to me today. I needed to raise a support call with Sun, so I called Sun. I gave them the serial number of the box and they looked up the support contract. Then they said that as the contract had been bought through SCC I'd have to raise the call through them then it would get passed to Sun. So I call SCC. SCC take my details then say that they can't act on the call unless it comes via our helpdesk. So I call our helpdesk who tell me to put it into an email and then they'll raise the call.
So I've had to write an email detailing the situation that our helpdesk will copy and paste into our helpdesk system and into an email to SCC who will then copy and paste the text into their helpdesk system and an email to Sun who will then copy and paste the text into their helpdesk system and phone me.
The purpose of the call? I need to download a package (SNMP agent installation package) and it seems to be missing from the web site so I need help finding it (often packages ont eh Sun web site are availabe to download but aren't linked so you need someone who knows the URL to give it to you so you can download it). I've actually called Sun twice today, the first time I was put through to pre-sales who told me to to hang up, call back and raise a support call.
Stephen
Homeless shelter?
I can't speak for everywhere but I do know that everywhere I've been in UK where there's been fixed CCTV cameras there have also been signs advising you that they're there and that you could be recorded. The police have mobile camera vans, which are distinctively marked and have warning posted on them as to what they are.
Some agencies almost certainly do do covert recording but the nature of the work they do means that before they record you they will have at least a reasonable suspicion that you are involved in illegal activity and are recording you to gather evidence.
Stephen
You therefore seem to not know much about most students then. IME it's rare to find a student who will bother to find a second source to corroborate the first one they find, even rarer that they will check that the sources are independant and it isn't just a case of one source citing the other or both citing a single source. I've seen many school pupils who will just take whatever the first hit on Google says as gospel. The idea of double checking is alien to them.
You would also, presumably, hope that the teacher would identify any errors resulting from inaccurate sources and point them out to the student. That is also similarly rare. I have several times come across tutors passing on inaccurate information because they had not bothered to confirm that it was infact correct.
Stephen
He was 'quibbling' over a disputed birthdate because that heppened to be one of the inaccuracies he found in the article he used as an example article. If he had closen the article about, say, Uranium and found an error in the atomic weights of the isotopes and pointed that out would you call that quibbling as well? If you see an inaccuracy in a reference text then ppinting it out is fair comment. He picked an example he was familiar with and cited a number of inaccuracies of which the date of birth was one. Sure he could have corrected it, but would his corrections have survived the next edit?
Stephen
The goatse.cx boy has just been exceeded as the most horrifying image to ever enter my brain.
Stephen
I did follow the link, the text I quoted is from the entry. I am quite aware of how to use my browser.
Stephen
From the post:
Not quite what you wrote.
Stephen
RTFC. I said under threat, not censored. Although, now you come to mention it, if someone has to edit their own work (or restrict it's distribution) for fear of visits from the Secret Services/FBI/CIA/MI5/KGB/Tufty Club or what ever cabal rules our lives then that seems to be a case of censorship. Whether it's censorship by government asshole, by religeous asshole or by total asshole.
Stephen
I sincerely doubt that. I'm not just going on comments from one or two biased people but on information from dozens of people I know personally, various mainstream news media sources and plenty of not so mainstream news sources. It's true that I haven't been to the US yet, I do hope to some day but there's that whole problem of getting a work permit or green card. A lot of US companies that used to be interested in hiring UK citizens are now either restricting themselves to within the borders of the US or offshoring to Asia. From what I gather, in recent years the hassle associated with hiring from overseas (partly due to the post 9/11 paranoia but other influences as well) has gone up such that many companies will knowingly hire a less able candidate (who may require signifcant training before they can start doing actual work) from within the US in preference to a much more able candidate (who could pretty much 'hit the ground running') from Europe. This happened to me earlier this year and the company were quite candid in admitting that the person they hired was far less able than me and had been hired on the basis that he didn't need a workpermit so was less hassle.
I might pay less taxes in the US but I'd also lose out on free (or heavily subsidised) healthcare at point of delivery and various other benefits of living in the UK. For example there's a medication I have to take every day. In the UK a two month supply costs the equivalent of $10 thanks to subsidy through the NHS, the same medication in the US would cost between $20 and $25 a week. Same chemical from the same supplier even in the same packaging.
I currently make about $50k pa of which about $12k goes in taxes, how much less would I pay in the US? Not enough I suspect, especially taking account of the fact that I'd have to keep paying for my home in the UK as well as paying for somewhere to live in the US, unless I knew I was going to be there for several years at least so could justify moving lock, stock and barrel.
Stephen
Point # 1: They did not threaten the President, or even you. They had to take the original entry, that caused the trouble, down so you can't see how innocuous it was, or maybe you wouldn't.
Point #2: Hearsay is where you hear someone say something and you repeat it. "Hear say", get it? The linked journal entry is someone reporting what happened to them. That is wittness testimony or first person reporting.
Point #3: The troll mod is very subjective on slashdot. One person's troll is another wacko's well thought out and insightful contribution.
Stephen
United Kingdom. We can say what we want (within the bounds of profanity laws and so long as we're prepared to stand by them if we get sued for defamation), can go anywhere (within the bounds of privacy/trepassing laws and security requirements) without getting shot at and don't get branded terrorists based simply on the color of our skin (although DWB still rears it's head periodically). I've frequently protested various things I disagreed with but have never been arrested (those that do get arrested tend to be doing things other than protesting that breach laws on assault and theft). I frequently write things about various political groups in my blog but have never had a visit from the Secret Services. Based on what friends who live in the US have told me I've come to believe that we're more free here in the UK than those in the US.
Stephen
Murdoch was born Australian but left there for the UK where he started News International and aquired 'The Sun', amongst other newspapers. He later moved to the US where he gained US citzenship to get around certain restrictions on non-US citizens or corporations owning media companies.
The nearest to a free press these days is the blogosphere, but even that is under threat.
Stephen
Most of the internet cafes I've used in the last 5 years do this. The workstations do a network boot when you log out which results in the disk being overwritten with an image of a clean system. This not only removes users data but also wipes out viruses and spyware. An added advantage is that when you want to add a new piece of software or apply a patch/upgrade you just have to do it to one workstation and recreate the image, it automatically gets rolled out to every workstation.
Stephen
Here in the UK we have legislation that says that work areas cannot be any colder than 16 degrees C for most types of work (for work that involves 'severe physical effort' it can drop to 13 degrees); "Workplace Health, Safety and Welfare Regulations" (1993), Regulation 7. If it drops below that then not only can you quit work and leave the premises (and they have to keep paying you) until the temperature rises buit you actually have a legal duty to do so. Personally I like around 17-19 degrees (given the choice I'll work in the server room that is air connect to 19 degrees).
Stephen
He, or rather Microsoft, seem to be very good at avoiding producing secure software.
Stephen
You missed out some really important words from that quote. As I recall the quote is: "Those who saccrifice an essential liberty for some temporary security deserve neither." It comes down to what you feel is essential and how short temporary is. Not all liberty is essential and not all security is temporary. Some things even fall under both banners.
Stephen
It's not so much a technical problem (anymore than anything based on a lookup would be) as a socialiological/political one. You have to be aware that your data domains are likely to change and design with that in mind. As a local government authority we have to be seen to be more equal ops than anyone else (weather we are more equal ops is a different matter, we have to be seen to be) but also due to the sheer scale of our systems combinations that are very low probability for other organisations are virtual certainties (if not actual certanties) for us. Supposing in the general population one in 10,000 people are in some way transgendered (I suspect it'd be more common than that but it's a good enough guess to illustrate the point) that means we'd have about 500 of them in our CRM database. Also because of the nature of the services we provide it's more likely that we'd need to know. Your local supermarket doesn't care if you're transgendered, they only care about what you put in your shopping trolley each week. We have to care if it means you're more or less likely to need certain services from us or if that might influence services those around them might need.
I think designing databases has taught me more about life and human diversity than anything else I've ever done, it's something you can do in isolation.
Stephen
On the number of genders, that includes things like "Don't Know" and "Declined To Say". Welcome to the world of public sector databases! IIRC the original list was:
- Don't Know
- Declined To Say
- Male
- Female
- Androgynous
- Female To Male Transexual (post op)
- Male To Female Transsexual (post op)
From what I've heard the others (that bring us up to 11) relate to people at the different stages of gender reassignment. I've heard talk of adding some more in to cover people who are biologically male but identify with the female gender but haven't begun (and may never begin) gender reassignment and people who are genetically female but identify with the male gender but haven't begun (and may never begin) gender reassignment. There has been some debate as to whether a person who is genetically male or female but identifes with the opposite gender but is sexually attracted to that opposite gender is the same gender as someone who is genetically male or female, identifies with the opposite gender but is attracted to their genetic gender. Personally I believe that they are as I think that gender identity is a separate issue to sexuality. Although, to be honest, I hadn't really given any of this much thought until I started working with systems where we had to take it into account.There are similar issues around race and ethnicity, indeed, for sometime there was a debate as to whether race and ethnicity were the same or different things.
I think his solution is more down to a rabid hatred of nulls rather than having a rational, real world, issues.
Stephen
As I noted in my comment. I actually don't that that that would be a desirable change in many situations even without the application breakage. Null means no value, it works in practice.
I've been an Oracle DBA for 8 years now and have yet to come accross a production situation where nulls cause a problem. The nearest I've ever seen was in a CRM system for a person gender column where the question was raised about if we didn't know a person's gender was that because they hadn't been asked or because they had declined to tell us. It was rapidly pointed out that as we had to provide a lookup table on gender any way and would just store a code in the person table with a foriegn key to the look up table (for legislative/equal-ops reasons we had to identify more than just Male and Female as possible genders; at the time there were 7 legally recognised genders, I believe we're up to 11 now) we'd just make the field not null and create codes for "Not Known" and "Declined To Say".
Your idea of a separate table is similar to his initial reccomendation of separate tables, just without the supplementary tables to identify rows that would have had null values in them for that column.
Stephen
I found a presentation that Hugh Darwen gave to Warwick University in 2003 on how to avoid Nulls, entitled "How to handle missing information without using nulls". It seems the reccomendation is to split every table up into separate tables (minimum of one per column in the original table) each of two columns, a key column and a data column. For any column that could potentially contain a null create a further one (or more) tables of one column (the key) each (for simplicity I'll refer to these as flag tables). If the column has a value in it for a particular record in the original table then record that value along side the key value in the data table. If it has no value (was null) in the original table then record the key value in the flag table. Where a null could have different meanings create a flag table for each meaning. The example he gives is a salary where someone can have a known salary, unknown salary or be unsalaried. This would result is some pretty horrendous queries as you would have to take account that the values for one column are spread accross two or more tables and that, depending on the data, one insert statement would have to insert into multiple tables and make decisions as to which tables to insert into. Foriegn key enforcement would also be pretty scary as you'd be enforcing rules like "If a value exists in table1 then the key must also exist in (one and only one of tables 2a, 2b, or 2c) and (one and only one of tables 3a or 3b) and (one and only one of tables 4a, 4b, 4c, 4d...4zzzz)...".
An alternative suggestion he gives is to instead of leaving the column null for the row, insert a text value explaining the reason there is no value. So, in the above example of salries, there will either be a numeric value, 'Salary Unknown' or 'Unsalaried'. This implies that all of your columns would have to be text as whatever the type of your actual data you'd need to provide for the possibility that you'd want to store a text string in there.
Neither option strikes me as being sensible. If you felt that null values not being picked up by clauses like "x != 'y'" then you can always lobby for an ammendment to the SQL standard to define Null as a value that does not equal anything, i.e. "x != 'y'" returns true when x is Null. Since that would result in a major change in behaviour (and so break a lot of application code) I don't think it would get through, or is desirable.
Stephen
Hostilities (and 'terrorist' acts) were initiated by the colonials before the declaration of independance. It helps if you look at things in date order.
Stephen
So does this also outlaw those spammers who offer to sell you a backdoor into pay porn sites?
Almost worth it...
:-)
Stephen
They supported, led and participated in an armed insurrection against the legal rulers. That action included attacks on civilian trade vessels, covert attacks on military and civilian establishments and transports with no legal declaration of war and acted in contravention with the established procedures and rules of warfare of the time. If that happened now they'd be called terrorists.
Stephen