Pullman was a piker compared to the mining companies. You ever hear this old song?
Sixteen Tons Sang by Tennesse Ernie Ford
Some people say a man is made outta mud A poor man's made outta muscle and blood Muscle and blood and skin and bones A mind that's a-weak and a back that's strong
You load sixteen tons, what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt Saint Peter don't you call me 'cause I can't go I owe my soul to the company store
I was born one mornin' when the sun didn't shine I picked up my shovel and I walked to the mine I loaded sixteen tons of number nine coal And the straw boss said "Well, a-bless my soul"
You load sixteen tons, what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt Saint Peter don't you call me 'cause I can't go I owe my soul to the company store
I was born one mornin', it was drizzlin' rain Fightin' and trouble are my middle name I was raised in the canebrake* by an ol' mama lion Cain't no-a high-toned woman make me walk the line
You load sixteen tons, what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt Saint Peter don't you call me 'cause I can't go I owe my soul to the company store
If you see me comin', better step aside A lotta men didn't, a lotta men died One fist of iron, the other of steel If the right one don't a-get you, then the left one will
You load sixteen tons, what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt Saint Peter don't you call me 'cause I can't go I owe my soul to the company store
" This song could definately be the battle cry of the American Miner. Miners were usually paid monthly. By the end of the month, they owed the company for the company house they were living in, for the tools they used to mine, for groceries to feed their family, and for any doctor bills. Miners had no choice but to buy from the companies. They were paid in scrip, not real money and this could only be spent at the company store.
Naturally this enabled the company to charge the miners whatever they wished. Most miners with families were constantly in debt to the company. When the miners did get paid at the end of the month, if there was any money left after they paid their employers, it was certainly not enough to last them another month. So it was a viscious cycle, and the next month, they again had to pay the company first and were lucky to have anything left for their families. "
They're generally outlawed for use by registered traders when working. You want your own phone? Fine. Just don't turn it on in the office. Don't use it, EVER! to contact a client. SEC regs are a bitch for IT.
For instance, Visual Studio.NET is an application that pretty much always needs to be run as admin.
What freaking moron at Microsoft thought running a development environment with admin privileges was a good idea? Under what possible circumstances in their drug addled world should this ever happen???
Such a statistical analysis would have to be acknowledged as inherently flawed, though. Incomplete information at all levels would badly distort whatever conclusions that could be drawn. Add in the fact that weighting the validity and relevance of the known data would be a subjective exercise, the data in the original source material would be in wildly different formats covering the same topics in a bewildering variety of ways, some unknown amount of the data would be deliberately falsified, etc. makes this an incredibly tough problem.
Last time I checked most employees were simply given the option, and could choose to switch to Linux if it didn't hurt their productivity (long term). Many made the switch. It's not easy getting 300,000+ people to switch without hurting productivity. They're slowing doing it.
The fact that he's now working for a company producing a proprietary, direct competitor to Java couldn't possibly have anything to do with is decision, could it? Nahhh. That'd be too cynical.
Study some history some time. People have been slaughtering each other over religious issues for thousands of years. Granted, many times religious fervor is stirred up by those in power. However, it wouldn't be an effective technique if people really didn't care about religion, would it?
Your first mistake is assuming a problem that doesn't exist. There is no demonstrated need for a national ID or for a national ID standard. No, 9/11 didn't demonstrate either of those needs. Every single one of those hijackers had full sets of identification that were set up in their real names. So did Timothy McVeigh, for that matter. Instead, we've gotten along just fine for the minimal documentation necessary to demonstrate that our home state(s) have granted us the right to drive. Nothing that has happened in the past 50 years has changed that.
Your second mistake is not really thinking through the implications of the 9th and 10th amendments. Quoting here from Cornell's website:
Amendment IX
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
Amendment X
BR The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.
The tenth amendment is the real key in this particular debate. If the peopl and the states have not granted the right to the federal government to develop a national ID, then the federal government has no right to develop one!
My response to this article on the third page of letters:
Haven't ANY of you people heard of FLOSS?
Software development is NOT hard. The closed source development model is. I refer you to a recent study on the economic impact of open source software that was recently published in the EU. The URL is:
While the entire 287 page report makes for fascinating reading, I'd like to direct your attention in particular to pages 48-53. Read that and tell me that software development is hard. Clearly, it's not when it's managed properly.
Again, I call bullshit. For at least the last couple of years I've had/less/ trouble installing new printers, cameras, video cards, USB devices, hard drives, and everything else that I wanted to under Linux than I've had under Windows. 99% of the time my Linux boxes simply recognize the new device and automatically load the appropriate drivers. The rest of the time I generally just have to enable a couple of things to get the system to recognize the device.
The sole Windows XP box, by contrast, requires me to spend time searching for drivers on various vendor Websites for the single downloadable driver that doesn't come loaded down with a bunch of unnecessary crap that just acts to destabilize and slow down the PC. Half the time no such animal exists, so I end up pulling down the latest and greatest POS driver/bloatware that comes with the packaged CD. Ugh!
I noticed LOTR on your list/after/ I had hit the submit button. D'oh!
As for Ayn Rand and humor? Personally, I've always found the woman to be so humor impaired that anything related to her is sort of like a humor black hole for me. Now, I probably would have gotten the joke if you had listed Terry Pratchett and called him a sober individual who writes melancholy stories about people's angst ridden search for meaning in their lives.:)
I went on a C.S. Lewis kick about 25 years ago, so forgive me if my somewhat senile memory is misremembering things.:) I plowed through "The Screwtape Letters, then the Narnia books, then "Out of the Silent Planet", then I think Perelandra". I personally would have ranked the Narnia series first, "The Screwtape Letters" second, then "Out of the Silent Planet" and "Perelandra". IIRC it was "Perelandra" that put me off him.
I always intended to find the time to go back and re-read at least some of his stuff, but I've never gotten around to it. So MANY books, so little time.:(
I call bullshit. I am so tired of this myth of unusability. I have a wife and 4 kids. 2 of those kids grew up with Linux only in the house from the time they were 3 or 4. My 2 stepkids and my wife got their first exposure to Linux when we got married 18 months ago. None of whom are technically inclined. They all use Linux and a variety FOSS apps daily.
Can they act as their own sysadmin? No, but then they can't do that for the sole Windows PC in the house either. I'm still stuck with babysitting that when it goes south, which happens far more frequently than the 4 Linux computers in the house combined.
People are brighter than you give them credit for. Could they install Windows? Yes, but they don't want to. Could they install Linux? Yes, but again, they don't want to. In my case, I installed Linux on three PCs and bought my wife a laptop with Linux pre-installed all so I wouldn't have to deal with Windows brain farts. I'm happy, they're happy.
In fact, all of them have figured out how to do stuff that I didn't know how to do. Yup, that Linux stuff is really hard to learn. NOT.
I wish I had mod points right now. You hit the nail on the head. Bricklin's statements prove that while he might be a crackerjack programmer, he really doesn't know networking very well.
That said, I have/zero/ faith that the big ISPs would implement QoS as a service that would actually be useful to the end customer. I am absolutely convinced that they would use it as a tool to degrade competitors' traffic and force smaller ISPs out of business.
I've seen and/or read everything on that list except for Ayn Rand. Please. The woman is too full of herself.:)
Seriously, though, this list is awfully short and misses a LOT of the classics. There are already plenty of solid mentions of missing material, so consider my list just additions.
No Kipling? Heinlein? Clarke? Asimov? Somtow Sucharitkul? Theodore Sturgeon? L. Sprague De Camp? Fritz Lieber? H. G. Wells? William Gibson? "The Forbidden Planet?" Tolkien? Robert E. Howard? Micheal Moorcock? "Buckaroo Bonzai and the 8th Dimension?" "The Ghost in the Shell?" "Dr. Who?"
And I'm/still/ just scraping the surface of what any self respecting bookworm/vidiot/geek should know intimately with.
I feel your pain.:) The good news is that things are steadily improving. Most of the large distros are now fully LSB compliant (with the possible exception of preferring.deb instead of.rpm packaging) More and more closed source app developers (and some FOSS ones, too) are designing their apps to the LSB as opposed to specific distributions. This means that installing and running an app compiled for an x86 Linux platform is much, much easier. I'm not saying that things will always be trouble free, just that it's a lot easier to go to Joe Random's website and get software quickly.
My favorite case in point: Unreal Tournament 2004 came with an installation script in the box that just worked for most people. That was before the LSB was all that solid, too.:)
No, you're missing the point of the OP. If a grad student could do it with access to the right hardware, anyone with a financial incentive to get the keys would simply hire a few grad students and supply them with the hardware.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Pullman was a piker compared to the mining companies. You ever hear this old song?
Sixteen Tons
Sang by Tennesse Ernie Ford
Some people say a man is made outta mud
A poor man's made outta muscle and blood
Muscle and blood and skin and bones
A mind that's a-weak and a back that's strong
You load sixteen tons, what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt
Saint Peter don't you call me 'cause I can't go
I owe my soul to the company store
I was born one mornin' when the sun didn't shine
I picked up my shovel and I walked to the mine
I loaded sixteen tons of number nine coal
And the straw boss said "Well, a-bless my soul"
You load sixteen tons, what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt
Saint Peter don't you call me 'cause I can't go
I owe my soul to the company store
I was born one mornin', it was drizzlin' rain
Fightin' and trouble are my middle name
I was raised in the canebrake* by an ol' mama lion
Cain't no-a high-toned woman make me walk the line
You load sixteen tons, what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt
Saint Peter don't you call me 'cause I can't go
I owe my soul to the company store
If you see me comin', better step aside
A lotta men didn't, a lotta men died
One fist of iron, the other of steel
If the right one don't a-get you, then the left one will
You load sixteen tons, what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt
Saint Peter don't you call me 'cause I can't go
I owe my soul to the company store
" This song could definately be the battle cry of the American Miner. Miners were usually paid monthly. By the end of the month, they owed the company for the company house they were living in, for the tools they used to mine, for groceries to feed their family, and for any doctor bills. Miners had no choice but to buy from the companies. They were paid in scrip, not real money and this could only be spent at the company store.
Naturally this enabled the company to charge the miners whatever they wished. Most miners with families were constantly in debt to the company. When the miners did get paid at the end of the month, if there was any money left after they paid their employers, it was certainly not enough to last them another month. So it was a viscious cycle, and the next month, they again had to pay the company first and were lucky to have anything left for their families. "
Taken from http://www.rootsweb.com/~wvcoal/sixteen.html
Switzerland
Israel
Finland to a lesser degree.
They're generally outlawed for use by registered traders when working. You want your own phone? Fine. Just don't turn it on in the office. Don't use it, EVER! to contact a client. SEC regs are a bitch for IT.
Howdy folks.
:)
It's time for today's top Slashdot humor tip. When someone references HHGTG, make sure that you understand the reference before slagging the OP.
=====> Joke
O
/ \
/ | \
/ \
What freaking moron at Microsoft thought running a development environment with admin privileges was a good idea? Under what possible circumstances in their drug addled world should this ever happen???
Read this cost analysis on using Vista before assuming that Microsoft did the right thing with their kernel.
Nonsense. The game shipped with Linux and Mac OS/X drivers on the CD, for heaven's sake! They had to test OpenGL just to get those platforms to work!
Such a statistical analysis would have to be acknowledged as inherently flawed, though. Incomplete information at all levels would badly distort whatever conclusions that could be drawn. Add in the fact that weighting the validity and relevance of the known data would be a subjective exercise, the data in the original source material would be in wildly different formats covering the same topics in a bewildering variety of ways, some unknown amount of the data would be deliberately falsified, etc. makes this an incredibly tough problem.
Sigh.
I was afraid of that. I heard the same thing from one of our IBM tech reps, but he couldn't provide a link, either.
Link?
The Economic Impact of Open Source Software and the competitiveness of the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) sector in the EU, pages 48-53. The best counter argument to the standard closed source development model that I've ever read.
The fact that he's now working for a company producing a proprietary, direct competitor to Java couldn't possibly have anything to do with is decision, could it? Nahhh. That'd be too cynical.
Shyeah, right!
Study some history some time. People have been slaughtering each other over religious issues for thousands of years. Granted, many times religious fervor is stirred up by those in power. However, it wouldn't be an effective technique if people really didn't care about religion, would it?
When he disguises naked power grabs as charity, we should complain!
Your second mistake is not really thinking through the implications of the 9th and 10th amendments. Quoting here from Cornell's website: The tenth amendment is the real key in this particular debate. If the peopl and the states have not granted the right to the federal government to develop a national ID, then the federal government has no right to develop one!
My response to this article on the third page of letters:
- flossimpact.pdf
Haven't ANY of you people heard of FLOSS?
Software development is NOT hard. The closed source development model is. I refer you to a recent study on the economic impact of open source software that was recently published in the EU. The URL is:
ec.europa.eu/enterprise/ict/policy/doc/2006-11-20
While the entire 287 page report makes for fascinating reading, I'd like to direct your attention in particular to pages 48-53. Read that and tell me that software development is hard. Clearly, it's not when it's managed properly.
Again, I call bullshit. For at least the last couple of years I've had /less/ trouble installing new printers, cameras, video cards, USB devices, hard drives, and everything else that I wanted to under Linux than I've had under Windows. 99% of the time my Linux boxes simply recognize the new device and automatically load the appropriate drivers. The rest of the time I generally just have to enable a couple of things to get the system to recognize the device.
The sole Windows XP box, by contrast, requires me to spend time searching for drivers on various vendor Websites for the single downloadable driver that doesn't come loaded down with a bunch of unnecessary crap that just acts to destabilize and slow down the PC. Half the time no such animal exists, so I end up pulling down the latest and greatest POS driver/bloatware that comes with the packaged CD. Ugh!
I noticed LOTR on your list /after/ I had hit the submit button. D'oh!
:)
As for Ayn Rand and humor? Personally, I've always found the woman to be so humor impaired that anything related to her is sort of like a humor black hole for me. Now, I probably would have gotten the joke if you had listed Terry Pratchett and called him a sober individual who writes melancholy stories about people's angst ridden search for meaning in their lives.
I went on a C.S. Lewis kick about 25 years ago, so forgive me if my somewhat senile memory is misremembering things. :) I plowed through "The Screwtape Letters, then the Narnia books, then "Out of the Silent Planet", then I think Perelandra". I personally would have ranked the Narnia series first, "The Screwtape Letters" second, then "Out of the Silent Planet" and "Perelandra". IIRC it was "Perelandra" that put me off him.
:(
I always intended to find the time to go back and re-read at least some of his stuff, but I've never gotten around to it. So MANY books, so little time.
I call bullshit. I am so tired of this myth of unusability. I have a wife and 4 kids. 2 of those kids grew up with Linux only in the house from the time they were 3 or 4. My 2 stepkids and my wife got their first exposure to Linux when we got married 18 months ago. None of whom are technically inclined. They all use Linux and a variety FOSS apps daily.
Can they act as their own sysadmin? No, but then they can't do that for the sole Windows PC in the house either. I'm still stuck with babysitting that when it goes south, which happens far more frequently than the 4 Linux computers in the house
combined.
People are brighter than you give them credit for. Could they install Windows? Yes, but they don't want to. Could they install Linux? Yes, but again, they don't want to. In my case, I installed Linux on three PCs and bought my wife a laptop with Linux pre-installed all so I wouldn't have to deal with Windows brain farts. I'm happy, they're happy.
In fact, all of them have figured out how to do stuff that I didn't know how to do. Yup, that Linux stuff is really hard to learn. NOT.
I wish I had mod points right now. You hit the nail on the head. Bricklin's statements prove that while he might be a crackerjack programmer, he really doesn't know networking very well.
/zero/ faith that the big ISPs would implement QoS as a service that would actually be useful to the end customer. I am absolutely convinced that they would use it as a tool to degrade competitors' traffic and force smaller ISPs out of business.
That said, I have
I've seen and/or read everything on that list except for Ayn Rand. Please. The woman is too full of herself. :)
/still/ just scraping the surface of what any self respecting bookworm/vidiot/geek should know intimately with.
Seriously, though, this list is awfully short and misses a LOT of the classics. There are already plenty of solid mentions of missing material, so consider my list just additions.
No Kipling? Heinlein? Clarke? Asimov? Somtow Sucharitkul? Theodore Sturgeon? L. Sprague De Camp? Fritz Lieber? H. G. Wells? William Gibson? "The Forbidden Planet?" Tolkien? Robert E. Howard? Micheal Moorcock? "Buckaroo Bonzai and the 8th Dimension?" "The Ghost in the Shell?" "Dr. Who?"
And I'm
Dunno. I was simply trying to clarify the OP's point, not make his argument. :)
I feel your pain. :) The good news is that things are steadily improving. Most of the large distros are now fully LSB compliant (with the possible exception of preferring .deb instead of .rpm packaging) More and more closed source app developers (and some FOSS ones, too) are designing their apps to the LSB as opposed to specific distributions. This means that installing and running an app compiled for an x86 Linux platform is much, much easier. I'm not saying that things will always be trouble free, just that it's a lot easier to go to Joe Random's website and get software quickly.
:)
My favorite case in point: Unreal Tournament 2004 came with an installation script in the box that just worked for most people. That was before the LSB was all that solid, too.
No, you're missing the point of the OP. If a grad student could do it with access to the right hardware, anyone with a financial incentive to get the keys would simply hire a few grad students and supply them with the hardware. :)