"The work is funded by federal grants," (snip other sources of funding, yes I know it's not ALL tax funded)
I am so glad that tax dollars extorted from me are being spent on such important projects. Thanks Uncle Sam!
I wonder if you meant this in humour and were completely overlooking the Open Source bias of slashdot.
Here's another way to look at it:
The government funds are going into something which will be released to the public.
Rather than: The government funded collegiate research will become proprietary to the University of Wisconsin, which will then lease out the rights to dairy producers the patented processes of precisely producing Cream Cheese.
I think I'm find with government funded public domain knowledge. Doesn't appear you are at all. Care to clarify?
I don't consider disasters as consequences of poor engineering to be especially funny.
Ever have one of those moments of severe humiliation or embarassment "you'll look back upon and laugh at some day"?
It's probably unfunniest to those who were killed and injured and those friend to or relations of.
An architect friend pointed out some building in Denver, Colorado, with a curved roof. A heavy snow overwhelmed whatever means the building had to cope with accumulations of precipitation. The foot or more snow fell as a sheet and flattened an unoccupied car parked along the street. Funny, but perhaps not to the person who returned to find their car under a pile of ice and snow and thinks they are now living on borrowed time.
What comes back to me, from time to time, is the astounding feats of engineering accomplished before computers came along. Now errors seem rampant as people think too much in virtual terms and don't spend enough time actually thinking through what their creation may really have to endure.
What on earth were they planning on doing with such a huge stockpile of molasses?!
Probably goes with all those Boston Baked Beans.
You probably don't give a passing consideration of the volumes corn syrup whizzing around the world in large tankers, to eventually be stored in large tanks, for the production of drinks, kiddie cereals, candy bars, etc. I'm sure ADM has some rather impressive tanks somewhere in Indiana.
Their motives were never in question. The motives of most criminals are usualy quite obvious. The perplexing thing in this case would be why Best Buy doesn't have safegaurds in place to prevent this sort of thing.
Indeed.
And I certainly hope that, in your attempts at sarcasm, you weren't implying that making a low-wage somehow excuses criminal behaviour.
Never. The real criminals are the ones who wear suits and ties and have solicitors, attorneys, barristers, public relations lackeys, etc. all set in speed dial on their cell phones for when their lack of foresite and prior planning have come to bite them on their arses.
What could motivate them to sell it is one thiing, but what motivated them to sell it with the data on is surely harder to explain.
You're assuming Best Buy sells off this scrap. In reality they should be turning it over to a disposal company (which, in theory, could sell the parts at flea market if not the most upstanding of ethical standards are adhered to.) But as the drive should have had Holes Drilled In it smells more like the monkey in charge of that job at BB chose not to, which strongly suggests it was they who pawned the drive, not corporate masters.
Of course in a moment of doubt, always lean towards the simplest answer: the guy who did it was a really stupid mofo.
Stupid, certainly. Unethical, most definitely. He or she should be sacked and then turned over to authorities for prosecution on theft, sale of stolen property, etc.
Most likely, but then the "cats out of the bag","the horse has left the barn". What should have been done wasn't. Now weither that was due to corporate neglect, or employee neglect isn't known.
Here's the problem: A low paid employee, rather than drill holes in a drive, took it home and sold it off at a flea market. It's a small object of possibly (depending upon contents) very great value.
Where are the controls to prevent such action taking place? Consider the bank teller -- not likely a very highly paid employee, yet thousands of dollars in coin and currency pass through their hands every day. Banks have worked out procedures to ensure their employees remain honest, whether balancing their drawers, surveillance cameras, or limiting how much they may hold in at their station at any given time (i.e. if Bill Gates walks in with a suitcase full of money, the teller must turn the large deposit over to a bank officer.)
Clearly as things of great risk assume different (smaller) dimensions people in charge have not adapted their procedures. This is a failure of Best Buy at the corporate level, not just some store. They need these items to be handled with full accountability.
Why do people try to do physical things to "destroy" magnetic media. You would think that Best Buy would have some software to erase the data (writing random 0/1's repeatedly). I suppose if they were replacing the hard drive Best Buy might have figured it wouldn't work, but at least they should have used a strong magnetic field.
Probably because an extremely strong magnetic field would be required to assure the job is done right. Drives actually reside beside very strong magnets with no problem. Drilling holes isn't a guarantee, either, one fo the best devices I have seen is one that actually bends the drive, platters and all.
If the information on the hard drive was so sensitive, why didn't the couple destroy it themselves? Even if Best Buy did destroy it, an employee would have had access to it anyway before its destruction. That's a security risk either way.
It's called: "Misplaced Trust in Corporate America"
Why, just look at these words which follow, meant to calm and sooth the worried customer:
"Our company values and places the utmost importance on maintaining the privacy of our customers. We will fully investigate these allegations."
They no doubt came from some tome of boilerplate Corporate Communications and Public Relations.
The real translation behind the scenes is doubtless anything less than a fast call to the law firm Best Buy retains to see how much they could be sued for and another call to the PR department to get the above phrase looked up in the Table of Contents and issued to media outlets. Meanwhile in the board room the executives are probably all bent over, like a circular conga-line holding covers over the arses of those in front of them.
Memo to store managers throughout the country: "Rotate a new batch of minimum-wage slaves into
all positions, which demand technical skills and adherence to moral and ethical code, post haste!"
Gad! Whatever could motivate people who are compensated so well to scrap computers and sell parts
at a flea market? I shall have to dwell further upon this great paradox this weekend at my summer
cottage in the Hamptons.
Is this what happens when you keep people from looking at porn all day? Perhaps it represents the amount of time that intelligent people 'waste' discussing politics.\ Or has the Internet awoken community interest, and those discussions are just the first steps to a more open society.
It's actually what you get when 1.5 billion bored people get on the internet and find there's nothing really all that interesting, but, hey, you can find the names of family, old school chums and that prick who used to kick you in the shins, years later... now is their time to be reacquainted with you and the other 14,999,984 chinese on the internet...
I've been doing development for a couple years in VB.net and find it generally to be one of the most cumbersome development tools I've ever had to work in. Exasperation is a daily experience.
I have to develop apps which run on whatever variety of hardware and operating system people in my organisation use, the real pain is when you have Win 98 up to XP scattered in pockets everywhere and some don't have the current drivers, such as the MDAC, to perform simple Access database access.
Cleary this has presented the logistical problem of getting the Framework and all drivers up to snuff on each client. Then there's the matter of differing default behaviour of the machines, some see.MDB extension and others show only the small icon (which no everyone's eyes are up to devining and lots of confusion, hilarity and lost time.)
Probably worst of all is the large steps between releases of Visual Studio. Your VB6 isn't going to convert, period. Your VB7 (VS 2000) will convert to VB7 (VS 2003) but if you've got a lot of code you may be thinking twice about this. Now along comes VS 2005, which to be honest is where the damn product should have been when it first came out. Problem is for me, I have too much vested in VS 2003 and won't be "upgrading" for some time.
Reminds me of the suffering I encountered (never did 100% recover from) when Linux changed libraries. That was a painful episode and I'm in no hurry to revisit it.
The compression on your pathetic DVD is nothing compared to the power of the.. uh.. nothing close to the quality of the original film. Too much banding and pixilating to suit me. Film in that regard still blows away digital media.
I was one of those few weird geeks who went to see this odd-ball movie when all most people in the audience wanted to see was Han Solo or something else like Star Wars. Guess I can blame that on reading Heavy Metal back when it was a decent showcase for sci-fi/fantasy artwork.
My first exposure to a similar character was Good Night, Mr. James, a Clifford D. Simak short, which I read in the 70's and someone has made into a short film, which I saw on PBS probably 15 years ago.
I want to see it again on a theatre screen in one of the better local theatres, the way it was when I
first fell under the spell woven by Ridley Scott, Philip K. Dick, Rutger Hauer, Sean Young, Edward James
Olmos, Brion James, Daryl Hannah, Joe Turkel and Harrison Ford. Too much stock is put into "special editions",
"directors cuts" ad nauseum DVD versions.
I was fortunate enough to see the Directors Cut of Blade Runner at the Maple Theatre in Troy, Michigan, several
years ago with a great many college friends. It was magic all over again. I've seen it a couple times on DVD, but
a tiny screen does this picture no justice. Stick with Adam Sandler rubbish on your plastic DVD-playing pal who's
fun to be with.
Pay $20+ for an ad infused FBI warning with regioning, or virtually nothing for no ads or FBI warnings or regioning.
Remove the warning, remove the ads, charge $10 max. I can live without movies if you force me to.
Yeah, tell me about it. I popped in a DVD a couple months back and it was crammed with plugs for upcoming movies, which came out some time back when the DVD was issued, and I couldn't fast-forward, skip to menu or anything. What a bunch of low-life ****ers.
I did eventually figure out I could hold down the menu button and start the DVD and it would actually skip to the menu, but some disks don't allow that.
Why don't they show the RIAA and MPAA giving the Big Spin, themselves?
bzzzzzzzzz-tik-tik-tik-tik-tik-tik "Come on 6.1 billion! Come on 6.1 billion!" tikka-tikka-tikka-tik-tok-tok"Come on 6.1 billion! YAAAAAYYYYYYY!!!! We lost 6.1 billion!!! Wheeee!!! Huzzah!!"
"Now we cut to live footage of those most responsible for the losses incurred by the RIAA and MPAA conducting a clandestine summit in a treehouse on the
outskirts of
Wooster, Massachusetts!"
"Ahoy, ye bloomin' yeller scoundrel!"
"Avast, ye bloomin' scupper-faced seadog!"
"Arr, ye great yeller galoot!"
"Avast, ye scurvy bilge-spewin' lubber!"
"Ahoy, ye poxy waterlogged galoot!"
"Avast, ye great bilge-spewin' picaroon!"
"Arr, ye bloomin' brine-swiggin' lubber!" ...
Because most English language papers are not on the same level as Americans in their political leanings. Even the most liberal Americans are right-wingers over in Europe. People like what they read to agree with what they already "feel" as some sort of validation that their feelings and opinions are correct. This is not a conspiracy, it's human nature. We like to be right, even if that means redefining what it means to *be* right.
A bit like the US administration being highly critical of Al-Jezeera, during the invation of Iraq, for showing graphic footage of the dead, while american audiences were fed, and I quote one network anchorman, "This is shock and awe!" Yeah, americans saw something which looked like quite a few Hollywood films. Al-Jezeera put a human face on "shock and awe", showing civilians with their bodies blown apart, and on image of a boy with only a partial head I will never shake the memory of.
You just blamed a news outlet for starting a war, causing a trade deficit, budgetary and foreign relations problems and mistakes... at the behest of corporations?
No, I didn't blame them. They help make it possible. Any news outlet which simply parrots what government or corporate sponsors want said are not what the 1st amendment is there to protect.
Sadly, the Whitehouse (and particularly the president since a leader is responsible for those who work at his/her behest) may pick and choose who attends press briefings. The president's handlers have also made it a point in the past few years to keep protesters at bay, in a specially designated "not friends of the president" lot down the street during rallies.
I feel we are heading towards the type of press we vilified in Soviet times, where it was nothing but propaganda. Piss-off the Whitehouse and see if you continue to be invited to press briefings. TV is soft news. Newspapers are a bit better, but still beholden to corporate interests. Why the love-fest between Fox and Bush, I do not know, but perhaps it's explored in the film Outfoxed I missed it when it was in town and should probably go rent it.
I didn't see Slashdot, DIGG, Fark, etc. listed - why not?!?
I didn't either see mention of the grass-roots media growing in Egypt, outside government control. Small newspapers and even a few small TV stations are flourishing. Giving at least some insight into what has been going on which the government has been slow to report. People in Egypt trust satellite and internet over the government spoon-feed. At least the government isn't cracking down on them, like say, the fair and honest chinese government. (Though from what I hear there are any number of small local papers all over the place in China which only be too happy to tell you what the government doesn't want you to know.
Well, since the majority of the news on the Internet comes from the same companies that publish newspapers and run the TV stations (cnn.com, foxnews.com, washingtonpost.com, etc), for all intents and purposes the Internet is almost exactly equally trustworthy as them.
Do you read outside your own country? If not, why?
The beauty of the internet is getting past political and physical boundaries. I can read english language sites beyond the scope of political parties or central governments who would prefer to spin things one way.
Slashdot Mirror
I am so glad that tax dollars extorted from me are being spent on such important projects. Thanks Uncle Sam!
I wonder if you meant this in humour and were completely overlooking the Open Source bias of slashdot.
Here's another way to look at it:
The government funds are going into something which will be released to the public.
Rather than: The government funded collegiate research will become proprietary to the University of Wisconsin, which will then lease out the rights to dairy producers the patented processes of precisely producing Cream Cheese.
I think I'm find with government funded public domain knowledge. Doesn't appear you are at all. Care to clarify?
Ever have one of those moments of severe humiliation or embarassment "you'll look back upon and laugh at some day"?
It's probably unfunniest to those who were killed and injured and those friend to or relations of.
An architect friend pointed out some building in Denver, Colorado, with a curved roof. A heavy snow overwhelmed whatever means the building had to cope with accumulations of precipitation. The foot or more snow fell as a sheet and flattened an unoccupied car parked along the street. Funny, but perhaps not to the person who returned to find their car under a pile of ice and snow and thinks they are now living on borrowed time.
What comes back to me, from time to time, is the astounding feats of engineering accomplished before computers came along. Now errors seem rampant as people think too much in virtual terms and don't spend enough time actually thinking through what their creation may really have to endure.
Probably goes with all those Boston Baked Beans.
You probably don't give a passing consideration of the volumes corn syrup whizzing around the world in large tankers, to eventually be stored in large tanks, for the production of drinks, kiddie cereals, candy bars, etc. I'm sure ADM has some rather impressive tanks somewhere in Indiana.
Built on national pride, it's become the world's largest albatross.
Indeed.
And I certainly hope that, in your attempts at sarcasm, you weren't implying that making a low-wage somehow excuses criminal behaviour.
Never. The real criminals are the ones who wear suits and ties and have solicitors, attorneys, barristers, public relations lackeys, etc. all set in speed dial on their cell phones for when their lack of foresite and prior planning have come to bite them on their arses.
You're assuming Best Buy sells off this scrap. In reality they should be turning it over to a disposal company (which, in theory, could sell the parts at flea market if not the most upstanding of ethical standards are adhered to.) But as the drive should have had Holes Drilled In it smells more like the monkey in charge of that job at BB chose not to, which strongly suggests it was they who pawned the drive, not corporate masters.
Of course in a moment of doubt, always lean towards the simplest answer: the guy who did it was a really stupid mofo.
Stupid, certainly. Unethical, most definitely. He or she should be sacked and then turned over to authorities for prosecution on theft, sale of stolen property, etc.
Here's the problem: A low paid employee, rather than drill holes in a drive, took it home and sold it off at a flea market. It's a small object of possibly (depending upon contents) very great value.
Where are the controls to prevent such action taking place? Consider the bank teller -- not likely a very highly paid employee, yet thousands of dollars in coin and currency pass through their hands every day. Banks have worked out procedures to ensure their employees remain honest, whether balancing their drawers, surveillance cameras, or limiting how much they may hold in at their station at any given time (i.e. if Bill Gates walks in with a suitcase full of money, the teller must turn the large deposit over to a bank officer.)
Clearly as things of great risk assume different (smaller) dimensions people in charge have not adapted their procedures. This is a failure of Best Buy at the corporate level, not just some store. They need these items to be handled with full accountability.
Probably because an extremely strong magnetic field would be required to assure the job is done right. Drives actually reside beside very strong magnets with no problem. Drilling holes isn't a guarantee, either, one fo the best devices I have seen is one that actually bends the drive, platters and all.
It's called: "Misplaced Trust in Corporate America"
Why, just look at these words which follow, meant to calm and sooth the worried customer:
They no doubt came from some tome of boilerplate Corporate Communications and Public Relations.The real translation behind the scenes is doubtless anything less than a fast call to the law firm Best Buy retains to see how much they could be sued for and another call to the PR department to get the above phrase looked up in the Table of Contents and issued to media outlets. Meanwhile in the board room the executives are probably all bent over, like a circular conga-line holding covers over the arses of those in front of them.
Tax records? Personal finance records?
Memo to store managers throughout the country: "Rotate a new batch of minimum-wage slaves into all positions, which demand technical skills and adherence to moral and ethical code, post haste!"
Gad! Whatever could motivate people who are compensated so well to scrap computers and sell parts at a flea market? I shall have to dwell further upon this great paradox this weekend at my summer cottage in the Hamptons.
It's actually what you get when 1.5 billion bored people get on the internet and find there's nothing really all that interesting, but, hey, you can find the names of family, old school chums and that prick who used to kick you in the shins, years later ... now is their time to be reacquainted with you and the other 14,999,984 chinese on the internet...
I've been doing development for a couple years in VB.net and find it generally to be one of the most cumbersome development tools I've ever had to work in. Exasperation is a daily experience.
I have to develop apps which run on whatever variety of hardware and operating system people in my organisation use, the real pain is when you have Win 98 up to XP scattered in pockets everywhere and some don't have the current drivers, such as the MDAC, to perform simple Access database access.
Cleary this has presented the logistical problem of getting the Framework and all drivers up to snuff on each client. Then there's the matter of differing default behaviour of the machines, some see .MDB extension and others show only the small icon (which no everyone's eyes are up to devining and lots of confusion, hilarity and lost time.)
Probably worst of all is the large steps between releases of Visual Studio. Your VB6 isn't going to convert, period. Your VB7 (VS 2000) will convert to VB7 (VS 2003) but if you've got a lot of code you may be thinking twice about this. Now along comes VS 2005, which to be honest is where the damn product should have been when it first came out. Problem is for me, I have too much vested in VS 2003 and won't be "upgrading" for some time.
Reminds me of the suffering I encountered (never did 100% recover from) when Linux changed libraries. That was a painful episode and I'm in no hurry to revisit it.
I really don't see a problem with this.
The compression on your pathetic DVD is nothing compared to the power of the .. uh .. nothing close to the quality of the original film. Too much banding and pixilating to suit me. Film in that regard still blows away digital media.
I was one of those few weird geeks who went to see this odd-ball movie when all most people in the audience wanted to see was Han Solo or something else like Star Wars. Guess I can blame that on reading Heavy Metal back when it was a decent showcase for sci-fi/fantasy artwork.
My first exposure to a similar character was Good Night, Mr. James, a Clifford D. Simak short, which I read in the 70's and someone has made into a short film, which I saw on PBS probably 15 years ago.
I want to see it again on a theatre screen in one of the better local theatres, the way it was when I first fell under the spell woven by Ridley Scott, Philip K. Dick, Rutger Hauer, Sean Young, Edward James Olmos, Brion James, Daryl Hannah, Joe Turkel and Harrison Ford. Too much stock is put into "special editions", "directors cuts" ad nauseum DVD versions.
I was fortunate enough to see the Directors Cut of Blade Runner at the Maple Theatre in Troy, Michigan, several years ago with a great many college friends. It was magic all over again. I've seen it a couple times on DVD, but a tiny screen does this picture no justice. Stick with Adam Sandler rubbish on your plastic DVD-playing pal who's fun to be with.
Remove the warning, remove the ads, charge $10 max. I can live without movies if you force me to.
Yeah, tell me about it. I popped in a DVD a couple months back and it was crammed with plugs for upcoming movies, which came out some time back when the DVD was issued, and I couldn't fast-forward, skip to menu or anything. What a bunch of low-life ****ers.
I did eventually figure out I could hold down the menu button and start the DVD and it would actually skip to the menu, but some disks don't allow that.
Donations through PayPal?
Why don't they show the RIAA and MPAA giving the Big Spin, themselves?
bzzzzzzzzz-tik-tik-tik-tik-tik-tik
"Come on 6.1 billion! Come on 6.1 billion!"
tikka-tikka-tikka-tik-tok-tok "Come on 6.1 billion! YAAAAAYYYYYYY!!!! We lost 6.1 billion!!! Wheeee!!! Huzzah!!"
"Now we cut to live footage of those most responsible for the losses incurred by the RIAA and MPAA conducting a clandestine summit in a treehouse on the outskirts of Wooster, Massachusetts!"
It sure beats the boring truth, doesn't it?A bit like the US administration being highly critical of Al-Jezeera, during the invation of Iraq, for showing graphic footage of the dead, while american audiences were fed, and I quote one network anchorman, "This is shock and awe!" Yeah, americans saw something which looked like quite a few Hollywood films. Al-Jezeera put a human face on "shock and awe", showing civilians with their bodies blown apart, and on image of a boy with only a partial head I will never shake the memory of.
And only a small group of people tipped the balance last election and gave the president "political capital" which he meant to spend.
Feel better? :-)
Not much.
No, I didn't blame them. They help make it possible. Any news outlet which simply parrots what government or corporate sponsors want said are not what the 1st amendment is there to protect.
Sadly, the Whitehouse (and particularly the president since a leader is responsible for those who work at his/her behest) may pick and choose who attends press briefings. The president's handlers have also made it a point in the past few years to keep protesters at bay, in a specially designated "not friends of the president" lot down the street during rallies.
I feel we are heading towards the type of press we vilified in Soviet times, where it was nothing but propaganda. Piss-off the Whitehouse and see if you continue to be invited to press briefings. TV is soft news. Newspapers are a bit better, but still beholden to corporate interests. Why the love-fest between Fox and Bush, I do not know, but perhaps it's explored in the film Outfoxed I missed it when it was in town and should probably go rent it.
I didn't either see mention of the grass-roots media growing in Egypt, outside government control. Small newspapers and even a few small TV stations are flourishing. Giving at least some insight into what has been going on which the government has been slow to report. People in Egypt trust satellite and internet over the government spoon-feed. At least the government isn't cracking down on them, like say, the fair and honest chinese government. (Though from what I hear there are any number of small local papers all over the place in China which only be too happy to tell you what the government doesn't want you to know.
Do you read outside your own country? If not, why?
The beauty of the internet is getting past political and physical boundaries. I can read english language sites beyond the scope of political parties or central governments who would prefer to spin things one way.