If the Twin Peaks patent is on GPL-violating code, then that would seem to me (IANAL) to be a clear and direct example of prior art. You'd have a case of an entity stealing work, then patenting it, and then attacking the people they stole from. That could be an incredibly embarassing thing for Twin Peaks. OTOH, if the GPL infringement is on unrelated code, then I would imagine that there could be seperate verdicts that each could be found guilty on. The question there would be: Are the damages comparable enough to force a settlement?
The first place I ran across the concept was Tom's Hardware, and you can still see the original article. "High Performance Computing" says Intel? Pish Tosh. Kids, you really can try this at home... but get a grown-up to assist you!
Religiosity in Operating Systems is a character flaw, not a strength. Clearly this is going to be a hard concept for you to work your head around because you yourself are evangelical about UNIX. If you find somebody who is evangelical about Windiows, you're basically asking for interpersonal conflict as this engineer with "passion" for Windows is going to feel outnumbered and isolated if your whole team uses emotional language like you do.
What you' are REALLY looking for are skills and atrributes that are OS-agnostic while still demonstrating serious practical experience with Microsoft server products:
Does your candidate demonstrate an analytical, problem solving mindset?
Does your candidate show the ability to play nicely with others?
Does your candidate demonstrate a sense of personal accountability for the work that they do?
If you don't feel comfortable saying "yes" to all the above questions, then all the nuts and bolts technical stuff means nothing. Once these fundamental questions have been answered, there are some specific technical avenues to explore with your future Windows sysadmin:
Ask them how familiar they are with Powershell, and see if they can cite examples of where they used Powershell to create a technical solution or make their jobs easier through automation.
Ask them if they have ever worked to integrate Active Directory with other LDAP sources
There are a bunch of technical questions you probably need to ask that I can't possibly suggest to you, because I don't know the details of your envirionment. But these two are mandatory. Powershell is a scripting language developed to handle all kinds of administrative and automation needs for a system administrator, and it was written by two UNIX guys. If your future Windows admin understands and appreciates Powershell, they not only have a skillset that is going to be demonstratably useful in the future, they will be more likely to "think like a UNIX guy" than someone who went to an MSCE puppy mill. The AD/LDAP integration question is the one thing I know about your environment. If you're going to operate UNIX and Windows servers in the same ecossytem, some level of integration is inevitable and making sure the guy on the Windows end has the technical chops is essential.
51%? So what this tells me is that a majority of respondents didn't understand enough to care, or didn't care enough to understand and provided random answers. This is what happens when you take squishy social science methodologies and put them in the hands of even squishier marketing consultancies. Just bend the scientific method over and shove a white paper up it's ass.
Policy makers should focus on making development more walkable.
You're wrong about this:
He's got the wrong target.
The walkability of any community is primarily a function of municipal governments at the city/county level, as well as neighborhood boards, zoning comissions, and the like. I think the last thing anybody on the right OR the left wants is to filter local decisions like this through a federal bureacracy.
There is an inflection point between the two, and that is when those local entities request federal transportation dollars to be used for multimodal projects rather than just highway expansion. So a fair response to your concern would be to look at this administration and ask whether or not they have been willing to approve more innovative use of those tax dollars than just widening roads. Unfortunately, I don't know the answer to that question, as IANACP (I Am Not A Civil Planner).
Foster has single-handedly committed all the cardinal sins that Serious SF Authors(tm) must never do:
Movie/TV spin-off novels? Check (See: Splinter of the Mind's Eye).
Crossing over into Fantasy? Check (See: Spellsinger).
Dabbling with humor? Check (Spellsinger, Glory Lane, etc.).
Indulging a disrespected fringe group? Check. (Furries man. See Spellsinger (again!), Quozl, the Icerigger trilogy).
If there is a scale that measures prolific hackery, with Peirs Anthony on the bottom and Stephen King on the top, I would put Foster far, far closer to King. Glory Lane, To the Vanishing Point, and Into the Out Of are all truly excellent reads. They're not life changers, they're just damn good. He's got a fine roster of clever and poigniant short stories. For old school geeks, the most notable of which is "Why Johnny Can't Speed" which has been cited as direct inspiration for the classic Steve Jackson game Car Wars.
And hey, without Car Wars, SJ Games might never have been successful enough to launch GURPS. Without GURPS, there would be no GURPS Cyberpunk, no Secret Service raid on SJ Games in 1991, and maybe no Electronic Frontier Foundation either. How's that for underrated?
If educators are getting their panties in a bunch over what some ex-hedge manager is doing on Youtube, then can I kindly suggest...
THAT THEY DO SOMETHING ON YOUTUBE!?!?!?!?!?
I have a tremendous amount of respect for individual educators but little respect for the K-12 establishment. If you're a teacher and the best thing you can think to do with your time is tear down what you perceive as underqualified competition, then I have no time for you. If you want me to check out your Youtube video, call me. I got a couple 14yr olds who are about to run headlong into Algebra this fall If you can hold their attention better than Kahn can, I'll be right there pimping your stuff on "teh interwebs."
The land in this transaction has been privately owned by colonial graybeard corporations that have had a long history in the islands. It's not something residents dwell on much because that relationship is entrenched in the culture and hsitory of the islands.
Now that this property is being transferred to a nouveau carpetbagging haole, there's a great opportunity for all kinds of stupid local political drama. Do not expect this to sail through the PUC approval easily.
Hawai'i state govt. + soveriegnty agitators + IT's most notorious arrogant bully = first class entertainment.
Well I was trying to be an equal opportunity offender there, but it's good to see those competetive instincts are driving you to take the lead in the brittle, self-important market niche.
I always figured that conservatives evolved from the innocent-seeming but violent, territorial, face-eating chimpanzees, and liberals evolved from those oversexed, touchy-feely bonobos. Now we know the truth!
Commenters above have demonstrated clearly why this should not be regarded as a sudden dawning of divine light on the brows of Comcast executives. Yet I still hold out a little bit of hope here.
IANAL, but if YOU are, can you tell us whether Comcast (and Verizon) putting forth defenses like that can help establish precedents to be used in cases involving other parties? Are we getting any fresh ammunition out of this?
Despite being smart and thoughtful enough to put in a method to cover their tracks after discovery, they took way, WAY to long to pull the trigger and too much forensic data has already been determined. That's a failure of bureacracy. A more nimble organization would have flushed the damn thing before it could be slashdotted.
Yes yes, I understand that you tried to wave off the number one response to your question by marginalizing the difference between programmers and salespeople as a "sweeping generalization" but it is in fact a real issue that cannot be dismissed. The Blank Slate was smashed years ago. Persuasion and programming are two wildly different cognitive skillsets.
If you find somebody who happens to have BOTH skillsets, that rare individual should probably have a leadership role in the sales organization to help steer the people underneath to do their sales work in a manner that is rational and aligned with what your product truly delivers to the customer.
But the real solution to the problem you are outlining in your question is A TIGHTLY INTEGRATED RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN YOUR SALES ORGANIZATION AND YOUR SUPPORT ORGANIZATION. Doing this right isn't easy. It's more than just giving your salespeople a batphone to the helpdesk. Both groups need to collaborate to determine how each side can work to help the other group acheive their goals. There are a variety of effective models, but it begins with both groups realizing that they have a shared responsibility to ensure happy customers.
Once being placed into orbit like any traditional satellite, and making small course adjustments like any traditional satellite, and performing any number of now-routine tasks performed by satellites, and after staying up in orbit for a long time like any other satellite, it engaged in one crucially oppressive, sovereignty-crushing task:
It landed back on the surface of the Earth!!!
The pictures of you picking your nose in the backyard last summer is just gravy.
Hey guess what, Americans have every right to be more worried about "cyber security" than terrorism. Odds are MUCH more likely that the average US citizen will be the victim of foreign-born cyber attack than physical terrorism. Of course most of those threats are categorized under "crime" than "warfare." Whether that is malware like the Zeus trojans, industrial espionage, etc.
Regardless of how you categorize it, we spend too much time looking at people's shoes at the airport, and not enough time hardening our public and private IT infrastructure. The public has it right this time.
The REAL prototype for today's Internet can be found on the single-line, amateur, free Bulletin Board Systems of that era. You won't find anything comparable to the steaming, frothing orgy of human id we have today in the archives of those online services. European software piracy boards? Check. White supremacists? Check. Crappy low-fi porn? Check. Illegal seizures by federal authorities? Check. The hijacking of discussions by socially maladjusted teenage boys? Check? The ham radio loving middle-aged pedos who stalked them? Check.
Science Fiction is the last bastion of the short story as serious literature. Some might scoff at describing ANY SF as serious literature, but at the heart of SF is it's willingness to ask big questions and offer big ideas. Short stories have no room for extraneous subplots, meandering descriptions or the dreaded "expository lump" of pseudo-scientific rationalizations. A great short story will take less than an hour to read and will last with you for years. A bad short story is over quickly and soon forgotten.
I tried hard to think of a great forgotten novel to recommend and all I could think of were short stories. People above have mentioned Asimov. I, Robot was serialized in its initial publication. Each chapter stands alone as a short story. I discovered Nancy Kress, Greg Bear, and others because of "Year's Best" SF anthologies. Most of the SF greats cut their teeth in the pulp market and some of their most resonant and lasting ideas come from those pages. Just sayin.
Okay smartypants, I'd be happy to oblige. Do you think you could put your entrepeneurship where your mouth is and become an e-book retailer that accepts Bitcoin? You know, for something other than your own poetry, maybe even written by folks we've heard of before?
No? Incapable or unwilling to help foster a legitimate Bitcoin economy? Then please crawl back into the magical-thinking-hole you came from.
For readers who are more interested in K12 virtual schooling (both private and charter) and less interested in whether or not TFA is describing actual malfeasance, I'd just like to give a quick shout out to Connections Academy (http://www.connectionsacademy.com) which operates charters in several states as well as being available as a private option nationally.
To make a long story short, I've experienced CA through the lens of four grade school children over a few different years, and I was thouroughly impressed the entire time. Honestly, given the miserable public K12 experience I had, I was jealous of them the whole time. The curriculum they provide is solid, well rounded, and challenging. The online system is clear and functional. We went through their charter in Oregon, and their local staff were all Ore. public school employees, and they were just as happy to be teachers for the charter as we were to be students/parents.
Obviously YMMV with this particular organization, or any other one that is out there like K12 Academy, IQ Academy, or some of the other orgs out there. I guess the point I'm trying to make is that we're far enough along in the evolution of virtual schooling that you don't need to accept "bleeding edge" pitfalls of early adoption if you want to get your kids into a virtual school. As far as TFA goes, I wouldn't touch these guys with a 10 ft. pole. Even within the constraints of your local charter system, you'll probably have options to choose from. So if you're worried about a "billionaire" running your school, don't choose that charter. Duh. Now when some state finally gets around to subcontracting their entire system to a single vendor... THAT is when you get your hackles up.
Slashdot Mirror
If the Twin Peaks patent is on GPL-violating code, then that would seem to me (IANAL) to be a clear and direct example of prior art. You'd have a case of an entity stealing work, then patenting it, and then attacking the people they stole from. That could be an incredibly embarassing thing for Twin Peaks. OTOH, if the GPL infringement is on unrelated code, then I would imagine that there could be seperate verdicts that each could be found guilty on. The question there would be: Are the damages comparable enough to force a settlement?
Now when you tell the end-user that they "let the magic smoke out" you might be completely accurate.
The first place I ran across the concept was Tom's Hardware, and you can still see the original article. "High Performance Computing" says Intel? Pish Tosh. Kids, you really can try this at home... but get a grown-up to assist you!
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/strip-fans,1203.html
Religiosity in Operating Systems is a character flaw, not a strength. Clearly this is going to be a hard concept for you to work your head around because you yourself are evangelical about UNIX. If you find somebody who is evangelical about Windiows, you're basically asking for interpersonal conflict as this engineer with "passion" for Windows is going to feel outnumbered and isolated if your whole team uses emotional language like you do.
What you' are REALLY looking for are skills and atrributes that are OS-agnostic while still demonstrating serious practical experience with Microsoft server products:
If you don't feel comfortable saying "yes" to all the above questions, then all the nuts and bolts technical stuff means nothing. Once these fundamental questions have been answered, there are some specific technical avenues to explore with your future Windows sysadmin:
There are a bunch of technical questions you probably need to ask that I can't possibly suggest to you, because I don't know the details of your envirionment. But these two are mandatory. Powershell is a scripting language developed to handle all kinds of administrative and automation needs for a system administrator, and it was written by two UNIX guys. If your future Windows admin understands and appreciates Powershell, they not only have a skillset that is going to be demonstratably useful in the future, they will be more likely to "think like a UNIX guy" than someone who went to an MSCE puppy mill. The AD/LDAP integration question is the one thing I know about your environment. If you're going to operate UNIX and Windows servers in the same ecossytem, some level of integration is inevitable and making sure the guy on the Windows end has the technical chops is essential.
51%? So what this tells me is that a majority of respondents didn't understand enough to care, or didn't care enough to understand and provided random answers. This is what happens when you take squishy social science methodologies and put them in the hands of even squishier marketing consultancies. Just bend the scientific method over and shove a white paper up it's ass.
You're right about this:
Policy makers should focus on making development more walkable.
You're wrong about this:
He's got the wrong target.
The walkability of any community is primarily a function of municipal governments at the city/county level, as well as neighborhood boards, zoning comissions, and the like. I think the last thing anybody on the right OR the left wants is to filter local decisions like this through a federal bureacracy.
There is an inflection point between the two, and that is when those local entities request federal transportation dollars to be used for multimodal projects rather than just highway expansion. So a fair response to your concern would be to look at this administration and ask whether or not they have been willing to approve more innovative use of those tax dollars than just widening roads. Unfortunately, I don't know the answer to that question, as IANACP (I Am Not A Civil Planner).
Foster has single-handedly committed all the cardinal sins that Serious SF Authors(tm) must never do:
Movie/TV spin-off novels? Check (See: Splinter of the Mind's Eye).
Crossing over into Fantasy? Check (See: Spellsinger).
Dabbling with humor? Check (Spellsinger, Glory Lane, etc.).
Indulging a disrespected fringe group? Check. (Furries man. See Spellsinger (again!), Quozl, the Icerigger trilogy).
If there is a scale that measures prolific hackery, with Peirs Anthony on the bottom and Stephen King on the top, I would put Foster far, far closer to King. Glory Lane, To the Vanishing Point, and Into the Out Of are all truly excellent reads. They're not life changers, they're just damn good. He's got a fine roster of clever and poigniant short stories. For old school geeks, the most notable of which is "Why Johnny Can't Speed" which has been cited as direct inspiration for the classic Steve Jackson game Car Wars.
And hey, without Car Wars, SJ Games might never have been successful enough to launch GURPS. Without GURPS, there would be no GURPS Cyberpunk, no Secret Service raid on SJ Games in 1991, and maybe no Electronic Frontier Foundation either. How's that for underrated?
If educators are getting their panties in a bunch over what some ex-hedge manager is doing on Youtube, then can I kindly suggest... THAT THEY DO SOMETHING ON YOUTUBE!?!?!?!?!? I have a tremendous amount of respect for individual educators but little respect for the K-12 establishment. If you're a teacher and the best thing you can think to do with your time is tear down what you perceive as underqualified competition, then I have no time for you. If you want me to check out your Youtube video, call me. I got a couple 14yr olds who are about to run headlong into Algebra this fall If you can hold their attention better than Kahn can, I'll be right there pimping your stuff on "teh interwebs."
The land in this transaction has been privately owned by colonial graybeard corporations that have had a long history in the islands. It's not something residents dwell on much because that relationship is entrenched in the culture and hsitory of the islands.
Now that this property is being transferred to a nouveau carpetbagging haole, there's a great opportunity for all kinds of stupid local political drama. Do not expect this to sail through the PUC approval easily.
Hawai'i state govt. + soveriegnty agitators + IT's most notorious arrogant bully = first class entertainment.
Well I was trying to be an equal opportunity offender there, but it's good to see those competetive instincts are driving you to take the lead in the brittle, self-important market niche.
I always figured that conservatives evolved from the innocent-seeming but violent, territorial, face-eating chimpanzees, and liberals evolved from those oversexed, touchy-feely bonobos. Now we know the truth!
Commenters above have demonstrated clearly why this should not be regarded as a sudden dawning of divine light on the brows of Comcast executives. Yet I still hold out a little bit of hope here. IANAL, but if YOU are, can you tell us whether Comcast (and Verizon) putting forth defenses like that can help establish precedents to be used in cases involving other parties? Are we getting any fresh ammunition out of this?
Is there a test yet for the douchebag gene?
Despite being smart and thoughtful enough to put in a method to cover their tracks after discovery, they took way, WAY to long to pull the trigger and too much forensic data has already been determined. That's a failure of bureacracy. A more nimble organization would have flushed the damn thing before it could be slashdotted.
How do we best teach salesmenship to programmers?
Yes yes, I understand that you tried to wave off the number one response to your question by marginalizing the difference between programmers and salespeople as a "sweeping generalization" but it is in fact a real issue that cannot be dismissed. The Blank Slate was smashed years ago. Persuasion and programming are two wildly different cognitive skillsets.
If you find somebody who happens to have BOTH skillsets, that rare individual should probably have a leadership role in the sales organization to help steer the people underneath to do their sales work in a manner that is rational and aligned with what your product truly delivers to the customer.
But the real solution to the problem you are outlining in your question is A TIGHTLY INTEGRATED RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN YOUR SALES ORGANIZATION AND YOUR SUPPORT ORGANIZATION. Doing this right isn't easy. It's more than just giving your salespeople a batphone to the helpdesk. Both groups need to collaborate to determine how each side can work to help the other group acheive their goals. There are a variety of effective models, but it begins with both groups realizing that they have a shared responsibility to ensure happy customers.
The nefarious purpose of this drone flight?
Once being placed into orbit like any traditional satellite, and making small course adjustments like any traditional satellite, and performing any number of now-routine tasks performed by satellites, and after staying up in orbit for a long time like any other satellite, it engaged in one crucially oppressive, sovereignty-crushing task:
It landed back on the surface of the Earth!!!
The pictures of you picking your nose in the backyard last summer is just gravy.
That's why we hate our parents.
Don Ho is SO mad right now. I smell a lawsuit coming.
Hey guess what, Americans have every right to be more worried about "cyber security" than terrorism. Odds are MUCH more likely that the average US citizen will be the victim of foreign-born cyber attack than physical terrorism. Of course most of those threats are categorized under "crime" than "warfare." Whether that is malware like the Zeus trojans, industrial espionage, etc. Regardless of how you categorize it, we spend too much time looking at people's shoes at the airport, and not enough time hardening our public and private IT infrastructure. The public has it right this time.
The REAL prototype for today's Internet can be found on the single-line, amateur, free Bulletin Board Systems of that era. You won't find anything comparable to the steaming, frothing orgy of human id we have today in the archives of those online services. European software piracy boards? Check. White supremacists? Check. Crappy low-fi porn? Check. Illegal seizures by federal authorities? Check. The hijacking of discussions by socially maladjusted teenage boys? Check? The ham radio loving middle-aged pedos who stalked them? Check.
(And you thought only XKCD was relevant to Slashdot) http://www.gocomics.com//culdesac/2012/04/04
Science Fiction is the last bastion of the short story as serious literature. Some might scoff at describing ANY SF as serious literature, but at the heart of SF is it's willingness to ask big questions and offer big ideas. Short stories have no room for extraneous subplots, meandering descriptions or the dreaded "expository lump" of pseudo-scientific rationalizations. A great short story will take less than an hour to read and will last with you for years. A bad short story is over quickly and soon forgotten. I tried hard to think of a great forgotten novel to recommend and all I could think of were short stories. People above have mentioned Asimov. I, Robot was serialized in its initial publication. Each chapter stands alone as a short story. I discovered Nancy Kress, Greg Bear, and others because of "Year's Best" SF anthologies. Most of the SF greats cut their teeth in the pulp market and some of their most resonant and lasting ideas come from those pages. Just sayin.
I was expecting some kind of snark about a sudden increase in Bitcoin stories at the Washington Post. /.ers are off their game today.
Okay smartypants, I'd be happy to oblige. Do you think you could put your entrepeneurship where your mouth is and become an e-book retailer that accepts Bitcoin? You know, for something other than your own poetry, maybe even written by folks we've heard of before?
No? Incapable or unwilling to help foster a legitimate Bitcoin economy? Then please crawl back into the magical-thinking-hole you came from.
For readers who are more interested in K12 virtual schooling (both private and charter) and less interested in whether or not TFA is describing actual malfeasance, I'd just like to give a quick shout out to Connections Academy (http://www.connectionsacademy.com) which operates charters in several states as well as being available as a private option nationally.
To make a long story short, I've experienced CA through the lens of four grade school children over a few different years, and I was thouroughly impressed the entire time. Honestly, given the miserable public K12 experience I had, I was jealous of them the whole time. The curriculum they provide is solid, well rounded, and challenging. The online system is clear and functional. We went through their charter in Oregon, and their local staff were all Ore. public school employees, and they were just as happy to be teachers for the charter as we were to be students/parents.
Obviously YMMV with this particular organization, or any other one that is out there like K12 Academy, IQ Academy, or some of the other orgs out there. I guess the point I'm trying to make is that we're far enough along in the evolution of virtual schooling that you don't need to accept "bleeding edge" pitfalls of early adoption if you want to get your kids into a virtual school. As far as TFA goes, I wouldn't touch these guys with a 10 ft. pole. Even within the constraints of your local charter system, you'll probably have options to choose from. So if you're worried about a "billionaire" running your school, don't choose that charter. Duh. Now when some state finally gets around to subcontracting their entire system to a single vendor... THAT is when you get your hackles up.