Touchy, a bit? If triggers aren't your thing, that's fine; how about domains, and the ability to set domains on parameters to stored procedures? (example: a stored procedure that takes an integer, where the integer is restricted to being between 3 and 7) Last time I checked the Oracle docs, that wasn't available. It's not a big deal -- but you should be careful with blanket statements. Every product has its little features, which matter to different people. Maybe you'd be more interested in CTE's (common table expression, syntax is 'with [recursive] xxx as (select...), [...], select... from xxx'? Sure, Oracle has connect-by, which I find more obvious for simple cases, but it doesn't have CTE's which Firebird and MSSQL both have, and are more generic (not just for recursion), and which I use the hell out of. I have no interest in converting an Oracle user, or anyone for that matter -- only in notifying you that it might be something to check out.
Isn't that trivially fixed by "buying from yourself", such that you can control the costs (indirectly) and still blow the top off the budget? It seems pretty common for even a moderately-sized business to split itself into lots of tightly-knit components, and depending on the definition of 'cost', it seems like that could work out perfectly for the contractors involved...
If you're going to switch databases over the issue, you might as well consider other options, like Firebird: it's also free, I do believe the timestamps have better-than-second precision (at the very least it insists on showing me 4 extra digits I never use for anything), and it's certainly easier to install, setup, and admin than PostgreSQL (IMO). It has limitations, of course, and you should be careful to read the fine print, as you would with any product selection. I would worry that you're using some particularly esoteric features of PostgreSQL that won't translate well to Firebird, but if MySQL is even an option for you, that's highly unlikely.
Slashdot declined to carry the story I posted on it (yeah, yeah, grousing...), but Firebird 2.1 (release) came out three months ago, with some really nifty features like on-commit triggers that let you enforce constraints no other database will help you enforce (that I've seen -- Oracle certainly won't.) It rocks.
Does Windows PowerShell (Monad) not fit the bill for you? (I personally use cygwin too.) Even so, the world of graphical developers needs to remember that a GUI is nice, but a GUI that also takes command-line parameters and documents those parameters is even better. Without that, there's not much a command-line can do to glue those apps together.
3) Who is responsible when they make decisions based on the results of queries that were incorrectly written, because they had an incomplete understanding of the tables?
You currently have a choke point where you can make sure this is well-defined: up-front before they use canned reports, or ad-hoc when they request new ones; when they start writing their own, it needs to be clear that they're on their own, and that they should *probably* at least ask for help along the way to make sure they get what they want (get the right answer), and that what they want makes sense for what they need (ask the right question), and that they understand the limitations of the data (missing data, small sample sizes, small list of codes, known-dirty data...)
Those rating systems exist because someone (lobbyist) begged "please don't regulate us, we'll regulate ourselves", which is itself pretty disturbing -- we can coerce industries to do things of their own accord that we probably couldn't have gotten away with legally (would probably be deemed unconstitutional later down the line), simply by threatening to create (likely badly written) legislation. What's also disturbing is that we don't then go ahead and legislate an issue we briefly considered worthy of legislation because "it's not currently an issue" -- so long as industries self-regulate, who needs laws? Why is a promise to be good, extracted under threat of legislation, as good as actually having legislation? What should even scarier is that the only reason a lobbyist would want the industry to self-regulate is that it's easier for them, they can get away with small lapses, and they can adapt the rules on the fly -- the latter two of which are the sorts of things we specifically don't want when creating laws, so the accepted solution doesn't fit the original problem description (that apparently implied law as an acceptable solution, or legislators wouldn't have had hearings and threatened anybody.) If an issue is important enough to warrant legislation, you shouldn't have the option of just letting an industry self-regulate; if you think that's sufficient after all, you should never have threatened legislation in the first place, and the industry really should feel free to go back to not regulating itself -- and, as a legislative body, you should be thrown out for abuse of power.
Maybe it was meant to discredit the journalist, rather than Wikipedia. If I were ticked off that the guy in the next cubicle over kept getting away with, say, using Wikipedia as a reference, and I knew what assignments were on his plate this week, maybe I would go add a reference to his upcoming article (but not too obviously so) somewhere I knew he would find it, just to see what would happen: would he go back to Wikipedia once again, would he find the plant, would he fall for it, or would he figure out it was a joke (on him), would he then start a witchhunt in the office to figure out who had tried to trick him? Or *maybe* his officemates were starting up a new Alternate Reality Game just for his birthday, and this was supposed to be the starting point, only he failed to catch the clue train and it's already Game Over?
All that comes to mind are giant remote-controlled versions of Gundam suits, being used for construction, lifting debris (search and rescue)... oh, and tearing through cities on a rampage, while the operator sits in a VR room back home.
There was some research I came across a while back saying that humans in a VR environment adapt quickly to using their limbs in abnormal ways, if the VR environment "coaches" them -- they could learn to move their elbows a special way to control the movement of a six-legged creature, for example. So it's possible we could design 'bots that aren't necessarily anthropomorphic that we could still retain control over via VR. Four-legged would be one option, but so would 3 or 6 or whatever is appropriate for the mission. The benefits of VR are more than just "not having to protect the operator against bullets" -- heat, cold, water, toxic vapors, chemical weapons, biological weapons, and G-forces (for pilots). It also means you could swap out operators on the fly -- when they become tired, distraught, or if the mission requires knowledge, skill, or cunning best provided by someone else.
You would probably want the operator to have a good idea of the status of all parts of the robot -- without his skin and bones reporting damage, the operator might not realize the robot is incapable of achieving something because it's damaged, and take it into a more dangerous situation than he should, wasting it. A sense of "pain" would still be important. A "check engine" light would be insufficient.
It seems most people in this thread missed the part where we're discussed a tele-operator robot, where someone is sitting in a suit back home that isn't powered (except maybe enough for force-feedback), and remote-controls a robot that is powered, but isn't carrying a human operator. We're not talking about AI. The main complaint then is communication -- if it were "robots on mars" it could be a lag issue, but here it's mostly a noise issue, someone jamming the signal. You'd also want to protect against theft -- it's one thing to reprogram a human, it's another to reprogram a bot.
It'd make it much easier to have discussions about the "value" of a given soldier, where it's a purely mechanical construct. Currently, there may be estimates on how much it costs to "operate" a soldier, in terms of training, food, lodging, medical care, transportation, etc. but it's difficult to discuss it publicly -- because it quickly starts to sound like losing N soldiers in battle was a cost/benefit decision, and their lives were only worth $X each. With bots, at least the numbers aren't emotionally-bound. (But then someone would want to verify that this was a cost-effective solution for war, and we'd have to compare the numbers, leading back to the same question. I think it's obvious to everyone that replacing each and every soldier with a $1billion machine would cost too much -- but they'd still be unwilling to discuss the point that a soldier is only worth, say, $300k, in terms of replacement cost. Any number would be too low.)
No. The cost is increasing by $3 billion (with a b). From the article:
Gutierrez said reverting to a paper-based census, in addition to other costs not associated with the handhelds, is expected to increase the cost of the 2010 census to between $2.2 billion and $3 billion through fiscal year 2013. That would bring the total cost of the 2010 census to between $13.7 billion and $14.5 billion. He said the bureau would need an increase of $160 million to $230 million for fiscal 2008 to cover costs associated with returning to paper, with an additional $600 million to $700 million for fiscal 2009. Gutierrez added that the majority of the cost increases would occur in 2010
So it actually costs somewhere around $37/person to count and classify each of us, or around 7 hours of minimum-wage labor. It's far worse than you think.
Also, the handhelds were for field operatives collecting data from people who didn't send in their forms -- the cost estimate above includes the distribution and processing of paper forms that you fill out yourself, which you could reasonably expect to be cheaper than going door-to-door collecting data, thus increasing the per-person cost of personal data collection.
Oh? Around our office, we're pretty convinced WebLogic (Portal) is a steaming pile... we'd switch everything to Tomcat if management would let us. But they already paid for WebLogic, you see.
'Sovereign Posture' refers to the situation where an interface may be complex, and is designed for the 'expert user', but that's okay -- anyone using it already intends to become an expert and is willing to take the time needed to do so, so long as they know the reward will be a faster/more-expressive work environment. The idea is that sometimes it's not worth it to create a 'dummy' version of your software. It makes some sense for 'winzip', but not for 'word'.
Robin Hood is still a thief, yes. But if we periodically do/don't support such a villain ("opposition leader"), we can effectively "stipple" in a middleground that otherwise would not exist. Democrats/Replublicans? It feels like we all "see" the solution we're asymptotically approaching, we just can't seem to get there from here, so we fake it instead. We need the loyal (and often illegal, sometimes even immoral) opposition to achieve a stable society.
They could get into a pitched gunfight anywhere. (Iraq, for example.) No, the reason they want the plane is so they can do something sensational, like crash into a building. It's a lot harder to do that in the middle of a gunfight. Ergo, seeing that their chances of achieving anything memorable are reduced by the presence of armed passengers, they'll find something else to do instead. Something memorable, never-before-seen, unexpected. Something more... terrorist-like. The plane thing's already been done. There's no reason to ever do it again, particularly not if it's going to be more difficult.
Both of those markets suffer from an additional constraint: consumers believe that getting the cheap model is a bad thing. Few people, even if poor, are interested in going to the local $5/visit doctor (if there even is one) because it's assumed that cheap = bad, and healthcare is something you just don't mess around with. (Which is the other reason healthcare costs keep going up -- people will pay absolutely anything for health. They're not going to stop their treatment and declare that they're not willing to pay $5000 for something that has an 80% chance of curing them of their current ailment. They'll just go into debt instead. Every time.) Those who are willing to deal with having "cheap" written all over their college diploma will get what they paid for -- possibly a really good education, but a diploma that doesn't glitter in the eyes of potential employers. You pay for an image, not just a lesson. We even ran into this when providing local computer PC repair for cheaper than the competition -- we couldn't get any business until we raised our prices. Nothing else changed. But we just weren't a valid competitor because we were too far away from the average price, too far down the bell curve. These units won't necessarily suffer from this -- there are objective tests that can be performed on these devices to show that the cheaper model still meets your requirements and that it's okay to buy it.
... and when they did so, the FDA didn't much approve of their over-the-top marketing (for Cocaine.) I wonder if they can get them riled up twice in a row?
In "Founding Brothers", the author posits that shortly after the revolution, it was socially expected that leaders should appear not to want/have-wanted the office; Washington and Jefferson both did the [Lucius Quinctius] Cincinnatus "I'm retiring to my beloved farm" thing, and during the Jefferson/Adams presidential race, neither campaigned for themselves, but rather had/let their friends & colleagues do so for them.
Is there a system within the law whereby a politician could make a promise and *ask* to be bound to that promise, by law? It's not really contract law, as the votes are anonymous, so that'd be hard to prove. It's not really a false-advertising law, as you're not selling a product or service (at least not in the traditional sense.) What does that leave? A contract with yourself? Seems like a problem we should have solved earlier, given the system of governance in use. But then we always assumed that: a) we'd impeach them if they did something *really* bad b) we'd fail to re-elect them if they didn't do enough good c) representatives are expected to read up and become experts on issues, sometimes secret issues, and make decisions on our behalf, given the data they have, not given the data we have. Under those circumstances, I guess it didn't make sense to find a way to legally bind them to do as we say?
So... you're saying a rigged system is better than no system, and if you notice that something is rigged/corrupt, you shouldn't demand justice, because that might throw everything into chaos, eventually? Is that what you're saying? Is this "Roman irony"?
Agreed. Besides, you hear stories of patients researching their conditions to a greater extent than their doctors, basically using the doctors only to get permission to go through with a proposed solution -- not to do the research. I know my g/f's mom spent *years* going from doctor to doctor for help, only for us to eventually help her self-diagnose as Celiac -- none of her doctors ever figured it out, nor spent the time researching the symptoms to see what it *could* be. They simply don't have the time. You go to doctors for: a) advice (which you can get elsewhere, and spend as long looking as you need to) b) permission (which, really, is none of their business, but somehow it became law) c) justification for insurance payment (the real reason, I think)
Growing up in France, everyone was issued a Carnet de Sante -- a Health Booklet. You keep all your medical records in one standardized paper booklet -- immunizations, visits, checks, growth charts, odd medical conditions, etc. Not high tech, but it worked. Doctors sign/stamp as you go, but you're responsible for carrying your health history around to various doctors -- and they'll look at what you bring, too! Here, I have to sign a form for my new doctor to call my old doctor, fax the form, get records sent (not always free), all so the new doctor can ignore what he's now received, and start all over -- oh, I'm sorry, your x-rays aren't in my prefered format, so I need you to get whole new ones, even though there's nothing actually wrong with the old ones. They don't seem to ever want me to, oh, I dunno, take home a copy of my visit data after each visit, then re-supply it to future doctors (same or otherwise.) I can't figure out if it's a way of making me "loyal" to a doctor (as they also like to charge a first-time-visit fee, regardless of how recently you've seen another doctor -- making switching doctors a costly pain)... but damn it, it's my data, it should be mine to keep and reveal.
We should turn slashdot into a wiki site -- not only can you post comments and moderate, but you can directly edit the topic summary as well! Maybe the entire discussion can be turned into a wiki -- constantly rebuilding itself into a summary of the opinions and argumentation of the various sides of the issue... if you've got time to comment, you should have time to clean, classify, and arrange your argument into a larger context, cite sources, and most particularly: keep quiet if the basic point you're making has already been made. That'd be *awesome*.
I'd like to think that any people desiring freedom from its government can do so without outside aid -- after all, there are almost always more civilians than military, right? I would have liked Iraq to free itself, for Afghanistan to free itself, maybe even China and Burma -- but is it really realistic to expect that with today's weapons, and today's means of communication, and today's wealth gulf between the rich and poor (where, in an oppressive regime, the rich tend to *be* the government)... that the people can really free themselves from even a relatively small oppressive regime? We can point all we like to guerilla tactics, which come about in that kind of asymmetric situation, but from what I can tell, that only ever gets you to the point of stalemate. The organized force can't truly win, but you don't rid yourself of them either.
In the end, they'll just have an asymmetric civil war. Messy business all around. There's a point to be made that if we can't resolve the civil war in Iraq, we can't do so in Burma. But I think there's still a difference between a civil war among fairly-matched people with an ideological disagreement (US north vs. south, Iraqi religious war, etc.) and a civil war between the great mass of the poor who want freedom, and the few priviledged who want to stay in power. Seems like one tide is easier to turn than the other.
As to helping -- we should also consider that if our goal is to maximize overall happiness, not just in our own community, but across the world, it makes sense to at least free people up to the point where they can help themselves, then all move forward together. Their status, I think, has some effect on us through the world economy, and makes it harder to improve things here at home.
We in the "West" have been blamed (and rightly so) for meddling in the affairs of others over the centuries; but I think a lot of the harm we caused was the result of our goals, not just our presence -- we were in it for ourselves, for our own home economies. We had colonies not to improve the condition of the locals (we left that job up to charities and religious organizations) but to extract as much wealth as we could from them, use them as armies in our wars, etc. Perhaps it's possible to come to someone's aid and not wind up with a country full of angry, poor people from which terrorists are naturally born? Just maybe? (How many terrorists have attacked us as a result of interfering in Kosovo? The French may not like our present government, but I've never heard them complain that we rescued their butts from the Germans -- and I lived there for 15 years.)
But perhaps you think that journalists who smuggle guns on airplanes and then reveal the flaws in airport security to the public should be thrown in jail as well. If intentions don't count, then every tank truck driver carrying hazardous substances who has an accident should be prosecuted as a terrorist.
a) If the journalist is caught in the act (though later than expected, after a flaw has obviously been uncovered worth documenting,) or even just because the article is read by a cop somewhere (we arrest people long after they've committed murder, right?) he should still be arrested and thrown in jail if a law has been broken. There's a process, and it doesn't end just because you're a journalist. Anyone can be a journalist, which is a great thing, but we can't just give out get-out-of-jail-free cards to everyone. It's unfortunate that many laws can't be challenged unless someone actually breaks the existing law, then gets a judge to throw the law out rather than put the citizen in jail, but that's another example of the same process. Civil disobedience is great, but it's still punishable by law, at least in the short term. Hacking into a secure network, if it violates laws, is still a violation of the law -- you can argue all day that they should be thankful you told them about it, or revealed a flaw with no intention of exploiting it, but until the harmed party makes that determination, or the due process of law decides to throw the case out... you have to suffer for what you think is right. If that means rotting in jail until the system is fixed, then you should proudly do so. It's just part of your duty as a citizen, no?
If you suspect a hole, however, I might suggest first going to the entity in question, asking for an interview with the higher-ups, ask them for permission to secretly attack their system under only semi-controlled conditions (as in you'll be rescued when security comes to beat you up, but they won't inform them ahead of time or prevent you from doing anything or in any way tamper with the system), for everyone's mutual benefit. If they agree... great. If they disagree, that might be worth publishing, telling everyone what you *think* might work, and disgrace them for not caring enough. But maybe that's just being petty.
b) What you're initially accused/charged with and what you get convicted of are different things. Seems like it's easier to downgrade charges during a trial than to upgrade them, so you start with the worst possible thing, then drop charges as you go. The government, when acting on our behalf in court (as we're all considered injured parties when public lands, etc. are involved), is obligated to fight "for us" to the fullest extent possible. It's part of the adversarial system. That's why we also have a judge and jury. Besides, the more ridiculous the claim (terrorist truck driver!) the easier it will be to disprove culpability. It's really in their best interest, if they want a conviction at all, to go for the most reasonable claim and make it stick -- "you weren't paying attention when you should have been, and are required to try to do, by law".
Slashdot Mirror
Touchy, a bit? If triggers aren't your thing, that's fine; how about domains, and the ability to set domains on parameters to stored procedures? (example: a stored procedure that takes an integer, where the integer is restricted to being between 3 and 7) Last time I checked the Oracle docs, that wasn't available. It's not a big deal -- but you should be careful with blanket statements. Every product has its little features, which matter to different people. Maybe you'd be more interested in CTE's (common table expression, syntax is 'with [recursive] xxx as (select ...), [...], select ... from xxx'? Sure, Oracle has connect-by, which I find more obvious for simple cases, but it doesn't have CTE's which Firebird and MSSQL both have, and are more generic (not just for recursion), and which I use the hell out of. I have no interest in converting an Oracle user, or anyone for that matter -- only in notifying you that it might be something to check out.
Isn't that trivially fixed by "buying from yourself", such that you can control the costs (indirectly) and still blow the top off the budget? It seems pretty common for even a moderately-sized business to split itself into lots of tightly-knit components, and depending on the definition of 'cost', it seems like that could work out perfectly for the contractors involved...
If you're going to switch databases over the issue, you might as well consider other options, like Firebird: it's also free, I do believe the timestamps have better-than-second precision (at the very least it insists on showing me 4 extra digits I never use for anything), and it's certainly easier to install, setup, and admin than PostgreSQL (IMO). It has limitations, of course, and you should be careful to read the fine print, as you would with any product selection. I would worry that you're using some particularly esoteric features of PostgreSQL that won't translate well to Firebird, but if MySQL is even an option for you, that's highly unlikely.
Slashdot declined to carry the story I posted on it (yeah, yeah, grousing...), but Firebird 2.1 (release) came out three months ago, with some really nifty features like on-commit triggers that let you enforce constraints no other database will help you enforce (that I've seen -- Oracle certainly won't.) It rocks.
Your mileage WILL vary, but I'd recommend at least checking it out. Either http://www.ibphoenix.com/ or http://www.firebirdsql.org/.
Does Windows PowerShell (Monad) not fit the bill for you? (I personally use cygwin too.) Even so, the world of graphical developers needs to remember that a GUI is nice, but a GUI that also takes command-line parameters and documents those parameters is even better. Without that, there's not much a command-line can do to glue those apps together.
3) Who is responsible when they make decisions based on the results of queries that were incorrectly written, because they had an incomplete understanding of the tables?
You currently have a choke point where you can make sure this is well-defined: up-front before they use canned reports, or ad-hoc when they request new ones; when they start writing their own, it needs to be clear that they're on their own, and that they should *probably* at least ask for help along the way to make sure they get what they want (get the right answer), and that what they want makes sense for what they need (ask the right question), and that they understand the limitations of the data (missing data, small sample sizes, small list of codes, known-dirty data...)
Those rating systems exist because someone (lobbyist) begged "please don't regulate us, we'll regulate ourselves", which is itself pretty disturbing -- we can coerce industries to do things of their own accord that we probably couldn't have gotten away with legally (would probably be deemed unconstitutional later down the line), simply by threatening to create (likely badly written) legislation. What's also disturbing is that we don't then go ahead and legislate an issue we briefly considered worthy of legislation because "it's not currently an issue" -- so long as industries self-regulate, who needs laws? Why is a promise to be good, extracted under threat of legislation, as good as actually having legislation? What should even scarier is that the only reason a lobbyist would want the industry to self-regulate is that it's easier for them, they can get away with small lapses, and they can adapt the rules on the fly -- the latter two of which are the sorts of things we specifically don't want when creating laws, so the accepted solution doesn't fit the original problem description (that apparently implied law as an acceptable solution, or legislators wouldn't have had hearings and threatened anybody.) If an issue is important enough to warrant legislation, you shouldn't have the option of just letting an industry self-regulate; if you think that's sufficient after all, you should never have threatened legislation in the first place, and the industry really should feel free to go back to not regulating itself -- and, as a legislative body, you should be thrown out for abuse of power.
Maybe it was meant to discredit the journalist, rather than Wikipedia. If I were ticked off that the guy in the next cubicle over kept getting away with, say, using Wikipedia as a reference, and I knew what assignments were on his plate this week, maybe I would go add a reference to his upcoming article (but not too obviously so) somewhere I knew he would find it, just to see what would happen: would he go back to Wikipedia once again, would he find the plant, would he fall for it, or would he figure out it was a joke (on him), would he then start a witchhunt in the office to figure out who had tried to trick him? Or *maybe* his officemates were starting up a new Alternate Reality Game just for his birthday, and this was supposed to be the starting point, only he failed to catch the clue train and it's already Game Over?
All that comes to mind are giant remote-controlled versions of Gundam suits, being used for construction, lifting debris (search and rescue) ... oh, and tearing through cities on a rampage, while the operator sits in a VR room back home.
There was some research I came across a while back saying that humans in a VR environment adapt quickly to using their limbs in abnormal ways, if the VR environment "coaches" them -- they could learn to move their elbows a special way to control the movement of a six-legged creature, for example. So it's possible we could design 'bots that aren't necessarily anthropomorphic that we could still retain control over via VR. Four-legged would be one option, but so would 3 or 6 or whatever is appropriate for the mission. The benefits of VR are more than just "not having to protect the operator against bullets" -- heat, cold, water, toxic vapors, chemical weapons, biological weapons, and G-forces (for pilots). It also means you could swap out operators on the fly -- when they become tired, distraught, or if the mission requires knowledge, skill, or cunning best provided by someone else.
You would probably want the operator to have a good idea of the status of all parts of the robot -- without his skin and bones reporting damage, the operator might not realize the robot is incapable of achieving something because it's damaged, and take it into a more dangerous situation than he should, wasting it. A sense of "pain" would still be important. A "check engine" light would be insufficient.
It seems most people in this thread missed the part where we're discussed a tele-operator robot, where someone is sitting in a suit back home that isn't powered (except maybe enough for force-feedback), and remote-controls a robot that is powered, but isn't carrying a human operator. We're not talking about AI. The main complaint then is communication -- if it were "robots on mars" it could be a lag issue, but here it's mostly a noise issue, someone jamming the signal. You'd also want to protect against theft -- it's one thing to reprogram a human, it's another to reprogram a bot.
It'd make it much easier to have discussions about the "value" of a given soldier, where it's a purely mechanical construct. Currently, there may be estimates on how much it costs to "operate" a soldier, in terms of training, food, lodging, medical care, transportation, etc. but it's difficult to discuss it publicly -- because it quickly starts to sound like losing N soldiers in battle was a cost/benefit decision, and their lives were only worth $X each. With bots, at least the numbers aren't emotionally-bound. (But then someone would want to verify that this was a cost-effective solution for war, and we'd have to compare the numbers, leading back to the same question. I think it's obvious to everyone that replacing each and every soldier with a $1billion machine would cost too much -- but they'd still be unwilling to discuss the point that a soldier is only worth, say, $300k, in terms of replacement cost. Any number would be too low.)
So it actually costs somewhere around $37/person to count and classify each of us, or around 7 hours of minimum-wage labor. It's far worse than you think.
Also, the handhelds were for field operatives collecting data from people who didn't send in their forms -- the cost estimate above includes the distribution and processing of paper forms that you fill out yourself, which you could reasonably expect to be cheaper than going door-to-door collecting data, thus increasing the per-person cost of personal data collection.
Pyxis medication dispensers, perhaps?
http://www.cardinal.com/us/en/providers/products/pyxis/products/medStation3500/index.asp
Oh? Around our office, we're pretty convinced WebLogic (Portal) is a steaming pile ... we'd switch everything to Tomcat if management would let us. But they already paid for WebLogic, you see.
http://www.mit.edu/~jtidwell/language/sovereign_posture.html from a collection of HCI design patterns at http://www.mit.edu/~jtidwell/interaction_patterns.html; I think J. Tidwell has since moved on to http://designinginterfaces.com/Introduction however, and in restructuring her thinking items like 'Sovereign Posture' seemed to lose their place. The new site seems to be more about layout than 'modes' or 'purposes' of use.
'Sovereign Posture' refers to the situation where an interface may be complex, and is designed for the 'expert user', but that's okay -- anyone using it already intends to become an expert and is willing to take the time needed to do so, so long as they know the reward will be a faster/more-expressive work environment. The idea is that sometimes it's not worth it to create a 'dummy' version of your software. It makes some sense for 'winzip', but not for 'word'.
Robin Hood is still a thief, yes. But if we periodically do/don't support such a villain ("opposition leader"), we can effectively "stipple" in a middleground that otherwise would not exist. Democrats/Replublicans? It feels like we all "see" the solution we're asymptotically approaching, we just can't seem to get there from here, so we fake it instead. We need the loyal (and often illegal, sometimes even immoral) opposition to achieve a stable society.
They could get into a pitched gunfight anywhere. (Iraq, for example.) No, the reason they want the plane is so they can do something sensational, like crash into a building. It's a lot harder to do that in the middle of a gunfight. Ergo, seeing that their chances of achieving anything memorable are reduced by the presence of armed passengers, they'll find something else to do instead. Something memorable, never-before-seen, unexpected. Something more ... terrorist-like. The plane thing's already been done. There's no reason to ever do it again, particularly not if it's going to be more difficult.
Both of those markets suffer from an additional constraint: consumers believe that getting the cheap model is a bad thing. Few people, even if poor, are interested in going to the local $5/visit doctor (if there even is one) because it's assumed that cheap = bad, and healthcare is something you just don't mess around with. (Which is the other reason healthcare costs keep going up -- people will pay absolutely anything for health. They're not going to stop their treatment and declare that they're not willing to pay $5000 for something that has an 80% chance of curing them of their current ailment. They'll just go into debt instead. Every time.)
Those who are willing to deal with having "cheap" written all over their college diploma will get what they paid for -- possibly a really good education, but a diploma that doesn't glitter in the eyes of potential employers. You pay for an image, not just a lesson.
We even ran into this when providing local computer PC repair for cheaper than the competition -- we couldn't get any business until we raised our prices. Nothing else changed. But we just weren't a valid competitor because we were too far away from the average price, too far down the bell curve.
These units won't necessarily suffer from this -- there are objective tests that can be performed on these devices to show that the cheaper model still meets your requirements and that it's okay to buy it.
... and when they did so, the FDA didn't much approve of their over-the-top marketing (for Cocaine.) I wonder if they can get them riled up twice in a row?
http://www.fda.gov/foi/warning_letters/b6312d.htm
In "Founding Brothers", the author posits that shortly after the revolution, it was socially expected that leaders should appear not to want/have-wanted the office; Washington and Jefferson both did the [Lucius Quinctius] Cincinnatus "I'm retiring to my beloved farm" thing, and during the Jefferson/Adams presidential race, neither campaigned for themselves, but rather had/let their friends & colleagues do so for them.
Would there *have* to be? Why?
I swear, back in the day, searching on 'hotbot' for 'c programmers' would return results like
...
C Programmers gone wild!
Naked C Programmers!
Does that count?
Is there a system within the law whereby a politician could make a promise and *ask* to be bound to that promise, by law? It's not really contract law, as the votes are anonymous, so that'd be hard to prove. It's not really a false-advertising law, as you're not selling a product or service (at least not in the traditional sense.) What does that leave? A contract with yourself? Seems like a problem we should have solved earlier, given the system of governance in use. But then we always assumed that:
a) we'd impeach them if they did something *really* bad
b) we'd fail to re-elect them if they didn't do enough good
c) representatives are expected to read up and become experts on issues, sometimes secret issues, and make decisions on our behalf, given the data they have, not given the data we have.
Under those circumstances, I guess it didn't make sense to find a way to legally bind them to do as we say?
So ... you're saying a rigged system is better than no system, and if you notice that something is rigged/corrupt, you shouldn't demand justice, because that might throw everything into chaos, eventually? Is that what you're saying? Is this "Roman irony"?
Agreed. Besides, you hear stories of patients researching their conditions to a greater extent than their doctors, basically using the doctors only to get permission to go through with a proposed solution -- not to do the research. I know my g/f's mom spent *years* going from doctor to doctor for help, only for us to eventually help her self-diagnose as Celiac -- none of her doctors ever figured it out, nor spent the time researching the symptoms to see what it *could* be. They simply don't have the time. You go to doctors for:
... but damn it, it's my data, it should be mine to keep and reveal.
a) advice (which you can get elsewhere, and spend as long looking as you need to)
b) permission (which, really, is none of their business, but somehow it became law)
c) justification for insurance payment (the real reason, I think)
Growing up in France, everyone was issued a Carnet de Sante -- a Health Booklet. You keep all your medical records in one standardized paper booklet -- immunizations, visits, checks, growth charts, odd medical conditions, etc. Not high tech, but it worked. Doctors sign/stamp as you go, but you're responsible for carrying your health history around to various doctors -- and they'll look at what you bring, too! Here, I have to sign a form for my new doctor to call my old doctor, fax the form, get records sent (not always free), all so the new doctor can ignore what he's now received, and start all over -- oh, I'm sorry, your x-rays aren't in my prefered format, so I need you to get whole new ones, even though there's nothing actually wrong with the old ones. They don't seem to ever want me to, oh, I dunno, take home a copy of my visit data after each visit, then re-supply it to future doctors (same or otherwise.) I can't figure out if it's a way of making me "loyal" to a doctor (as they also like to charge a first-time-visit fee, regardless of how recently you've seen another doctor -- making switching doctors a costly pain)
We should turn slashdot into a wiki site -- not only can you post comments and moderate, but you can directly edit the topic summary as well! Maybe the entire discussion can be turned into a wiki -- constantly rebuilding itself into a summary of the opinions and argumentation of the various sides of the issue ... if you've got time to comment, you should have time to clean, classify, and arrange your argument into a larger context, cite sources, and most particularly: keep quiet if the basic point you're making has already been made. That'd be *awesome*.
I'd like to think that any people desiring freedom from its government can do so without outside aid -- after all, there are almost always more civilians than military, right? I would have liked Iraq to free itself, for Afghanistan to free itself, maybe even China and Burma -- but is it really realistic to expect that with today's weapons, and today's means of communication, and today's wealth gulf between the rich and poor (where, in an oppressive regime, the rich tend to *be* the government) ... that the people can really free themselves from even a relatively small oppressive regime? We can point all we like to guerilla tactics, which come about in that kind of asymmetric situation, but from what I can tell, that only ever gets you to the point of stalemate. The organized force can't truly win, but you don't rid yourself of them either.
In the end, they'll just have an asymmetric civil war. Messy business all around. There's a point to be made that if we can't resolve the civil war in Iraq, we can't do so in Burma. But I think there's still a difference between a civil war among fairly-matched people with an ideological disagreement (US north vs. south, Iraqi religious war, etc.) and a civil war between the great mass of the poor who want freedom, and the few priviledged who want to stay in power. Seems like one tide is easier to turn than the other.
As to helping -- we should also consider that if our goal is to maximize overall happiness, not just in our own community, but across the world, it makes sense to at least free people up to the point where they can help themselves, then all move forward together. Their status, I think, has some effect on us through the world economy, and makes it harder to improve things here at home.
We in the "West" have been blamed (and rightly so) for meddling in the affairs of others over the centuries; but I think a lot of the harm we caused was the result of our goals, not just our presence -- we were in it for ourselves, for our own home economies. We had colonies not to improve the condition of the locals (we left that job up to charities and religious organizations) but to extract as much wealth as we could from them, use them as armies in our wars, etc. Perhaps it's possible to come to someone's aid and not wind up with a country full of angry, poor people from which terrorists are naturally born? Just maybe? (How many terrorists have attacked us as a result of interfering in Kosovo? The French may not like our present government, but I've never heard them complain that we rescued their butts from the Germans -- and I lived there for 15 years.)
But perhaps you think that journalists who smuggle guns on airplanes and then reveal the flaws in airport security to the public should be thrown in jail as well. If intentions don't count, then every tank truck driver carrying hazardous substances who has an accident should be prosecuted as a terrorist.
... you have to suffer for what you think is right. If that means rotting in jail until the system is fixed, then you should proudly do so. It's just part of your duty as a citizen, no?
... great. If they disagree, that might be worth publishing, telling everyone what you *think* might work, and disgrace them for not caring enough. But maybe that's just being petty.
a) If the journalist is caught in the act (though later than expected, after a flaw has obviously been uncovered worth documenting,) or even just because the article is read by a cop somewhere (we arrest people long after they've committed murder, right?) he should still be arrested and thrown in jail if a law has been broken. There's a process, and it doesn't end just because you're a journalist. Anyone can be a journalist, which is a great thing, but we can't just give out get-out-of-jail-free cards to everyone. It's unfortunate that many laws can't be challenged unless someone actually breaks the existing law, then gets a judge to throw the law out rather than put the citizen in jail, but that's another example of the same process. Civil disobedience is great, but it's still punishable by law, at least in the short term. Hacking into a secure network, if it violates laws, is still a violation of the law -- you can argue all day that they should be thankful you told them about it, or revealed a flaw with no intention of exploiting it, but until the harmed party makes that determination, or the due process of law decides to throw the case out
If you suspect a hole, however, I might suggest first going to the entity in question, asking for an interview with the higher-ups, ask them for permission to secretly attack their system under only semi-controlled conditions (as in you'll be rescued when security comes to beat you up, but they won't inform them ahead of time or prevent you from doing anything or in any way tamper with the system), for everyone's mutual benefit. If they agree
b) What you're initially accused/charged with and what you get convicted of are different things. Seems like it's easier to downgrade charges during a trial than to upgrade them, so you start with the worst possible thing, then drop charges as you go. The government, when acting on our behalf in court (as we're all considered injured parties when public lands, etc. are involved), is obligated to fight "for us" to the fullest extent possible. It's part of the adversarial system. That's why we also have a judge and jury. Besides, the more ridiculous the claim (terrorist truck driver!) the easier it will be to disprove culpability. It's really in their best interest, if they want a conviction at all, to go for the most reasonable claim and make it stick -- "you weren't paying attention when you should have been, and are required to try to do, by law".