Well it is at least several times as good as Dunkin Donuts... sigh, life in New England.
Fortunately, I can make coffee at home. And my GF has introduced me to cuban coffee, made in that little espresso pot that sits on the stove - pure, strong espresso goodness. Or I can make in my regular espresso machine, with steam, latte, etc., or just straight, pure espresso coffee + sugar. (Cuban comes in a vacuum pack. Other vacuum packs are different, YMMV.)
Cuban (and other Caribbean) coffee is traditionally boiled in a sock, not an espresso pot. And no, you don't pull the sock out of the laundry.
Actually, real Cuban coffee looks like milk. Until you taste it. There's definitely coffee in there!
Starbucks collapsed in Australia since the place was already full of places with Italian style coffee for a cheaper price instead of some boiled mud tainted with mint, caramel or whatever.
Kenyan coffee is good, but to claim central american coffee is not quality is utter bullshit. I bet you've never actually been to a guatamalan coffee plantation, and that in a blind taste-test you could tell the difference between beans from the different regions.
In fact I bet you're one of those snobs who think civet-crap coffee is actually intrinsically better than coffee from carefully mechanically and then hand sorted high-quality coffee beans. I'd love you to do a comparative taste-test of coffee made from beans harvested from civet-shit and coffee made from beans I shit out.
Go be snobbish somewhere else. Better yet, go back to the trailer park Folgers dark roast you're running away from.
Kenyan coffee can be very good. I just brewed up the second cup of the morning - a fair/free trade local brand that the company owners first sold to me at a local farmer's market. And it's competitive in price with more run-of-the-mill stuff.
But the Americas can hold their own. While I consider arabica coffee in general to be a bit harsh, I've have good stuff (and non-so-good, alas) from Costa Rica. And if you're willing to sell the dog and kids, go for some uncut Jamaican Blue Mountain.
If coffee becomes scarce, though, we might have to switch to Florida Orange Juice. Oh wait - citrus greening.
... if either one begins to melt due to global warming, you can be sure the remaining contrarian scientists will hop on board with a program to stop CO2 emissions.
I fear you vastly underestimate the perversity of people.
If you'll recall, several much lower-tech warning signs were already there, even without having to snoop personally into the lives of everyone on the planet.
The very fact that the recent attacks were conducted the way that they were suggests that anti-terror intelligence has been largely effective in stopping the "big", "complex" operations such as 9/11 and the 7/7 attacks. Now, it seems that terror cells are reduced to one or two man operations, with little to no planning or central direction.
Make no mistake. If I was on an airplane hijacked by terrorists due to lack of programs like this, I'd soil myself, whine, and cry like a little baby. I'm not that brave. But at least I'd be a free little baby, even if it meant I'd die a free little baby.
A "big" terrorist operation has never been more than a handful of active participants and the organization backing them isn't that large either.
The United States Government, on the other hand, is a behemoth whose control and influence extends from the corridors of commerce right down to yurts on the edge of the Gobi Desert. Bin Ladin was a wealthy man, but his bank account was pocket change compared to the US Treasury.
Terrorists can make your life living hell, briefly. The US Government can make everyone's life living hell indefinitely. They have the resources to grind most individuals into a fine paste no matter who you are, where you live, or even how many millions you have. Russia has already shown what having a few billion dollars means for oligarchs who displease the regime.
The only thing that keeps the behemoth from being a juggernaut is that when the country was founded, a set of rigorous principles backed by a codified set of laws on a framework of checks and balances was constructed and implemented. And was done so precisely because they had seen that being governed by "men of good judgement" wasn't working for them.
Much is made of the famous tripod of the Executive, Judical and Legislative branches of the government and how they are integral to Checks and Balances, but there is a fourth leg as well: the Citizenry. Just because they aren't named as an actual organization doesn't mean that they're discounted. We are supposed to have "the right to remain secure in our own homes", for example. Which you aren't, when someone obtains cellphone location information extracted through the very walls of that home.
If you want to distil the current hoopla down to its essentials, here they are:
1. We, the Government, need massive amounts of information to do our job, but you must not question specifically why we do or how we are going to use it. "The King, by the Grace of God, knows best".
2. This information collected is "harmless". But not so harmless that just anyone is allowed to see it.
3. We have no way of knowing how vulnerable these secret methods of analysis are to the Garbage-in/Gospel-out system of reporting. If it turns out that money-laundering front businesses have a statistical blip of being located within a 30-meter radius of ice cream stores, for example. People often forget that sometimes the more you know, the less accurate your knowledge can become. One of the great ironies of one of the more publicly-available government resources on terrorism was that it was only keyed to the "Fox News" spelling of "Usama" bin Ladin's, name. The actual arabic letter in question can be read as "o", "u", or even "w", but most popular sources transliterate it as "Osama".
4. Our system of Checks and Balances is at work. Except that in this particular case, all of the checks and balances are operating in secret, so we can only assume they work. Trust Your Government.
The USA has been since its founding predicated on the idea that a well-informed populace is an essential component of democracy. Benjamin Franklin was a printer. More than once in the succeeding years we've seen examples of why secrecy is the antithesis of democracy. Roaches flee the light. Now the Information Age is in full bloom and what do we see? Not more information for the people, but less.
The question is, what are we going to do about this trend?
CPython "compiles" a Python program to bytecode, but that's just a pickling of the parse tree. Does this bytecode get further compiled to native code nowadays, or does it get interpreted like CPython has always done?
Implementation details can vary, although the conversion of the raw source to bytecode form is one of the more expensive parts of the execution process, so any cached compilation can pay off.
For serious optimization, go beyond straight native code to something like a JVM (jython) which can analyze run-time code usage and re-optimize on the fly.
Is a sentence with no meaning. Or, for that matter, a verb or predicate. It makes me want to revive the word "dorky." Which at least can make sense as a 1-word sentence.
Ahem.
Today we are all going back to virtual desktops and in 5-10 people will want real desktops, then back again. The wheel keeps on turning.
10 Years from now, we will abandon the cloud because we'll all be using iPencils - pocket-sized stylus-shaped devices that contain more computing power than the entire Cloud, the sum total of all human knowledge and the complete corporate database. Plus, they'll act as their own printers.
15 years from now, we'll toss the iPencils because people kept bending over and having them slide out of their pockets. Instead we'll have mental interfaces to the Cosmic Brain. Everything you need will be in the Cosmic Brain.
Any rumors that the prototypes of this Cosmic Brain rain are being built by the NSA cannot be confirmed or denied, but if you are a loyal American Patriot you won't ask anyway. You do love our American Freedom, right?
Doublethink is basically the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them."
Physicists do that occasionally.
They need to do stuff like that since they haven't got the Theory of Everything yet. So they work with what they got even if the stuff is contradictory.
So do theologians:
"It's so simple a little child can understand it"/"The ways of God are inscrutable to man".
It's become clear that the federal government no longer serves the interests of the people.
Does anyone have suggestions for fixing the problem?
Whenever some "government done did wrong again" article comes up, the comments are all non-constructive: blithe unconcern, fatalism, pessimism, and so on.
What constructive actions can be taken, and how can the people be encouraged to support these actions?
My one idea: If people could band together and agree to vote out the incumbent (senator, representative, president) whenever one of these incidents crop up, there would be incentive for politicians to better serve the people in order to continue in office. This would mean giving up party loyalty and the idea of "lessor of two evils", which a lot of people won't do. Some congressional elections are quite close, so 2,000 or so petitioners might be enough to swing a future election.
(And no, replies of "you won't accomplish anything because of this reason" are not constructive.)
From what I've seen, local politicians are mostly OK. They may be corrupt, but practicality doesn't get pushed aside by blind partisanship. Moving up to the state level, it's less so, especially recently in my own home state. But since the name recognition for reaching state office generally comes from having first participated at local levels, we could start turning this thing around by considering more carefully the records of those we "promote" to that level. I've seen too many regional/statewide campagins where the reason for voting for the other guy is that "So-and-so is Too Liberal" or "Such-and-such has strong Conservative values". Forget all this Liberal/Conservative, Republican/Democrat, Us/Them crap. Look beyond the narrow issues and the one-size-fits-all solutions and don't vote for the person who reaffirms your strongest prejudices, vote for the person most likely to do actual practical good.
Vote 1-strike-and-you're out. If the person you elect ends up doing the same old thing as everyone else has been doing, vote for someone else next time, even if it's not the ideal person. Even if the other guy makes your skin crawl. One bad choice only makes a difference if all the choices are the same bad choice. That's why we have groups of legislators. Make them all fear for their jobs, because no matter how much you spend on a campaign, if the people don't vote for you, it's no good.
And do it again for the next level up, all the way to the top. We need to stop voting our emotions and vote with our brains. We need to move beyond the same old solutions-that-can't-solve, and it doesn't matter whether the reason they failed was actual flaws in the solution or simply that the solution requires an unrealistic set of circumstances (such as zero opposition) to work.
In the end, we always get the government we deserve, but I'd like to think we deserve better than what we've got.
Now I won't have to go through the trouble of backing up any of my e-mail!
Who said they were planning to share all that information? One of the first principles of Top Secret is that even if it's yours, even if it's plastered on lamp-posts all over town, even if it's been made into a popular song being sung all over the world they won't let you see it.
When you're collecting information on as broad a scale as the Verizon incident, it does come closer to surveying than it does to traditional surveillance.
He decided to get the certification. I asked why? I program in it every day, as do most of my coworkers and not a single one has a certification or has ever considered it. But, he studied up a bit (gotta review all of the irrelevant stuff that the cert needs that would never get used at a job like this), went to the testing center, and got the cert. I think the cert really helped show that he was actually proficient in the language and wasn't just listing a something where he had copied a few lines of code from a textbook for a semester in college.
Very few certs show me that someone is actually proficient, since the majority of them are cram-and-barf and overly-concerned with features so obscure that even after decades of work, I'll go back and RTFM before using them, if for no other reason that if I bothered to learn them at all, what I learned is probably obsolete. I've met too many people who had certs, but had promptly forgotten whatever practical knowledge they'd picked up while cramming as soon as the exam was done.
If you have 1 or 2 certs, I'll give you credit for initiative, although that doesn't pass the interview. If you have 10 or 20, I'll suspect you're a professional test-taker, and unless the position actually benefits from test-taking skills, I'll discount the them.
Of course they're bored stiff. That's not the point. My boring life is my own. I'm no man's slave; no man's property. Yet with so much surveillance over people, control becomes possible. We become an increasingly servile state as we become a police and surveillance state. Not because we're necessarily doing anything wrong, but precisely because we are watched. The whole world becomes Foucault's panopticon.
The problem with being bored is that bored people are likely to find entertainment using the resources at hand.
I'm not a generally paranoid person, but damn it all to hell. You've got the DOJ and it appears members of the Obama administration targeting "enemies" and now you've got them on a run with them being able to do taps because of whatever they feel like. And people called Bush bad? This is right out of "how to create your own dictatorship." What's next? Said enemies start to disappear because they're not toeing the Obama line.
Aided and abetted by resources made available by the Bush Administration.
This is why rabid partisans - among others - should be careful what they wish for. They may get it, only to discover that it ends up in the hands of the other side.
Perhaps the older drugs were manufactured for maximum effectiveness and the newer ones for maximum profit.
Close, perhaps. Cynical, certainly.
A lot of the older drugs were discovered more or less accidentally. Mostly because their effects were anything but subtle.
Unfortunately, so were the side-effects.
There are perfectly good humanitarian reasons for chasing new drugs.
First of all, drugs have varying effects depending on the patient. So the "go to" drug might not effectively - if at all - on some people. Or even harm them.
Secondly, the side-effects of the drugs may be prohibitive for some people.
So there's definitely a demand for drugs that are more finely-targeted than the original sledgehammer medications. Problem is, the more precise the solution, the more likely that the number of people it works effectively for is going to be very small. And, on top of that, the objectionable features become more objectionable, relatively speaking.
That's aside, of course from the all-too-common situation where the business decision is made to push a drug even when it's more of a medical liability than an asset just because it's more of a (potential) financial asset than a liability.
You seem to fail to understand that there is no difference between designing a car and designing a software product.
All the things that go into designing a car should go into designing software. The fact that you don't do it that way shows the failure is you.
Chasing the current fad is for those without the ability to produce something of quality. They don't provide actual benefit, just waste resources.
The reason that software 'developers' get by with it and engineers don't is because most software can't result in someones death, where as an engineering failure on a car can.
You've tried to compare apples to oranges... but only because you don't realize your oranges are really just another apple.
False analogy.
Even Homer Simpson knows what a car should be. Software, however, is rarely so well-defined. With the exception of fundamental systems with decades of practical use such as basic accounting packages, most software does not have a "master architecture" that it can be designed against.
The Waterfall method has always attempted to define a master architecture, but the problem is, even when the waterfall method works, the users realize after they actually have a working product that they could be doing their job better if the steering wheel was on the left and not the right and that the brakes should be pedals and not levers. This isn't failure to plan, it's learning from experience. Automobiles went through this phase as well, but there are fewer basic types of automobiles and the learning process mostly ended a century ago.
Forget all of the other alleged virtues of Agile. The only ones that the users really care about are that they get something that they can limp along with sooner and that subsequent stages will trend towards improving the product in the directions that are best adapted to their needs, with a minimum of tear-the-whole-thing-up-and-start-over. Reduced costs may or may not happen. Faster final results probably won't. What IT does internally, they could care less about. But if the users feel like they're part of the ongoing process and they're getting what they need, they'll be... well, probably not satisfied, but at least happier.
"I've written new software that can use the wifi signals bouncing around in your home to help you change channels on your TV, or possibly give surreptitious surveillance to any law enorcement agency that can get a bullshit warrant from a rubber stamp judge. We promise it will only be used to help you change the TV channel."
Do programmers even filter this stuff through their conscience any more?
.
Yes, we do. However, on the one hand, we come up with ways to make life (allegedly) easier and more entertaining. On the other hand, you have people who would gladly snoop by bouncing rocks off your house and listening to the echoes if they could et away with it. Bouncing light beams off glass windows to "hear" what was being said inside, in fact was a spy trick that probably dates back to the 1950's.
People with evil intent are with us always, and as far as I'm concerned, the most evil of the lot are the ones who do it because they're "the good guys". To them, inventors and programmers are just one more set of tools to be exploited.
Orson Scott Card actually wrote a series like that, where everyone believed in magic, but it was actually a mind-reading computer in a satellite, that the civilization had long since forgotten about. Was a neat idea, even if the later books got increasingly, annoyingly mystical and lost sight of the "this is supposed to actually be sci-fi" (a problem later books in Card series often fight with...)
I was given a Magic Wand remote control for Xmas. It's a standard IR learning remote in the shape of the stereotypical wizard's implement with accelerometers that allow it to distinguish about 11 different types of gestures.
One of the nice things about Linux is that it's quite easy to wire just about any function you want into an IR sensor daemon. Or if you prefer, a Wii Remote, which does essentially the same thing, only via Bluetooth.
Then again, jack in a Kinect and you can use a #2 pencil for the same tricks.
Slashdot Mirror
Well it is at least several times as good as Dunkin Donuts... sigh, life in New England.
Fortunately, I can make coffee at home. And my GF has introduced me to cuban coffee, made in that little espresso pot that sits on the stove - pure, strong espresso goodness. Or I can make in my regular espresso machine, with steam, latte, etc., or just straight, pure espresso coffee + sugar. (Cuban comes in a vacuum pack. Other vacuum packs are different, YMMV.)
Cuban (and other Caribbean) coffee is traditionally boiled in a sock, not an espresso pot. And no, you don't pull the sock out of the laundry.
Actually, real Cuban coffee looks like milk. Until you taste it. There's definitely coffee in there!
I always called them Charbucks - I guess we have the same opinion about their coffee roasting skills.
Apparently most of their customers add milk or some sort of creamer. Changes the character. If you add milk, charcoal evidently gives better flavor.
Since I don't add milk, I prefer other brands.
Starbucks collapsed in Australia since the place was already full of places with Italian style coffee for a cheaper price instead of some boiled mud tainted with mint, caramel or whatever.
Starbucks isn't mud.
It's charcoal.
Kenyan coffee is good, but to claim central american coffee is not quality is utter bullshit. I bet you've never actually been to a guatamalan coffee plantation, and that in a blind taste-test you could tell the difference between beans from the different regions.
In fact I bet you're one of those snobs who think civet-crap coffee is actually intrinsically better than coffee from carefully mechanically and then hand sorted high-quality coffee beans. I'd love you to do a comparative taste-test of coffee made from beans harvested from civet-shit and coffee made from beans I shit out.
Go be snobbish somewhere else. Better yet, go back to the trailer park Folgers dark roast you're running away from.
Kenyan coffee can be very good. I just brewed up the second cup of the morning - a fair/free trade local brand that the company owners first sold to me at a local farmer's market. And it's competitive in price with more run-of-the-mill stuff.
But the Americas can hold their own. While I consider arabica coffee in general to be a bit harsh, I've have good stuff (and non-so-good, alas) from Costa Rica. And if you're willing to sell the dog and kids, go for some uncut Jamaican Blue Mountain.
If coffee becomes scarce, though, we might have to switch to Florida Orange Juice. Oh wait - citrus greening.
... if either one begins to melt due to global warming, you can be sure the remaining contrarian scientists will hop on board with a program to stop CO2 emissions.
I fear you vastly underestimate the perversity of people.
Well, did it?
If you'll recall, several much lower-tech warning signs were already there, even without having to snoop personally into the lives of everyone on the planet.
And they dropped the ball anyway.
For serious optimization, go beyond straight native code to something like a JVM (jython)
But then you're back using Java and dealing with One Raging Asshole Called Larry Ellison.
Well, IBM plays pretty heavily in that space, too. Not that IBM doesn't have warts of its own.
The very fact that the recent attacks were conducted the way that they were suggests that anti-terror intelligence has been largely effective in stopping the "big", "complex" operations such as 9/11 and the 7/7 attacks. Now, it seems that terror cells are reduced to one or two man operations, with little to no planning or central direction.
Make no mistake. If I was on an airplane hijacked by terrorists due to lack of programs like this, I'd soil myself, whine, and cry like a little baby. I'm not that brave. But at least I'd be a free little baby, even if it meant I'd die a free little baby.
A "big" terrorist operation has never been more than a handful of active participants and the organization backing them isn't that large either.
The United States Government, on the other hand, is a behemoth whose control and influence extends from the corridors of commerce right down to yurts on the edge of the Gobi Desert. Bin Ladin was a wealthy man, but his bank account was pocket change compared to the US Treasury.
Terrorists can make your life living hell, briefly. The US Government can make everyone's life living hell indefinitely. They have the resources to grind most individuals into a fine paste no matter who you are, where you live, or even how many millions you have. Russia has already shown what having a few billion dollars means for oligarchs who displease the regime.
The only thing that keeps the behemoth from being a juggernaut is that when the country was founded, a set of rigorous principles backed by a codified set of laws on a framework of checks and balances was constructed and implemented. And was done so precisely because they had seen that being governed by "men of good judgement" wasn't working for them.
Much is made of the famous tripod of the Executive, Judical and Legislative branches of the government and how they are integral to Checks and Balances, but there is a fourth leg as well: the Citizenry. Just because they aren't named as an actual organization doesn't mean that they're discounted. We are supposed to have "the right to remain secure in our own homes", for example. Which you aren't, when someone obtains cellphone location information extracted through the very walls of that home.
If you want to distil the current hoopla down to its essentials, here they are:
1. We, the Government, need massive amounts of information to do our job, but you must not question specifically why we do or how we are going to use it. "The King, by the Grace of God, knows best".
2. This information collected is "harmless". But not so harmless that just anyone is allowed to see it.
3. We have no way of knowing how vulnerable these secret methods of analysis are to the Garbage-in/Gospel-out system of reporting. If it turns out that money-laundering front businesses have a statistical blip of being located within a 30-meter radius of ice cream stores, for example. People often forget that sometimes the more you know, the less accurate your knowledge can become. One of the great ironies of one of the more publicly-available government resources on terrorism was that it was only keyed to the "Fox News" spelling of "Usama" bin Ladin's, name. The actual arabic letter in question can be read as "o", "u", or even "w", but most popular sources transliterate it as "Osama".
4. Our system of Checks and Balances is at work. Except that in this particular case, all of the checks and balances are operating in secret, so we can only assume they work. Trust Your Government.
The USA has been since its founding predicated on the idea that a well-informed populace is an essential component of democracy. Benjamin Franklin was a printer. More than once in the succeeding years we've seen examples of why secrecy is the antithesis of democracy. Roaches flee the light. Now the Information Age is in full bloom and what do we see? Not more information for the people, but less.
The question is, what are we going to do about this trend?
'Only terrorists, criminals and spies should fear secret activities of the British and US intelligence agencies.
People who say things like this frighten me.
CPython "compiles" a Python program to bytecode, but that's just a pickling of the parse tree. Does this bytecode get further compiled to native code nowadays, or does it get interpreted like CPython has always done?
Implementation details can vary, although the conversion of the raw source to bytecode form is one of the more expensive parts of the execution process, so any cached compilation can pay off.
For serious optimization, go beyond straight native code to something like a JVM (jython) which can analyze run-time code usage and re-optimize on the fly.
it's Time to switch to python
Develop software - production software - in an interpreted language?
Not on my watch.
C# and Microsoft is looking better everyday.
Python is commonly compiled at first use these days, much like the Java JIT compilation process.
If you want a legitimate reason to avoid Python for mission-critical stuff, it's the lack of rigorous development-time type-checking.
This.
Is a sentence with no meaning. Or, for that matter, a verb or predicate. It makes me want to revive the word "dorky." Which at least can make sense as a 1-word sentence.
Ahem.
Today we are all going back to virtual desktops and in 5-10 people will want real desktops, then back again. The wheel keeps on turning.
10 Years from now, we will abandon the cloud because we'll all be using iPencils - pocket-sized stylus-shaped devices that contain more computing power than the entire Cloud, the sum total of all human knowledge and the complete corporate database. Plus, they'll act as their own printers.
15 years from now, we'll toss the iPencils because people kept bending over and having them slide out of their pockets. Instead we'll have mental interfaces to the Cosmic Brain. Everything you need will be in the Cosmic Brain.
Any rumors that the prototypes of this Cosmic Brain rain are being built by the NSA cannot be confirmed or denied, but if you are a loyal American Patriot you won't ask anyway. You do love our American Freedom, right?
Doublethink is basically the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them."
Physicists do that occasionally.
They need to do stuff like that since they haven't got the Theory of Everything yet. So they work with what they got even if the stuff is contradictory.
So do theologians:
"It's so simple a little child can understand it"/"The ways of God are inscrutable to man".
It's become clear that the federal government no longer serves the interests of the people.
Does anyone have suggestions for fixing the problem?
Whenever some "government done did wrong again" article comes up, the comments are all non-constructive: blithe unconcern, fatalism, pessimism, and so on.
What constructive actions can be taken, and how can the people be encouraged to support these actions?
My one idea: If people could band together and agree to vote out the incumbent (senator, representative, president) whenever one of these incidents crop up, there would be incentive for politicians to better serve the people in order to continue in office. This would mean giving up party loyalty and the idea of "lessor of two evils", which a lot of people won't do. Some congressional elections are quite close, so 2,000 or so petitioners might be enough to swing a future election.
(And no, replies of "you won't accomplish anything because of this reason" are not constructive.)
From what I've seen, local politicians are mostly OK. They may be corrupt, but practicality doesn't get pushed aside by blind partisanship. Moving up to the state level, it's less so, especially recently in my own home state. But since the name recognition for reaching state office generally comes from having first participated at local levels, we could start turning this thing around by considering more carefully the records of those we "promote" to that level. I've seen too many regional/statewide campagins where the reason for voting for the other guy is that "So-and-so is Too Liberal" or "Such-and-such has strong Conservative values". Forget all this Liberal/Conservative, Republican/Democrat, Us/Them crap. Look beyond the narrow issues and the one-size-fits-all solutions and don't vote for the person who reaffirms your strongest prejudices, vote for the person most likely to do actual practical good.
Vote 1-strike-and-you're out. If the person you elect ends up doing the same old thing as everyone else has been doing, vote for someone else next time, even if it's not the ideal person. Even if the other guy makes your skin crawl. One bad choice only makes a difference if all the choices are the same bad choice. That's why we have groups of legislators. Make them all fear for their jobs, because no matter how much you spend on a campaign, if the people don't vote for you, it's no good.
And do it again for the next level up, all the way to the top. We need to stop voting our emotions and vote with our brains. We need to move beyond the same old solutions-that-can't-solve, and it doesn't matter whether the reason they failed was actual flaws in the solution or simply that the solution requires an unrealistic set of circumstances (such as zero opposition) to work.
In the end, we always get the government we deserve, but I'd like to think we deserve better than what we've got.
Now I won't have to go through the trouble of backing up any of my e-mail!
Who said they were planning to share all that information? One of the first principles of Top Secret is that even if it's yours, even if it's plastered on lamp-posts all over town, even if it's been made into a popular song being sung all over the world they won't let you see it.
"surveylance". I like that term.
When you're collecting information on as broad a scale as the Verizon incident, it does come closer to surveying than it does to traditional surveillance.
He decided to get the certification. I asked why? I program in it every day, as do most of my coworkers and not a single one has a certification or has ever considered it. But, he studied up a bit (gotta review all of the irrelevant stuff that the cert needs that would never get used at a job like this), went to the testing center, and got the cert. I think the cert really helped show that he was actually proficient in the language and wasn't just listing a something where he had copied a few lines of code from a textbook for a semester in college.
Very few certs show me that someone is actually proficient, since the majority of them are cram-and-barf and overly-concerned with features so obscure that even after decades of work, I'll go back and RTFM before using them, if for no other reason that if I bothered to learn them at all, what I learned is probably obsolete. I've met too many people who had certs, but had promptly forgotten whatever practical knowledge they'd picked up while cramming as soon as the exam was done.
If you have 1 or 2 certs, I'll give you credit for initiative, although that doesn't pass the interview. If you have 10 or 20, I'll suspect you're a professional test-taker, and unless the position actually benefits from test-taking skills, I'll discount the them.
Of course they're bored stiff. That's not the point. My boring life is my own. I'm no man's slave; no man's property. Yet with so much surveillance over people, control becomes possible. We become an increasingly servile state as we become a police and surveillance state. Not because we're necessarily doing anything wrong, but precisely because we are watched. The whole world becomes Foucault's panopticon.
The problem with being bored is that bored people are likely to find entertainment using the resources at hand.
Apparently DHS can search laptops and phones based on "hunches" as well.
I'm not a generally paranoid person, but damn it all to hell. You've got the DOJ and it appears members of the Obama administration targeting "enemies" and now you've got them on a run with them being able to do taps because of whatever they feel like. And people called Bush bad? This is right out of "how to create your own dictatorship." What's next? Said enemies start to disappear because they're not toeing the Obama line.
Aided and abetted by resources made available by the Bush Administration.
This is why rabid partisans - among others - should be careful what they wish for. They may get it, only to discover that it ends up in the hands of the other side.
But no matter which side holds them, we all lose.
Wrong. When his long-lost brother let him design one, it was total shite and ruined the company.
Yes, but he loved the car! It was exactly what the customer wanted.
I never said that the car had to be profitable. Or even the product of a sane mind.
they have more US operators than overseas. They have both though, because they need their business support to be top notch.
Actually, they have both because the business customers complained so loudly that they were forced to re-shore business support.
Perhaps the older drugs were manufactured for maximum effectiveness and the newer ones for maximum profit.
Close, perhaps. Cynical, certainly.
A lot of the older drugs were discovered more or less accidentally. Mostly because their effects were anything but subtle.
Unfortunately, so were the side-effects.
There are perfectly good humanitarian reasons for chasing new drugs.
First of all, drugs have varying effects depending on the patient. So the "go to" drug might not effectively - if at all - on some people. Or even harm them.
Secondly, the side-effects of the drugs may be prohibitive for some people.
So there's definitely a demand for drugs that are more finely-targeted than the original sledgehammer medications. Problem is, the more precise the solution, the more likely that the number of people it works effectively for is going to be very small. And, on top of that, the objectionable features become more objectionable, relatively speaking.
That's aside, of course from the all-too-common situation where the business decision is made to push a drug even when it's more of a medical liability than an asset just because it's more of a (potential) financial asset than a liability.
You are a problem.
You seem to fail to understand that there is no difference between designing a car and designing a software product.
All the things that go into designing a car should go into designing software. The fact that you don't do it that way shows the failure is you.
Chasing the current fad is for those without the ability to produce something of quality. They don't provide actual benefit, just waste resources.
The reason that software 'developers' get by with it and engineers don't is because most software can't result in someones death, where as an engineering failure on a car can.
You've tried to compare apples to oranges ... but only because you don't realize your oranges are really just another apple.
False analogy.
Even Homer Simpson knows what a car should be. Software, however, is rarely so well-defined. With the exception of fundamental systems with decades of practical use such as basic accounting packages, most software does not have a "master architecture" that it can be designed against.
The Waterfall method has always attempted to define a master architecture, but the problem is, even when the waterfall method works, the users realize after they actually have a working product that they could be doing their job better if the steering wheel was on the left and not the right and that the brakes should be pedals and not levers. This isn't failure to plan, it's learning from experience. Automobiles went through this phase as well, but there are fewer basic types of automobiles and the learning process mostly ended a century ago.
Forget all of the other alleged virtues of Agile. The only ones that the users really care about are that they get something that they can limp along with sooner and that subsequent stages will trend towards improving the product in the directions that are best adapted to their needs, with a minimum of tear-the-whole-thing-up-and-start-over. Reduced costs may or may not happen. Faster final results probably won't. What IT does internally, they could care less about. But if the users feel like they're part of the ongoing process and they're getting what they need, they'll be... well, probably not satisfied, but at least happier.
"I've written new software that can use the wifi signals bouncing around in your home to help you change channels on your TV, or possibly give surreptitious surveillance to any law enorcement agency that can get a bullshit warrant from a rubber stamp judge. We promise it will only be used to help you change the TV channel."
Do programmers even filter this stuff through their conscience any more?
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Yes, we do. However, on the one hand, we come up with ways to make life (allegedly) easier and more entertaining. On the other hand, you have people who would gladly snoop by bouncing rocks off your house and listening to the echoes if they could et away with it. Bouncing light beams off glass windows to "hear" what was being said inside, in fact was a spy trick that probably dates back to the 1950's.
People with evil intent are with us always, and as far as I'm concerned, the most evil of the lot are the ones who do it because they're "the good guys". To them, inventors and programmers are just one more set of tools to be exploited.
Orson Scott Card actually wrote a series like that, where everyone believed in magic, but it was actually a mind-reading computer in a satellite, that the civilization had long since forgotten about. Was a neat idea, even if the later books got increasingly, annoyingly mystical and lost sight of the "this is supposed to actually be sci-fi" (a problem later books in Card series often fight with...)
I was given a Magic Wand remote control for Xmas. It's a standard IR learning remote in the shape of the stereotypical wizard's implement with accelerometers that allow it to distinguish about 11 different types of gestures.
One of the nice things about Linux is that it's quite easy to wire just about any function you want into an IR sensor daemon. Or if you prefer, a Wii Remote, which does essentially the same thing, only via Bluetooth.
Then again, jack in a Kinect and you can use a #2 pencil for the same tricks.