According to Wikipedia, the Department of Homeland Security has a quarter million employees. Given judicious application of intelligent software design, that's more than enough to keep tabs on everyone in the US. (assuming that in addition to the aforementioned intelligent software design, all quarter-million employees are fairly high-caliber. Given that 55k of those employees are from the TSA, well....)
Yes. Yes it does matter, on all those fronts. You might as well ask "does it matter if you can't leave your apartment because you've got agoraphobia or because you are Jaycee Lee Dugard and some twisted bastard is keeping you in the shed out back." Either way, you can't leave, so what difference does it make?
And you are much more likely to be in the "can't afford it" category living under communism, so it isn't like that's an either/or situation anyway.
I do agree with your punchline though... freedoms have to be protected continuously, or you lose them.
Although the punishment for murder ranges from nothing to death, while the punishment for offending a corporation ranges from a few years in jail (here) to a lifetime to many lifetimes in wages to getting lauded as a hero and receiving millions of dollars (pick your favorite trumped-up corporate scandal).
Too bad prosecutors often fail to live up to the vast responsibility they've been given via prosecutorial discretion. (my favorite of late is a Georgia woman who was convicted of vehicular homicide when her 5 year old kid was hit and killed by a drunk driver as she and her family crossed the street from the bus stop - not only was she not driving, she doesn't even own a car. Nice work, Ms. Prosecutor... more irony - She gets 6 times the prison time of the drunk driver who plowed into her and her family. Double-good nice work, Ms. Prosecutor)
By that rationale, any request on a web server via the HTTP GET or POST that could escalate privilege or divulge private data should go unpunished.
Yes, that's correct. We're not talking about a (D)DOS attack. This was a normal request/response. The owners of the servers should be 100% responsible for the security of those servers in such situations.
Well, by this logic there should be no laws against computer intrusion. If you didn't secure your computer against that port 73 buffer overrun bug, well, that's your fault for getting p0wnd. Or if there is a bug in the java beans backend of your server that crashes all authentication to root when presented with malformed unicode? Well, tough... patch your servers, moron. Some hacker finds a vulnerability in Apache that allows him to get root using get/post commands and uses that to get control of your server - nothing wrong with that?
I mean, really - did you really, really mean to say that attacks using get or post should be perfectly legal? There's lots of malicious activity that can be undertaken using http connections. There's laws against hacking computers for the same reason that there are laws against breaking and entering in the realm of real estate. We don't say "well, you shoulda bought a better lock" when a burglar breaks in through the back door. We say the burglar is a criminal and prosecute him.
That doesn't mean you shouldn't get a better lock, or do a better job of computer security - but I still don't think we should just say "if you didn't secure your server well enough, that's your own fault".
It is euphemistically called the Disposition Matrix by the Obama administration. This president has decreed for himself the power to order the execution of anyone, including American citizens, anywhere, including within the United States, for reasons known only to him and at his sole discretion, without oversight or appeal.
Yeah, it's worse than having a gun walking operation go south on you.
I didn't say any of that. Didn't even imply it. I just pointed out the fundamental flaw in your logic - the stated foundation was "But do you honestly think somebody THAT bigoted won't drag that bigotry into the comic?" In other words, because he's outspokenly opposed to state recognition of gay marriage, he'll contaminate the story he's paid to write with anti-gay propaganda. It also includes a "wow, he's way out on the fringe, all nutty on the issue" stinger. Which is contradicted by the notion that he's in lockstep with most major religions on the issue.
I don't think anybody ought to be forced to do anything. If this guy is your white whale, have at it. Doesn't mean I won't point out silly hyperbole when I see it. Like I said, I think he's on the wrong side of this issue. Doesn't mean every criticism is legitimate.
Generally and roughly speaking, historically (over the last 5-6 decades, anyway), the Left has been pro-civil-rights, while the Right has been con-civil-rights.
Really? Which civil rights are those? Where is the left on self-defense? Or freedom of speech? What about property rights? Where are lefties or righties on victimless crimes? Seems there are more rabble-rousers on the left against some of those victimless crimes. Heck, the left is even in favor of criminalizing certain thoughts for crying out loud.
So no, I reject your self-satisfied notion that there is any pro-civil rights support on the left or the right. There's support of some rights for some people that we deem to be on our team. That's not the same thing as being pro-civil-rights in general.
DoMA is up for challenge in the Supreme Court this term. Should be interesting to see whether fealty to government power wins out over fealty to politics on the left, and if limits on government imposed by the constitution move the right to overcome their love of the social conservatives.
I'd be surprised if it was anything other than a party line vote, but it should be a no brainer to declare this an unconstitutional overreach in a 9-0 vote. Of course one could have said that about Wickard or Raich as well.
But do you honestly think somebody THAT bigoted won't drag that bigotry into the comic?
That's just plain stupid. Superman dates back to the first half of the 20th century. For most of the entire history of Superman the number of people in support of gay marriage was negligible. I dare say there was likely not a single outspoken proponent of gay marriage involved in the writing of Superman for the first several decades. In fact, for most of the history of Superman you'd be hard pressed to find anyone with a public pro-gay stance at all. And virulently anti-gay commentary was commonplace.
And how many story lines dealt with anti-gay marriage propaganda? Or anti-gay anything?
The guy is a devout Mormon, which is a variant of Christianity. Most Christian sects reject homosexuality, at least officially. Toeing that party line hardly makes him an extremist. That puts him in line with a large majority of adherents to the largest religion in the country.
And this is coming from someone who is far, far to the left of any national political figure on the issue of gay rights.
but as of today, I hope that if I ever become a hateful bigot, society will spurn me.
So.... what makes you so sure you aren't a hateful bigot? By who's yardstick to you measure your hatefulness? Yeah, you may hate "all the right people" according to the crowd you run with, but that's hardly a solid moral foundation.
How's this for an idea? We the people stop allowing our leaders to go to war unless we are willing to accept massive death and destruction, including lots of what they euphemistically call collateral damage. If it isn't important enough to justify killing large numbers of people, including women and children, let's just not do it. Somehow I think if we held ourselves to that standard finding some "appropriate compromise" wouldn't be necessary, and war would be a much less frequent occurrence. As a side benefit, the military's job would become much more straightforward: destroy the enemy. No more half-war, half-nationbuilding. Just kill people and break things.
In fact, if that were the standard, perhaps war would quickly become a relic of the past. We'd be extremely reluctant to go to war, and any potential enemies would have to weigh the possible consequence of complete and utter annihilation.
The takehome from TFA for me was that Inhouse/Custom, Android, Ubuntu, FreeRTOS and Windows Embedded 7 are all gaining marketshare year over year with everyone else either holding steady or losing ground. They also happen to be the top 5 OS in the survey. The biggest gainer in what appears to be a consolidating market was Android.
Absolutely - DNA sequencing has moved from non-existent to "really expensive and really slow" when I used to do it over 20 years ago to "extremely fast and quite cheap" today. This has led to an amazing explosion in our understanding of biology - from the first discovery of life beyond animals, plants and bacteria (archaea) by sequencing and comparing ribosomal RNA - to today's ecological studies of the microbiome by mass sequencing of all the DNA found in seawater or sewage or whatever. If that's not a fundamental, game-changing invention... well, I would say I don't know what is. But it is and I know it. So should anyone mildly versed in the sciences - say, someone writing an article about the state of invention. Soon enough it'll be so cheap that you'll get your genes sequenced before your doctor prescribes a new antidepressant to make sure he gives you the right one for your genetic profile. Really amazing stuff.
The "quit throwing people in jail for pot (and other drugs)" position is somehow "removing your power in the name of liberties while giving more power to the wealthy."
How about this position: complete legalization of all drugs. Not just "medical MJ", not just "decriminalization", but full scale, "buy organic pot brownies at Whole Foods" legalization. No special sin taxes, just ordinary sales tax like any other item up for sale.
That's the libertarian position. Any talk of "tax it just like alcohol" is a sop thrown in for those sitting on the fence who might need a little something in exchange for letting go of their anti-drug prejudices.
There's lots of potential problems with the implementation of this policy, but "removing your power in the name of liberties while giving more power to the wealthy" sure as heck ain't one of them.
The peering network proposed in this article was created more than a decade ago by Slashdot user Meridun. Built at a time of slow home internet connections and ISP interference with networks like napster and gnutella, his ELF (extreme low frequency) peering software was designed to be anonymous and untraceable by encryption and proxying of the entire peering infrastructure - including file indexes. The ELF reference was due to intentional throttling of each connection to avoid swamping the user's connection or the ISP. Since each user was proxying several connections while downloading from several other connections, overall performance was slow compared to Bittorrent when it arrived on the scene - but it was much better at preserving anonymity. And you could set your bandwidth usage to as high or low as you desired, so it wasn't really obligate low frequency.
It was an exceptionally cool idea. It didn't take off though. As far as I know it was only frequented by fans of obscure Anime that wasn't available outside Japan at the time. Not being a fan of obscure Anime that wasn't available outside of Japan at the time, I never used it myself.
Maybe a couple of cents, but nine cents per gallon?
Well, we are talking about the station getting charged 3% by the credit card company. At $3.00 per gallon that's.... let's see.. 3 cents per dollar.... 3 cents times 3 dolllars.... 9 cents!
So at $3.00 per gallon they'd be simply passing along their costs by either offering a 9 cent per gallon discount for cash or adding a 9 cent surcharge for credit.
Yeah! And now that you mention it... they really should make a sequel to "The Matrix" some day. It really is surprising that such a big hit was never followed up on...
I remember, DrinkyPoo.... Oh boy, do I remember. When I was a kid doing a lab rotation I made the mistake of plugging what I thought was a serial line printer that we had laying around in a store room into a PC serial port to replace the broken line printer for the gamma counter. Ooops. Everything looked fine for a few seconds, then the printer started spewing paper and printing random gibberish. Then it let the blue smoke out. Fried the printer's board. I think the printer might have gone with an old VAX that had been replaced. I dunno. It was a dumb enough mistake that I took my lumps without asking any further questions. The lab manager, techs and grad students who helped with the fiasco were grateful enough that I took the sole responsibility that we never spoke of it again. But I bet none of us ever made that "the connector looks the same so it must work" mistake again.
That's a great analysis of "regulatory capture" from the perspective of inherent personal freedom. Unfortunately most people, including a large percentage of slashdotters, believe that "free speech" means "people who have the correct opinion are free to speak". And correct of course means "agreeing with me". A large chunk of the readership here and the electorate at large would be happy to have "GMO Free" as a label on their organic tofu, but would recoil at the implications of removing government restrictions on free speech for things they oppose, like tobacco companies, or Monsanto in the case of this thread.
Every time this sort of discussion comes up I am struck by the awesome capacity for cognitive dissonance that most people have. The rabidly pro-freedom, free-as-in-speech free software movement is often populated by equally rabid anti-freedom statists in all other areas of their lives. That's just plain weird.
Yeah, R is great. But that's not the kind of data analysis I'm talking about. The new features in Excel that have such a huge impact on the business environment are database analysis tools. You can build your own cubes right in excel - without knowing what a cube is. "Business Intelligence" is the old buzzword. Things like Cognos, Hyperion and Business Objects compete in this space. To properly use these tools you need a DBA, data warehousing specialist and a reporting expert/administrator. After all of that the business user can build his own reports in the more advanced tools.
With the new excel, if they can get access to the data they can drag and drop to create local cubes and report against them in real time. If you are a reporting/data warehouse person you really have to try these tools out just to see it.
Of course anyone who has worked in the database world can understand just how dangerous this power can be... just because you can access the data easily doesn't mean you have the expertise to understand how wrong the answer you just obtained is. Even well trained DBA's can make simple mistakes in joins to get a plausible but wrong answer. Imagine your typical sales manager trying to determine if his beautifully presented numbers are off by two orders of magnitude.... (Sorry Chad, you aren't going to get that Ferrari next month...)
Microsoft Live is not yet Google Docs, and Google Docs are a long way from Microsoft Office (though each is getting closer).
For a large volume of uses Google Docs is sufficient. If you need to create a simple memo or even a modest legal document Docs is certainly good enough. But it is not remotely getting closer to Office in the larger picture. Office is moving forward much, much faster in high-end business applications. Just take the example of Excel: the new data analysis and reporting capabilities built in to Excel are simply amazing. They exceed anything available from the best vertical reporting apps just a few years back, and are accessible to advanced business users for "playing around" with the data in ways that formerly would have required advanced data warehouse experts. These features in Excel are game changing in the corporate environment where Excel is a stock application for all business user desktops.
I wonder how Delta, a Georgia based company can be subject to California law with respect to online privacy? What about Los Angeles law? Are they subject to that too?
Does Slashdot have to worry about their website complying with Fresno law?
The whole thing just seems a little bit odd. Like when the US goes after foreign-based online gambling companies.
I enjoyed that rant. We tried to solve the problem of IT setting priorities by forcing all of the department heads to prioritize their top 3 items each week. As an example of what we were dealing with, our CFO took a month to put together his list and came back with 5 items on his "top 3" list of projects. After we started to work on his priorities he came back with a new top priority to add to the list. So we put it ahead of #1 on the list and "Project Zero" was born.
He wasn't alone: the president of the company had a meeting with us about a huge initiative he wanted to undertake immediately. Starting the next week he put other items that were more pressing (but not important) at the top of his list. He did this every week. Every week we warned him that we were not going to work on his other project because he was prioritizing these other things this week. Every week he said he understood and signed off on our statement of work. A year later he got pressure from the board of directors and threw us right under the bus. Called me into a huge meeting to yell at us for not getting his project done "in over a year". I calmly produced 60 pages of signed off work orders from him, proving that at every turn he decided to have us work on something else and he bore the full and sole responsibility for the project's delay. You know what? Nobody cared.... I believe the direct quote was "I'm tired of excuses. I expect results, not excuses."
Ok, now I'm confused. We just expanded public healthcare funding and are on a path to single payer when this cobbled-together mess of mandates collapses. Rising cost of education is hardly a redistribution program, but perhaps you refer to a broader path to opportunity... that I can understand and support. But the rising cost of higher education is largely due to all of the money being thrown at it from the government in the form of grants (a little) and much more so loan guarantees. And even with all of that you can still pay for your college education waiting tables - just not at a top tier university. Or a second tier university.
Don't know much about decreasing upward mobility.... people still move between brackets plenty - up and down. Well, down mostly of late, but still. But more than half of the bottom 10% of the poor are in that position because they've been in the prison system. And a majority of those were in prison for drugs. Still not a redistribution problem, but it is a government created problem. I'd prefer that we leave it to AA and others to help people sort out their drug problems, rather than using guns to force them to stop using drugs. But hey, that's just me. If we had a live-and-let-live policy on victimless crimes, that's 5% of the population that would have every opportunity to get their act together and join the middle class... or better. But neither of our two major parties support anything at all to do with fixing that problem. And cutting checks to support them won't help either.
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According to Wikipedia, the Department of Homeland Security has a quarter million employees. Given judicious application of intelligent software design, that's more than enough to keep tabs on everyone in the US. (assuming that in addition to the aforementioned intelligent software design, all quarter-million employees are fairly high-caliber. Given that 55k of those employees are from the TSA, well....)
Yes. Yes it does matter, on all those fronts. You might as well ask "does it matter if you can't leave your apartment because you've got agoraphobia or because you are Jaycee Lee Dugard and some twisted bastard is keeping you in the shed out back." Either way, you can't leave, so what difference does it make?
And you are much more likely to be in the "can't afford it" category living under communism, so it isn't like that's an either/or situation anyway.
I do agree with your punchline though... freedoms have to be protected continuously, or you lose them.
That's an excellent point.
Although the punishment for murder ranges from nothing to death, while the punishment for offending a corporation ranges from a few years in jail (here) to a lifetime to many lifetimes in wages to getting lauded as a hero and receiving millions of dollars (pick your favorite trumped-up corporate scandal).
Too bad prosecutors often fail to live up to the vast responsibility they've been given via prosecutorial discretion. (my favorite of late is a Georgia woman who was convicted of vehicular homicide when her 5 year old kid was hit and killed by a drunk driver as she and her family crossed the street from the bus stop - not only was she not driving, she doesn't even own a car. Nice work, Ms. Prosecutor... more irony - She gets 6 times the prison time of the drunk driver who plowed into her and her family. Double-good nice work, Ms. Prosecutor)
By that rationale, any request on a web server via the HTTP GET or POST that could escalate privilege or divulge private data should go unpunished.
Yes, that's correct. We're not talking about a (D)DOS attack. This was a normal request/response. The owners of the servers should be 100% responsible for the security of those servers in such situations.
Well, by this logic there should be no laws against computer intrusion. If you didn't secure your computer against that port 73 buffer overrun bug, well, that's your fault for getting p0wnd. Or if there is a bug in the java beans backend of your server that crashes all authentication to root when presented with malformed unicode? Well, tough... patch your servers, moron. Some hacker finds a vulnerability in Apache that allows him to get root using get/post commands and uses that to get control of your server - nothing wrong with that?
I mean, really - did you really, really mean to say that attacks using get or post should be perfectly legal? There's lots of malicious activity that can be undertaken using http connections. There's laws against hacking computers for the same reason that there are laws against breaking and entering in the realm of real estate. We don't say "well, you shoulda bought a better lock" when a burglar breaks in through the back door. We say the burglar is a criminal and prosecute him.
That doesn't mean you shouldn't get a better lock, or do a better job of computer security - but I still don't think we should just say "if you didn't secure your server well enough, that's your own fault".
It is euphemistically called the Disposition Matrix by the Obama administration. This president has decreed for himself the power to order the execution of anyone, including American citizens, anywhere, including within the United States, for reasons known only to him and at his sole discretion, without oversight or appeal.
Yeah, it's worse than having a gun walking operation go south on you.
I didn't say any of that. Didn't even imply it. I just pointed out the fundamental flaw in your logic - the stated foundation was "But do you honestly think somebody THAT bigoted won't drag that bigotry into the comic?" In other words, because he's outspokenly opposed to state recognition of gay marriage, he'll contaminate the story he's paid to write with anti-gay propaganda. It also includes a "wow, he's way out on the fringe, all nutty on the issue" stinger. Which is contradicted by the notion that he's in lockstep with most major religions on the issue.
I don't think anybody ought to be forced to do anything. If this guy is your white whale, have at it. Doesn't mean I won't point out silly hyperbole when I see it. Like I said, I think he's on the wrong side of this issue. Doesn't mean every criticism is legitimate.
Generally and roughly speaking, historically (over the last 5-6 decades, anyway), the Left has been pro-civil-rights, while the Right has been con-civil-rights.
Really? Which civil rights are those? Where is the left on self-defense? Or freedom of speech? What about property rights? Where are lefties or righties on victimless crimes? Seems there are more rabble-rousers on the left against some of those victimless crimes. Heck, the left is even in favor of criminalizing certain thoughts for crying out loud.
So no, I reject your self-satisfied notion that there is any pro-civil rights support on the left or the right. There's support of some rights for some people that we deem to be on our team. That's not the same thing as being pro-civil-rights in general.
DoMA is up for challenge in the Supreme Court this term. Should be interesting to see whether fealty to government power wins out over fealty to politics on the left, and if limits on government imposed by the constitution move the right to overcome their love of the social conservatives.
I'd be surprised if it was anything other than a party line vote, but it should be a no brainer to declare this an unconstitutional overreach in a 9-0 vote. Of course one could have said that about Wickard or Raich as well.
But do you honestly think somebody THAT bigoted won't drag that bigotry into the comic?
That's just plain stupid. Superman dates back to the first half of the 20th century. For most of the entire history of Superman the number of people in support of gay marriage was negligible. I dare say there was likely not a single outspoken proponent of gay marriage involved in the writing of Superman for the first several decades. In fact, for most of the history of Superman you'd be hard pressed to find anyone with a public pro-gay stance at all. And virulently anti-gay commentary was commonplace.
And how many story lines dealt with anti-gay marriage propaganda? Or anti-gay anything?
The guy is a devout Mormon, which is a variant of Christianity. Most Christian sects reject homosexuality, at least officially. Toeing that party line hardly makes him an extremist. That puts him in line with a large majority of adherents to the largest religion in the country.
And this is coming from someone who is far, far to the left of any national political figure on the issue of gay rights.
So.... what makes you so sure you aren't a hateful bigot? By who's yardstick to you measure your hatefulness? Yeah, you may hate "all the right people" according to the crowd you run with, but that's hardly a solid moral foundation.
How's this for an idea? We the people stop allowing our leaders to go to war unless we are willing to accept massive death and destruction, including lots of what they euphemistically call collateral damage. If it isn't important enough to justify killing large numbers of people, including women and children, let's just not do it. Somehow I think if we held ourselves to that standard finding some "appropriate compromise" wouldn't be necessary, and war would be a much less frequent occurrence. As a side benefit, the military's job would become much more straightforward: destroy the enemy. No more half-war, half-nationbuilding. Just kill people and break things.
In fact, if that were the standard, perhaps war would quickly become a relic of the past. We'd be extremely reluctant to go to war, and any potential enemies would have to weigh the possible consequence of complete and utter annihilation.
The takehome from TFA for me was that Inhouse/Custom, Android, Ubuntu, FreeRTOS and Windows Embedded 7 are all gaining marketshare year over year with everyone else either holding steady or losing ground. They also happen to be the top 5 OS in the survey. The biggest gainer in what appears to be a consolidating market was Android.
Absolutely - DNA sequencing has moved from non-existent to "really expensive and really slow" when I used to do it over 20 years ago to "extremely fast and quite cheap" today. This has led to an amazing explosion in our understanding of biology - from the first discovery of life beyond animals, plants and bacteria (archaea) by sequencing and comparing ribosomal RNA - to today's ecological studies of the microbiome by mass sequencing of all the DNA found in seawater or sewage or whatever. If that's not a fundamental, game-changing invention... well, I would say I don't know what is. But it is and I know it. So should anyone mildly versed in the sciences - say, someone writing an article about the state of invention. Soon enough it'll be so cheap that you'll get your genes sequenced before your doctor prescribes a new antidepressant to make sure he gives you the right one for your genetic profile. Really amazing stuff.
Wow, that's an impressive display of logic!
The "quit throwing people in jail for pot (and other drugs)" position is somehow "removing your power in the name of liberties while giving more power to the wealthy."
How about this position: complete legalization of all drugs. Not just "medical MJ", not just "decriminalization", but full scale, "buy organic pot brownies at Whole Foods" legalization. No special sin taxes, just ordinary sales tax like any other item up for sale.
That's the libertarian position. Any talk of "tax it just like alcohol" is a sop thrown in for those sitting on the fence who might need a little something in exchange for letting go of their anti-drug prejudices.
There's lots of potential problems with the implementation of this policy, but "removing your power in the name of liberties while giving more power to the wealthy" sure as heck ain't one of them.
The peering network proposed in this article was created more than a decade ago by Slashdot user Meridun. Built at a time of slow home internet connections and ISP interference with networks like napster and gnutella, his ELF (extreme low frequency) peering software was designed to be anonymous and untraceable by encryption and proxying of the entire peering infrastructure - including file indexes. The ELF reference was due to intentional throttling of each connection to avoid swamping the user's connection or the ISP. Since each user was proxying several connections while downloading from several other connections, overall performance was slow compared to Bittorrent when it arrived on the scene - but it was much better at preserving anonymity. And you could set your bandwidth usage to as high or low as you desired, so it wasn't really obligate low frequency.
It was an exceptionally cool idea. It didn't take off though. As far as I know it was only frequented by fans of obscure Anime that wasn't available outside Japan at the time. Not being a fan of obscure Anime that wasn't available outside of Japan at the time, I never used it myself.
Maybe a couple of cents, but nine cents per gallon?
Well, we are talking about the station getting charged 3% by the credit card company. At $3.00 per gallon that's .... let's see.. 3 cents per dollar.... 3 cents times 3 dolllars.... 9 cents!
So at $3.00 per gallon they'd be simply passing along their costs by either offering a 9 cent per gallon discount for cash or adding a 9 cent surcharge for credit.
Yeah! And now that you mention it... they really should make a sequel to "The Matrix" some day. It really is surprising that such a big hit was never followed up on...
I remember, DrinkyPoo.... Oh boy, do I remember. When I was a kid doing a lab rotation I made the mistake of plugging what I thought was a serial line printer that we had laying around in a store room into a PC serial port to replace the broken line printer for the gamma counter. Ooops. Everything looked fine for a few seconds, then the printer started spewing paper and printing random gibberish. Then it let the blue smoke out. Fried the printer's board. I think the printer might have gone with an old VAX that had been replaced. I dunno. It was a dumb enough mistake that I took my lumps without asking any further questions. The lab manager, techs and grad students who helped with the fiasco were grateful enough that I took the sole responsibility that we never spoke of it again. But I bet none of us ever made that "the connector looks the same so it must work" mistake again.
That's a great analysis of "regulatory capture" from the perspective of inherent personal freedom. Unfortunately most people, including a large percentage of slashdotters, believe that "free speech" means "people who have the correct opinion are free to speak". And correct of course means "agreeing with me". A large chunk of the readership here and the electorate at large would be happy to have "GMO Free" as a label on their organic tofu, but would recoil at the implications of removing government restrictions on free speech for things they oppose, like tobacco companies, or Monsanto in the case of this thread.
Every time this sort of discussion comes up I am struck by the awesome capacity for cognitive dissonance that most people have. The rabidly pro-freedom, free-as-in-speech free software movement is often populated by equally rabid anti-freedom statists in all other areas of their lives. That's just plain weird.
Yeah, R is great. But that's not the kind of data analysis I'm talking about. The new features in Excel that have such a huge impact on the business environment are database analysis tools. You can build your own cubes right in excel - without knowing what a cube is. "Business Intelligence" is the old buzzword. Things like Cognos, Hyperion and Business Objects compete in this space. To properly use these tools you need a DBA, data warehousing specialist and a reporting expert/administrator. After all of that the business user can build his own reports in the more advanced tools.
With the new excel, if they can get access to the data they can drag and drop to create local cubes and report against them in real time. If you are a reporting/data warehouse person you really have to try these tools out just to see it.
Of course anyone who has worked in the database world can understand just how dangerous this power can be... just because you can access the data easily doesn't mean you have the expertise to understand how wrong the answer you just obtained is. Even well trained DBA's can make simple mistakes in joins to get a plausible but wrong answer. Imagine your typical sales manager trying to determine if his beautifully presented numbers are off by two orders of magnitude.... (Sorry Chad, you aren't going to get that Ferrari next month...)
Microsoft Live is not yet Google Docs, and Google Docs are a long way from Microsoft Office (though each is getting closer).
For a large volume of uses Google Docs is sufficient. If you need to create a simple memo or even a modest legal document Docs is certainly good enough. But it is not remotely getting closer to Office in the larger picture. Office is moving forward much, much faster in high-end business applications. Just take the example of Excel: the new data analysis and reporting capabilities built in to Excel are simply amazing. They exceed anything available from the best vertical reporting apps just a few years back, and are accessible to advanced business users for "playing around" with the data in ways that formerly would have required advanced data warehouse experts. These features in Excel are game changing in the corporate environment where Excel is a stock application for all business user desktops.
I wonder how Delta, a Georgia based company can be subject to California law with respect to online privacy? What about Los Angeles law? Are they subject to that too?
Does Slashdot have to worry about their website complying with Fresno law?
The whole thing just seems a little bit odd. Like when the US goes after foreign-based online gambling companies.
The 80's called, they want their "robots are stealing our jobs" meme back.
I enjoyed that rant. We tried to solve the problem of IT setting priorities by forcing all of the department heads to prioritize their top 3 items each week. As an example of what we were dealing with, our CFO took a month to put together his list and came back with 5 items on his "top 3" list of projects. After we started to work on his priorities he came back with a new top priority to add to the list. So we put it ahead of #1 on the list and "Project Zero" was born.
He wasn't alone: the president of the company had a meeting with us about a huge initiative he wanted to undertake immediately. Starting the next week he put other items that were more pressing (but not important) at the top of his list. He did this every week. Every week we warned him that we were not going to work on his other project because he was prioritizing these other things this week. Every week he said he understood and signed off on our statement of work. A year later he got pressure from the board of directors and threw us right under the bus. Called me into a huge meeting to yell at us for not getting his project done "in over a year". I calmly produced 60 pages of signed off work orders from him, proving that at every turn he decided to have us work on something else and he bore the full and sole responsibility for the project's delay. You know what? Nobody cared.... I believe the direct quote was "I'm tired of excuses. I expect results, not excuses."
Lesson learned. Don't work for crazy people.
Ok, now I'm confused. We just expanded public healthcare funding and are on a path to single payer when this cobbled-together mess of mandates collapses. Rising cost of education is hardly a redistribution program, but perhaps you refer to a broader path to opportunity... that I can understand and support. But the rising cost of higher education is largely due to all of the money being thrown at it from the government in the form of grants (a little) and much more so loan guarantees. And even with all of that you can still pay for your college education waiting tables - just not at a top tier university. Or a second tier university.
Don't know much about decreasing upward mobility.... people still move between brackets plenty - up and down. Well, down mostly of late, but still. But more than half of the bottom 10% of the poor are in that position because they've been in the prison system. And a majority of those were in prison for drugs. Still not a redistribution problem, but it is a government created problem. I'd prefer that we leave it to AA and others to help people sort out their drug problems, rather than using guns to force them to stop using drugs. But hey, that's just me. If we had a live-and-let-live policy on victimless crimes, that's 5% of the population that would have every opportunity to get their act together and join the middle class ... or better. But neither of our two major parties support anything at all to do with fixing that problem. And cutting checks to support them won't help either.