It will suck if they start realizing how much more money they could be making by defining a core as a CPU for licensing...
They'll wait until we all have 4 to 8 cores. Then they'll hit us for an 4-8x hit in licensing cost. They don't want to kill off multi-core processing for main stream use before it really begins.
Not that they tell the truth at times of peace, either - it's either the libertarian "the government is the source of all evil and there would be paradise on Earth if we could just overthrow it" -style nonsense or the authoritarian "it is unpatriotic to criticize the government" -style bullshit.
Trust no one. That's as good an advice as any...
Sounds like we need several competing news sources owned/sponsered by different groups. You could have 2-3 sponsored by separate branches of the government. You'd have tradional CNN type news on cable that is "media company owned", but then I think that you should have a news source owned by each industrial group. Like all the automakers, energy companies, farmers, or doctors own their own 2-3 news sources. Of course their news would be tilted to make them look good and those that want to limit, control or set disagreeable laws in a negative light. The good thing though is that groups that tradionally don't have wide spread news coverage could.
Its funny how freedom of the press was designed to allow for independent criticism of public policy, yet a government-run news service is about the most even-handed news you can get.
Only when you want to read critism of things other than the government. Government critism wouldn't be even handed and fair if things really get bad.
Now you know that the NSA can't even figure out how to get electricity set up so that they can power their billion dollar computers, meanwhile your company, which you consider to be run by dopes probably, has multiple plans to deal with such issues. The reason for this is simple:
The NSA does not design computers, they just buy them on contract from big companies like IBM or whoever. All they have to do is write a check. This leaves the NSA with the responsibility to plug that computer in, and they have failed at it. And you can take it as a fact that this is the case with almost all government projects. They write a check to a contractor, and then don't have the competence to use what they bought.
Um, I'd say that some one was hoping that "it was in the contract." I work for a local government police department. Over the last 3-4 years I've been getting our "new" RMS up and used. Well, there have been several things that we've brought to our bosses' attention that the product doesn't do. What our our bosses answers? It was in the contract that the software should do X. I heard that for 6 months to a year. Finally, some one gave me copy of the contract. Nope. No mention of a number of features that our bosses say that were "in the contract," or worse "the sales manager promised us" that they'd get that fixed or rolled out. What's really bad is that very few of the City's IT people were asked when the contract was made. It was all through bosses and managers that didn't have any computer experience and just assumed that things just worked once you've bought them. The project has been pretty successful and we've gotten most of the the features that we've bugged our vendor about. We've been bugging them for 3 years though over what our bosses say was in the contract for day one. I could easily see similiar things happening through all branches of any government. Heck, any branch where you don't personnally use a product, but are responsible for buying it for some one else will have these sorts of miss understandings.
While you may argue about the morality of their participation in supposed spying on citizens or about the morality of current or past military, political, and diplomatic conquests they've aided, you can't argue that they aren't absolutely the top tier of their profession in the world. I don't know of a single more experienced, qualified, or intelligent collection of mathemiticians and computer pros in the world, and that's not an appeal to ignorance. They've found and fixed mistakes in common products such as linux and PGP that have gone undetected by the rest of the population for decades, and they've done it in their free time as a hobby.
Um, how would we know of all the global spying organizations and their levels of skill. How would you or I what skills that the FBI, CIA, NSA, KGB, or MI6 relatively excel in? We can guess and look at job openings on some, but "know?" Unless you run your own private spy agency, you should be limited in what you know. I find if funny that you judge the skill of the NSA on if their workers have worked on open source software. I'm sorry, but that really doesn't mean anything. Why? The best code builders/breakers have always been working for the government. A handful and here and there stay at universities, but the really good ones have always been found and used by their respective governments. We as civilians don't know if government crypto Phds are the best, we really, really "hope" that they are. Just because they are good in their field and have fixed mistakes that professions in the field might have found decades ago doesn't mean that they are the best in the world. I'm sorry you need another metric to measure them by. I really, hope that the CIA/NSA are the best in the world. I wouldn't take it on faith that they are though.
What's really needed, of course, is a new way of writing and maintaining software. The programs we use today are essentially bespoke, hand-built items, much the way cars were at the start of the 20th century. The primitive fabrication methods are masked because computer software can be duplicated infinitely without additional cost, but it's still an industry ripe for a new enry Ford to invent the digital equivalent of a production line.
Actually, I think that this could be a great idea for MS to send into areas where only pirated copies of windows dominate. Instead of thinking of just a lite version, you have an ad bar on one section of the screen that downloads ads so that you are getting some money off those pirates. I think this "could" work, but it won't. Really, you'd need a 20+" monitor to give you enough screen space. It would be nice if they bundled internet service in there as well, but I don't think that worked the last time some one tried it. Oh, here is an idea. Sony or Walmart to buy 4-5 million of those $100 scaled down laptops for the third world, stick "My First Sony Laptop" on the top, and have the default OS download your Sony/Walmart ads. You can sell them for $75-100 in with the Barbie laptop toys.
As for physical retailers, have a setup where people can come in and download songs to thier devices. People don't want to have to go to the store all the time to get things like music. Deal with it. But if you have something like this, people can drop in and grab a song they just heard on the radio or something. Or perhaps retail music is dead, will anyone really miss it?
I read this and thought, retail music stores will be dead. Retail music won't die. Why? Well, Wal-Mart, Target, any gas station, or ATM could sell music direct to consumers devices. You'd have a booth, you'd search by either artist, album, radio station, or what ever to pull up the song that you'd like. You could play the entire thing there if you really wanted to. All music would be $1 a song or maybe $.10 for "old" stuff," $1 for everything within say the last 10-15 years, and $1-$2 for anything new or popular per song. The key is to make the system/booths every where people go on a daily basis any way and make it easy to buy. Partner with gas stations and ATMs to have a booth to have an ATM/music booth in every store. I'd think designing the machines would be easy. Just make sure that you have a 500 Gb HD preloaded with most musc. If you really want to get fancy, make sure the devices have some sort of built-in download ability so that all new songs are just downloaded to the machines. The theory would be most consumers wouldn't want to wait for the 3 minutes that it would take to download a song. We are trying to make it an impluse purchase as they use their ATM machine. I'd try to license the iTunes format, but would offer mp3s as the default standard. You could also use a "hi-def" standard and charge 2-3 times as much for the "hi-def" version. You'd aim for all mp3 players, but you'd have an eye towards i-pods as well. What kind of download options should you offer? Compact flash or usb transfer, wifi, blue-tooth? An idea would also be to have account key chains where you just scan your key chain and it pulls up your profile and you can re-download any music that you've already bought, and makes it easy for you to buy/prepay or make gift purchases for others. Say you just add $20 to you keychain at the cash register and then just pick 20 songs from the machine. You give the consumers several easy to use options.
Great. Now we know what congress has been talking about. Big deal. Wake me up when you can tell me what in the hell they were thinking.
Nah, that won't ever work. You'd need to add in support to track lobbiest and funds spent towards each individual congress person. You need to also compare if they actually voted along the lines of what they presented. This sounds like its just doing something like a word count. Big whoop. You can have 2 or more sides pushing competing bills that have similiar but important differences. They'd both pop up the same main key words. How will they improve this thing so that they can track not just that they were talking about "abortion" but one side had bills limiting abortion and another side wanting it to be easier for abortions. Well, I'd want to know not just that they were talking about abortion, but all the sides and the money follows of the behind the scene people as well. Then you'd really start getting interesting results.
I haven't shopped for a laser printer in 14 years because my LaserJet IIIP refuses to die. And yes, I use it every day.
I see this as how HP is going downhill. I've supported some LaserJet 4Ls and HP LJ6 with longer live spans. The problem that plagued the 6 was paper jams after several years of use. We've just gotten a HP3550N about 1.5 years ago. It's a fair color printer, and does o.k. for most people but I don't like it. We were wanting to print our annual reports and some other highend pictures on it. The color comes out far darker than it should. It's possible to get good results with it, but it's more of an art than just printing to it. I've just looked for another high-end color jet for crime scene use. Something that you can print out full page figure prints or copies of checks and see all the detail. I was startled that there are 3-5 network color lasers for $300-$400. Part of me thought hey if the price ever drops to $100-$150, I'm going to have to pick one up for my home use, though I don't print that much. I don't think that inkjets will last another 10-15 years. I think laserjets will replace inkjets for home use in maybe 5-6 years. It depends on when the price drops just alittle bit more.
I once oversaw moving a firms's HQ and IT functions from Silicon Valley to San Antonio, TX because of the "math" some white collar genius put together like this Forbes nonsense. Sure, the "average" wage was one-half of what it was in Palo Alto, but because of the "quality" of local talent, we ended up hiring THREE TIMES as many staff to do the same amount of work. (For the math-challenged, that meant productivity sucked by 50%.) This wasn't just a drain on company resources, but on the few people who DID know their chops and had to hoist it in for the dullards. Those that made the move and saw the disaster had to in turn move completely out of the area to restore sanity to their careers. And the "icing on the cake" is that San Antonio is the only place I've stood hip deep in mud and had sand blow in my face. No thanky-thanky.
This just tell's me that your firm doesn't know how to hire people. There are plenty of talented people in Texas. Heck, there are plenty of talented homegrown people in the Litte Rock, AR area. If your company can't find them, don't blame the area. I personnally believe this applies to all of the US. There are plenty of trainable college grads in most major US cities. If you think the talent/gurus are much better in a tech hot spot, then you are willing to pay a premium for equal talent not better talent. I'd think that most businesses that move to area's where the cost of living is lower end up hiring more people not to do the same amount of work. They hire more people because its cheaper and can get more done if the organization is properly run.
You've gotta fucking be kidding, right? In the 1970's, in grade school, I was taught metric measurements, in anticipation that the US was going to switch to metric, like the rest of the world. Then Reagan got elected. Now I live in a country that uses this byzantine system of weights and measures, and I'll be damned if I'm going to learn how many furlongs are in a hogshead. And now you want to mess with dates? They're going to brand you a French Spy and burn you in effigy.
I doubt that the US will ever move away from feet/inces/miles. Feet and inches are just easier than metric units for the construction industry. Metric doesn't offer any advantages. Yard/Feet/inches offer practical advantages over units that you can only evenly divide by 2, 5, 10. Miles and KM are about the same thing. What advantage is there for switching from miles to km? Oh yes we become SI friendly. I like our temperature scale better because it is more useful for weather measurements than the other. Most people only use temperature for cooking and noticing the weather. I'd think that the SI units are actually used in industry, but I could be wrong there. But come on YYYY-MM-DD makes everything easier! I was taught MM/DD/YY in school. I had to write it below my name on everything. The YY was just and after thought and really didn't matter much in a school environment where you threw way all those school papers at the end of the year. Out of school though keeping things. Everything is in MM/DD/YY like it is supposed to be easy. Well, it is pretty easy for sorting within a year, but once you start keeping years of data is starts to become unfriendly. Sorting things in the computer is trivial with YYYY-MM-DD as well.
with nearly 2/3 of the nation considered "obese," who's actually going to use this? You know, I think that's exactly the same thing they said about DDR.
I think this is kinda where Wii is heading. I'd call it the stealth excerise game. Think about "forcing" your gamers to physically move around alot or from various positions/wide body movements. You could "trick" your gamers into doing alot more body movements rather than them just sitting there. How long until some one combines a DDR pad and the Wii controller in an interesting way so that you move your character's stance or lower body foot work with the DDR pad and play with the controller for weapons/tools?
I'm with CmdrTaco - hire people you think you can trust. If you're proven wrong, fire them. Don't give people access to sensitive data until they've proven that they're trustworthy, and if you have something that can't leak outside the company no matter what, don't put it somewhere that anyone else can get to it.
Um, no disrepect to you or CmdrTaco, but/. doesn't bring in millions or billions. If we brought CmdrTaco millions of dollars a year, he'd be very paranoid about anything that could stop us from bringing in millions a year.
What you're trying to do is paradoxical. You're saying, "I ultimately trust these guys with the security of all of my information, but I don't completely trust them with the security of all of my information."
My response is that you need atleast 3+ IT sections that all have equal ability. One should do work and be logged, you don't trust any of them, so you have the other 2 sections check up on everything. The problem is that you have to be able to afford a large staff for that solution. If you only have 3 IT guys, well, you would just be SOL if one of them wants to sell your info to the highest bidder.
A company is worthles without it's employees. Select good people, pay them well and treat them fairly. Next question... How do you remove paranoid executives from positions of power and stop them from inflating operating costs through needless and morale busting authoritarian technology.
Um, pretending the entire thing doesn't exist doesn't help stop it. I'd advise having aleast 3 IT divison's that look over each other's shoulder. You don't assume anyone is trusted. No one should have direct access to precious data. I'm paranoid by nature it's a good trait for us all to foster. This is a cover your ass question. The admin wants to know how to setup things so if no single person can comprise the system from the inside. It's a very difficult problem to solve. Throwing up a firewall and encrypting data won't help if the people you are trying to protect against will already be inside a firewall and have access to the encryption keys. My answer would be that none of your IT people should have direct access to any encryption keys and that everything should be automatically encrypted so that the IT staff shouldn't be able to just access anything in your system.
The ISO date form is YYYY-MM-DD (2006-08-02) or YYYYMMDD (20060802).
Personally, I find the mixed number/letter forms like "2006 AUG 2" and "2 Aug 2006" work best when dealing with other humans who speak the same language. It's unambiguous -- there's only one sane way to interpret it -- and the letter/number distinction stands out more than dashes. For computers and other kinds of filing, though, the ISO form definately wins. It makes sorting so much easier.
I think that our schools should switch and start teaching the ISO YYYY-MM-DD. It's all in what you were taught in what makes sense. For everything that I personally do, it's in YYYY-MM-DD. I hate encountering files that are DD/MM/YY or MM/DD/YY, it's just difficult using them for files. I wish governments would switch to YYYY-MM-DD and then filing could be made so much easier.
You know there was once a time when the cop would simply walk a beat, in doing this he actually built a bond between him and those he was supposed to protect. Also he knew from doing this who was likely to be "good" or "bad" if something went down. Ever since they took to driving around in cars this bond has been broken and they now just respond to calls without the humanity behind it.
This must be a city thing. I'd be ticked if by police department ever started trying to "walk" a beat. Why? Because it's impossible. One cop could walk a few blocks, but that's about it. Here is another thing. I tend to be anti-social myself. I don't want to be friendly with my government employees, or clerks. That's just how I am. You seem to want "the police" "to know" everyone in their beat by being on a first name basis with everyone and actually "knowing" everyone. I would hate to live in your ideal world. I'll pay taxes, but I don't want my authority figures "knowing me."
(most collections are sealed away. Even if you do use them, how could you possibly get real use out of 100 cars or 1000 beanie babies?), then the only thing you have left is monetary value and bragging rights.
My kids play with my mom's beanies. Beanie babies are actually fun to play and throw around. Beanie baby wars! You just can't do that with cars though.
It's over AOL, the days of dialup are gone and people will eventually be using DSL or Cable provided by their locality. I for one am impressed that AOL even exists. I mean seriously, who uses AOL?
Well, I use it mainly because it is more than a 1/3 the price of DSL or Cable. I hate dail-up, but I can live with it rather than pay more than $60 for internet. I honestly think "broadband" internet shouldn't cost more than $10 a month, but I'll live with about $20 a month. 60*12=$720 a year 20*12=$240. $720-$240=$480. You might be able to afford $480, but my family can't. We don't have cable because we can't justify the expense. To me, DSL and Cable aren't mainstream because most people can't afford them as options. Dail-up is not dead by a long shot.
But back to the thread's main focus, this will be an ideal kick in these countries behind to help them catch up to European and Western countries. If 4 million computers can produce just one more person who can go to college and stand on his feet, then everyone wins.
You want those governments to spend $400 million just for the chance that a child will "go to college?" I would actually hope a more than 1 in out of 4,000,000 gets a "higher education" because of these things. Aim for 10% or something. 400,000 getting either a HS or basic college general ed sounds alot better. What really threw me was the whole "go to college" part of your comment. If this thing is actually really successful, then these kids should be able to achieve a full college education right where they are at rather than moving else just for educational needs. That educational concept is too radical for the teacher's unions/colleges to accpet in any first world country. I'm curious at how it'll turn out in the future and hopeful about it, but if only 1 in a million benefit from these then it was wasted government money.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but arrests stay on your record, regardless of what happens after that. Moreover, you'll always have to answer that you have been arrested on job applications etc., doing otherwise could bring serious legal consequences but doing so may well exclude you from opportunity.
I'd have to check that's not something that I interact with. I know all the local arrests are recorded in our RMS. Our RMS doesn't interface with the courts so feed back on the results isn't input into it. As far as I'm aware of, arrests aren't recorded at a level other than locally. I don't know if that applies in all states though. I'm kinda mixed in out look in the whole thing. Before I had this job, I'd have thought the police should be damn near perfect. I've learned better. We are lucky to get fair to good out of them.;) My police department requires 30 hours of college and pays one of the highest in the state. Our problem is keeping qualified personnel. The problem is that my department will spend the money and get you up to our standards and then you can jump ship to the feds for more money or decide to completely switch fields which happens alot. Keeping good cops is a tough job. I didn't read the article so I don't know the fine points of what happened. I just think that on most things the police system is self correcting. If you get one that is breaking the law, around here the cop is thrown in jail like anyone else.
Most likely nothing. And that's as it should be. Why? Because he most likely thought that he was in the right
That doesn't matter -- he was out of line, no matter how justified he believed his actions to be and he needs to be accountable for them. By your logic, very few crimes of passion would be punishable... unless you believe there's a different standard for members of law enforcement.
Ok. I load our criminal code onto our police department's cars, and they all have easy access to it. Now, I'm sure it's in the general orders manual that they should know/read and be famailiar with everything in the criminal code book. That's an ideal. Usually, they train to a given standard and for all types of crimes write up the report in a form manner. Patrol's charge's usually have to be revised by CID. CID usually determines if a crime actually fits what the state criminal charge is or revises the charges to the closest one that they can charge the suspect with. When I stated he most likely thought he was in the right, I'm saying that the cop most likely actually thought that what the guy was doing happened to be illegal and for CID to find the charge/a charge to make it stick. What most likely happened is CID looked through their Lexis Nexis criminal code and couldn't find any mention of public citizen's taking police officer's photos being against the law.
If the person was using the images to threaten undercover policemen, then it might have been, but just the act of taking photos shouldn't be. The person incharge of CID should have sent a memo/called the person in charge of Patrol and had him make and annoucement at all the shift's roll call that it wasn't illegal and not to do it again. Police aren't perfect. They revise their standards, and what their written policies are all the time.
The problem is that the public usually just sees the lowest level patrol person on the street. That person isn't responsible for changing policy or running things. Usually a Captain writes/changes policy so that's the level that you'd need to complain to. The individual patrol person should be just carrying out their general orders manual with some slack every now and then for the unexpected. Do you really want to know the number one thing that the general public complains to their local pd about? I'll let you in on it. Animal services is the number one section that recieves the most compliants, and citizens will not be happy with whatever the policies are. Take animal's to the animal shelter and the citizen isn't happy if their critter dies when it isn't picked up after 2 weeks. I've heard of an entire shift chasing down a stray animal that there was a complaint over when nothing else more important was going on.
You want to change your police department? Communicate with it. Find out who you need to talk to and phone them up about once a month or so. Make sure all your neighbors also know the individual to contact. You will be listened to, and the police in your neighborhood will change their policies when it is possible and within reason for them to do so.
I don't know if your police department offers this, but mine has these "close watches" and any citizen can request for the police to keep and extra eye on their property if they are going out of town for week or have seen strange people in the neighborhood. Both individuals and business owners request this from the police department. They send out a group e-mail for the close watches.
Helpless to stop the endless barrage of stories and claims that we're living in an Orwellian 1984 totalitarian police state, when in fact nothing substantial has really changed in 50 years (save the technology, which goes both ways: it gives authorities more systems to abuse, and it gives citizens more vehicles to document and comment, e.g., ubiquitous cell phone cameras and blogs where nearly everyone believes that we already like in a police state).
What *really* scares me is that people genuinely, legitimately believe this, and believe that police and government are out to get them, and that they're all corrupt and only looking for ways to extend their power or line their pockets.
I'm the IT guy in a small city police department. Trust me on this police don't want to share data with anyone and what data the police collects you can pay $10 for copy of the report. Why don't police want to share data? Because they collect "intel" data and some of the people in there may have done nothing wrong. Take gangs. If a gang member is arrested, they like to try to link together gang members. Well, just because you are a gang member or linked to a gang member doesn't mean that you've done anything wrong. I've been amazed at how little the police can legally share with each other. There are both state and federal laws limiting the "intel" information. I think the rule of thumb is that you can generally share your data among your department, but you generally can't share intel information farther than that. If you wand some potentially scary stuff, look up N-DEx http://policechiefmagazine.org/magazine/index.cfm? fuseaction=display_arch&article_id=908&issue_id=62 006 . NIBRS is about all the feds care about and it's all just crime stats.
There is a policeman that I work with. I tell him routinely, that I think that the feds should be the final resting place for every report that they write and everything should be stored by them. In car dash cameras should be attached to police reports and submitted up to the Feds and stored both to cover the individual policeman's butt, and incase anyone else in the nation wanted to compare video. I'd want that one automated though. Heck, there isn't even a "national" standard for finger prints. Each state has its own system and doesn't look outside of its system.
It's amazing how well the police do their jobs with the tools that they have.
The end total of the IT that I'd like to give to my cops would be a virtual police state. I really drooled over the traffic cameras that London could afford. We'd never be able to spend like that though. Heck, there was an article on/. a few days ago about a camera searching every passing car and doing NCIC lookups to see if there were any hits. I think that every city should have one of those systems for each of their major transportation hubs. Humans can't catch much, but with a system like that, if an auto is in the system as stolen, then a police person can atleast be alerted and stop the car that he would have otherwise missed.
That device was something like $25-$30K. For my department to afford it, we'd need a grant to cover it. We could purchase something around $4-$5K, but not something for $25-30K. There are alot of neat police tools that I'd like our department to have access to, but each one is priced around $25-30K and we don't have that much to spend.
We looked last year and replacing our analog cameras and VCRs to the digital cameras with lowlight and storing them on 4 GB flash cards and wirelessly transmit. We were going to setup 5 cars with plans of upgrading our entire fleet of 25 units, but it was going to cost about $65K for the inital 5 cars and setting up the backbone system. The night vision on that system was sweet. I wish our department had it. One other nice feature was that it was always rec
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It will suck if they start realizing how much more money they could be making by defining a core as a CPU for licensing...
They'll wait until we all have 4 to 8 cores. Then they'll hit us for an 4-8x hit in licensing cost. They don't want to kill off multi-core processing for main stream use before it really begins.
Not that they tell the truth at times of peace, either - it's either the libertarian "the government is the source of all evil and there would be paradise on Earth if we could just overthrow it" -style nonsense or the authoritarian "it is unpatriotic to criticize the government" -style bullshit.
Trust no one. That's as good an advice as any...
Sounds like we need several competing news sources owned/sponsered by different groups. You could have 2-3 sponsored by separate branches of the government. You'd have tradional CNN type news on cable that is "media company owned", but then I think that you should have a news source owned by each industrial group. Like all the automakers, energy companies, farmers, or doctors own their own 2-3 news sources. Of course their news would be tilted to make them look good and those that want to limit, control or set disagreeable laws in a negative light. The good thing though is that groups that tradionally don't have wide spread news coverage could.
Its funny how freedom of the press was designed to allow for independent criticism of public policy, yet a government-run news service is about the most even-handed news you can get.
Only when you want to read critism of things other than the government. Government critism wouldn't be even handed and fair if things really get bad.
657,437 searches for "how to cancel AOL"
Which brings up 43,400 hits on google.
Now you know that the NSA can't even figure out how to get electricity set up so that they can power their billion dollar computers, meanwhile your company, which you consider to be run by dopes probably, has multiple plans to deal with such issues. The reason for this is simple:
The NSA does not design computers, they just buy them on contract from big companies like IBM or whoever. All they have to do is write a check.
This leaves the NSA with the responsibility to plug that computer in, and they have failed at it. And you can take it as a fact that this is the case with almost all government projects. They write a check to a contractor, and then don't have the competence to use what they bought.
Um, I'd say that some one was hoping that "it was in the contract." I work for a local government police department. Over the last 3-4 years I've been getting our "new" RMS up and used. Well, there have been several things that we've brought to our bosses' attention that the product doesn't do. What our our bosses answers? It was in the contract that the software should do X. I heard that for 6 months to a year. Finally, some one gave me copy of the contract. Nope. No mention of a number of features that our bosses say that were "in the contract," or worse "the sales manager promised us" that they'd get that fixed or rolled out. What's really bad is that very few of the City's IT people were asked when the contract was made. It was all through bosses and managers that didn't have any computer experience and just assumed that things just worked once you've bought them. The project has been pretty successful and we've gotten most of the the features that we've bugged our vendor about. We've been bugging them for 3 years though over what our bosses say was in the contract for day one. I could easily see similiar things happening through all branches of any government. Heck, any branch where you don't personnally use a product, but are responsible for buying it for some one else will have these sorts of miss understandings.
While you may argue about the morality of their participation in supposed spying on citizens or about the morality of current or past military, political, and diplomatic conquests they've aided, you can't argue that they aren't absolutely the top tier of their profession in the world. I don't know of a single more experienced, qualified, or intelligent collection of mathemiticians and computer pros in the world, and that's not an appeal to ignorance. They've found and fixed mistakes in common products such as linux and PGP that have gone undetected by the rest of the population for decades, and they've done it in their free time as a hobby.
Um, how would we know of all the global spying organizations and their levels of skill. How would you or I what skills that the FBI, CIA, NSA, KGB, or MI6 relatively excel in? We can guess and look at job openings on some, but "know?" Unless you run your own private spy agency, you should be limited in what you know. I find if funny that you judge the skill of the NSA on if their workers have worked on open source software. I'm sorry, but that really doesn't mean anything. Why? The best code builders/breakers have always been working for the government. A handful and here and there stay at universities, but the really good ones have always been found and used by their respective governments. We as civilians don't know if government crypto Phds are the best, we really, really "hope" that they are. Just because they are good in their field and have fixed mistakes that professions in the field might have found decades ago doesn't mean that they are the best in the world. I'm sorry you need another metric to measure them by. I really, hope that the CIA/NSA are the best in the world. I wouldn't take it on faith that they are though.
What's really needed, of course, is a new way of writing and maintaining software. The programs we use today are essentially bespoke, hand-built items, much the way cars were at the start of the 20th century. The primitive fabrication methods are masked because computer software can be duplicated infinitely without additional cost, but it's still an industry ripe for a new enry Ford to invent the digital equivalent of a production line.
Actually, I think that this could be a great idea for MS to send into areas where only pirated copies of windows dominate. Instead of thinking of just a lite version, you have an ad bar on one section of the screen that downloads ads so that you are getting some money off those pirates. I think this "could" work, but it won't. Really, you'd need a 20+" monitor to give you enough screen space. It would be nice if they bundled internet service in there as well, but I don't think that worked the last time some one tried it. Oh, here is an idea. Sony or Walmart to buy 4-5 million of those $100 scaled down laptops for the third world, stick "My First Sony Laptop" on the top, and have the default OS download your Sony/Walmart ads. You can sell them for $75-100 in with the Barbie laptop toys.
As for physical retailers, have a setup where people can come in and download songs to thier devices. People don't want to have to go to the store all the time to get things like music. Deal with it. But if you have something like this, people can drop in and grab a song they just heard on the radio or something. Or perhaps retail music is dead, will anyone really miss it?
I read this and thought, retail music stores will be dead. Retail music won't die. Why? Well, Wal-Mart, Target, any gas station, or ATM could sell music direct to consumers devices. You'd have a booth, you'd search by either artist, album, radio station, or what ever to pull up the song that you'd like. You could play the entire thing there if you really wanted to. All music would be $1 a song or maybe $.10 for "old" stuff," $1 for everything within say the last 10-15 years, and $1-$2 for anything new or popular per song. The key is to make the system/booths every where people go on a daily basis any way and make it easy to buy. Partner with gas stations and ATMs to have a booth to have an ATM/music booth in every store. I'd think designing the machines would be easy. Just make sure that you have a 500 Gb HD preloaded with most musc. If you really want to get fancy, make sure the devices have some sort of built-in download ability so that all new songs are just downloaded to the machines. The theory would be most consumers wouldn't want to wait for the 3 minutes that it would take to download a song. We are trying to make it an impluse purchase as they use their ATM machine. I'd try to license the iTunes format, but would offer mp3s as the default standard. You could also use a "hi-def" standard and charge 2-3 times as much for the "hi-def" version. You'd aim for all mp3 players, but you'd have an eye towards i-pods as well. What kind of download options should you offer? Compact flash or usb transfer, wifi, blue-tooth? An idea would also be to have account key chains where you just scan your key chain and it pulls up your profile and you can re-download any music that you've already bought, and makes it easy for you to buy/prepay or make gift purchases for others. Say you just add $20 to you keychain at the cash register and then just pick 20 songs from the machine. You give the consumers several easy to use options.
Great. Now we know what congress has been talking about.
Big deal.
Wake me up when you can tell me what in the hell they were thinking.
Nah, that won't ever work. You'd need to add in support to track lobbiest and funds spent towards each individual congress person. You need to also compare if they actually voted along the lines of what they presented. This sounds like its just doing something like a word count. Big whoop. You can have 2 or more sides pushing competing bills that have similiar but important differences. They'd both pop up the same main key words. How will they improve this thing so that they can track not just that they were talking about "abortion" but one side had bills limiting abortion and another side wanting it to be easier for abortions. Well, I'd want to know not just that they were talking about abortion, but all the sides and the money follows of the behind the scene people as well. Then you'd really start getting interesting results.
I haven't shopped for a laser printer in 14 years because my LaserJet IIIP refuses to die. And yes, I use it every day.
I see this as how HP is going downhill. I've supported some LaserJet 4Ls and HP LJ6 with longer live spans. The problem that plagued the 6 was paper jams after several years of use. We've just gotten a HP3550N about 1.5 years ago. It's a fair color printer, and does o.k. for most people but I don't like it. We were wanting to print our annual reports and some other highend pictures on it. The color comes out far darker than it should. It's possible to get good results with it, but it's more of an art than just printing to it. I've just looked for another high-end color jet for crime scene use. Something that you can print out full page figure prints or copies of checks and see all the detail. I was startled that there are 3-5 network color lasers for $300-$400. Part of me thought hey if the price ever drops to $100-$150, I'm going to have to pick one up for my home use, though I don't print that much. I don't think that inkjets will last another 10-15 years. I think laserjets will replace inkjets for home use in maybe 5-6 years. It depends on when the price drops just alittle bit more.
I once oversaw moving a firms's HQ and IT functions from Silicon Valley to San Antonio, TX because of the "math" some white collar genius put together like this Forbes nonsense. Sure, the "average" wage was one-half of what it was in Palo Alto, but because of the "quality" of local talent, we ended up hiring THREE TIMES as many staff to do the same amount of work. (For the math-challenged, that meant productivity sucked by 50%.) This wasn't just a drain on company resources, but on the few people who DID know their chops and had to hoist it in for the dullards. Those that made the move and saw the disaster had to in turn move completely out of the area to restore sanity to their careers. And the "icing on the cake" is that San Antonio is the only place I've stood hip deep in mud and had sand blow in my face. No thanky-thanky.
This just tell's me that your firm doesn't know how to hire people. There are plenty of talented people in Texas. Heck, there are plenty of talented homegrown people in the Litte Rock, AR area. If your company can't find them, don't blame the area. I personnally believe this applies to all of the US. There are plenty of trainable college grads in most major US cities. If you think the talent/gurus are much better in a tech hot spot, then you are willing to pay a premium for equal talent not better talent. I'd think that most businesses that move to area's where the cost of living is lower end up hiring more people not to do the same amount of work. They hire more people because its cheaper and can get more done if the organization is properly run.
You've gotta fucking be kidding, right? In the 1970's, in grade school, I was taught metric measurements, in anticipation that the US was going to switch to metric, like the rest of the world. Then Reagan got elected. Now I live in a country that uses this byzantine system of weights and measures, and I'll be damned if I'm going to learn how many furlongs are in a hogshead.
And now you want to mess with dates? They're going to brand you a French Spy and burn you in effigy.
I doubt that the US will ever move away from feet/inces/miles. Feet and inches are just easier than metric units for the construction industry. Metric doesn't offer any advantages. Yard/Feet/inches offer practical advantages over units that you can only evenly divide by 2, 5, 10. Miles and KM are about the same thing. What advantage is there for switching from miles to km? Oh yes we become SI friendly. I like our temperature scale better because it is more useful for weather measurements than the other. Most people only use temperature for cooking and noticing the weather. I'd think that the SI units are actually used in industry, but I could be wrong there. But come on YYYY-MM-DD makes everything easier! I was taught MM/DD/YY in school. I had to write it below my name on everything. The YY was just and after thought and really didn't matter much in a school environment where you threw way all those school papers at the end of the year. Out of school though keeping things. Everything is in MM/DD/YY like it is supposed to be easy. Well, it is pretty easy for sorting within a year, but once you start keeping years of data is starts to become unfriendly. Sorting things in the computer is trivial with YYYY-MM-DD as well.
with nearly 2/3 of the nation considered "obese," who's actually going to use this?
You know, I think that's exactly the same thing they said about DDR.
I think this is kinda where Wii is heading. I'd call it the stealth excerise game. Think about "forcing" your gamers to physically move around alot or from various positions/wide body movements. You could "trick" your gamers into doing alot more body movements rather than them just sitting there. How long until some one combines a DDR pad and the Wii controller in an interesting way so that you move your character's stance or lower body foot work with the DDR pad and play with the controller for weapons/tools?
I'm with CmdrTaco - hire people you think you can trust. If you're proven wrong, fire them. Don't give people access to sensitive data until they've proven that they're trustworthy, and if you have something that can't leak outside the company no matter what, don't put it somewhere that anyone else can get to it.
/. doesn't bring in millions or billions. If we brought CmdrTaco millions of dollars a year, he'd be very paranoid about anything that could stop us from bringing in millions a year.
Um, no disrepect to you or CmdrTaco, but
What you're trying to do is paradoxical. You're saying, "I ultimately trust these guys with the security of all of my information, but I don't completely trust them with the security of all of my information."
My response is that you need atleast 3+ IT sections that all have equal ability. One should do work and be logged, you don't trust any of them, so you have the other 2 sections check up on everything. The problem is that you have to be able to afford a large staff for that solution. If you only have 3 IT guys, well, you would just be SOL if one of them wants to sell your info to the highest bidder.
A company is worthles without it's employees. Select good people, pay them well and treat them fairly. Next question... How do you remove paranoid executives from positions of power and stop them from inflating operating costs through needless and morale busting authoritarian technology.
Um, pretending the entire thing doesn't exist doesn't help stop it. I'd advise having aleast 3 IT divison's that look over each other's shoulder. You don't assume anyone is trusted. No one should have direct access to precious data. I'm paranoid by nature it's a good trait for us all to foster. This is a cover your ass question. The admin wants to know how to setup things so if no single person can comprise the system from the inside. It's a very difficult problem to solve. Throwing up a firewall and encrypting data won't help if the people you are trying to protect against will already be inside a firewall and have access to the encryption keys. My answer would be that none of your IT people should have direct access to any encryption keys and that everything should be automatically encrypted so that the IT staff shouldn't be able to just access anything in your system.
The ISO date form is YYYY-MM-DD (2006-08-02) or YYYYMMDD (20060802).
Personally, I find the mixed number/letter forms like "2006 AUG 2" and "2 Aug 2006" work best when dealing with other humans who speak the same language. It's unambiguous -- there's only one sane way to interpret it -- and the letter/number distinction stands out more than dashes. For computers and other kinds of filing, though, the ISO form definately wins. It makes sorting so much easier.
I think that our schools should switch and start teaching the ISO YYYY-MM-DD. It's all in what you were taught in what makes sense. For everything that I personally do, it's in YYYY-MM-DD. I hate encountering files that are DD/MM/YY or MM/DD/YY, it's just difficult using them for files. I wish governments would switch to YYYY-MM-DD and then filing could be made so much easier.
You know there was once a time when the cop would simply walk a beat, in doing this he actually built a bond between him and those he was supposed to protect. Also he knew from doing this who was likely to be "good" or "bad" if something went down. Ever since they took to driving around in cars this bond has been broken and they now just respond to calls without the humanity behind it.
This must be a city thing. I'd be ticked if by police department ever started trying to "walk" a beat. Why? Because it's impossible. One cop could walk a few blocks, but that's about it. Here is another thing. I tend to be anti-social myself. I don't want to be friendly with my government employees, or clerks. That's just how I am. You seem to want "the police" "to know" everyone in their beat by being on a first name basis with everyone and actually "knowing" everyone. I would hate to live in your ideal world. I'll pay taxes, but I don't want my authority figures "knowing me."
Having created a crime-free paradise (by American standards), the British government has proceeded to outlaw merely unpleasant behaviour.
So when are they declaring war on France again?
(most collections are sealed away. Even if you do use them, how could you possibly get real use out of 100 cars or 1000 beanie babies?), then the only thing you have left is monetary value and bragging rights.
My kids play with my mom's beanies. Beanie babies are actually fun to play and throw around. Beanie baby wars! You just can't do that with cars though.
It's over AOL, the days of dialup are gone and people will eventually be using DSL or Cable provided by their locality. I for one am impressed that AOL even exists. I mean seriously, who uses AOL?
Well, I use it mainly because it is more than a 1/3 the price of DSL or Cable. I hate dail-up, but I can live with it rather than pay more than $60 for internet. I honestly think "broadband" internet shouldn't cost more than $10 a month, but I'll live with about $20 a month. 60*12=$720 a year 20*12=$240. $720-$240=$480. You might be able to afford $480, but my family can't. We don't have cable because we can't justify the expense. To me, DSL and Cable aren't mainstream because most people can't afford them as options. Dail-up is not dead by a long shot.
But back to the thread's main focus, this will be an ideal kick in these countries behind to help them catch up to European and Western countries. If 4 million computers can produce just one more person who can go to college and stand on his feet, then everyone wins.
You want those governments to spend $400 million just for the chance that a child will "go to college?" I would actually hope a more than 1 in out of 4,000,000 gets a "higher education" because of these things. Aim for 10% or something. 400,000 getting either a HS or basic college general ed sounds alot better. What really threw me was the whole "go to college" part of your comment. If this thing is actually really successful, then these kids should be able to achieve a full college education right where they are at rather than moving else just for educational needs. That educational concept is too radical for the teacher's unions/colleges to accpet in any first world country. I'm curious at how it'll turn out in the future and hopeful about it, but if only 1 in a million benefit from these then it was wasted government money.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but arrests stay on your record, regardless of what happens after that. Moreover, you'll always have to answer that you have been arrested on job applications etc., doing otherwise could bring serious legal consequences but doing so may well exclude you from opportunity.
;) My police department requires 30 hours of college and pays one of the highest in the state. Our problem is keeping qualified personnel. The problem is that my department will spend the money and get you up to our standards and then you can jump ship to the feds for more money or decide to completely switch fields which happens alot. Keeping good cops is a tough job. I didn't read the article so I don't know the fine points of what happened. I just think that on most things the police system is self correcting. If you get one that is breaking the law, around here the cop is thrown in jail like anyone else.
I'd have to check that's not something that I interact with. I know all the local arrests are recorded in our RMS. Our RMS doesn't interface with the courts so feed back on the results isn't input into it. As far as I'm aware of, arrests aren't recorded at a level other than locally. I don't know if that applies in all states though. I'm kinda mixed in out look in the whole thing. Before I had this job, I'd have thought the police should be damn near perfect. I've learned better. We are lucky to get fair to good out of them.
Most likely nothing. And that's as it should be. Why? Because he most likely thought that he was in the right
That doesn't matter -- he was out of line, no matter how justified he believed his actions to be and he needs to be accountable for them. By your logic, very few crimes of passion would be punishable... unless you believe there's a different standard for members of law enforcement.
Ok. I load our criminal code onto our police department's cars, and they all have easy access to it. Now, I'm sure it's in the general orders manual that they should know/read and be famailiar with everything in the criminal code book. That's an ideal. Usually, they train to a given standard and for all types of crimes write up the report in a form manner. Patrol's charge's usually have to be revised by CID. CID usually determines if a crime actually fits what the state criminal charge is or revises the charges to the closest one that they can charge the suspect with. When I stated he most likely thought he was in the right, I'm saying that the cop most likely actually thought that what the guy was doing happened to be illegal and for CID to find the charge/a charge to make it stick. What most likely happened is CID looked through their Lexis Nexis criminal code and couldn't find any mention of public citizen's taking police officer's photos being against the law.
If the person was using the images to threaten undercover policemen, then it might have been, but just the act of taking photos shouldn't be. The person incharge of CID should have sent a memo/called the person in charge of Patrol and had him make and annoucement at all the shift's roll call that it wasn't illegal and not to do it again. Police aren't perfect. They revise their standards, and what their written policies are all the time.
The problem is that the public usually just sees the lowest level patrol person on the street. That person isn't responsible for changing policy or running things. Usually a Captain writes/changes policy so that's the level that you'd need to complain to. The individual patrol person should be just carrying out their general orders manual with some slack every now and then for the unexpected. Do you really want to know the number one thing that the general public complains to their local pd about? I'll let you in on it. Animal services is the number one section that recieves the most compliants, and citizens will not be happy with whatever the policies are. Take animal's to the animal shelter and the citizen isn't happy if their critter dies when it isn't picked up after 2 weeks. I've heard of an entire shift chasing down a stray animal that there was a complaint over when nothing else more important was going on.
You want to change your police department? Communicate with it. Find out who you need to talk to and phone them up about once a month or so. Make sure all your neighbors also know the individual to contact. You will be listened to, and the police in your neighborhood will change their policies when it is possible and within reason for them to do so.
I don't know if your police department offers this, but mine has these "close watches" and any citizen can request for the police to keep and extra eye on their property if they are going out of town for week or have seen strange people in the neighborhood. Both individuals and business owners request this from the police department. They send out a group e-mail for the close watches.
Helpless to stop the endless barrage of stories and claims that we're living in an Orwellian 1984 totalitarian police state, when in fact nothing substantial has really changed in 50 years (save the technology, which goes both ways: it gives authorities more systems to abuse, and it gives citizens more vehicles to document and comment, e.g., ubiquitous cell phone cameras and blogs where nearly everyone believes that we already like in a police state).
/. a few days ago about a camera searching every passing car and doing NCIC lookups to see if there were any hits. I think that every city should have one of those systems for each of their major transportation hubs. Humans can't catch much, but with a system like that, if an auto is in the system as stolen, then a police person can atleast be alerted and stop the car that he would have otherwise missed.
What *really* scares me is that people genuinely, legitimately believe this, and believe that police and government are out to get them, and that they're all corrupt and only looking for ways to extend their power or line their pockets.
I'm the IT guy in a small city police department. Trust me on this police don't want to share data with anyone and what data the police collects you can pay $10 for copy of the report. Why don't police want to share data? Because they collect "intel" data and some of the people in there may have done nothing wrong. Take gangs. If a gang member is arrested, they like to try to link together gang members. Well, just because you are a gang member or linked to a gang member doesn't mean that you've done anything wrong. I've been amazed at how little the police can legally share with each other. There are both state and federal laws limiting the "intel" information. I think the rule of thumb is that you can generally share your data among your department, but you generally can't share intel information farther than that. If you wand some potentially scary stuff, look up N-DEx
http://policechiefmagazine.org/magazine/index.cfm? fuseaction=display_arch&article_id=908&issue_id=62 006 . NIBRS is about all the feds care about and it's all just crime stats.
There is a policeman that I work with. I tell him routinely, that I think that the feds should be the final resting place for every report that they write and everything should be stored by them. In car dash cameras should be attached to police reports and submitted up to the Feds and stored both to cover the individual policeman's butt, and incase anyone else in the nation wanted to compare video. I'd want that one automated though. Heck, there isn't even a "national" standard for finger prints. Each state has its own system and doesn't look outside of its system.
It's amazing how well the police do their jobs with the tools that they have.
The end total of the IT that I'd like to give to my cops would be a virtual police state. I really drooled over the traffic cameras that London could afford. We'd never be able to spend like that though. Heck, there was an article on
That device was something like $25-$30K. For my department to afford it, we'd need a grant to cover it. We could purchase something around $4-$5K, but not something for $25-30K. There are alot of neat police tools that I'd like our department to have access to, but each one is priced around $25-30K and we don't have that much to spend.
We looked last year and replacing our analog cameras and VCRs to the digital cameras with lowlight and storing them on 4 GB flash cards and wirelessly transmit. We were going to setup 5 cars with plans of upgrading our entire fleet of 25 units, but it was going to cost about $65K for the inital 5 cars and setting up the backbone system. The night vision on that system was sweet. I wish our department had it. One other nice feature was that it was always rec