Microsoft now has Windows 7 users shutting off auto updates to stop this.
I've had to shut off auto-updates for a very long time. My graduate students are VERY unhappy when they start a week-long model run and a few days later the computer has rebooted to install a needless update.
Windows 10, as I understand it, makes this problem worse.
I don't know what is in the mind of the Microsoft people. They finally get an OS that is stable enough it can run for a week without needing to be rebooted (or rebooting on its own) and they decide you have to reboot anyway.
You should learn how to make a local policy which you can push to all machines. No business or school should be blindly using the automatic update schedule from Microsoft. Create your own so you don't have unnecessary loss of productivity and downtime. You can't blame Microsoft for this. They only want computers more secure.
was not enough? If Anonymous had this capability of hurting ISIS' (impressive) online propaganda, why did they not use it before the attack on Paris?
Before Paris it was the responsibility of the countries in the middle east to police their own. Now it's clear they can't contain it, even with aid so the rest of the world will be dragged into it.
You CAN... but you have to be prepared to take a very scorched earth policy.
If you're ready to just Glass the country, and prepared for the Fallout that will entail (pun intended), then Infantry becomes irrelevant.
I am not in any way suggesting that this is either advisable, or something that any sane person would do, but it IS a position where bombing does not require infantry to win.
Free glass for everyone? No more free steak giveaways! Imagine the price of all computer devices if the screens can be scooped out of the desert.
It could easily be the case that U.S. intelligence agencies are too incompetent to catch these terrorist affiliated social media accounts.
U.S. intelligence agencies haven't exactly demonstrated a capacity to really make effective use of the big data they collect.
Yes, they are quite good at intercepting and collecting data, but there are many indications that the NSA in particular doesn't really have the data intelligence necessary to effectively sift through what they capture.
In the 'proud' tradition of the TSA, our intelligence agency's anti-terror data collection operations may be more security theater than actual security.
That said I'm not sure a bunch of anons are likely to do much better.
How do you know? It's not like they share any of this information with the public? It takes years to infiltrate the enemy yet we just found and killed Jihadi John. If anything, it proves our intelligence is working. Nothing happens overnight.
When you consider that the CIA created Osama Bin Laden (by training him, and providing weapons when he was fighting the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan); and the CIA created ISIS (by creating false intelligence to justify the invasion of Iraq), the CIA is simply a terrorist organization that pretends to be working for American interests.
We're better off without you frankly. The world would be a lot healthier without your meddling. Stop trying to make Dick Cheney even richer than he is.
Thanks!
Ok. The CIA didn't create ISIS. ISIS is the response to thousands of years of constant repression by dictatorships in the Middle East. Killing Saddam may have accelerated ISIS from rising but once he died it would have happened anyways. Both Syria and Iran have seen the same thing happen. This isn't Al Qaeda the terrorist network. This is thousands of people sick of the Middle East. But now they have people who are listening to their cause. Recruits are coming from all over the world who are not muslim or arabs. Regular people you meet on the streets or had a drink with yesterday. That's who ISIS is looking for. They want to form a new country. They ripped across what is now Europe centuries ago during the Crusades. Neither the CIA or America existed back then.
But now that they expanded their fight to outside of the Middle East it will be the end for them. It's been predicted for many years that WW3 would be in the Middle East. It's coming. It will be fought on the ground, in the air, electronically and socially.
You are aware that people have been recruiting since before there was an Internet... Right?
You too are trapped in this retarded first world view of things and have absolutely no concept of how different their world is from yours. Most of their members have never seen the Internet, how the fuck are they going to be recruited by an entirely first world time sink they don't even know exists.
Just because you once heard a news story about a couple girls who did it via social media doesn't make it common, it just makes you look silly for believing that.
That's where you're wrong. How do you think CNN gets a hold of all their videos? Internet. They have the money to setup and leverage social media. Facebook is the #1 form of communication across the planet. Especially for young recruits. That's how they intercept would be recruits crossing the borders into the middle east. Social media.
There is a sizable community which legitimately records concerts, with consent from the band (encouragement even), and shares them with the world.
example: http://bt.etree.org/ is all bittorrent.
https://archive.org/details/et... allows direct download of MP3's, but if you want a 1gb set of flac files, they encourage use of bittorrent.
I'm sure these asshats would send a cease and desist order to that website accusing them of pirating their own music.
FUD, I've been downloading legal stuff and probably pirating more illegal stuff with torrent since ~2008.
The only time I got cought was for seeding something really large over 50x and I only got an email that had the name and hash of the said torrent and said torrents are harmful and you should use an anti-virus and more FUD like what you just said. It's been 2 years since and I continue to torrent because I can't legally obtain the media I want and my country has no extradition to anywhere in the world.
When they make it legal to buy their stuff in my country then we can talk money.
I got emailed by Comcast for seeding Crysis 2. I purchased the game from Steam a few days after trying it out since I wanted to do online play.
I really hope the mindless morons follow your advice and get themselves fined and knocked offline because bittorrent in NO WAY provides a method to pirate and not get caught. In fact, out of ALL the methods you have at your disposal to pirate content, bittorrent is the WORST option. simply joining a swarm without even sending or receiving blasts your IP to anyone who bothers to listen.
Even with DHT, you still have to connect to nodes. Without DHT you are at the behest of whatever torrent tracker(s) are in use. Most of which are extremely easy to eavesdrop on.
Why would the "feds" want to shut down a major source of idiots for them to harass? I get your post was in jest, but it's so off base I feel the need to warn the morons who might actually think you were being serious.
The only bittorrent traffic I generate is when I download patches/games from Blizzard.
My biggest complaint is the Bonjour shit they package with iTunes/Quicktime. It's a service they install. This facilities connecting to your mobile device. But if you let it run on a computer for more than 8 days the machine will become unresponsive. Your event viewer will be filled up with out of memory errors from Bonjour.
I have to uninstall that piece of crap every time there is an update. Plus iTunes crashes all the time. It's almost as if they want to trick people into thinking it's Windows so they switch to using an Apple device instead. For me, it reminds why I would never switch if they can't support multiple OS's correctly.
Plus we're tired of being tricked into accidentally downloading unwanted virusscanners (flash), toolbars (java), and whatever other crap they want to bundle. We are tired of running two dozen automatic update tools at all times, all fighting for internet access and all using memory and CPU time. Sure, it's very little and it mostly ends up in swap anyways - but it adds up. And we are certainly tired of having to deal with that crap every time we boot the machine.
It's a great mystery to me why Windows does not have a unified update service (like Windows Update, but also including tools from 3rd parties). It doesn't even have to go through Microsofts servers - just let programs register their own server with the update service, and then let the update service do updates at times when it is convenient to me.
I've solved at least part of this problem by simply not having QuickTime or Java installed. Flash is installed, but only runs on demand (which is actually far less often than you'd imagine). Windows Update I've shut down after Microsoft started pushing spyware and adware as "important updates". So now I run a risk of "hackers". So far they've proven less of a nuisance than actual vendors...
Mozilla's "take all of these new shit features to get your security fix" system of updates is an abject failure. You'll notice that the number of Firefox users updating their browser declined so much that Mozilla made it mandatory, which made admins like me have to blackhole the update servers at the router.
Works the same for Google. They update their browser to block certain plugins and add-ins and do it automatically. Why should I suddenly have to whitelist Java because Google now finds it insecure?
Mozilla and Google have solved the update problem in a nice way. They install services that do the updating, but don't run most of the time. When the app detects an update it wakes up the service, which does the installation.
That means that the updater uses zero resources when not actively updating, and because it was installed as a service doesn't need further UAC prompts or admin level elevation to work. In other words, limited users can update.
I uninstall google update the second after I install Chrome.
... is that it's essentially an Oracle only platform (not sure what Fujitsu does w/ it in Japan). So if you want to be locked into Oracle and pay the same sort of cash that you would for an Itanic building, this is the way to go.
Otherwise, who else is there who's building boxes based on these that could run something that's not from Oracle, and therefore, doesn't involve paying them huge ransoms? As it is, Linux has almost completely left that platform, and I'm not sure of what support the BSDs have left - aside from OpenBSD. Speaking of which, this CPU, given all its security features, could be a good match for OpenBSD, which could explore interesting ways of using the features in it that are actually useful.
This tech is also being moved to their Cloud offering. So they can provide secure, powerful configurations at a fraction of the cost. They own the cpu, the os and the storage now.
Its all true, I was there. Sun was the mightiest company in the land once, the whole internet ran on Solaris machines. Then Linus Torvalds came with his x86 based unix-like thingie, and once mighty Sun toppled like a house of chips.
It didn't help that Sun was highly mis-managed, wasteful with spending and gave away so much for free. We were given $150k worth of servers for a pilot which were on loaner. When we called 3 years later, no one even knew we were loaned the equipment. Then Oracle purchased us and finally purchased Sun. So we tossed the equipment.
Colors? I bet he counts binary as "one potato, two potato, four potato".
It's very unlikely that the decision to call the categories "colors" originated with the sales/PR people. Designers need names for things, and calling things like this "colors" has a long history. Graph coloring, red-black trees, cache coloring... "color" is a nice notion for labels on chunks of memory or data where the color is an attribute that has no meaning to the underlying structure but is layered on top for bookkeeping purposes. Among other benefits, it makes for nice whiteboard diagrams, because you can actually color the nodes in the diagram.
Colors is also easier to understand for those purchasing the tech who aren't necessarily techies.
One thing about Microsoft these days is their relentless push to stop you using their software on-premises, or at least out of their control. "Cloud first" means local datacenter last, so I'm expecting that they're going to be slowly increasing prices to a point where the MBAs have every argument they need to move the company to Office 365. Their hosted email is admittedly very good, but it's still not "yours" and not reliable in the case of network failure, Azure hiccups, etc. I'm definitely not cloud-averse, but I do know that it really doesn't cost that much to run an Exchange server in house -- the architecture has changed enough such that it's not total black magic anymore, and the majority of the day to day admin can be done by regular help desk guys or automation tools. So, most normal-sized places with simple email requirements can get away with one guy who's good with Exchange, and it doesn't have to be their full time job until you get to a certain number of users.
Management accounting is weird -- it makes more financial sense for a company to pay and pay for years on end for a service in a subscription format, rather than buy and hold onto a software license. Same thing goes for assets -- every big company is falling all over themselves to sell real estate only to pay someone else for the privilege of occupying what was their building...all because of accounting tricks. It's so strange because it's backwards compared to personal accounting. People usually want to pay off their cars or houses and live in them without a mortgage or car loan, for example. Businesses seem to want to go to software companies and say, "Please, let me pay you forever to use your software."
Unless you need to customize your software on the database level it's going to be cheaper to host your products in a cloud environment, long term. These cloud companies can offer it cheaper based on existing infrastructure than what most small or even large companies would need to purchase in house.
Imagine if most the poor white trash in the US were to move to China, Brazil or India to do the shit jobs that the people there didn't want to do at the pay being offered. Not very many of their offspring would likely end up in gifted programs in those countries either. That is the large percentage of those from Latin America who are in the US: the poor, uneducated folks that couldn't earn a living at home. That's one of the reasons why many people who immigrated legally to the US from Mexico don't want to be associated with those who did it illegally. You will also find many individuals in Latin American countries that are very European in appearance due to not having any or very little Native Americans as ancestors. These also tend to be well educated and more on the wealthy end of society. They aren't going to be the ones who sneak into a neighboring country to do shit jobs for low pay. Like you said, it all boils down to heredity.
If the NSA's intrusive powers, constitutionality aside, are all about terrorists, what in God's name are they doing passing normal crime info on to the FBI and DEA?
I don't think this revealation is all that secret. I recall some extra special terrorist power being granted to the FBI late Clinton era, and they immediately used it to bust drug people. They didn't even bother with the sophistry that drug distribution is a kind of terrorism.
No, when asked directly, they said, "Well, I know what we promised to use it only for terrorists, but the law doesn't actually state terrorist investigations only, so tuff." They lied to get it through Congress, then immediately began misusing it in a way only a lawyer or someone planning to throw a coup would find reasonable.
Yes, or course. I remember back in 2001 or 2002 discussing all the new powers the government gave itself with a friend of mine. He actually believed it would only be used for terrorism cases. I was stunned by the naivete. Anyone with any sense should have known that any new powers will be used for any damn thing the Feds want.
Aside from paranoia do we have any real cases where the government has abused this surveillance footage? Did they call your wife and tell her you were looking at porn? Or are you just afraid they could do so? One is abuse, one is the perception of being abused.
Management may have ordered the crime but the engineers were the ones that carried it out.
How about management did not order anything? How about engineers were trying to keep the engine within EPA standards so they would receive their bonuses? Not a single manager would need to know this if a small group of engineers (two, maybe three) decided to conspire in order to make their bonus targets.
Not all managers are bad, and it only takes a few rogue engineers to insert something like this. If an engineer is skilled enough to cheat on stuff like this, he or she is probably skilled enough to obscure the evidence and hide it from peers or co-workers.
And don't get me wrong, I'm not blaming anyone. All I'm saying is that I read a lot of armchair investigation here, from people who don't know the facts. At this time everything is possible, from a direct order from the CEO, to a rogue engineer.
Hell, a bonus doesn't even need to be involved. It could be a matter of keeping your job by making a deadline. In that case you definitely tell no one.
I find it odd to hear how programmers seem so abused by PHBs. Maybe it's an American thing, but in the UK, I've always found that employers want to keep hold of skilled people like programmers, because new ones are hard to find and take a while to get up to speed. This means that saying no is always possible.
(Nothing to to with official engineer status and ethics. There's no general requirement for engineer certifications for programmers here.)
Pure exaggeration. Developers who don't want to make a change, feature, etc always blame their manager for making the decision. Product not going the direction you want? It must be the PHB's fault.
There's a difference between a substance being bad (which has been empirically demonstrated) and it being dangerous at the concentrations being suggested. There's research that shows drinking too much water is bad for you, but we're not going to start making laws about water consumption for obvious reasons.
What if we made the current emission standards two orders of magnitude more strict? Obviously that would be even better for the environment and human health, but if the current regulations are already to a point where the amounts being released have a negligible impact on health, pollution, etc. then making them more strict does not amount to much real good, but adds potentially significant costs.
The point raised is an interesting one as at one point in time it would have been unethical to not return an escaped slave. While it's obvious that there's a gulf of distance between the ethics of vehicle emissions and that of slavery, it cuts to the point lgw was trying to make in that if the standards themselves are meaningless (an open question that neither of you have presented actual evidence in support or contradiction of) then the only reason to stay within their confines is because it is the law, which says nothing about its usefulness in and of itself.
The crux of the matter is how good the law actually is. If it's a regulation that requires $10 of cost to prevent $1 of harm, it's a poor law and is wasting resources so that someone can satisfy their own sense of morality. If it's a case of $10 of cost preventing $100 of harm, then it's a good law that prevents damage to society or shared resources. If we have a bad law, then it should be broken through acts of civil disobedience because a bad law is more harmful to society than the behavior it seeks to prevent.
We'd be better served putting aside notions of whether the behavior is ethical, feelings about corporatism, and stances on government environmentalism so that we can objectively examine whether the emission laws that exist are reasonable because they do reduce harm or whether they're simply the result of someone deciding that they get to choose what's best for everyone else. Only then is it fair to answer whether the behavior is ethical, else we're just arguing assumptions or semantics.
You don't get to decide what the value of human life is. Neither do the engineers. When the standards were agreed upon which is not only saving the planet but human life then it's done. Deciding whether it costs $1 to cure someone you poisoned versus $100 is not the company's choice to make. Hell we could pin Terrorism on them while we're at it since you're technically selling chemical weapons to the public without them knowing it.
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Microsoft now has Windows 7 users shutting off auto updates to stop this.
I've had to shut off auto-updates for a very long time. My graduate students are VERY unhappy when they start a week-long model run and a few days later the computer has rebooted to install a needless update.
Windows 10, as I understand it, makes this problem worse.
I don't know what is in the mind of the Microsoft people. They finally get an OS that is stable enough it can run for a week without needing to be rebooted (or rebooting on its own) and they decide you have to reboot anyway.
You should learn how to make a local policy which you can push to all machines. No business or school should be blindly using the automatic update schedule from Microsoft. Create your own so you don't have unnecessary loss of productivity and downtime. You can't blame Microsoft for this. They only want computers more secure.
Did they really have to wait for ISIS to strike in Paris? The group's earlier:
was not enough? If Anonymous had this capability of hurting ISIS' (impressive) online propaganda, why did they not use it before the attack on Paris?
I just want to add the the USA doesn't sit here and beg other countries for help. We deal with our problems.
Did they really have to wait for ISIS to strike in Paris? The group's earlier:
was not enough? If Anonymous had this capability of hurting ISIS' (impressive) online propaganda, why did they not use it before the attack on Paris?
Before Paris it was the responsibility of the countries in the middle east to police their own. Now it's clear they can't contain it, even with aid so the rest of the world will be dragged into it.
You CAN ... but you have to be prepared to take a very scorched earth policy.
If you're ready to just Glass the country, and prepared for the Fallout that will entail (pun intended), then Infantry becomes irrelevant.
I am not in any way suggesting that this is either advisable, or something that any sane person would do, but it IS a position where bombing does not require infantry to win.
Free glass for everyone? No more free steak giveaways! Imagine the price of all computer devices if the screens can be scooped out of the desert.
It could easily be the case that U.S. intelligence agencies are too incompetent to catch these terrorist affiliated social media accounts. U.S. intelligence agencies haven't exactly demonstrated a capacity to really make effective use of the big data they collect. Yes, they are quite good at intercepting and collecting data, but there are many indications that the NSA in particular doesn't really have the data intelligence necessary to effectively sift through what they capture. In the 'proud' tradition of the TSA, our intelligence agency's anti-terror data collection operations may be more security theater than actual security. That said I'm not sure a bunch of anons are likely to do much better.
How do you know? It's not like they share any of this information with the public? It takes years to infiltrate the enemy yet we just found and killed Jihadi John. If anything, it proves our intelligence is working. Nothing happens overnight.
Dude;
When you consider that the CIA created Osama Bin Laden (by training him, and providing weapons when he was fighting the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan); and the CIA created ISIS (by creating false intelligence to justify the invasion of Iraq), the CIA is simply a terrorist organization that pretends to be working for American interests.
We're better off without you frankly. The world would be a lot healthier without your meddling. Stop trying to make Dick Cheney even richer than he is.
Thanks!
Ok. The CIA didn't create ISIS. ISIS is the response to thousands of years of constant repression by dictatorships in the Middle East. Killing Saddam may have accelerated ISIS from rising but once he died it would have happened anyways. Both Syria and Iran have seen the same thing happen. This isn't Al Qaeda the terrorist network. This is thousands of people sick of the Middle East. But now they have people who are listening to their cause. Recruits are coming from all over the world who are not muslim or arabs. Regular people you meet on the streets or had a drink with yesterday. That's who ISIS is looking for. They want to form a new country. They ripped across what is now Europe centuries ago during the Crusades. Neither the CIA or America existed back then. But now that they expanded their fight to outside of the Middle East it will be the end for them. It's been predicted for many years that WW3 would be in the Middle East. It's coming. It will be fought on the ground, in the air, electronically and socially.
You are aware that people have been recruiting since before there was an Internet ... Right?
You too are trapped in this retarded first world view of things and have absolutely no concept of how different their world is from yours. Most of their members have never seen the Internet, how the fuck are they going to be recruited by an entirely first world time sink they don't even know exists.
Just because you once heard a news story about a couple girls who did it via social media doesn't make it common, it just makes you look silly for believing that.
That's where you're wrong. How do you think CNN gets a hold of all their videos? Internet. They have the money to setup and leverage social media. Facebook is the #1 form of communication across the planet. Especially for young recruits. That's how they intercept would be recruits crossing the borders into the middle east. Social media.
There is a sizable community which legitimately records concerts, with consent from the band (encouragement even), and shares them with the world. example: http://bt.etree.org/ is all bittorrent. https://archive.org/details/et... allows direct download of MP3's, but if you want a 1gb set of flac files, they encourage use of bittorrent.
I'm sure these asshats would send a cease and desist order to that website accusing them of pirating their own music.
Then you're doing it wrong.
Or get a job? Then there's no need to pirate.
FUD, I've been downloading legal stuff and probably pirating more illegal stuff with torrent since ~2008. The only time I got cought was for seeding something really large over 50x and I only got an email that had the name and hash of the said torrent and said torrents are harmful and you should use an anti-virus and more FUD like what you just said. It's been 2 years since and I continue to torrent because I can't legally obtain the media I want and my country has no extradition to anywhere in the world. When they make it legal to buy their stuff in my country then we can talk money.
I got emailed by Comcast for seeding Crysis 2. I purchased the game from Steam a few days after trying it out since I wanted to do online play.
I really hope the mindless morons follow your advice and get themselves fined and knocked offline because bittorrent in NO WAY provides a method to pirate and not get caught. In fact, out of ALL the methods you have at your disposal to pirate content, bittorrent is the WORST option. simply joining a swarm without even sending or receiving blasts your IP to anyone who bothers to listen. Even with DHT, you still have to connect to nodes. Without DHT you are at the behest of whatever torrent tracker(s) are in use. Most of which are extremely easy to eavesdrop on. Why would the "feds" want to shut down a major source of idiots for them to harass? I get your post was in jest, but it's so off base I feel the need to warn the morons who might actually think you were being serious.
The only bittorrent traffic I generate is when I download patches/games from Blizzard.
My biggest complaint is the Bonjour shit they package with iTunes/Quicktime. It's a service they install. This facilities connecting to your mobile device. But if you let it run on a computer for more than 8 days the machine will become unresponsive. Your event viewer will be filled up with out of memory errors from Bonjour. I have to uninstall that piece of crap every time there is an update. Plus iTunes crashes all the time. It's almost as if they want to trick people into thinking it's Windows so they switch to using an Apple device instead. For me, it reminds why I would never switch if they can't support multiple OS's correctly.
Plus we're tired of being tricked into accidentally downloading unwanted virusscanners (flash), toolbars (java), and whatever other crap they want to bundle. We are tired of running two dozen automatic update tools at all times, all fighting for internet access and all using memory and CPU time. Sure, it's very little and it mostly ends up in swap anyways - but it adds up. And we are certainly tired of having to deal with that crap every time we boot the machine.
It's a great mystery to me why Windows does not have a unified update service (like Windows Update, but also including tools from 3rd parties). It doesn't even have to go through Microsofts servers - just let programs register their own server with the update service, and then let the update service do updates at times when it is convenient to me.
I've solved at least part of this problem by simply not having QuickTime or Java installed. Flash is installed, but only runs on demand (which is actually far less often than you'd imagine). Windows Update I've shut down after Microsoft started pushing spyware and adware as "important updates". So now I run a risk of "hackers". So far they've proven less of a nuisance than actual vendors...
MS has never pushed spyware onto people's system.
Mozilla's "take all of these new shit features to get your security fix" system of updates is an abject failure. You'll notice that the number of Firefox users updating their browser declined so much that Mozilla made it mandatory, which made admins like me have to blackhole the update servers at the router.
Works the same for Google. They update their browser to block certain plugins and add-ins and do it automatically. Why should I suddenly have to whitelist Java because Google now finds it insecure?
Mozilla and Google have solved the update problem in a nice way. They install services that do the updating, but don't run most of the time. When the app detects an update it wakes up the service, which does the installation.
That means that the updater uses zero resources when not actively updating, and because it was installed as a service doesn't need further UAC prompts or admin level elevation to work. In other words, limited users can update.
I uninstall google update the second after I install Chrome.
If you truly understood how debt collection really works, you might not be so passé about it.
I know that they break the law with extortion threats when trying to collect debt.
... is that it's essentially an Oracle only platform (not sure what Fujitsu does w/ it in Japan). So if you want to be locked into Oracle and pay the same sort of cash that you would for an Itanic building, this is the way to go.
Otherwise, who else is there who's building boxes based on these that could run something that's not from Oracle, and therefore, doesn't involve paying them huge ransoms? As it is, Linux has almost completely left that platform, and I'm not sure of what support the BSDs have left - aside from OpenBSD. Speaking of which, this CPU, given all its security features, could be a good match for OpenBSD, which could explore interesting ways of using the features in it that are actually useful.
This tech is also being moved to their Cloud offering. So they can provide secure, powerful configurations at a fraction of the cost. They own the cpu, the os and the storage now.
Its all true, I was there. Sun was the mightiest company in the land once, the whole internet ran on Solaris machines. Then Linus Torvalds came with his x86 based unix-like thingie, and once mighty Sun toppled like a house of chips.
It didn't help that Sun was highly mis-managed, wasteful with spending and gave away so much for free. We were given $150k worth of servers for a pilot which were on loaner. When we called 3 years later, no one even knew we were loaned the equipment. Then Oracle purchased us and finally purchased Sun. So we tossed the equipment.
Colors? I bet he counts binary as "one potato, two potato, four potato".
It's very unlikely that the decision to call the categories "colors" originated with the sales/PR people. Designers need names for things, and calling things like this "colors" has a long history. Graph coloring, red-black trees, cache coloring... "color" is a nice notion for labels on chunks of memory or data where the color is an attribute that has no meaning to the underlying structure but is layered on top for bookkeeping purposes. Among other benefits, it makes for nice whiteboard diagrams, because you can actually color the nodes in the diagram.
Colors is also easier to understand for those purchasing the tech who aren't necessarily techies.
One thing about Microsoft these days is their relentless push to stop you using their software on-premises, or at least out of their control. "Cloud first" means local datacenter last, so I'm expecting that they're going to be slowly increasing prices to a point where the MBAs have every argument they need to move the company to Office 365. Their hosted email is admittedly very good, but it's still not "yours" and not reliable in the case of network failure, Azure hiccups, etc. I'm definitely not cloud-averse, but I do know that it really doesn't cost that much to run an Exchange server in house -- the architecture has changed enough such that it's not total black magic anymore, and the majority of the day to day admin can be done by regular help desk guys or automation tools. So, most normal-sized places with simple email requirements can get away with one guy who's good with Exchange, and it doesn't have to be their full time job until you get to a certain number of users.
Management accounting is weird -- it makes more financial sense for a company to pay and pay for years on end for a service in a subscription format, rather than buy and hold onto a software license. Same thing goes for assets -- every big company is falling all over themselves to sell real estate only to pay someone else for the privilege of occupying what was their building...all because of accounting tricks. It's so strange because it's backwards compared to personal accounting. People usually want to pay off their cars or houses and live in them without a mortgage or car loan, for example. Businesses seem to want to go to software companies and say, "Please, let me pay you forever to use your software."
Unless you need to customize your software on the database level it's going to be cheaper to host your products in a cloud environment, long term. These cloud companies can offer it cheaper based on existing infrastructure than what most small or even large companies would need to purchase in house.
Imagine if most the poor white trash in the US were to move to China, Brazil or India to do the shit jobs that the people there didn't want to do at the pay being offered. Not very many of their offspring would likely end up in gifted programs in those countries either. That is the large percentage of those from Latin America who are in the US: the poor, uneducated folks that couldn't earn a living at home. That's one of the reasons why many people who immigrated legally to the US from Mexico don't want to be associated with those who did it illegally. You will also find many individuals in Latin American countries that are very European in appearance due to not having any or very little Native Americans as ancestors. These also tend to be well educated and more on the wealthy end of society. They aren't going to be the ones who sneak into a neighboring country to do shit jobs for low pay. Like you said, it all boils down to heredity.
Not everyone can be Matt Damon.
If the NSA's intrusive powers, constitutionality aside, are all about terrorists, what in God's name are they doing passing normal crime info on to the FBI and DEA?
I don't think this revealation is all that secret. I recall some extra special terrorist power being granted to the FBI late Clinton era, and they immediately used it to bust drug people. They didn't even bother with the sophistry that drug distribution is a kind of terrorism.
No, when asked directly, they said, "Well, I know what we promised to use it only for terrorists, but the law doesn't actually state terrorist investigations only, so tuff." They lied to get it through Congress, then immediately began misusing it in a way only a lawyer or someone planning to throw a coup would find reasonable.
Yes, or course. I remember back in 2001 or 2002 discussing all the new powers the government gave itself with a friend of mine. He actually believed it would only be used for terrorism cases. I was stunned by the naivete. Anyone with any sense should have known that any new powers will be used for any damn thing the Feds want.
Aside from paranoia do we have any real cases where the government has abused this surveillance footage? Did they call your wife and tell her you were looking at porn? Or are you just afraid they could do so? One is abuse, one is the perception of being abused.
Management may have ordered the crime but the engineers were the ones that carried it out.
How about management did not order anything? How about engineers were trying to keep the engine within EPA standards so they would receive their bonuses? Not a single manager would need to know this if a small group of engineers (two, maybe three) decided to conspire in order to make their bonus targets. Not all managers are bad, and it only takes a few rogue engineers to insert something like this. If an engineer is skilled enough to cheat on stuff like this, he or she is probably skilled enough to obscure the evidence and hide it from peers or co-workers. And don't get me wrong, I'm not blaming anyone. All I'm saying is that I read a lot of armchair investigation here, from people who don't know the facts. At this time everything is possible, from a direct order from the CEO, to a rogue engineer.
Hell, a bonus doesn't even need to be involved. It could be a matter of keeping your job by making a deadline. In that case you definitely tell no one.
I find it odd to hear how programmers seem so abused by PHBs. Maybe it's an American thing, but in the UK, I've always found that employers want to keep hold of skilled people like programmers, because new ones are hard to find and take a while to get up to speed. This means that saying no is always possible.
(Nothing to to with official engineer status and ethics. There's no general requirement for engineer certifications for programmers here.)
Pure exaggeration. Developers who don't want to make a change, feature, etc always blame their manager for making the decision. Product not going the direction you want? It must be the PHB's fault.
There's a difference between a substance being bad (which has been empirically demonstrated) and it being dangerous at the concentrations being suggested. There's research that shows drinking too much water is bad for you, but we're not going to start making laws about water consumption for obvious reasons. What if we made the current emission standards two orders of magnitude more strict? Obviously that would be even better for the environment and human health, but if the current regulations are already to a point where the amounts being released have a negligible impact on health, pollution, etc. then making them more strict does not amount to much real good, but adds potentially significant costs. The point raised is an interesting one as at one point in time it would have been unethical to not return an escaped slave. While it's obvious that there's a gulf of distance between the ethics of vehicle emissions and that of slavery, it cuts to the point lgw was trying to make in that if the standards themselves are meaningless (an open question that neither of you have presented actual evidence in support or contradiction of) then the only reason to stay within their confines is because it is the law, which says nothing about its usefulness in and of itself. The crux of the matter is how good the law actually is. If it's a regulation that requires $10 of cost to prevent $1 of harm, it's a poor law and is wasting resources so that someone can satisfy their own sense of morality. If it's a case of $10 of cost preventing $100 of harm, then it's a good law that prevents damage to society or shared resources. If we have a bad law, then it should be broken through acts of civil disobedience because a bad law is more harmful to society than the behavior it seeks to prevent. We'd be better served putting aside notions of whether the behavior is ethical, feelings about corporatism, and stances on government environmentalism so that we can objectively examine whether the emission laws that exist are reasonable because they do reduce harm or whether they're simply the result of someone deciding that they get to choose what's best for everyone else. Only then is it fair to answer whether the behavior is ethical, else we're just arguing assumptions or semantics.
You don't get to decide what the value of human life is. Neither do the engineers. When the standards were agreed upon which is not only saving the planet but human life then it's done. Deciding whether it costs $1 to cure someone you poisoned versus $100 is not the company's choice to make. Hell we could pin Terrorism on them while we're at it since you're technically selling chemical weapons to the public without them knowing it.