Good IT is so hard to pull off because you have to convince people that events that strike once every few years have to be prepared for otherwise a disruption in service will occur.
Like the PHB at the office where my wife works said after announcing that the IT guy was to be laid off and not replaced: "I don't see why we need an IT guy-- we never have any computer problems" (cluebat time!)
Such a script could, if I'm not mistaken, be used to reboot the machine. One would think this would be an ideal way to hide the problem very nicely.
For a real-time application like air traffic control, you really can't automate reboots like that. You need someone standing there to say "crap! crap! crap!" and take the necessary actions when the system decides it doesn't want to reboot properly.*
*even if they don't know what to do, they can at least shout "crap!", which is more than a system stuck at the BIOS screen with an "elbow parity error" can say.
"The photos that come after the one at the top of the tower where you see the creepy hunched over guy's reflection are clearly meant to appear as though they were taken as the photographer ran like hell."
Just give motorcyclists the right to ride armed and defend ourselves from attempted-murderers, and you'll see a sharp and sudden drop in the number of morons who dare to drive while under the influence of cellphones.
Heh. Yeah, but there's nothing you can do about the out-and-out morons. I've got a rats nest of rods and screws up and down my left leg from a nice lady who didn't need a cell phone to ignore me and turn left on the yellow as I entered the intersection. There's no discernable activity to curb in those folks, just outright thickheadedness. Though I guess removing them and "culling the herd" might be beneficial in the long run...
Yep, they think that the hazard lights on means "I'll be right back, so I'm not actually parking". What it really means is "come write me a parking ticket", because "parking" is any time you leave your car unattended, lights flashing or not. I'm on good terms with our local parking enforcement guys at work, and they both say that they look for cars with their hazard lights on. Better off leaving the lights off and taking your chances. Some guys will let the hazard lights slide for a little while if you also have your hood up, because that actually indicates car trouble. But then you run the risk of losing your battery to a "sidewalk entrepreneur".
All these search engines are great but they are nothing without content. Whoever successfully wins the race to get between the transaction of searching for content and the content itself is going to make a dookload of money. On your marks, get set.. GO!
But the content is nothing unless people can get to it. That's the entire point of the search engine business: indexing publicly accessable web pages. You can't "get between" the content and the search engine unless you also get between the content and the intended consumer.
Google grabbed 36% of the web searches, Yahoo! had 29% and AskJeeves (which includes Teoma, Excite and iWon combined) only had 6%. 36% to 29% is not such and "incredible lead" to me.
True, but I reckon a large portion of those using Yahoo to search are yahoo mail users who use it because they're already there. I don't think any significant portion of those 36% are likely to go somewhere else until that somewhere else has a better search engine. If anything, the GMail thing should start to siphon off Yahoo people.
AOL has local dial-up access pretty much everywhere. Useful for small business and anyone on the road.
Any decent ISP has local access pretty much anywhere. AOL hasn't really had an advantage in that regard for four or five years. The only excuse for using AOL is "not knowing any better".
The photos that come after the one at the top of the tower where you see the creepy hunched over guy's reflection are clearly meant to appear as though they were taken as the photographer ran like hell. The fact that none of them are blurry shows that he stopped to take each of these "frantic" shots carefully enough for them to be in perfect focus with no motion blur. The sequence was too carefully crafted and tells a linear story too clearly to be unintentional. It's not even half as believeable as The Blair Witch Project, and that was pretty obviously fiction as well.
This is a situation that has no solution short of revolution, and today revolution can't succeed because the government has millions of times more firepower than the citizenry.
Kind of a tangent here, but I always like to point out (when this argument comes up) that the government's firepower is the military, and the military is staffed primarilly with citizens. They're not robots, they're people. When it really comes time for the revolution, the military won't automatically side with the government, it'll fragment into loyalists and rebels like it does everywhere else they have a revolution. Not saying that the gov't won't have some advantages; just that it won't be gaggles of t-shirt and jeans wearing people with nothing better than old hunting rifles fighting against armored columns of stone-faced soldiers with machine guns, mowing them down like grass.
I hardly consider orbiting the Earth at a set rate "freedom of movement".
No, but it sure does render the issue moot. An orbiting telescope need only "freedom of movement" along a single axis in order to have complete coverage of the entirity of space. A 90-odd minute orbit creates the need for patience and planning, but any decent reasearch should have plenty of those anyway.
I dare you to name any profound, completely corporately-funded discovery, which was not based wholly or in major parts on any prior research in public academia.
Heh. Name the reverse. All research is a tangled mess of dependencies. Academia does not exist in a vacuum. To settle such an argument one must go all the back to the question of "which came first: commerce, or scholarly endeavors?" At that point, you're too far away from the present to clearly say whether one piggybacked more on the other.
2) A system that prevents the tumblers from contacting with the locking mechanism. Amazing as it may seem, quite a few safes don't follow rule #2
No decent safe uses a lock mechanism that allows the fence to contact the wheels. True, they market a lot of fire safes as if they were burglary safes at your Friendly Neighborhood Hardware Store, but no one serious about security buys a safe there. But yeah, basically any safe that doesn't include as a final step in dialing the combo "then turn back to 0" is a piece of junk.
Maybe this is a bit offtopic, but didn't the same thing happen when the Iraqi Information Minister tried to surrender?
Basically, yeah, same thing. Just like there was no point in taking as a POW some lowly mechanic, likewise the US army didn't really have any reason to arrest a talking head. That late in both wars, the fighting was over and neither of those guys were "fighters" anyway.
This administartion idea of diplomacy is to insult people and tell them we are going to kill them and of course sometimes to kill them.
That is diplomacy, man. What, do you think diplomacy is about bringing your enemies (who'd just as soon murder you in your bed and torch your house)flowers and candy and asking them nicely to stop doing X, or to let you do Y? No, it's about politely informing them that you could pour nuclear fire down their pants and nobody would care, so they better do things our way.
Control, and predictability, are illusions. At least, to the degree proposed in Foundation. I seem to recall however that Foundation acknowledged the difficulties posed by unruly leaders coming from out of nowhere.
Yeah, that was the one fatal flaw in The whole Foundation series: the assertion that there could be such a thing as predictable as "psycho-history". The premise that, once you get up to a large enough scale, small errors "cancel out" has been pretty much shown to be exactly not how complex iterative systems work. I, unfortunately, first read the Foundation books very shortly after reading Chaos by James Gleick, so I found it impossible to suspend disbelief.
Re:the whole IP issue is invalid
on
Is IP Property?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Define "natural right". The only rights any person has is what they can keep by force, everything else is illusionary.
You are correct, to a point. The basic "natural" rights are the rights to life, liberty, and property. The exercise of natural rights do not infringe upon the rights of others. These are also all things that can be reasonably protected by force of arms of the rights holder. Free speech is an extension of the right to "liberty". Copyright is not a natural right, as it requires the infringement of the natural right of free speech. You can argue that no rights exist without force to back them, but this is really irrelevant. Rights are a philosophical construct, and our society bases its laws on a specific philosophy of rights. But you seem unclear on the whole principle of rights in general. Here's quickie on the philosophy behind it.
Until the seller of Nazi artifacts in Idaho tries to sell to a buyer in Germany.
If he does, the German police don't show up in Idaho, they show up at the home of the guy in Germany who bought the stuff. My comparison stands.
Re:the whole IP issue is invalid
on
Is IP Property?
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· Score: 2
Copyright holders do have rights, and those shouldn't be thrown out, just because a large portion of the public find it inconvient, there must be a better reason.
Incorrect. In fact, your entire argument is specious because of this assumption. Copyright is not a "right" in the traditional sense; it is a limitation of the rights of the rest of us, designed to encourage "science and the useful arts" by granting creators a limited monopoly on something that would, in nature, by free, as in beer. There is no natural right to own an idea. If the people of the united states wish this government-granted exclusivity minimized to a one-day monolpoly on reproduction, that's just hard cheese (not that it'll ever happen that way, what with our representatives being in the pocket of IP-dependent corps).
So patents are great when they're used against organizations you don't like, but they're evil when they're used to squash innovation? You can't have it both ways.
No one claims to have it both ways. It is perfecxtly consistent to consider the current state of IP law an abomination, and then gloat gleefully when one of the larger pushers of such laws is hoist by their own petard.It's a simple case of "see how you like it!"
That may be true, but I am reliably informed that it is a serious criminal offence in Germany to make that kind of comparison to a competitor. I presume there is no way of blocking this in Germany, so I can forsee a criminal prosecution against the Vile Monopoly.
Being that none of the radio stations are in Germany, you forsee criminal prosecution where there can be none. German courts have no more jurisdiction over this than they do over a seller of Nazi artifacts in Idaho.
Slashdot Mirror
Like the PHB at the office where my wife works said after announcing that the IT guy was to be laid off and not replaced: "I don't see why we need an IT guy-- we never have any computer problems" (cluebat time!)
For a real-time application like air traffic control, you really can't automate reboots like that. You need someone standing there to say "crap! crap! crap!" and take the necessary actions when the system decides it doesn't want to reboot properly.*
*even if they don't know what to do, they can at least shout "crap!", which is more than a system stuck at the BIOS screen with an "elbow parity error" can say.
Really?
yes, really.
Heh. Yeah, but there's nothing you can do about the out-and-out morons. I've got a rats nest of rods and screws up and down my left leg from a nice lady who didn't need a cell phone to ignore me and turn left on the yellow as I entered the intersection. There's no discernable activity to curb in those folks, just outright thickheadedness. Though I guess removing them and "culling the herd" might be beneficial in the long run...
Yep, they think that the hazard lights on means "I'll be right back, so I'm not actually parking". What it really means is "come write me a parking ticket", because "parking" is any time you leave your car unattended, lights flashing or not. I'm on good terms with our local parking enforcement guys at work, and they both say that they look for cars with their hazard lights on. Better off leaving the lights off and taking your chances. Some guys will let the hazard lights slide for a little while if you also have your hood up, because that actually indicates car trouble. But then you run the risk of losing your battery to a "sidewalk entrepreneur".
But the content is nothing unless people can get to it. That's the entire point of the search engine business: indexing publicly accessable web pages. You can't "get between" the content and the search engine unless you also get between the content and the intended consumer.
True, but I reckon a large portion of those using Yahoo to search are yahoo mail users who use it because they're already there. I don't think any significant portion of those 36% are likely to go somewhere else until that somewhere else has a better search engine. If anything, the GMail thing should start to siphon off Yahoo people.
"No pizza. Only Khlavkalash!"
"We've got Mountain Dew and Crab Juice"
"Ew, uch, ewww, yuch! I'll take the crab juice."
1) it's not that long, and 2) if it breaks, only the part below the break falss; the part above flies off into space
Any decent ISP has local access pretty much anywhere. AOL hasn't really had an advantage in that regard for four or five years. The only excuse for using AOL is "not knowing any better".
Hmmm....AIDS is still something that only happens to other people. For me at least. Still, I see your point...
Where's the evidence that says it's a hoax?
The photos that come after the one at the top of the tower where you see the creepy hunched over guy's reflection are clearly meant to appear as though they were taken as the photographer ran like hell. The fact that none of them are blurry shows that he stopped to take each of these "frantic" shots carefully enough for them to be in perfect focus with no motion blur. The sequence was too carefully crafted and tells a linear story too clearly to be unintentional. It's not even half as believeable as The Blair Witch Project, and that was pretty obviously fiction as well.
Kind of a tangent here, but I always like to point out (when this argument comes up) that the government's firepower is the military, and the military is staffed primarilly with citizens. They're not robots, they're people. When it really comes time for the revolution, the military won't automatically side with the government, it'll fragment into loyalists and rebels like it does everywhere else they have a revolution. Not saying that the gov't won't have some advantages; just that it won't be gaggles of t-shirt and jeans wearing people with nothing better than old hunting rifles fighting against armored columns of stone-faced soldiers with machine guns, mowing them down like grass.
No, but it sure does render the issue moot. An orbiting telescope need only "freedom of movement" along a single axis in order to have complete coverage of the entirity of space. A 90-odd minute orbit creates the need for patience and planning, but any decent reasearch should have plenty of those anyway.
Heh. Name the reverse. All research is a tangled mess of dependencies. Academia does not exist in a vacuum. To settle such an argument one must go all the back to the question of "which came first: commerce, or scholarly endeavors?" At that point, you're too far away from the present to clearly say whether one piggybacked more on the other.
Amazing as it may seem, quite a few safes don't follow rule #2
No decent safe uses a lock mechanism that allows the fence to contact the wheels. True, they market a lot of fire safes as if they were burglary safes at your Friendly Neighborhood Hardware Store, but no one serious about security buys a safe there. But yeah, basically any safe that doesn't include as a final step in dialing the combo "then turn back to 0" is a piece of junk.
Basically, yeah, same thing. Just like there was no point in taking as a POW some lowly mechanic, likewise the US army didn't really have any reason to arrest a talking head. That late in both wars, the fighting was over and neither of those guys were "fighters" anyway.
That is diplomacy, man. What, do you think diplomacy is about bringing your enemies (who'd just as soon murder you in your bed and torch your house)flowers and candy and asking them nicely to stop doing X, or to let you do Y? No, it's about politely informing them that you could pour nuclear fire down their pants and nobody would care, so they better do things our way.
Yeah, that was the one fatal flaw in The whole Foundation series: the assertion that there could be such a thing as predictable as "psycho-history". The premise that, once you get up to a large enough scale, small errors "cancel out" has been pretty much shown to be exactly not how complex iterative systems work. I, unfortunately, first read the Foundation books very shortly after reading Chaos by James Gleick, so I found it impossible to suspend disbelief.
You are correct, to a point. The basic "natural" rights are the rights to life, liberty, and property. The exercise of natural rights do not infringe upon the rights of others. These are also all things that can be reasonably protected by force of arms of the rights holder. Free speech is an extension of the right to "liberty". Copyright is not a natural right, as it requires the infringement of the natural right of free speech. You can argue that no rights exist without force to back them, but this is really irrelevant. Rights are a philosophical construct, and our society bases its laws on a specific philosophy of rights. But you seem unclear on the whole principle of rights in general. Here's quickie on the philosophy behind it.
If he does, the German police don't show up in Idaho, they show up at the home of the guy in Germany who bought the stuff. My comparison stands.
Incorrect. In fact, your entire argument is specious because of this assumption. Copyright is not a "right" in the traditional sense; it is a limitation of the rights of the rest of us, designed to encourage "science and the useful arts" by granting creators a limited monopoly on something that would, in nature, by free, as in beer. There is no natural right to own an idea. If the people of the united states wish this government-granted exclusivity minimized to a one-day monolpoly on reproduction, that's just hard cheese (not that it'll ever happen that way, what with our representatives being in the pocket of IP-dependent corps).
No one claims to have it both ways. It is perfecxtly consistent to consider the current state of IP law an abomination, and then gloat gleefully when one of the larger pushers of such laws is hoist by their own petard.It's a simple case of "see how you like it!"
Being that none of the radio stations are in Germany, you forsee criminal prosecution where there can be none. German courts have no more jurisdiction over this than they do over a seller of Nazi artifacts in Idaho.
How is it that you are posting from at least 6 days in the future.
PS: what are the powerball numbers for next week?