That falls in line with my own thoughts. It's time that the people showed government that government works FOR THE PEOPLE, not the other way around.
This is a nice idea, except that the organisations receiving these requests, and who are now apparently writing this "very strongly worded" letter, are corporations. Those corporations exist to make money, not to look after the interests of people. If the two coincide in any meaningful way, then you can expect that company to find any and every way to trumpet their willingness to look after the people, but it is a very rare company indeed that will attach enough intrinsic value to their ethical stance and the interests of their current and potential customers to be willing to sacrifice a chance at profit. If this "letter" was being written and signed by a large minority (a majority is too much to hope for, probably) of the 220+ million Americans who are eligible to vote, then it would be an example of the people demonstrating their will on this matter.
In this case, I suspect that if Edward Snowden had not leaked the information about PRISM, none of the corporate types involved in the letter would have had even one thought between them of doing any such thing, and any who did think of it and then mention it to anyone would have been regarded as insane. This letter is purely a PR stunt.
Until the entire process for surveillance and eavesdropping, data harvesting and interception is put on a transparent basis and is subject to an open and unbiased judicial review process to ensure it complies with the current interpretation of the letter of the law, the chances of people regaining trust in the government and the corporations is one hell of a lot slimmer than the average American supermodel.
First comment from me, is that this is a laudable goal, and OP has my respect for wanting to help the world. Second comment is that, from my limited (Electronics, Integrated Circuit Engineering, Machine Vision/AI) experience in academia, most of the research there is commercially driven, either because a large corp has come along with a wad of money and asked the institution to research something specific, or because the institution has an eye toward commercially applicable research, via patents on something or through a commercial enterprise linked to the research institution.
I definitely think there are options for OP to get into "pure" research, and the way I would go about it is to get into one of the Graduate Research programs (Masters/Ph.D) at an institution that is doing something interesting and where faculty staff make positive noises about retaining post-grads as research fellows, and then make it clear that I am interested in staying on as a research fellow after finishing the program. It might work, or it might not. Also, research fellowships are typically not a long-term option in my experience, being 2-3 years or until the money runs out, whichever is shorter.
Then, you get companies like Google (with their 75/20/5% time split for working on core, off-the-wall, and personal stuff) or Intel (who do a lot of research, but again, commercially-driven). The days of Bell Labs and their almost pure "research for the fun of it" are pretty much gone... you can find a bit of that spirit in a lot of places, but it is typically one of the first things to be cut when the company and economy are doing well, and one of the last things to be started/supported when things are picking up. So now is probably not the best time to be looking for this kind of opportunity:)
The problem isn't as much voting either R or D, but that those are the only two choices. Both parties have a vested interest in making you believe that voting anything else is a wasted vote, since, by that logic, if you don't vote R, then D wins. This is only true if both R and D refuse to corporate with a hypothetical third party.
Multi-party politics can certainly work, and I would not want to limit the US to only 2 choices for the sake of it. However, multi-party setups where the number of separate parties get larger tend towards minority governments, coalitions with their own internal stresses, and generally less effective decision-making, with policy being driven by the need to keep a coalition together rather than "for the good of the people". ok, I have probably just come fairly close to describing the current setup of the Republican party, which when viewed through the lens of long distance looks like several groups of escapees from the Insane Asylum, none of whom really like or trust each other, but who are driven by a greater dislike and distrust of "the enemy" (The Democrats). I suspect that there are equally deep divisions within the Democrat ranks, and these would be exposed during the campaigning process to choose a challenger to an incumbent President (by definition, the incumbent's lack of a need to compete against others within their party gives the appearance of unity). Given things like the Tea Party agenda, their less-than-comfortable relationship with the GOP, and the underlying American/Republican frontier spirit which fuels a psyche of individual independence, governance and self-reliance, I suspect that a multi-party system would see 2 or 3 "Democrat" parties differentiated by non-core Democrat policies, and 3-8 "Republican" parties with variations of core Republican policies, plus perhaps independent parties organised along religious orientation lines. That would have definite advantages - instead of an increasingly polarized argument between two behemoths, there might actually be genuine discussion of political and social matters less encumbered by rhetoric. Fundamentally though, you would probably find government being made up primarily of a Democrat coalition, with the Republican parties rendered largely ineffective by internal squabbling, leading to some of the more moderate Republican elements moving toward the center in an attempt to either differentiate and distance themselves from the playground name-calling or even trying to latch onto the Democrat machine. In Europe certainly, multi-party politics tend to work fairly well, but generally with a relatively small number of discrete parties. I suspect that the US road to multi-partyism would explode into a larger number of small parties, which tends to be less effective, and in itself does not address concerns about competence or accountability of governments (Italy and Greece in recent history as examples).
Ultimately, I see the underlying problem being less that there are only 2 parties, but that those two parties fundamentally present as 2 ideologically opposed voices with no middle ground, but when looking at the detail behind the rhetoric, the two appear to be remarkably close together.
Why do we keep any of those (entirely incompetent) critters around?
Just borrowed the bracketed comment from your previous sentence, to add weight to the bit I was quoting... The reason you keep those incompetent/self-serving/corrupt (delete as appropriate, or just leave alone if you think your congressman/woman is all 3) critters around is because you keep voting for the incumbent in the elections for your Congressional Representatives in both houses. Fundamentally, whether one party or the other engages in gerrymandering does not/should not matter - if enough of the voting members of the public say "enough, this person's actions in the House have shown them to be incompetent/self-serving/corrupt, I am going to vote for something, anything, else...", then the presently incumbent will become the previously incumbent Representative. However, for that to happen... die-hard Republicans might need to vote for a pinko-liberal-commie-muslim-african-gay-transsexual Democrat. Die-hard Democrats might need to vote for a Nazi-nationalist-caveman-fundamentalist-greedy-extremist-Bible thumping Republican. Oh, and the sheeple who normally vote for the one with the best TV adverts might need to break the habit of a lifetime, and form their own opinion. What would that achieve? Well in many cases, it might replace half way competent representatives who made one or two mistakes with inexperienced first-timers who will make more mistakes. It will probably also bring in a few who are just as, if not more, incompetent/self-serving/corrupt than the ones they are replacing. Such is life. You cannot mandate IQ tests, education on technology, economics, world politics and georgraphy specifically for politicians (it might be a good idea to try, though). But after 3 or 4 iterations (yes, I am saying this process will probably take 10+ years), your elected representatives might actually get the message that if they continue to suck up to the people selling tickets for the gravy train, rather than listening to and serving the will of the people, their political career will be short. By that time as well, there would be a saturation of former members of Congress on the after-dinner speaking circuit, we would not need another biography from a politician, and market forces would mean that they cannot earn the same as a failed one-term politician can do today, because the US government would no longer be as beholden to the big business interests that shell out the serious lobbying money and "campaign donations" that have been present in recent history.
In short, if you get rid of the ones who are not doing their jobs properly, over time the whole group will improve with the realization that failure leads to the exit door, and not to a yellow brick road lined by sacks of money.
Heights, or being crushed by a collapsing bridge as I walk under it (I walk under bridges all the time, to try and work with that one. I know it is irrational, but there you go...). A while ago, I would have said Public Speaking/giving presentations (, but after working on it for a while, I have improved immensely in that area.
Most of the things that I actually might find scary do not generally happen to programmers. Odd things do come up, though - I worked my way through University working as a bouncer at various nightclubs. In that job, I was shot, shot at, knifed, involved in several other knife fights, fist fights, and numerous potentially hostile confrontations with drunk or high people looking for a fight. None of that violence was directed at me personally - I happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The only time someone has actually aimed violence against me personally was while working as a programmer/on-site software implementation consultant. As the "new guy" I went on-site to install and troubleshoot a new version of our application - a back-office/inventory system - for a client, the manager of the office I was visiting picked me up and tried to punch me as soon as he heard which company I was from (the backstory - a sales guy long on promises and short on knowledge got the contract by lying about the capabilities and readiness of the product, and I was the 3rd consultant sent on-site 6 months after the agreed delivery date, still with a beta version of the product. Not appreciated by the body-building, steroid-pumping manager, who was already having a bad day). We quickly got past that and started to make progress as soon as his nose stopped bleeding, and long before he stopped limping, and the installation became a case study and reference site for us, thanks to the efforts of the entire development team and the relationship manager. But to this date, that is the only time in all my years of working (30ish) that someones animosity has been directed at me personally. Working as a programmer can be a dangerous job!
The problem with what Mr Horgan is advocating is that his argument is based on his view of the Humanities subjects that he teaches, and the way he teaches them. His view of science subjects, as fields dominated by facts and accepted doctrine based on those facts is an accurate representation of the way science subjects are taught by many teachers, but it does not match the science teaching I received from the teachers and lecturers throughout my school and university life. There, I was taught that scientific "facts" are opinions tested and supported by experimentation, and which have not yet been proven incorrect. I was taught to consider the experiences of others, but to keep my eyes open and brain engaged, observe the world around me and to form my own opinions, then conduct my own experiments to determine the validity of those opinions. I was given the freedom to decide on the nature of those experiments - did I want to form experiments with a goal of proving and supporting my opinions (the "bias for confirmation" approach, and one in which Mr Horgan is right - we do have an immense capacity for self-and collective delusion), or did I want to actually test the accuracy of those opinions by trying to disprove them? In short, my science teachers taught me to see all sides of a question, consider as many variables as I could find, look at things as they are instead of how I would like them to be, and form opinions based on those observations. But also to continuously re-evaluate my opinions in the light of any new information that comes to light. I cannot comment readily on the teaching of the Humanities subjects, as from the age of 14 I concentrated exclusively on the mathematics and science disciplines, plus the fact that some of my friends were starting to experience a pronounced swelling in the chest area. However, my anecdotal recollection is that a lot of my humanities lessons were dominated by "facts" based on what was written in the Bible, a history book, geological or archaeological "facts", and accepted grammar in foreign languages.
On that basis, I feel a more accurate target for his attention would be the teaching methods in schools across all disciplines, where the individual teachers discourage independent critical thinking in favour of memorizing lists of "facts" designed to (1) prepare students for an exam, and (2) give the teacher an easier lesson plan with less preparation.
ok, maybe not... but I must admit that in the past I have been tempted by the idea of introducing that developer's legs to a 10 kilo sledgehammer... Contacting the old client ahead of time, asking them for a reference which specifically mentions your work on that project (and ideally which mentions you as the author, with the new guy as maintainer). Explain to the new client that the developer claiming the code was taken on to perform maintenance of the project after you left.
SMART goals (Specific/Measurable/Achievable/Relevant/Time-bound) are typically used when discussing bonuses, but fundamentally they can also form the basis of a review process for somebody's base level ability to do their job, if the company does not have any other metric, which in this case it sounds as though they do not. I suspect that the manager has high subordinate satisfaction ratings for the most part, as it seems he acts as nothing more than a mouthpiece for them, meaning they get what they want, while members of other teams do not see the performance issue as that of the IT Manager, but of the team as a whole, because IT is a "black box". Depending on the employee rights and the politics of the company, it may be as simple as delivering a fact- and statistics-based report to the boss/board of directors. A complete breakdown of costs for every project and analysis of cost-overruns is probably overkill unless you are a consultant paid by the hour (but if this is the way you go, prepare a 1-2 page summary for presentation to the board, with the full 300 page report available for anyone who wants to read a more in-depth analysis). At that point, your job is done. You were hired to produce a report, you have done that. Let them know that you can produce similar reports for other divisions if they want you to, and maybe ask them if their situation can be anonymised and used as a case study for your Management Forensics consultancy if they have the opportunity to review it before you publish the case study. Exit stage left, hopefully not pursued by a bear. If you are angling to take over the guy's job, bear in mind that if you have a large part to play in firing a popular boss and then you replace him, you will have an uphill battle getting people on your side. The departure of the boss, and the introduction of business-oriented goals may change the atmosphere of the office... that together with you stepping in after sharpening the knife that killed your predecessor might result in a wave of departures from the team. As the new manager, the drop in productivity will be on you, not your predecessor. so you would need to turn it round quickly. All-in-all, I would say it is easier to let some other person take the management position and then step in when they almost inevitably fail - you are one step removed from the boss the guys liked, the tanking team performance is a god excuse to bring in some goal-based metrics, and by that time, people might have forgotten that you were around writing a report on the team in the weeks leading up to the popular boss getting the chop.
Up until the Human Rights Act of 1998, which incorporated the European Convention on Human Rights into UK law, there was no legal right to privacy in the United Kingdom. There was some coverage in areas of legal and medical privacy under "Breach of Confidence" and related legislation around harrassment and data protection, but fundamentally the idea of "Privacy" is a very new one in UK law. To see a UK politician (not just that, but one of the top 5 members of the ruling Government) being so cavalier about surveillance by organisations which have no judicial oversight, and justifying it with the old saw "you have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide"...
This is the same politician (William Hague) who, in a speech to the Conservative Party's annual political conference in 2001 (at this point, he was the party leader, and the Conservatives were the opposition party to the ruling Labour government of the time... the Conservatives are now the government, having formed a coalition with the Liberal Democrats after the last election) said:
"I think Britain would be all right, if only we had a different Government. A Conservative Government that speaks with the voice of the British people. A Conservative Government never embarrassed or ashamed of the British people. A Conservative Government that trusts the people..."
So now, the Government wants to know what the voice of the British people are saying, so they are willing to spy on them. The Government is either embarrassed by, ashamed of, or afraid of, the British people, so they are willing to spy on them. The Government is so mistrustful of the people, that they are willing to spy on them,
And if there is any objection from the people, the response from the Government is "you only have something to fear if you have something to hide". Sorry Mr Hague, but as far as I know I have nothing to hide (disclaimer, I am not a UK lawyer with extensive and up-to-the-minute knowledge of all laws on the statute books in the UK). All the same, I personally object strongly to having my legally conferred right to privacy circumscribed to satisfy the voyeurism tendencies of some random idiot who feels like peeking.
My first thought as I was reading the summary is "why are the bugs only being highlighted at the end of the project?". Granted, that is when the users have something approaching a "complete" product to work with so that is where they will do most of their testing... wait, have I just answered my own question?? It seems I have, yes. Welcome to the wonderful world of the project manager and analyst - if the client is coming with bug reports, there are 3 potential areas where someone screwed up - either the client explained it badly (in which case, it is not a bug as such, it is a functional change - paid work), or you did not do as good a job as you should have of writing the spec (in which case, in my opinion, you should eat the cost and learn from the mistake), or the developer botched the implementation of your spec (in an ideal world, the developer *should* fix that, as they caused the problem). If the client or you screw up, just about the only way to catch that is during a user acceptance test. Determining whether the screw-up is yours or the client's comes down to a review of your spec and needs some honest appraisal by you - if the spec is unambiguous and the product does what the spec says, and the client has signed off on the spec, then it is their fault. If the spec is ambiguous and open to interpretation (typically this is going to be when the spec matches what the user wants, and what the product does, but the product and the user's expectations do not match), then you have the fault. Yes, it is incredibly hard to write clear, unambiguous specs and then get a client to read through them and understand them... but in that case the spec is a bit like a EULA - the user does not have to read and understand them, they just have to sign on the dotted line to say "the spec matches what I want". If the dev screws up, getting them to hold their hand up and admit to the fault and fix it is hard, as you have found - why work for free when you can work for money - but if you structure the contract correctly, with a completion bonus that they get when the client takes delivery, then you have some kind of hold over them. For example, a basic wage of $60k/year pro rata with $40k/year pro rata paid after sign-off. Some/most contractors will be put off by that, and they are typically the ones who will cut and run at the first mention of "bug" and "free". But the ones who are willing to take that on will probably be more conscientious in terms of self-testing, unit testing, analysis and possibly querying the spec, because if they can get it right first time, they get the bonus without doing any extra work... As for the other side - getting the users to test and validate earlier in the process, for that you need to deliver functional prototypes early in the process and implement some manner of testing window - most of the companies I have worked for as a PM/analyst have contract clauses that give clients a 30-60 day window from delivery of a new version of an application to report bugs as bugs - after that, any errors are categorized as billable change requests, so the client has both incentive and responsibility to perform testing of their own.
It does mean that you get to have some tough conversations with a client because they are reporting a "bug" after 5 minutes of use, 6 months after you delivered the application, and if you want to be flexible and client-focussed, you can look at whether that bug should have been caught by in-house testing to confirm compliance with your spec.
Lastly, when you find a couple of good contractors who are able to write good code and who take enough pride in teh quality of their work that they are willing to work on fixing bugs in their code (they do exist, honestly, they are about twice as common as unicorns, and are sighted more often than flying pigs), either offer them a permanent position, marry them off to your sister so that you can keep track of them, or tell them that they do such good work you will want to call them back next time you get a juicy and interesting project.
ok, maybe I am a bit too naive for this job, but I have been working as an analyst/PM/IT implementation consultant in the banking and finance industry for the last 10 years.
Stockholm's "sea water" is what most people would describe as brackish - the salt content is much lower than larger bodies of water. While I suspect that the Zebra mussels would still find it too salty to thrive, you might find that individuals can adapt and propagate.
If the app developed by Microsoft enables Youlube users to violate the Google ToS, then I can see an argument in Google's favour, especially if the app behaviour is not something the user can control. Having said that, it also sounds as though the Youlube apps on "other platforms" (I am assuming this is a reference to both iOS and Android) are more functional than the version for WP8. If that is a function of the way that WP8 works compared to iOS and Android, then MS are again out of luck, but if Google are purposely denying MS access to features that are available to iOS and Android, then I can see Google getting a slap as well.
Basically, I think that MS will be getting told off, and Google might also be in hot water over this, if the disagreement ends up in court in front of a judge who has some understanding of technology*cough*.
As a clarification and reminder for the patent examiners, this is a good thing. However, the USPTO has guidelines and rules as well, with odd little things like "Prior art" and descriptions of things that should not be patentable. However, there is also a policy (not sure if it is written, or just written about) that if the patent examiner cannot understand the patent application but cannot specifically see that it definitely contravenes any of the guidelines for things that should not be patentable, the patent should be granted and then the court system should be used to test the validity of the patent.
In 2000, the DoE and Bechtel National, Inc. (the contractor retained to build the Vitrification plant at Hanford) began construction of the plant before the design of the critical elements of the plant had been completed - in fact, before the design of many of those elements had even been started. The goal, to save time and money. Trying to build a house? No problem... our construction team have built a few of those so they know what to do based on early architectural sketches and teamwork. But this is not a house, it is a vitrification plant for 50+ million gallons of the worst nuclear waste in the world with a total radioactive potential of around 170-180 million curies (Cernobyl released about half that). Oh, and that shit is not only hot radioactively, it is hot temperature-wise too. Today, 60 of 177 storage tanks are leaking with the rest at a high risk of leaking, and if all goes well the complex to house the worst of the waste after vitrification will be built by 2048, with the whole vitrification process completed by 2062. Unless there are delays... after all, this is a government project, they are good at hitting project deadlines, right? Each tank is layered, with a relatively solid layer at the bottom, a salt cake above that, then sludge followed by liquid and a gas layer. Sounds a bit like my toilet after a bad Chinese meal... only more of it. Most of the radioactivity is in the solids and sludge whereas most of the volume is in the liquids and the salt cake - you need the liquid to transfer the rest through the crappy piping and filters from the storage tanks to the vitrification plant, and it all has to flow fast enough to keep the solids moving without causing any blockages or radioactive buildups. To top it all off, the glass mixture used in the vitrification process has to be tailoered to the mixture in the tank, and given the diversity of radioactive processes, materials and production methods in use on site, there will be at least 10 compounts required, with no way of knowing what is in what tank short of analysing the contents and getting a representative sample of everything in the tank.
Simple:-S
To my layman's mind, two things come to mind - 1. The whole thing is a complete clusterfuck, and it will be a miracle if the whole lot does not end very badly. 2, Top priority is to contain the leak in the immediate vicinity, but short of digging some massive trenches and excavating a huge foundation then filling the whole lot with some kind of radioactive-resistant concrete, and doing it in such a way that you can inspect the result for leaks, I cannot see how they are going to manage that. Time to call in Bruce Willis and get him to start drilling, I guess.
it's not that hard. just go by the german definition.
But that means that leaving your towel on a sun lounger before breakfast to reserve that sun lounger for your sole use is perfectly acceptable!
As with any other internationalized business, though... either you tailor your offering to match the requirements or lack thereof of local laws in each case, or you put together a "one size fits all" policy that incorporates the strictest interpretation of each element of local legislation in individual countries. Apple and other international businesses might complain about the complexity of either approach, but that is part of the cost of doing business in an international environment. Suck it up.
To me, this is exactly like charging a person who uses a buggy phone that gives them free calls every other call with fraud. They bought the phone as is, made no changes to it and they are being charged. These guys didn't change the code in the poker machine, they just knew what buttons to press after putting money in. If anything, they should be celebrated as the folks that beat the gaming industry.
While I agree that using CFAA to prosecute these guys was prosecutorial overreach of the abusive kind, the cellphone analogy does not quite work (close though:-) ) - if the "normal" operating process for the poker machine is "put money in", "play", "complete game", "cash out/play again/insert more money and repeat", and the guys were doing this, then the analogy would work. But the actual process was one that was so illogical that the only statistically likely way to discover it would be with inside information or via hacking. Probably the prosecutors originally assumed this was the case and were looking at using CFAA, and decided to be lazy and press on with abusive over-reach instead of re-adjusting to use more appropriate legislation when their initial investigations. Alternatively, the prosecutors could actually have, SHOCK AND HORROR, actually done their job properly, and looked at all of the available evidence and THEN decided what statutes they were going to try and run the prosecution under to aim for a conviction based on the actual discovered evidence rather than their own assumptions or that one of them really wanted to try a CFAA case.
Having said that it is statistically likely to have been uncovered with inside information or hacking, the number of times people have played these machines means that there was still a slim but significant possibility of it being discovered by accident as seems to have happened here, and in those cases (as far as I am aware) there is no legal requirement for him to report the "malfunctioning" equipment to either the casino or the manufacturer so the worst thing that could be done to him legally is for the casino to ban him from their establishments and for the casino to take the matter up with the manufacturer, using a civil law suit to recover the lost money from the manufacturer, who then makes a claim on some liability insurance or other (and if I am wrong about him not having a duty to report the problem, then it is a civil problem between the casino and the patron).
Actually, quite the opposite. Not for the lack of moral turpitude, but for the presence of it. Turpitude = depraved or wicked behaviour or character.
Quite true... I was so taken with the idea of moral turpitude that I ended up in two minds about how to phrase it, and ended up doing both, shooting myself in the grammatical foot in the process... that'll teach me to get excited about turpitude:)
As a university student, my uni grants access to MS products like Windows, Visual Studio etc. It really was a matter of entering a serial and that was all that had to be done. I take it off the shelf windows activates more obtusely?
Basically, yes. For Enterprise/Volume/Educational institution licences, there is a fairly basic serial number activation process to allow the mass-rollout of desktops from a central publishing server like SCCM. That means your IT department will not mutiny over having activation problems on 15% of your workstations after rolling out a new installation to 10,000 desks. For the one-off retail items, either in terms of OEM or boxed product, the activation hassles lie with the end user (i.e. one individual... not much direct revenue to M$) even though the OEMs probably roll out the same installation image to a similar number of workstations as the mass-rollout IT crowd. Of course, the end user can call the OEM's support line to bitch about it, but unless the OEM's support line is a premium rate number that is generating revenue just by having know-nothing users being guided through activation by know-almost-nothing Tier 1 support, then the OEM will say "Activation problems... sorry, go talk to Microsoft. Our contract states that we provide hardware support only..."
From which ditch they will run their congressional campaigns.
I am not sure it would go quite that far... after all, they may be liars, cheats, bullies, shysters, conmen, and to cap it all... lawyers. But there is a long way to go from that to suggest they can make the leap to the next level of unconscionable evil and become Congressional Politicians. Oh, damn, showing my jaundiced and cynical side there, making the overly broad generalization that all politicians are scum of the earth whose sole purpose in running for office seems to be to hop on the gravy train of lobbyists' "Campaign Contributions" and line their own pockets at the expense of the electorate and citizenry of the country they are elected to serve:)
An interesting side-question would be to ask how many competent and genuinely honest people would get into politics to do some real good, but are put off or corrupted in the face of the Gravy Train on one side, and world-weary cynics like me, seeing the worst in all politicians and condemning them without personal knowledge, on the other. Not too many, I guess... (but if you think that YOUR congressman/woman is doing a good job, don't just post about it here, send them a letter praising their performance - if enough people do that, so that they get some positivity once in a while, it might help them to make the right choice next time, too.
It took this ONE judge basically collecting 5-10 other Fedral cases after putting out an order to consolidate Prenda's cases to fewer jurisdictions. It was only after getting a half dozen other circuit courts to agree, he could even read that they had been using different names and such in different courts. He broke down a lot of the corporate veil judges normally don't get to do.
It took special permissions from other courts and over a year of sorting paperwork to get ONE SET of troll lawyers. Effectively all this does its chase the trolls out of HIS court, and into courts where the judges won't catch them.
Actually, the Judge has gone a bit further than that - he has referred all of the individuals identified as actively culpable to the Bar Associations for the districts where they are legally allowed to practice due to their lack of "moral turpitude". Given that judges have no direct control (albeit with considerable influence, but no official ability to directly rule on such matters), he is effectively telling the American Bar association to strike these guys off, take them to a quiet spot, order them to dig a ditch and climb in, ready for the ditch to be filled in.
Nuke it from orbit, it's the only way to be sure. Not to mention that it's already in orbit.
Nice idea... simple solution... but if we take this seriously (sorry, too early in the morning for my sense of humour to have woken up yet) the only problem with it is that any explosive method of dealing with orbiting debris just creates lots of small and tiny pieces of shrapnel, and traveling through a field of that crap at orbital velocities is not going to be the highlight of your day. Not a problem if you are in an M1 Abrams battle tank, but satellites do not have armour, except for shielding against the sun's radiation, and things like solar panels do not work very well after being hit a few times by orbital debris. What we REALLY need is a small version of Mega Maid (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VptOUWC-Itc) to go up there and hoover up all the junk, preferably while leaving all the viable stuff alone.
The traditional art of Dumpster diving plus a Windows or a Linux install would have saved these machines from their fate. If they were scheduled for replacement, then I'm sure some charity or educational establishment could have benefited.
There are many establishments which could have benefited here, but there are two issues with that - first, the machines would have to be sanitized so there is a guarantee that no confidential information is stored on them (90% of government IT disposals ignore that rule, but the Germans are actually among the best at following it); and second, I am pretty sure that the majority of recipient organisations would say "no thanks, we cannot handle the clean-up" if an organisation said "here you go, have 170 PCs that are infected with a virus, all you have to do is clean the virus off the system", either because the recipient organisation is lazy or because they are a charity/educational institution with little or no available IT expertise.
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That falls in line with my own thoughts. It's time that the people showed government that government works FOR THE PEOPLE, not the other way around.
This is a nice idea, except that the organisations receiving these requests, and who are now apparently writing this "very strongly worded" letter, are corporations. Those corporations exist to make money, not to look after the interests of people. If the two coincide in any meaningful way, then you can expect that company to find any and every way to trumpet their willingness to look after the people, but it is a very rare company indeed that will attach enough intrinsic value to their ethical stance and the interests of their current and potential customers to be willing to sacrifice a chance at profit.
If this "letter" was being written and signed by a large minority (a majority is too much to hope for, probably) of the 220+ million Americans who are eligible to vote, then it would be an example of the people demonstrating their will on this matter.
In this case, I suspect that if Edward Snowden had not leaked the information about PRISM, none of the corporate types involved in the letter would have had even one thought between them of doing any such thing, and any who did think of it and then mention it to anyone would have been regarded as insane.
This letter is purely a PR stunt.
Until the entire process for surveillance and eavesdropping, data harvesting and interception is put on a transparent basis and is subject to an open and unbiased judicial review process to ensure it complies with the current interpretation of the letter of the law, the chances of people regaining trust in the government and the corporations is one hell of a lot slimmer than the average American supermodel.
First comment from me, is that this is a laudable goal, and OP has my respect for wanting to help the world.
Second comment is that, from my limited (Electronics, Integrated Circuit Engineering, Machine Vision/AI) experience in academia, most of the research there is commercially driven, either because a large corp has come along with a wad of money and asked the institution to research something specific, or because the institution has an eye toward commercially applicable research, via patents on something or through a commercial enterprise linked to the research institution.
I definitely think there are options for OP to get into "pure" research, and the way I would go about it is to get into one of the Graduate Research programs (Masters/Ph.D) at an institution that is doing something interesting and where faculty staff make positive noises about retaining post-grads as research fellows, and then make it clear that I am interested in staying on as a research fellow after finishing the program. It might work, or it might not. Also, research fellowships are typically not a long-term option in my experience, being 2-3 years or until the money runs out, whichever is shorter.
Then, you get companies like Google (with their 75/20/5% time split for working on core, off-the-wall, and personal stuff) or Intel (who do a lot of research, but again, commercially-driven). :)
The days of Bell Labs and their almost pure "research for the fun of it" are pretty much gone... you can find a bit of that spirit in a lot of places, but it is typically one of the first things to be cut when the company and economy are doing well, and one of the last things to be started/supported when things are picking up. So now is probably not the best time to be looking for this kind of opportunity
I think the design gurus at the various phone handset manufacturers are closet Dom Jolly/Trigger Happy TV fans...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27aVPqpnL7Y
The problem isn't as much voting either R or D, but that those are the only two choices. Both parties have a vested interest in making you believe that voting anything else is a wasted vote, since, by that logic, if you don't vote R, then D wins. This is only true if both R and D refuse to corporate with a hypothetical third party.
Multi-party politics can certainly work, and I would not want to limit the US to only 2 choices for the sake of it. However, multi-party setups where the number of separate parties get larger tend towards minority governments, coalitions with their own internal stresses, and generally less effective decision-making, with policy being driven by the need to keep a coalition together rather than "for the good of the people".
ok, I have probably just come fairly close to describing the current setup of the Republican party, which when viewed through the lens of long distance looks like several groups of escapees from the Insane Asylum, none of whom really like or trust each other, but who are driven by a greater dislike and distrust of "the enemy" (The Democrats). I suspect that there are equally deep divisions within the Democrat ranks, and these would be exposed during the campaigning process to choose a challenger to an incumbent President (by definition, the incumbent's lack of a need to compete against others within their party gives the appearance of unity).
Given things like the Tea Party agenda, their less-than-comfortable relationship with the GOP, and the underlying American/Republican frontier spirit which fuels a psyche of individual independence, governance and self-reliance, I suspect that a multi-party system would see 2 or 3 "Democrat" parties differentiated by non-core Democrat policies, and 3-8 "Republican" parties with variations of core Republican policies, plus perhaps independent parties organised along religious orientation lines.
That would have definite advantages - instead of an increasingly polarized argument between two behemoths, there might actually be genuine discussion of political and social matters less encumbered by rhetoric. Fundamentally though, you would probably find government being made up primarily of a Democrat coalition, with the Republican parties rendered largely ineffective by internal squabbling, leading to some of the more moderate Republican elements moving toward the center in an attempt to either differentiate and distance themselves from the playground name-calling or even trying to latch onto the Democrat machine.
In Europe certainly, multi-party politics tend to work fairly well, but generally with a relatively small number of discrete parties. I suspect that the US road to multi-partyism would explode into a larger number of small parties, which tends to be less effective, and in itself does not address concerns about competence or accountability of governments (Italy and Greece in recent history as examples).
Ultimately, I see the underlying problem being less that there are only 2 parties, but that those two parties fundamentally present as 2 ideologically opposed voices with no middle ground, but when looking at the detail behind the rhetoric, the two appear to be remarkably close together.
Why do we keep any of those (entirely incompetent) critters around?
Just borrowed the bracketed comment from your previous sentence, to add weight to the bit I was quoting...
The reason you keep those incompetent/self-serving/corrupt (delete as appropriate, or just leave alone if you think your congressman/woman is all 3) critters around is because you keep voting for the incumbent in the elections for your Congressional Representatives in both houses. Fundamentally, whether one party or the other engages in gerrymandering does not/should not matter - if enough of the voting members of the public say "enough, this person's actions in the House have shown them to be incompetent/self-serving/corrupt, I am going to vote for something, anything, else...", then the presently incumbent will become the previously incumbent Representative.
However, for that to happen... die-hard Republicans might need to vote for a pinko-liberal-commie-muslim-african-gay-transsexual Democrat. Die-hard Democrats might need to vote for a Nazi-nationalist-caveman-fundamentalist-greedy-extremist-Bible thumping Republican. Oh, and the sheeple who normally vote for the one with the best TV adverts might need to break the habit of a lifetime, and form their own opinion.
What would that achieve? Well in many cases, it might replace half way competent representatives who made one or two mistakes with inexperienced first-timers who will make more mistakes. It will probably also bring in a few who are just as, if not more, incompetent/self-serving/corrupt than the ones they are replacing. Such is life. You cannot mandate IQ tests, education on technology, economics, world politics and georgraphy specifically for politicians (it might be a good idea to try, though). But after 3 or 4 iterations (yes, I am saying this process will probably take 10+ years), your elected representatives might actually get the message that if they continue to suck up to the people selling tickets for the gravy train, rather than listening to and serving the will of the people, their political career will be short. By that time as well, there would be a saturation of former members of Congress on the after-dinner speaking circuit, we would not need another biography from a politician, and market forces would mean that they cannot earn the same as a failed one-term politician can do today, because the US government would no longer be as beholden to the big business interests that shell out the serious lobbying money and "campaign donations" that have been present in recent history.
In short, if you get rid of the ones who are not doing their jobs properly, over time the whole group will improve with the realization that failure leads to the exit door, and not to a yellow brick road lined by sacks of money.
Heights, or being crushed by a collapsing bridge as I walk under it (I walk under bridges all the time, to try and work with that one. I know it is irrational, but there you go...). A while ago, I would have said Public Speaking/giving presentations (, but after working on it for a while, I have improved immensely in that area.
Most of the things that I actually might find scary do not generally happen to programmers. Odd things do come up, though - I worked my way through University working as a bouncer at various nightclubs. In that job, I was shot, shot at, knifed, involved in several other knife fights, fist fights, and numerous potentially hostile confrontations with drunk or high people looking for a fight. None of that violence was directed at me personally - I happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The only time someone has actually aimed violence against me personally was while working as a programmer/on-site software implementation consultant. As the "new guy" I went on-site to install and troubleshoot a new version of our application - a back-office/inventory system - for a client, the manager of the office I was visiting picked me up and tried to punch me as soon as he heard which company I was from (the backstory - a sales guy long on promises and short on knowledge got the contract by lying about the capabilities and readiness of the product, and I was the 3rd consultant sent on-site 6 months after the agreed delivery date, still with a beta version of the product. Not appreciated by the body-building, steroid-pumping manager, who was already having a bad day).
We quickly got past that and started to make progress as soon as his nose stopped bleeding, and long before he stopped limping, and the installation became a case study and reference site for us, thanks to the efforts of the entire development team and the relationship manager. But to this date, that is the only time in all my years of working (30ish) that someones animosity has been directed at me personally. Working as a programmer can be a dangerous job!
The problem with what Mr Horgan is advocating is that his argument is based on his view of the Humanities subjects that he teaches, and the way he teaches them.
His view of science subjects, as fields dominated by facts and accepted doctrine based on those facts is an accurate representation of the way science subjects are taught by many teachers, but it does not match the science teaching I received from the teachers and lecturers throughout my school and university life.
There, I was taught that scientific "facts" are opinions tested and supported by experimentation, and which have not yet been proven incorrect. I was taught to consider the experiences of others, but to keep my eyes open and brain engaged, observe the world around me and to form my own opinions, then conduct my own experiments to determine the validity of those opinions. I was given the freedom to decide on the nature of those experiments - did I want to form experiments with a goal of proving and supporting my opinions (the "bias for confirmation" approach, and one in which Mr Horgan is right - we do have an immense capacity for self-and collective delusion), or did I want to actually test the accuracy of those opinions by trying to disprove them?
In short, my science teachers taught me to see all sides of a question, consider as many variables as I could find, look at things as they are instead of how I would like them to be, and form opinions based on those observations. But also to continuously re-evaluate my opinions in the light of any new information that comes to light.
I cannot comment readily on the teaching of the Humanities subjects, as from the age of 14 I concentrated exclusively on the mathematics and science disciplines, plus the fact that some of my friends were starting to experience a pronounced swelling in the chest area. However, my anecdotal recollection is that a lot of my humanities lessons were dominated by "facts" based on what was written in the Bible, a history book, geological or archaeological "facts", and accepted grammar in foreign languages.
On that basis, I feel a more accurate target for his attention would be the teaching methods in schools across all disciplines, where the individual teachers discourage independent critical thinking in favour of memorizing lists of "facts" designed to (1) prepare students for an exam, and (2) give the teacher an easier lesson plan with less preparation.
So... the needs of the many outweigh the rights of the few?
No, the desires of the few (1%) outweigh the rights of the many (99%).
ok, maybe not... but I must admit that in the past I have been tempted by the idea of introducing that developer's legs to a 10 kilo sledgehammer...
Contacting the old client ahead of time, asking them for a reference which specifically mentions your work on that project (and ideally which mentions you as the author, with the new guy as maintainer).
Explain to the new client that the developer claiming the code was taken on to perform maintenance of the project after you left.
SMART goals (Specific/Measurable/Achievable/Relevant/Time-bound) are typically used when discussing bonuses, but fundamentally they can also form the basis of a review process for somebody's base level ability to do their job, if the company does not have any other metric, which in this case it sounds as though they do not.
I suspect that the manager has high subordinate satisfaction ratings for the most part, as it seems he acts as nothing more than a mouthpiece for them, meaning they get what they want, while members of other teams do not see the performance issue as that of the IT Manager, but of the team as a whole, because IT is a "black box".
Depending on the employee rights and the politics of the company, it may be as simple as delivering a fact- and statistics-based report to the boss/board of directors. A complete breakdown of costs for every project and analysis of cost-overruns is probably overkill unless you are a consultant paid by the hour (but if this is the way you go, prepare a 1-2 page summary for presentation to the board, with the full 300 page report available for anyone who wants to read a more in-depth analysis).
At that point, your job is done. You were hired to produce a report, you have done that. Let them know that you can produce similar reports for other divisions if they want you to, and maybe ask them if their situation can be anonymised and used as a case study for your Management Forensics consultancy if they have the opportunity to review it before you publish the case study. Exit stage left, hopefully not pursued by a bear.
If you are angling to take over the guy's job, bear in mind that if you have a large part to play in firing a popular boss and then you replace him, you will have an uphill battle getting people on your side. The departure of the boss, and the introduction of business-oriented goals may change the atmosphere of the office... that together with you stepping in after sharpening the knife that killed your predecessor might result in a wave of departures from the team. As the new manager, the drop in productivity will be on you, not your predecessor. so you would need to turn it round quickly. All-in-all, I would say it is easier to let some other person take the management position and then step in when they almost inevitably fail - you are one step removed from the boss the guys liked, the tanking team performance is a god excuse to bring in some goal-based metrics, and by that time, people might have forgotten that you were around writing a report on the team in the weeks leading up to the popular boss getting the chop.
Up until the Human Rights Act of 1998, which incorporated the European Convention on Human Rights into UK law, there was no legal right to privacy in the United Kingdom. There was some coverage in areas of legal and medical privacy under "Breach of Confidence" and related legislation around harrassment and data protection, but fundamentally the idea of "Privacy" is a very new one in UK law.
To see a UK politician (not just that, but one of the top 5 members of the ruling Government) being so cavalier about surveillance by organisations which have no judicial oversight, and justifying it with the old saw "you have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide"...
This is the same politician (William Hague) who, in a speech to the Conservative Party's annual political conference in 2001 (at this point, he was the party leader, and the Conservatives were the opposition party to the ruling Labour government of the time... the Conservatives are now the government, having formed a coalition with the Liberal Democrats after the last election) said:
"I think Britain would be all right, if only we had a different Government.
A Conservative Government that speaks with the voice of the British people.
A Conservative Government never embarrassed or ashamed of the British people.
A Conservative Government that trusts the people..."
So now, the Government wants to know what the voice of the British people are saying, so they are willing to spy on them.
The Government is either embarrassed by, ashamed of, or afraid of, the British people, so they are willing to spy on them.
The Government is so mistrustful of the people, that they are willing to spy on them,
And if there is any objection from the people, the response from the Government is "you only have something to fear if you have something to hide".
Sorry Mr Hague, but as far as I know I have nothing to hide (disclaimer, I am not a UK lawyer with extensive and up-to-the-minute knowledge of all laws on the statute books in the UK). All the same, I personally object strongly to having my legally conferred right to privacy circumscribed to satisfy the voyeurism tendencies of some random idiot who feels like peeking.
So they know where the D-Wave system is, but they cannot definitively measure whether it is actually a quantum computer or not...
My first thought as I was reading the summary is "why are the bugs only being highlighted at the end of the project?".
Granted, that is when the users have something approaching a "complete" product to work with so that is where they will do most of their testing... wait, have I just answered my own question?? It seems I have, yes.
Welcome to the wonderful world of the project manager and analyst - if the client is coming with bug reports, there are 3 potential areas where someone screwed up - either the client explained it badly (in which case, it is not a bug as such, it is a functional change - paid work), or you did not do as good a job as you should have of writing the spec (in which case, in my opinion, you should eat the cost and learn from the mistake), or the developer botched the implementation of your spec (in an ideal world, the developer *should* fix that, as they caused the problem).
If the client or you screw up, just about the only way to catch that is during a user acceptance test. Determining whether the screw-up is yours or the client's comes down to a review of your spec and needs some honest appraisal by you - if the spec is unambiguous and the product does what the spec says, and the client has signed off on the spec, then it is their fault. If the spec is ambiguous and open to interpretation (typically this is going to be when the spec matches what the user wants, and what the product does, but the product and the user's expectations do not match), then you have the fault. Yes, it is incredibly hard to write clear, unambiguous specs and then get a client to read through them and understand them... but in that case the spec is a bit like a EULA - the user does not have to read and understand them, they just have to sign on the dotted line to say "the spec matches what I want".
If the dev screws up, getting them to hold their hand up and admit to the fault and fix it is hard, as you have found - why work for free when you can work for money - but if you structure the contract correctly, with a completion bonus that they get when the client takes delivery, then you have some kind of hold over them. For example, a basic wage of $60k/year pro rata with $40k/year pro rata paid after sign-off. Some/most contractors will be put off by that, and they are typically the ones who will cut and run at the first mention of "bug" and "free". But the ones who are willing to take that on will probably be more conscientious in terms of self-testing, unit testing, analysis and possibly querying the spec, because if they can get it right first time, they get the bonus without doing any extra work...
As for the other side - getting the users to test and validate earlier in the process, for that you need to deliver functional prototypes early in the process and implement some manner of testing window - most of the companies I have worked for as a PM/analyst have contract clauses that give clients a 30-60 day window from delivery of a new version of an application to report bugs as bugs - after that, any errors are categorized as billable change requests, so the client has both incentive and responsibility to perform testing of their own.
It does mean that you get to have some tough conversations with a client because they are reporting a "bug" after 5 minutes of use, 6 months after you delivered the application, and if you want to be flexible and client-focussed, you can look at whether that bug should have been caught by in-house testing to confirm compliance with your spec.
Lastly, when you find a couple of good contractors who are able to write good code and who take enough pride in teh quality of their work that they are willing to work on fixing bugs in their code (they do exist, honestly, they are about twice as common as unicorns, and are sighted more often than flying pigs), either offer them a permanent position, marry them off to your sister so that you can keep track of them, or tell them that they do such good work you will want to call them back next time you get a juicy and interesting project.
ok, maybe I am a bit too naive for this job, but I have been working as an analyst/PM/IT implementation consultant in the banking and finance industry for the last 10 years.
Stockholm's "sea water" is what most people would describe as brackish - the salt content is much lower than larger bodies of water. While I suspect that the Zebra mussels would still find it too salty to thrive, you might find that individuals can adapt and propagate.
If the app developed by Microsoft enables Youlube users to violate the Google ToS, then I can see an argument in Google's favour, especially if the app behaviour is not something the user can control.
Having said that, it also sounds as though the Youlube apps on "other platforms" (I am assuming this is a reference to both iOS and Android) are more functional than the version for WP8. If that is a function of the way that WP8 works compared to iOS and Android, then MS are again out of luck, but if Google are purposely denying MS access to features that are available to iOS and Android, then I can see Google getting a slap as well.
Basically, I think that MS will be getting told off, and Google might also be in hot water over this, if the disagreement ends up in court in front of a judge who has some understanding of technology*cough*.
As a clarification and reminder for the patent examiners, this is a good thing. However, the USPTO has guidelines and rules as well, with odd little things like "Prior art" and descriptions of things that should not be patentable.
However, there is also a policy (not sure if it is written, or just written about) that if the patent examiner cannot understand the patent application but cannot specifically see that it definitely contravenes any of the guidelines for things that should not be patentable, the patent should be granted and then the court system should be used to test the validity of the patent.
In 2000, the DoE and Bechtel National, Inc. (the contractor retained to build the Vitrification plant at Hanford) began construction of the plant before the design of the critical elements of the plant had been completed - in fact, before the design of many of those elements had even been started. The goal, to save time and money.
Trying to build a house? No problem... our construction team have built a few of those so they know what to do based on early architectural sketches and teamwork. But this is not a house, it is a vitrification plant for 50+ million gallons of the worst nuclear waste in the world with a total radioactive potential of around 170-180 million curies (Cernobyl released about half that). Oh, and that shit is not only hot radioactively, it is hot temperature-wise too.
Today, 60 of 177 storage tanks are leaking with the rest at a high risk of leaking, and if all goes well the complex to house the worst of the waste after vitrification will be built by 2048, with the whole vitrification process completed by 2062. Unless there are delays... after all, this is a government project, they are good at hitting project deadlines, right?
Each tank is layered, with a relatively solid layer at the bottom, a salt cake above that, then sludge followed by liquid and a gas layer. Sounds a bit like my toilet after a bad Chinese meal... only more of it. Most of the radioactivity is in the solids and sludge whereas most of the volume is in the liquids and the salt cake - you need the liquid to transfer the rest through the crappy piping and filters from the storage tanks to the vitrification plant, and it all has to flow fast enough to keep the solids moving without causing any blockages or radioactive buildups.
To top it all off, the glass mixture used in the vitrification process has to be tailoered to the mixture in the tank, and given the diversity of radioactive processes, materials and production methods in use on site, there will be at least 10 compounts required, with no way of knowing what is in what tank short of analysing the contents and getting a representative sample of everything in the tank.
Simple :-S
To my layman's mind, two things come to mind - 1. The whole thing is a complete clusterfuck, and it will be a miracle if the whole lot does not end very badly. 2, Top priority is to contain the leak in the immediate vicinity, but short of digging some massive trenches and excavating a huge foundation then filling the whole lot with some kind of radioactive-resistant concrete, and doing it in such a way that you can inspect the result for leaks, I cannot see how they are going to manage that.
Time to call in Bruce Willis and get him to start drilling, I guess.
it's not that hard. just go by the german definition.
But that means that leaving your towel on a sun lounger before breakfast to reserve that sun lounger for your sole use is perfectly acceptable!
As with any other internationalized business, though... either you tailor your offering to match the requirements or lack thereof of local laws in each case, or you put together a "one size fits all" policy that incorporates the strictest interpretation of each element of local legislation in individual countries.
Apple and other international businesses might complain about the complexity of either approach, but that is part of the cost of doing business in an international environment. Suck it up.
To me, this is exactly like charging a person who uses a buggy phone that gives them free calls every other call with fraud. They bought the phone as is, made no changes to it and they are being charged. These guys didn't change the code in the poker machine, they just knew what buttons to press after putting money in. If anything, they should be celebrated as the folks that beat the gaming industry.
While I agree that using CFAA to prosecute these guys was prosecutorial overreach of the abusive kind, the cellphone analogy does not quite work (close though :-) ) - if the "normal" operating process for the poker machine is "put money in", "play", "complete game", "cash out/play again/insert more money and repeat", and the guys were doing this, then the analogy would work.
But the actual process was one that was so illogical that the only statistically likely way to discover it would be with inside information or via hacking. Probably the prosecutors originally assumed this was the case and were looking at using CFAA, and decided to be lazy and press on with abusive over-reach instead of re-adjusting to use more appropriate legislation when their initial investigations. Alternatively, the prosecutors could actually have, SHOCK AND HORROR, actually done their job properly, and looked at all of the available evidence and THEN decided what statutes they were going to try and run the prosecution under to aim for a conviction based on the actual discovered evidence rather than their own assumptions or that one of them really wanted to try a CFAA case.
Having said that it is statistically likely to have been uncovered with inside information or hacking, the number of times people have played these machines means that there was still a slim but significant possibility of it being discovered by accident as seems to have happened here, and in those cases (as far as I am aware) there is no legal requirement for him to report the "malfunctioning" equipment to either the casino or the manufacturer so the worst thing that could be done to him legally is for the casino to ban him from their establishments and for the casino to take the matter up with the manufacturer, using a civil law suit to recover the lost money from the manufacturer, who then makes a claim on some liability insurance or other (and if I am wrong about him not having a duty to report the problem, then it is a civil problem between the casino and the patron).
Actually, quite the opposite. Not for the lack of moral turpitude, but for the presence of it. Turpitude = depraved or wicked behaviour or character.
Quite true... I was so taken with the idea of moral turpitude that I ended up in two minds about how to phrase it, and ended up doing both, shooting myself in the grammatical foot in the process... that'll teach me to get excited about turpitude :)
As a university student, my uni grants access to MS products like Windows, Visual Studio etc. It really was a matter of entering a serial and that was all that had to be done. I take it off the shelf windows activates more obtusely?
Basically, yes. For Enterprise/Volume/Educational institution licences, there is a fairly basic serial number activation process to allow the mass-rollout of desktops from a central publishing server like SCCM. That means your IT department will not mutiny over having activation problems on 15% of your workstations after rolling out a new installation to 10,000 desks.
For the one-off retail items, either in terms of OEM or boxed product, the activation hassles lie with the end user (i.e. one individual... not much direct revenue to M$) even though the OEMs probably roll out the same installation image to a similar number of workstations as the mass-rollout IT crowd. Of course, the end user can call the OEM's support line to bitch about it, but unless the OEM's support line is a premium rate number that is generating revenue just by having know-nothing users being guided through activation by know-almost-nothing Tier 1 support, then the OEM will say "Activation problems... sorry, go talk to Microsoft. Our contract states that we provide hardware support only..."
From which ditch they will run their congressional campaigns.
I am not sure it would go quite that far... after all, they may be liars, cheats, bullies, shysters, conmen, and to cap it all... lawyers. But there is a long way to go from that to suggest they can make the leap to the next level of unconscionable evil and become Congressional Politicians. :)
Oh, damn, showing my jaundiced and cynical side there, making the overly broad generalization that all politicians are scum of the earth whose sole purpose in running for office seems to be to hop on the gravy train of lobbyists' "Campaign Contributions" and line their own pockets at the expense of the electorate and citizenry of the country they are elected to serve
An interesting side-question would be to ask how many competent and genuinely honest people would get into politics to do some real good, but are put off or corrupted in the face of the Gravy Train on one side, and world-weary cynics like me, seeing the worst in all politicians and condemning them without personal knowledge, on the other. Not too many, I guess... (but if you think that YOUR congressman/woman is doing a good job, don't just post about it here, send them a letter praising their performance - if enough people do that, so that they get some positivity once in a while, it might help them to make the right choice next time, too.
Oooo look, a Unicorn!!
It took this ONE judge basically collecting 5-10 other Fedral cases after putting out an order to consolidate Prenda's cases to fewer jurisdictions. It was only after getting a half dozen other circuit courts to agree, he could even read that they had been using different names and such in different courts. He broke down a lot of the corporate veil judges normally don't get to do.
It took special permissions from other courts and over a year of sorting paperwork to get ONE SET of troll lawyers. Effectively all this does its chase the trolls out of HIS court, and into courts where the judges won't catch them.
Actually, the Judge has gone a bit further than that - he has referred all of the individuals identified as actively culpable to the Bar Associations for the districts where they are legally allowed to practice due to their lack of "moral turpitude". Given that judges have no direct control (albeit with considerable influence, but no official ability to directly rule on such matters), he is effectively telling the American Bar association to strike these guys off, take them to a quiet spot, order them to dig a ditch and climb in, ready for the ditch to be filled in.
Nuke it from orbit, it's the only way to be sure. Not to mention that it's already in orbit.
Nice idea... simple solution... but if we take this seriously (sorry, too early in the morning for my sense of humour to have woken up yet) the only problem with it is that any explosive method of dealing with orbiting debris just creates lots of small and tiny pieces of shrapnel, and traveling through a field of that crap at orbital velocities is not going to be the highlight of your day. Not a problem if you are in an M1 Abrams battle tank, but satellites do not have armour, except for shielding against the sun's radiation, and things like solar panels do not work very well after being hit a few times by orbital debris.
What we REALLY need is a small version of Mega Maid (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VptOUWC-Itc) to go up there and hoover up all the junk, preferably while leaving all the viable stuff alone.
Where are all the machines they threw away?
The traditional art of Dumpster diving plus a Windows or a Linux install would have saved these machines from their fate. If they were scheduled for replacement, then I'm sure some charity or educational establishment could have benefited.
There are many establishments which could have benefited here, but there are two issues with that - first, the machines would have to be sanitized so there is a guarantee that no confidential information is stored on them (90% of government IT disposals ignore that rule, but the Germans are actually among the best at following it); and second, I am pretty sure that the majority of recipient organisations would say "no thanks, we cannot handle the clean-up" if an organisation said "here you go, have 170 PCs that are infected with a virus, all you have to do is clean the virus off the system", either because the recipient organisation is lazy or because they are a charity/educational institution with little or no available IT expertise.