In this case, it's genuine contamination since it's a version they never released. So Monsanto did a field test, after which they were supposed to destroy all of the plants. Now a bunch of years they find that version out in the wild.
If that's the case then we don't know if it is safe for human consumption, do we? We don't even know if it's environmentally safe. In fact, if Monsanto did destroy all of it and it came back then we're staring in the face of the first seeds of the Zombie Apocalypse: Zombie Wheat
In this case, it's genuine contamination since it's a version they never released. So Monsanto did a field test, after which they were supposed to destroy all of the plants. Now a bunch of years they find that version out in the wild.
If that's the case then we don't know if it is safe for human consumption, do we? We don't even know if it's environmentally safe. In fact, if Monsanto did destroy all of it and it came back then we're staring in the face of the first seeds of the Zombie Apocalypse: Zombie Wheat
We don't know if any new wheat mutant is safe. At any time, nature could have come up with a highly toxic variety. People have kept crops safe for thousands of years by planting edible wheat and destroying the stuff that tasted bad or made people sick. The only danger is that it's possible for a company like Monsanto to produce and sell large amounts of bad crops before it has been thoroughly tested for safety.
It's impossible to avoid cross contamination with wheat. Like most grasses, it releases its pollen into the wind and any plant of the same (or close enough) species it falls on will be a hybrid.
No, the problem is NOT how the world is structured. It is that autistic people are disabled with a brain disorder we can't fix, and the "treatments" are, to date, largely ineffective at helping them deal with their disability. But there are plenty of people who are out there selling snake oil to their desperate parents.
Humans can choose to simply ignore rules because for humans, rules are not built in. If machines are build with rules built in at a low level, it may be much more constraining on their behavior, even if they are very intelligent.
“We’ve shown that the brain’s indicator of word learning in 2-year-olds already diagnosed with autism predicts their eventual skills on a broad set of cognitive and linguistic abilities and adaptive behaviors,” said lead author Patricia Kuhl, co-director of the University of Washington’s Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences.
In other words, they can tell you a lot about your kid's future based on this one test.
The bad news:
“This is true four years after the initial test, and regardless of the type of autism treatment the children received,” she said.
The FSF's position on javascript is perfectly consistent with their position on other software; because javascript is just software. It hardly seems surprising that they would be displeased that government-backed, your-tax-dollars-at-work sites would be relying on proprietary javascript.
When it's my tax dollars at work, I want the developers using efficient and powerful tools.
That doesn't solve the problem of what happens when an employee loses a device or has it stolen, or somebody plugs a spy device into a network-connected computer. Physical access to a connected device pretty much negates most forms of NAC.
1. How on Earth would you save $1000/year per employee on hardware?
2. What is this support thing you mentioned? My guess is if they're not providing devices they're also not providing support for employee-owned devices.
Sure, it doesn't CRASH, but it can really fuck your documents to pieces. If you're not careful you can end up spending countless hours trying to get your document to auto-number paragraphs in a reasonable fashion and use consistent style that doesn't look like dog shit and get figures to appear where you want them in a document.
That said, the thing I expect they are trying to fight is not the usability of the software, but the usability of the DATA.
There are major problems with using any proprietary format for data.
Lock-in -- once you records are in a proprietary format, you can only work with programs that read the proprietary format. You are tied to Microsoft if you are using Microsoft formats for your records. Or you can try to use third-party import filters that may or may not import the proprietary-formatted files correctly. Microsoft has been pretty good about making their document format specifications publicly available, but there are no guarantees.
Forced migration - Every few years, Microsoft and others change their document formats. If you allow use of the new version, new documents get created by default in the new format. Unfortunately, everybody in the organization has to deal with them and when their number reaches a critical mass, it becomes necessary for everybody to upgrade to the new software. This is very expensive, including licensing costs and lost time retraining people to use the new version efficiently or not retraining them and suffering even more lost time while they retrain themselves. And Microsoft removes the older version from the market so that if you add people or machines, you have to upgrade. They will get you to spend that money one way or another.
Public accessibility -- The Australian government is not a corporation owned by stockholders. It belongs to the Australian people, some of whom own Microsoft Office and some of whom do not. Public documents therefore must be accessible in free-to-the-public formats.
Security -- Microsoft Office documents allow macros that can access system functions. This is a serious security problem. Even Adobe Acrobat has that problem -- maybe worse than Microsoft.
Downgradeability -- Microsoft and every other software company I'm aware of focuses on getting you upgraded (at a cost) the the latest and greatest (for them) version. They make no provision and may actively interfere with your efforts to use an older version instead of a new one. Maybe for some reason you need to run an old version of a program -- because it has some feature MS thought was unimportant and wasn't carried to the new version. But it's important to YOU, the Australian government. How do you get a copy of the obsolete program up and running? This isn't a problem with open-source software. You can archive every version. If 30 years from now, you need to run it, you unarchive it, compile it and run it on a virtual machine. (If it's far enough in the future, you will also have to run your virtual machine on a virtual machine and so on until you get up to something that runs directly on current technology.)
Huh? Did he say they had invented TCP/IP or ethernet? Civil engineers in the 1950s didn't invent CONCRETE either. But they built the interstate highway system.
But if fits the new internet model of how you make money. Put in a few thousand hours developing (and promoting) an application that a large number of people find marginally interesting -- enough that you have a huge number of page hits. Then sell to one of the majors at a vastly inflated price, so your 10,000 hours or so of work is rewarded with a billion dollars.
Net pay rate if you succeed, $100,000 an hour.
Net pay rate if you don't succeed: $0/hour.
Who gets the big payoff is a total crap shoot. It's like winning the lottery, only the stakes are bigger. Who loses? The suckers you get to buy you out.
And it all goes to prove something I've been saying for years: Hard work and prudent investments will never make you rich. What will make you rich if finding a way to get paid for what other people are doing.
"the new administrative fee is a key component for accelerating revenue growth for the rest of the year"
So, have I understood this correctly? If you have a contract with them, they aren't violating it, because they aren't raising your rates. They're just adding a separate administrative fee. Reminds me of the game airlines play: your flight is cheap, but you have to pay the fees for the airports, for fuel, for your luggage, for having wings on the airplane...
This is great for the bean-counters and marketeers, but it's unethical as hell. Why do big businesses lose their ethics? Does MBA stand for "Must Be an A**hole"?
There's a big difference. When you buy an airline ticket, they tell you when you make the contract (i.e. buy the ticket) that there is an extra charge for baggage. What you agree to at the time you make the contract is part of the contract. This is not part of the contract. This is stealing.
AT&T would be required to let customers out of their contracts without an early termination fee if it raised prices, but it is avoiding this by simply calling the increase a 'surcharge'
I love the way there's always a loophole!
There's not. This is blatantly illegal and a breach of contract.
Autistic people are not just socially inept and prone to obsession. They're also really poor at understanding what they are supposed to be doing and staying on tasks that don't interest them. A few such people in an organization are OK. Managers can deal with one or two people who require extra supervision. But if your whole department is staffed with autistics, you're not going to get the job done and not be able to cope with the unexpected.
Since there are supposedly laws preventing the C.I.A. and N.S.A. from spying on our own countrymen, countrywomen, country-boys-and-girls-and-cats-and-dogs, supposedly there is a "gentleman's agreement" between the brits, israelis, and ourselves to trade info gathered on one-anothers' countrymen
What passes as fodder for discussion between intelligent people around here is beyond me.
Apparently, the NSA didn't figure the Utah State government for such a bunch of chiselers. They still have a lawsuit ahead of them, in which the plaintiff and the judges will be different branches of the Federal government. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see which way that will turn out. If they should lose, it would pave the way for all kinds (literally ALL kinds) of indirect taxes directed at the federal government by states, counties, cities and rural fire protection districts.
NSA builds coal-fired generator on site and arranges to have coal brought in by rail (the line is aleady there) from Colorado, where there's more than plenty coal. NSA tells Utah to fuck off. Problem solved.
That depends on the reason they stopped working on efficiency. If they stopped because they're *tired*, they're going to get their asses handed to them by the less-complacent. If they stopped because it's no longer among the highest four nails on the reducible-cost Pareto, they're doing the right thing for now.
Slashdot Mirror
In this case, it's genuine contamination since it's a version they never released. So Monsanto did a field test, after which they were supposed to destroy all of the plants. Now a bunch of years they find that version out in the wild.
If that's the case then we don't know if it is safe for human consumption, do we? We don't even know if it's environmentally safe. In fact, if Monsanto did destroy all of it and it came back then we're staring in the face of the first seeds of the Zombie Apocalypse: Zombie Wheat
In this case, it's genuine contamination since it's a version they never released. So Monsanto did a field test, after which they were supposed to destroy all of the plants. Now a bunch of years they find that version out in the wild.
If that's the case then we don't know if it is safe for human consumption, do we? We don't even know if it's environmentally safe. In fact, if Monsanto did destroy all of it and it came back then we're staring in the face of the first seeds of the Zombie Apocalypse: Zombie Wheat
We don't know if any new wheat mutant is safe. At any time, nature could have come up with a highly toxic variety. People have kept crops safe for thousands of years by planting edible wheat and destroying the stuff that tasted bad or made people sick. The only danger is that it's possible for a company like Monsanto to produce and sell large amounts of bad crops before it has been thoroughly tested for safety.
It's impossible to avoid cross contamination with wheat. Like most grasses, it releases its pollen into the wind and any plant of the same (or close enough) species it falls on will be a hybrid.
No, the problem is NOT how the world is structured. It is that autistic people are disabled with a brain disorder we can't fix, and the "treatments" are, to date, largely ineffective at helping them deal with their disability. But there are plenty of people who are out there selling snake oil to their desperate parents.
--BY--YOUR--COMMAND--
Humans can choose to simply ignore rules because for humans, rules are not built in. If machines are build with rules built in at a low level, it may be much more constraining on their behavior, even if they are very intelligent.
Is it really all that wrong to program a robot to go blow up a bridge when there's a war on?
Regarding automobiles, the word supercharger already has a specific meaning, Find another word.
The other day I saw an advertisement for a wireless music receiver. Back in the day, we had something like that. We called it a radio.
“We’ve shown that the brain’s indicator of word learning in 2-year-olds already diagnosed with autism predicts their eventual skills on a broad set of cognitive and linguistic abilities and adaptive behaviors,” said lead author Patricia Kuhl, co-director of the University of Washington’s Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences.
In other words, they can tell you a lot about your kid's future based on this one test.
The bad news:
“This is true four years after the initial test, and regardless of the type of autism treatment the children received,” she said.
In other words, the autism treatments don't work.
The FSF's position on javascript is perfectly consistent with their position on other software; because javascript is just software. It hardly seems surprising that they would be displeased that government-backed, your-tax-dollars-at-work sites would be relying on proprietary javascript.
When it's my tax dollars at work, I want the developers using efficient and powerful tools.
That doesn't solve the problem of what happens when an employee loses a device or has it stolen, or somebody plugs a spy device into a network-connected computer. Physical access to a connected device pretty much negates most forms of NAC.
1. How on Earth would you save $1000/year per employee on hardware?
2. What is this support thing you mentioned? My guess is if they're not providing devices they're also not providing support for employee-owned devices.
Sure, it doesn't CRASH, but it can really fuck your documents to pieces. If you're not careful you can end up spending countless hours trying to get your document to auto-number paragraphs in a reasonable fashion and use consistent style that doesn't look like dog shit and get figures to appear where you want them in a document.
That said, the thing I expect they are trying to fight is not the usability of the software, but the usability of the DATA.
There are major problems with using any proprietary format for data.
Huh? Did he say they had invented TCP/IP or ethernet? Civil engineers in the 1950s didn't invent CONCRETE either. But they built the interstate highway system.
But if fits the new internet model of how you make money. Put in a few thousand hours developing (and promoting) an application that a large number of people find marginally interesting -- enough that you have a huge number of page hits. Then sell to one of the majors at a vastly inflated price, so your 10,000 hours or so of work is rewarded with a billion dollars.
Net pay rate if you succeed, $100,000 an hour.
Net pay rate if you don't succeed: $0/hour.
Who gets the big payoff is a total crap shoot. It's like winning the lottery, only the stakes are bigger. Who loses? The suckers you get to buy you out.
And it all goes to prove something I've been saying for years: Hard work and prudent investments will never make you rich. What will make you rich if finding a way to get paid for what other people are doing.
How are they ranked? Windows Live #9??? Ahead of Twitter #13? LinkedIn #12 ahead of Twitter #13? Blogspot #11 ahead of Google India #12???
"the new administrative fee is a key component for accelerating revenue growth for the rest of the year"
So, have I understood this correctly? If you have a contract with them, they aren't violating it, because they aren't raising your rates. They're just adding a separate administrative fee. Reminds me of the game airlines play: your flight is cheap, but you have to pay the fees for the airports, for fuel, for your luggage, for having wings on the airplane...
This is great for the bean-counters and marketeers, but it's unethical as hell. Why do big businesses lose their ethics? Does MBA stand for "Must Be an A**hole"?
There's a big difference. When you buy an airline ticket, they tell you when you make the contract (i.e. buy the ticket) that there is an extra charge for baggage. What you agree to at the time you make the contract is part of the contract. This is not part of the contract. This is stealing.
AT&T would be required to let customers out of their contracts without an early termination fee if it raised prices, but it is avoiding this by simply calling the increase a 'surcharge'
I love the way there's always a loophole!
There's not. This is blatantly illegal and a breach of contract.
Autistic people are not just socially inept and prone to obsession. They're also really poor at understanding what they are supposed to be doing and staying on tasks that don't interest them. A few such people in an organization are OK. Managers can deal with one or two people who require extra supervision. But if your whole department is staffed with autistics, you're not going to get the job done and not be able to cope with the unexpected.
But you were Navy. Sailors are expendable.
Since there are supposedly laws preventing the C.I.A. and N.S.A. from spying on our own countrymen, countrywomen, country-boys-and-girls-and-cats-and-dogs, supposedly there is a "gentleman's agreement" between the brits, israelis, and ourselves to trade info gathered on one-anothers' countrymen
What passes as fodder for discussion between intelligent people around here is beyond me.
Apparently, the NSA didn't figure the Utah State government for such a bunch of chiselers. They still have a lawsuit ahead of them, in which the plaintiff and the judges will be different branches of the Federal government. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see which way that will turn out. If they should lose, it would pave the way for all kinds (literally ALL kinds) of indirect taxes directed at the federal government by states, counties, cities and rural fire protection districts.
NSA builds coal-fired generator on site and arranges to have coal brought in by rail (the line is aleady there) from Colorado, where there's more than plenty coal. NSA tells Utah to fuck off. Problem solved.
That depends on the reason they stopped working on efficiency. If they stopped because they're *tired*, they're going to get their asses handed to them by the less-complacent. If they stopped because it's no longer among the highest four nails on the reducible-cost Pareto, they're doing the right thing for now.
True. Those things are almost exact opposites. You will never waste money by cutting costs, if you are accounting correctly.