I'm also watching for the Canadair-RJ aircraft'ss impact on hub-n-spoke vs. direct: the RJ is rapidly replacing turboprops on spoke flights. The RJ class is larger, seats 50-70 people max, increases comfort over old turboprops, has jet speeds and a range of 1800 miles or more, which lets it act against the hub-n-spoke model.
The reason I'm interested is because this sort of counter-movement was speculated on by Warren Buffett a couple years ago: these aircraft allow point to point business models to compete with the hub-n-spoke models.
Then again, Buffett is atypical: a billionaire with a fractional-ownership jet membership because of his famed frugality. Given everyone else's preference for lower prices as the highest criterion, there might not be enough business travellers willing to share direct flights at even a modest premium. And Wikipedia talks a bit about the economics and trends still seeming to be in hub-n-spoke's favor.
(Let's dial up the old wayback machine...bzzt, brrrr-up... kading!)
Shh... there's Joss, working on an early manuscript:
JW (to self): These guys need a casual nickname... uh... rough riders... nah. What else has there been? Redcoats, bluebellies, brownshirts, blues, greys, black ninjas... let's try a color and article of clothing... red-gstring? eew, ick!... green-pants? (snorted laugh) Uh, brownpants... nope, that's almost worse. Brownshirt? nah, think that's the nazis. Ugh. Redcoats? Goldcoats? Nah, too real-estate and only an idiot would wear a gold uniform into battle. Greencoats? Nah, that's the manager at a holiday inn, isn't it?... greycoats? Not bad. Bluecoats? Browncoats? Browncoats. yeah, that'll do!
(alt version):
(Costumer) Hey, Joss, we have all these old brown jackets. Wanna use 'em? (JW): Cool, rebel uniforms!!!
(alt alt version):
(JW): Heh, I could make that scruffy canvas jacket I wore in high school into a fashion statement!
(We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming...)
Suspecting (without seeing the show) that, because the uniform nickname had the same color as Nazi brownshirts it is therefore laden with meaning, is pretty absurd. This would be even clearer for you after watching the series: a ragtag bunch of rural individualists that got their butts kicked by an empire in *no* way makes me think 'nazi'. At least not with respect to the losers.
To be fair, something minor like generic uniform colors aren't symbolism; if that sort of symbolism was intended, most authors would use other parallels/cues to reaffirm the symbolism. And there's plenty of other submaterial in Firefly, so why bother?
Hey, I loved it too but I'm also biased in favor of it (I grew up in southeast Idaho). That said, I can name funnier movies, better characterization, etc. It's full of moments where more money could have improved it. But, like I said in another post on this thread, doing so costs a *lot*! Napoleon D is the *archtype* of my point: you can do so much cheaply nowadays.
The details? I am SO not an expert, but from what I've gleaned from friends that are:
The *details* are the zillion budget items for a movie: sets, lighting, sound, special effects, costumes, makeup, etc etc etc. They're manpower-intensive, use specialized gear, and perfection in these crafts only comes with experience. Otherwise, the audience will notice.
Every one of the 200 names that go zinging past at a movie's end represents a category of details important enough that the show hired a specialist. Small, indy films cut corners on these, but that just means people try to do several jobs at once, and at some point the audience will start to notice.
So, if you wanna do things right, you hire some help. Once you grow beyond a team of a few people, start planning a la Brooks' mythical man-month, where each sixth person needs a manager. That gets fun, because the boss role is split between some guy too distracted to care about half of the details (the director) and people hired to handle these details as transparently as possible. Add in accountants and schedulers and people to round up the crafts needed or get bids for the work being done, etc. Even on a good day, it really starts to look like a wierdass engineering project by the time you're done. Once costs stretch the budget (and they will, whether you're doing Titanic or a documentary) throw in someone obsessed with budget (producer). If you're sadistic, imagine the worst-case of the conflict between director and producer.
Then, do everything on insane interdependent timelines: sets can take weeks to assemble, and hours to touch up before filming. Makeup often starts at 4am, there's a continual flow of 'plan shot, make adjustments to fit plan, shoot, repeat', so that actors are sometimes only onstage for a few hours total spaced over as much as a 16-hour day, and in addition to the crafts, security, catering, medics, etc. are all needed to help all these people throughout that long day. Add external factors (weather, lost gear, changes in story, disappearing cast members).
The end result is fairly inefficient, with dozens of people waiting for their next task, but billing for the whole day. Spending rates soar, but each person you remove causes tiny gaps and mistakes or slows things down immensely. A director pausing to review a shot also means everyone else is pausing to wait for him. But not pausing could mean rebuilding the set, flying actors back in, etc. when a shot is deemed unworkable...
I don't see gadgets *solving* a lot of this. And as they do, new complications are introduced. For example, DV allows better immediate-review capability than film. That saves $$$loads$$$ on film, but increases the chance for delays. Sound gear gets better, but audience expectations increase. Special effects are a never-ending race with audience expectations, too.
Probably the best way to do it would be to get together with someone like John Carmack and define a series of prize awards for technologies that are critical to bringing the cost of movie production down.
You mean, like a DV camcorder and a PC?! Or custom flash animations? Or Machinima? Or an Intel 'Play' ($100 or less at toy stores everywhere)?
Seriously, someone emailed me a 1-minute, 20-frame animated gif that made me laugh myself silly (google 'lord-of-the-rings really-really'). Napoleon Dynamite (a so-so flick) cost $60,000. 401-the-movie (or whatever that homebrew flick was called) was done by two guys in a garage. Whether you go gonzo and buy old gear (early video toasters are STUPID cheap on ebay, for the capability they have) or buy new consumer/hobbyist gear (toys or personal gear), you can create stuff easily nowadays. And once done, between burnable discs, torrents and viral marketing and websites, good material can be distributed more easily than ever, too.
The difference between a damn-funny personal movie and commercial cinema isn't in the creativity (the writing, editing, acting, etc). It's all the details. I judged a regional film fest last year, and the judges instinctively 'cut slack' to beginner projects. If the content is good, everyone tolerates cut corners. But, once there's money to be made, you have to go back and reshoot, paying attention to the details.
Until the goal is truly going commercial, people can do amazing stuff just using COTS gadgetry and a PC. The capability is there sixteen different ways to sundown. Hell, people can do cool stuff in freakin' Powerpoint, as David Byrne demonstrated last year.
I'm sure there are technical hardware improvements possible. But they're not the barrier. Competitions or websites giving these airtime/attention, busted copyright laws (it should be legal/cheap (via compulsory licensing?) to co-opt content like LOTR RRSE does) and desire and experience are about the only impediments.
Wow, not to be a troll, but I can't decide if you're just lassez-faire or a shill for... what... a shill for the police state? (I can't believe I'm saying that!) I mean, you've just blurted out some spooky hand-wavy opinions like it appears it'll be privacy safe, there's nothing compulsory, and who really needs all that privacy?
Your worst remark was:
The only concern, one might suppose, is for people who don't want this information accumulated should their computer later be searched by others (the law? An employer? A relative?). This is perhaps a legitimate concern, but hard to argue for, as a reason to cripple error reporting.
First, 'cuz I don't wanna' is all the argument one should need for refusing to be a perpetual beta tester for a vendor unless they freakin' PAY me. IMNSHO, that rule so utterly outranks everything else. One should NEVER EVER EVER have a hard time arguing for personal privacy. BECAUSE I SAID NO is all the argument needed.
That said, an automated system has dreadful risks. Just like security vs. phonecams, this is a big deal for anyone that does high-security tasks! Just a step below the *SECRET* work (often done on air-gap-separated networks that are safe from accidental disclosure to MS) is work done that has legal privilege, corporate/governmental security requirements or limited-release rules. It is routinely worked on using people and systems that might accidentally send it to MS. Leaked document contents would be catastrophic, regardless of anonymizing the OS-specific data.
In other words, if worrying about getting caught by wife/boss/law is the Only concern you can suppose, you are definitely not grasping the breadth or depth of privacy.
'Mothing compulsory' is no excuse, since vendors have a habit of selfishly shifting the rules to suit themselves.
Again, sorry for the flamage... I guess I either need stronger meds or a less-orwellian government.
You've covered the two logical ends of this, but between them I can still envision misuse of this:
An whistleblower leaks a boxful of only-slightly-damaging stuff about Enron. In the midst of it is a contract. Publication of the negotiated rate violates trade secrets and there isn't anything else about *that* document that deserves confidentiality protections. Enron sifts thru, finds it and a few other examples, and makes the demand for ID based on trade-secret violations.
No argument from me. But I didn't say 'confer rights'... I said 'don't give up any rights'. That was *specifically* what GP claimed. They can't really believe that we should tiptoe around this confederacy of dunces because being smarter than a box of hair (or enjoying the novelty of $1 coins and $2 bills) somehow has become a liability that strips away one's rights. That remains the dumbest damn thing I've ever heard, and (as a slashdot regular) that's saying a lot.
Oh, and what's your IPALO/. wisdom with respect to unreasonable arrest or seizure law? Surely one is protected from false arrest (or whatever) (IRANAL) when using $2 bills, no?
Honestly, can you tell me what they'd need more for if all they're going to do is type documents, send pictures, and surf the web? A friend of mine is still running his 800mhz Powerbook at work with 128MB of RAM with no complaints.
They're not the cutting edge. Hell, I'm not, but I see a need for speed because of: mp3's, video-on-demand, podcasting, voice-recognition, rippin' dvd's, capturing TV (myth, xptv, or whatever), centralized media and multiple remote players, kids doing homemade animation, gaming, backups, making backups of dvds so the 2-year-old doesn't destroy the original, advanced video processing, sound editing, home photography archives...
Nah, I don't need a gigabit net, firewire, raid or fast computers. This here 1-mhz Altair, wordstar, and 8" floppies will do me just fine. Together with a daisy-wheel, I can do all the writing I want. Really.
Still to come: videophones, real-time avatars, bespoke animation/video, more on-demand video/audio (including education and games), always-on videoconference ability, trivial offsite backups/redundancy, depth-of-field or other non-video data added to video feeds, any-to-any video feeds (think n-megapixel streaming cameraphone), realtime data analysis on problems that currently are out of reach, even broader upheavals between mainstream-media and blogs/indy musicians, etc.
Every time you give me more power, I'll find problems worth solving and places to use it. I used to slip a digit in some finite element work and take puzzles from 40-hrs of cpu time to unsolvable. Given a few more years, my old work will be running at 30 frames a second.
Right now, a pic of the Power5 chip is pinned to my wall: 8 cpu cores, 4 mmus, 144mb cache, one chip/die. Ads say this baby scales up to 16-ways for 128 cpus possible, at 2ghz. I say it's just a good start...
Duh... just transfer your domain registration to Jump Domain (or google for negative reviews of incredibly-bad, incredibly-expensive registrars), then hand her the keys in return for a cashiers check for the transfer fee.
I've got this Dell Inkjet 720 piece-of-shit whose refill cartridges are even MORE proprietary and spendy than Lexmark's (the printer's maker, uncoincidentally). Don't blame me, it came free with a cheap PC my mom bought. After weeks of plotting a way to kill it (catapult? Charcoal and liquid oxygen? Tommy Gun?... hmmm) I found a better resolution:
I'm about to give to a frightful local charter school that is apparently run by Jackbooted-Thugs-R-Us. Enforced parade marches, no talking except at lunch or if asked a question, etc. Win-win: two evils get mutual antagonism and I get a clear conscience. Oh, and I even get a tax write-off!
It's not a freedom of the press issue...A civil crime has allegedly been committed and the bloggers (are) akin to... material witness... examples of corporate malfeasance are just retarded. If Apple was committing a crime, this could never be happening. Revealing a crime is a protected act and supercedes the civil contract.
Thanks for the clarification/reminder. I'm trying to weed thru the mass of 'free press' misreadings/opinions to answer the more-valid concerns against Secrets law being used as a employee gag-order mechanism. You hit that one soundly, but left me with two questions:
1 - You used the term 'civil crime'... is 'civil crime' a legitimate concept? IANAL, but that seems to juxtapose two frameworks (i.e., civil vs. criminal). 2 - Can Trade-Secret subpoenaes be used as a tool to 'chill' whistleblower activity? Could some future Enron trump up a Trade Secret claim to get the name of an anonymous source? If so, we're back to this being less black-n-white.
A coworker told such a similar story back around '96...
The only detail that shifted was the mall rent-a-cop also was clueless, and the cop that arrived on scene was noticeably belligerent with him until this *priceless* moment when he realized that my friend was just some guy and that everyone else was dumber than dirt. The cop gasped, stared at them (clerk, manager and rent-a-cop) for a moment, threw the $2 on the counter and said "It's Real, they exist, give him his food" and stormed out to go do some real work.... similarity is so tight, I almost wonder who cribbed the story from whom. But either way, it's priceless.
OT: if MS has breached its requirements to a person, is that person then justified in breaching his/her requirements? For example, the one about not decompiling. Just a thought.
No, just as with the GPL, under copyright law, Microsoft's license is the only thing that allows you to use their software at all, so technically if they breach their license, then you no longer are able to use that license to use the software, and are therefore in violation of copyright.
The law's only as good as 12 angry jurors...
Might be fun to send a 30-day-refund request with the remark that "I bought this to decompile it for educational purposes. Please refund my purchase. Since there is a chance I am misinterpreting the legal jargon, if it is ok for me to decompile this for educational purposes, no response is needed."
No, I found it. A dozen google-searches and bobs-yer-uncle. But the key word is 'dig'. 2006 isn't a real budget, yet. And as I wrote to another commenter, seeing the recap I sought in table 12 of hundreds of pages collection of numbers is the 'hiding' I dislike.
Oh, and I hesitate to trust even Uncle Sam when it comes to opening word docs and spreadsheets. Infosec audits for him-- um-mm, not so safe.
But having to scroll through pages and pages on a nonroot document... I think that's worthy of saying PITA and buried to describe the circumstance. I went to OMB and CBO looking for this info, for example.
And if I handed this report to my boss, he'd ask for a summary paragraph at the head that said "by category, we're spending $X on X, $Y on Y,". The summary paragraph for this? Well, from OMB/budget/fy2005, you get collections of topics. Picking a likely one (budget.html) I get a set of links. Topmost is a lengthy policy 'speech' by GWB (understandable that it is first), six more on specific agendas, twenty departmental budgets, and then your summary table set. It isn't as bad as the location of the plans for the Bypass that took out Arthur Dent's house, but it is well-obfuscated.
I understand that is the way things work, but as an engineer I also dislike the deception, here or anywhere else it happens. Compare the annual reports from companies in banner years vs. bad years... in the former, they are eager to show off the success and growth and profit. In the latter, they talk about conditions and percentages and influencing factors, and even occasionally split stuff wierdly (discretionary vs. fixed budgets, splitting a sector loss among geographical regions, or etc).
This one is just nuts. Why on earth am I writing essays which are going to be marked automatically by a machine?... I should be able to use a machine so I don't have to go through the effort of writing one.... writing it... damn well deserves to be read by the professor who assigned it.
Damn straight!! I said this same thing to my supervisor, who didn't read all of my status reports or email. At first he disagreed, but I held my ground.
Oh, and I'm still looking for a job, if anyone's got any leads.
NASA doesn't get the funding that it needs, yes. They get half of what they got, proportionally, back in the days of Apollo, and their budget is completely dwarfed by things like the military, medicare, medicaid, social security, national debt interest, etc.
The hard numbers are interesting:
Nasa : $16 Billion Military : $420 Billion Medicare : $300 Billion Medicaid : $175 Billion SocialSec: $518 Billion Interest : $322 Billion Etc. :... well, there's $2500 Billion total spending
Even more interesting is the serious PITA it is to find this data.
I've got projected 2005, budgeted 2005, some 2004, and some 2006
stuff overlapping up there. Politicians and agencies hide the info a zillion
ways, talking in percentages and percent-changes whenever it'll
improve their argument.
Um, that's why they are closed? There's a perfectly good list of API's you are supposed to use. Quick tip, they are not the ones you are have to reverse engineer.
hahahahahahaha, you so veddy funny.
Like in life, Microsoft API docs are full of shades of grey. In this case, let's say white is things working how microsoft says they work, black is absolutely nothing working as documented, and the spectrum in between is where all their API's live. I believe the *'FULL DETAILS'* aren't even necessarily understood by microsoft: like any other progs, they've got too much to do, too little time, and too little time to backtrack, refactor, clean and document. And as the old saw goes, I choose to not attribute to evil what can be explained by incompetence (or distractions, laziness, or pointy-haired bosses).
Dig into WinCE's API, or MFC or any other published microsoft code, and you'll see plenty of supporting evidence. 3rd party coders would have to be psychic to anticipate which way things'll break due to a new SP.
In the US, let's start with unenumerated rights, contract under duress (since you go wankin' off on the whole license thing next) and glance for a moment at the right to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. Of those 3, 2 fit into my doing anything I want on a DVD. In Norway, reverse-engineering for compatibility is also protected, per the article.
Then you lost most of us completely at 'you bought a license.' Nope. We are buying stuff. CD's and DVD's are tangible goods, not an oddly-shaped contract. This is one time a jury would eat your freakin' lunch: I defy you to find a roomful of jurors that say that the commonly-held notion is that a DVD is a license.
I'm in a tiny consultancy of 50. But the stuff I describe is a mishmash of 2 current customers: one of the largest oil companies (we help their security division worldwide) and a gazillion-dollar Department of Justice project (70 servers, several hundred desktops and >50 terabytes on a Hitachi 9980, with a budget in the tens of millions).
Before that, I worked in the I/T branch of a company with 800 ppl (an engineering firm with a serious geek quotient, where the leadership was fully aware of FOSS and how heavily it was being used), and worked for Cargill's I/T. At something like 70,000 ppl, Cargill tended to have the personality you're talking about: they were all about managed/maintained solutions until you looked closely. Then it was a mixed bag: I watched one honcho shoot himself in the foot by banning a rogue/unsupported AND critical I/T element, and watched 2 lower managers respect that task-criticality outweighed the support concern. But both of them hid the details to avoid a backlash.
With I/T being squeezed to do more with less, shrinking the budget for support contracts are a way to improve the bottom line. Better to get the raise for cutting costs risk getting fired for a failure than to get penalized or fired for spiralling costs, the lowest mgr's think. That, among other things, is why I hate being a manager and like being a consultant: If I am the so-called hired-expert, I can honestly list the flaws needing attention and push steadily for fixes, rather than be caught between ethics and a sharp set of fiscal scissors.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm also watching for the Canadair-RJ aircraft'ss impact on hub-n-spoke vs. direct: the RJ is rapidly replacing turboprops on spoke flights. The RJ class is larger, seats 50-70 people max, increases comfort over old turboprops, has jet speeds and a range of 1800 miles or more, which lets it act against the hub-n-spoke model.
The reason I'm interested is because this sort of counter-movement was speculated on by Warren Buffett a couple years ago: these aircraft allow point to point business models to compete with the hub-n-spoke models.
Then again, Buffett is atypical: a billionaire with a fractional-ownership jet membership because of his famed frugality. Given everyone else's preference for lower prices as the highest criterion, there might not be enough business travellers willing to share direct flights at even a modest premium. And Wikipedia talks a bit about the economics and trends still seeming to be in hub-n-spoke's favor.
(Let's dial up the old wayback machine...bzzt, brrrr-up... kading!)
Shh... there's Joss, working on an early manuscript:
JW (to self): These guys need a casual nickname... uh... rough riders... nah. What else has there been? Redcoats, bluebellies, brownshirts, blues, greys, black ninjas... let's try a color and article of clothing... red-gstring? eew, ick!... green-pants? (snorted laugh) Uh, brownpants... nope, that's almost worse. Brownshirt? nah, think that's the nazis. Ugh. Redcoats? Goldcoats? Nah, too real-estate and only an idiot would wear a gold uniform into battle. Greencoats? Nah, that's the manager at a holiday inn, isn't it?... greycoats? Not bad. Bluecoats? Browncoats? Browncoats. yeah, that'll do!
(alt version):
(Costumer) Hey, Joss, we have all these old brown jackets. Wanna use 'em?
(JW): Cool, rebel uniforms!!!
(alt alt version):
(JW): Heh, I could make that scruffy canvas jacket I wore in high school into a fashion statement!
(We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming...)
Suspecting (without seeing the show) that, because the uniform nickname had the same color as Nazi brownshirts it is therefore laden with meaning, is pretty absurd. This would be even clearer for you after watching the series: a ragtag bunch of rural individualists that got their butts kicked by an empire in *no* way makes me think 'nazi'. At least not with respect to the losers.
To be fair, something minor like generic uniform colors aren't symbolism; if that sort of symbolism was intended, most authors would use other parallels/cues to reaffirm the symbolism. And there's plenty of other submaterial in Firefly, so why bother?
Hey, I loved it too but I'm also biased in favor of it (I grew up in southeast Idaho). That said, I can name funnier movies, better characterization, etc. It's full of moments where more money could have improved it. But, like I said in another post on this thread, doing so costs a *lot*! Napoleon D is the *archtype* of my point: you can do so much cheaply nowadays.
The details? I am SO not an expert, but from what I've gleaned from friends that are:
The *details* are the zillion budget items for a movie: sets, lighting, sound, special effects, costumes, makeup, etc etc etc. They're manpower-intensive, use specialized gear, and perfection in these crafts only comes with experience. Otherwise, the audience will notice.
Every one of the 200 names that go zinging past at a movie's end represents a category of details important enough that the show hired a specialist. Small, indy films cut corners on these, but that just means people try to do several jobs at once, and at some point the audience will start to notice.
So, if you wanna do things right, you hire some help. Once you grow beyond a team of a few people, start planning a la Brooks' mythical man-month, where each sixth person needs a manager. That gets fun, because the boss role is split between some guy too distracted to care about half of the details (the director) and people hired to handle these details as transparently as possible. Add in accountants and schedulers and people to round up the crafts needed or get bids for the work being done, etc. Even on a good day, it really starts to look like a wierdass engineering project by the time you're done. Once costs stretch the budget (and they will, whether you're doing Titanic or a documentary) throw in someone obsessed with budget (producer). If you're sadistic, imagine the worst-case of the conflict between director and producer.
Then, do everything on insane interdependent timelines: sets can take weeks to assemble, and hours to touch up before filming. Makeup often starts at 4am, there's a continual flow of 'plan shot, make adjustments to fit plan, shoot, repeat', so that actors are sometimes only onstage for a few hours total spaced over as much as a 16-hour day, and in addition to the crafts, security, catering, medics, etc. are all needed to help all these people throughout that long day. Add external factors (weather, lost gear, changes in story, disappearing cast members).
The end result is fairly inefficient, with dozens of people waiting for their next task, but billing for the whole day. Spending rates soar, but each person you remove causes tiny gaps and mistakes or slows things down immensely. A director pausing to review a shot also means everyone else is pausing to wait for him. But not pausing could mean rebuilding the set, flying actors back in, etc. when a shot is deemed unworkable...
I don't see gadgets *solving* a lot of this. And as they do, new complications are introduced. For example, DV allows better immediate-review capability than film. That saves $$$loads$$$ on film, but increases the chance for delays. Sound gear gets better, but audience expectations increase. Special effects are a never-ending race with audience expectations, too.
You mean, like a DV camcorder and a PC?! Or custom flash animations? Or Machinima? Or an Intel 'Play' ($100 or less at toy stores everywhere)?
Seriously, someone emailed me a 1-minute, 20-frame animated gif that made me laugh myself silly (google 'lord-of-the-rings really-really'). Napoleon Dynamite (a so-so flick) cost $60,000. 401-the-movie (or whatever that homebrew flick was called) was done by two guys in a garage. Whether you go gonzo and buy old gear (early video toasters are STUPID cheap on ebay, for the capability they have) or buy new consumer/hobbyist gear (toys or personal gear), you can create stuff easily nowadays. And once done, between burnable discs, torrents and viral marketing and websites, good material can be distributed more easily than ever, too.
The difference between a damn-funny personal movie and commercial cinema isn't in the creativity (the writing, editing, acting, etc). It's all the details. I judged a regional film fest last year, and the judges instinctively 'cut slack' to beginner projects. If the content is good, everyone tolerates cut corners. But, once there's money to be made, you have to go back and reshoot, paying attention to the details.
Until the goal is truly going commercial, people can do amazing stuff just using COTS gadgetry and a PC. The capability is there sixteen different ways to sundown. Hell, people can do cool stuff in freakin' Powerpoint, as David Byrne demonstrated last year.
I'm sure there are technical hardware improvements possible. But they're not the barrier. Competitions or websites giving these airtime/attention, busted copyright laws (it should be legal/cheap (via compulsory licensing?) to co-opt content like LOTR RRSE does) and desire and experience are about the only impediments.
Duh... Nothing compulsory, not mothing compulsory.
Your worst remark was:
First, 'cuz I don't wanna' is all the argument one should need for refusing to be a perpetual beta tester for a vendor unless they freakin' PAY me. IMNSHO, that rule so utterly outranks everything else. One should NEVER EVER EVER have a hard time arguing for personal privacy. BECAUSE I SAID NO is all the argument needed.
That said, an automated system has dreadful risks. Just like security vs. phonecams, this is a big deal for anyone that does high-security tasks! Just a step below the *SECRET* work (often done on air-gap-separated networks that are safe from accidental disclosure to MS) is work done that has legal privilege, corporate/governmental security requirements or limited-release rules. It is routinely worked on using people and systems that might accidentally send it to MS. Leaked document contents would be catastrophic, regardless of anonymizing the OS-specific data.
In other words, if worrying about getting caught by wife/boss/law is the Only concern you can suppose, you are definitely not grasping the breadth or depth of privacy.
'Mothing compulsory' is no excuse, since vendors have a habit of selfishly shifting the rules to suit themselves.
Again, sorry for the flamage... I guess I either need stronger meds or a less-orwellian government.
You've covered the two logical ends of this, but between them I can still envision misuse of this:
An whistleblower leaks a boxful of only-slightly-damaging stuff about Enron. In the midst of it is a contract. Publication of the negotiated rate violates trade secrets and there isn't anything else about *that* document that deserves confidentiality protections. Enron sifts thru, finds it and a few other examples, and makes the demand for ID based on trade-secret violations.
Oh, and what's your IPALO/. wisdom with respect to unreasonable arrest or seizure law? Surely one is protected from false arrest (or whatever) (IRANAL) when using $2 bills, no?
They're not the cutting edge. Hell, I'm not, but I see a need for speed because of: mp3's, video-on-demand, podcasting, voice-recognition, rippin' dvd's, capturing TV (myth, xptv, or whatever), centralized media and multiple remote players, kids doing homemade animation, gaming, backups, making backups of dvds so the 2-year-old doesn't destroy the original, advanced video processing, sound editing, home photography archives...
Nah, I don't need a gigabit net, firewire, raid or fast computers. This here 1-mhz Altair, wordstar, and 8" floppies will do me just fine. Together with a daisy-wheel, I can do all the writing I want. Really.
Still to come: videophones, real-time avatars, bespoke animation/video, more on-demand video/audio (including education and games), always-on videoconference ability, trivial offsite backups/redundancy, depth-of-field or other non-video data added to video feeds, any-to-any video feeds (think n-megapixel streaming cameraphone), realtime data analysis on problems that currently are out of reach, even broader upheavals between mainstream-media and blogs/indy musicians, etc.
Every time you give me more power, I'll find problems worth solving and places to use it. I used to slip a digit in some finite element work and take puzzles from 40-hrs of cpu time to unsolvable. Given a few more years, my old work will be running at 30 frames a second.
Right now, a pic of the Power5 chip is pinned to my wall: 8 cpu cores, 4 mmus, 144mb cache, one chip/die. Ads say this baby scales up to 16-ways for 128 cpus possible, at 2ghz. I say it's just a good start...
I've got this Dell Inkjet 720 piece-of-shit whose refill cartridges are even MORE proprietary and spendy than Lexmark's (the printer's maker, uncoincidentally). Don't blame me, it came free with a cheap PC my mom bought. After weeks of plotting a way to kill it (catapult? Charcoal and liquid oxygen? Tommy Gun?... hmmm) I found a better resolution:
I'm about to give to a frightful local charter school that is apparently run by Jackbooted-Thugs-R-Us. Enforced parade marches, no talking except at lunch or if asked a question, etc. Win-win: two evils get mutual antagonism and I get a clear conscience. Oh, and I even get a tax write-off!
Thanks for the clarification/reminder. I'm trying to weed thru the mass of 'free press' misreadings/opinions to answer the more-valid concerns against Secrets law being used as a employee gag-order mechanism. You hit that one soundly, but left me with two questions:
1 - You used the term 'civil crime'... is 'civil crime' a legitimate concept? IANAL, but that seems to juxtapose two frameworks (i.e., civil vs. criminal).
2 - Can Trade-Secret subpoenaes be used as a tool to 'chill' whistleblower activity? Could some future Enron trump up a Trade Secret claim to get the name of an anonymous source? If so, we're back to this being less black-n-white.
Let me guess, the existence of $2 bills was news to you...
A coworker told such a similar story back around '96...
... similarity is so tight, I almost wonder who cribbed the story from whom. But either way, it's priceless.
The only detail that shifted was the mall rent-a-cop also was clueless, and the cop that arrived on scene was noticeably belligerent with him until this *priceless* moment when he realized that my friend was just some guy and that everyone else was dumber than dirt. The cop gasped, stared at them (clerk, manager and rent-a-cop) for a moment, threw the $2 on the counter and said "It's Real, they exist, give him his food" and stormed out to go do some real work.
The law's only as good as 12 angry jurors...
Might be fun to send a 30-day-refund request with the remark that "I bought this to decompile it for educational purposes. Please refund my purchase. Since there is a chance I am misinterpreting the legal jargon, if it is ok for me to decompile this for educational purposes, no response is needed."
No, I found it. A dozen google-searches and bobs-yer-uncle. But the key word is 'dig'. 2006 isn't a real budget, yet. And as I wrote to another commenter, seeing the recap I sought in table 12 of hundreds of pages collection of numbers is the 'hiding' I dislike.
Oh, and I hesitate to trust even Uncle Sam when it comes to opening word docs and spreadsheets. Infosec audits for him-- um-mm, not so safe.
Table s-12 was what I sought. Thanks.
But having to scroll through pages and pages on a nonroot document... I think that's worthy of saying PITA and buried to describe the circumstance. I went to OMB and CBO looking for this info, for example.
And if I handed this report to my boss, he'd ask for a summary paragraph at the head that said "by category, we're spending $X on X, $Y on Y,". The summary paragraph for this? Well, from OMB/budget/fy2005, you get collections of topics. Picking a likely one (budget.html) I get a set of links. Topmost is a lengthy policy 'speech' by GWB (understandable that it is first), six more on specific agendas, twenty departmental budgets, and then your summary table set. It isn't as bad as the location of the plans for the Bypass that took out Arthur Dent's house, but it is well-obfuscated.
I understand that is the way things work, but as an engineer I also dislike the deception, here or anywhere else it happens. Compare the annual reports from companies in banner years vs. bad years... in the former, they are eager to show off the success and growth and profit. In the latter, they talk about conditions and percentages and influencing factors, and even occasionally split stuff wierdly (discretionary vs. fixed budgets, splitting a sector loss among geographical regions, or etc).
Oh, and I'm still looking for a job, if anyone's got any leads.
The correct spelling is Novluser. You left off the 'r'.
Trust a shareholder.
Is there anyone still buying that pack of Rethuglican bulls**t?
http://www.perkel.com/politics/gore/internet.htm
http://www.sethf.com/gore/
So, who're we to believe? Some guy on slashdot, rethugican hacks, or Vint Cerf... I choose to believe Cerf.
Everyone, don't feed the troll.
hahahahahahaha, you so veddy funny.
Like in life, Microsoft API docs are full of shades of grey. In this case, let's say white is things working how microsoft says they work, black is absolutely nothing working as documented, and the spectrum in between is where all their API's live. I believe the *'FULL DETAILS'* aren't even necessarily understood by microsoft: like any other progs, they've got too much to do, too little time, and too little time to backtrack, refactor, clean and document. And as the old saw goes, I choose to not attribute to evil what can be explained by incompetence (or distractions, laziness, or pointy-haired bosses).
Dig into WinCE's API, or MFC or any other published microsoft code, and you'll see plenty of supporting evidence. 3rd party coders would have to be psychic to anticipate which way things'll break due to a new SP.
Since when was the 'Right to be entertained...'
In the US, let's start with unenumerated rights, contract under duress (since you go wankin' off on the whole license thing next) and glance for a moment at the right to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. Of those 3, 2 fit into my doing anything I want on a DVD. In Norway, reverse-engineering for compatibility is also protected, per the article.
Then you lost most of us completely at 'you bought a license.' Nope. We are buying stuff. CD's and DVD's are tangible goods, not an oddly-shaped contract. This is one time a jury would eat your freakin' lunch: I defy you to find a roomful of jurors that say that the commonly-held notion is that a DVD is a license.
Glad I'm not the only one that read this as NSFW: "Australian NSFW Government making way for Linux"... huh-wha?!
I'm in a tiny consultancy of 50. But the stuff I describe is a mishmash of 2 current customers: one of the largest oil companies (we help their security division worldwide) and a gazillion-dollar Department of Justice project (70 servers, several hundred desktops and >50 terabytes on a Hitachi 9980, with a budget in the tens of millions).
Before that, I worked in the I/T branch of a company with 800 ppl (an engineering firm with a serious geek quotient, where the leadership was fully aware of FOSS and how heavily it was being used), and worked for Cargill's I/T. At something like 70,000 ppl, Cargill tended to have the personality you're talking about: they were all about managed/maintained solutions until you looked closely. Then it was a mixed bag: I watched one honcho shoot himself in the foot by banning a rogue/unsupported AND critical I/T element, and watched 2 lower managers respect that task-criticality outweighed the support concern. But both of them hid the details to avoid a backlash.
With I/T being squeezed to do more with less, shrinking the budget for support contracts are a way to improve the bottom line. Better to get the raise for cutting costs risk getting fired for a failure than to get penalized or fired for spiralling costs, the lowest mgr's think. That, among other things, is why I hate being a manager and like being a consultant: If I am the so-called hired-expert, I can honestly list the flaws needing attention and push steadily for fixes, rather than be caught between ethics and a sharp set of fiscal scissors.