I believe it was the Medici family which first documented the need for bank regulation in the 1500s, although it is possible that other civilizations with extensive merchant activity may have realized that earlier but not left records. Bank and banking system failures in the 1600s, 1700s, 1800s, and early 1900s led all nations with large merchant, industrial, and financial economies to pass and implement banking regulation, oversight, and auditing requirements.
Actually the environments where computer programming was developed had plenty of men - they just considered the activity too mundane and low-level for their capabilities and put "the girls" (many of whom had MAs in math) on that task.
So... how was it that women's brains were "wired" for programming from 1940 to 1985 [1], but suddenly around 1990 they stopped being interested in "coding" and "IT"?
sPh
[1] From 1940-1950 approximately 100% of programmers were women; from 1950-1980 the percentage was still very high and probably a majority. 1984 was the peak year for women graduating with engineering degrees since WWII and a large percentage of those women took CS degrees.
= = = I am getting pretty tired of reading asserions like "we can't even launch a damn website". What they were trying to launch was not a Website but a very complex, probably too complex, brokerage-type system to mate people with myriad insurance options. -= = =
Megadittos, as a certain demographic likes to say. healthcare.gov was in essence one of the largest EDI projects of all time, with all the transactions going live on the same day rather than phased in. And we all know how much the current generation of Web n.x people loves to work on EDI code. They just run to sign on for EDI projects the way lemmings run to embrace Disney film crews.
Very, very complex project. Certainly some senior management failures all the way to the Oval Office, and probably (as is often the case) a portion of those failures due to arrogance and failure to listen. But at the same time, not working too badly given the size, scope, and hard deadlines, and apparently getting better day-by-day as anyone with megaproject experience would expect.
= = = On the contrary, they know exactly how an amoral, win-at-any-cost, use-any-means-necessary-to-attain-absolute-political-power cunt like Pelosi works. = = =
Just thought we should memorialize that as the deep, thoughtful, centrist political analysis of the Anonymous Coward at 45521181.
There is a also a myth that hospitals and hospital emergency rooms are required to provide care for medical conditions. They aren't - they are only required to stabilize and provide palliative care to any patient who arrives at their doors. Colon cancer and no insurance? The ER will give you a diagnosis and some painkillers, then on your way.
= = = Boehner cannot be Speaker without the Tea Party (libertarian) members of his caucus. = = =
Technically the Speaker of the House serves the entire House, Congress, and Nation, not just his personal political party; the House Majority Leader serves the majority political party. The Speakership hasn't operated that way since before the Civil War, but Boehner always has the option of working with the Minority Leader to obtain a majority of votes to pass anything that truly needs to be passed. Which is what he did with the debt ceiling, actually, once the inability of certain members of his own caucus to count became apparent.
= = = One of his first moves was to let partisan Nancy Pelosi take the lead = = =
It is always easy to spot the breitbart.com fans in the office:
1) They all subscribe to the "Nancy Pelosi as ultimate evil librul WITCH" theory - despite Pelosi being an ordinary centrist Democrat. Which is to say, a bit to the left of the DLC/Third Way, a bit more to the left of the neoliberals: just about at the median of US voters.
2) They have no understanding of how a legislature that intends to endure for many years and which uses parliamentary rules of procedure, actually works
3) They have no understanding of what the Speaker of the House's job actually is.
sPh
Pelosi is, to be sure, a very good political manager (and therefore a very effective Speaker of the House). Perhaps that is what makes her unforgivable compared to Boehner and - particularly - Cruz.
No, you are specifically claiming (1) that this "uncertainty" about Iraq's possession of nuclear weapons was a justification for the United States to launch an unprovoked invasion of Iraq and (2) that that was the reason that the Bush/Cheney did in fact order the invasion of Iraq. #1 is false under international law and just about every system of nation-state interaction since the Babylonian Empire [1], and #2 was very clearly false even at the time and as the author indicates wasn't believed in any way shape or form by the Bush Administration itself.
You're also conveniently leaving out PNAC and the entire "stir the beehive" theory, of which one Richard Cheney was a leading proponent in the 1995-2000 time frame. And you are gliding right by the false intelligence that Cheney and Bolton worked very hard to introduce into the system. It doesn't matter a whit what Saddam Hussein told an FBI interrogator or anyone else since the actual facts on the ground in Iraq (whether true or deceptive)/were never a factor in the decision to invade/.
sPh
[1] So given that it was reported this week that a certain nation is not only bankrolling Pakistan's nuclear weapon development but has one on order for themselves, is the US now justified in invading that nation? Why or why not?
Yeah, no. You are reciting the story that Cheney's handlers developed and pushed into the Washington DC media when things really started to go bad in Iraq (around 2005). And Cheney is very, very good at that kind of thing (managing his image and stroking the egos of DC "thought leaders"). The story was then revised and expanded during the trial of traitor Irving Libby (I'm surprised you haven't worked the name Armitage into your hard right fantasy narrative) and re-pushed very hard during 2008 and 2009 in an attempt to set the narrative and pre-write the history.
Here's what a reporter who spent five years researching the Bush/Cheney Administration had to say:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/11/07/why-did-we-go-to-war-in-iraq-an-interview-with-peter-baker/ EK: But it wasn’t hijacked by Iraq. The Bush administration chose that war. And, to be honest, that’s what I read the book to understand. I’ve never felt like I understood the reason the Bush administration decided to go to war in Iraq. Once that decision was made, I feel like I can track the arguments for and against it. But the fundamental choice to make that the project is a mystery to me. Now that you’ve written the book, do you feel like you understand it?
PB: I have a better understanding, but I think it’s one of these questions that will be revisited and re-debated for decades to come. My guess is 20 years from now we’ll still be seeing more books on that question. It is the essence of this presidency: Why go to war in Iraq? Some mention Bush’s father. Some mention Cheney’s sense of unfinished business in the Gulf War. There’s the false intelligence.
And overlaying all that is what it felt like in that moment. They were operating in an atmosphere of fear and anger and uncertainty. They were seeing these threat reports every day -- including episodes we didn’t even know about, like the botulism scare. When they come into office, they had thought, at the time, that Iraq was a top threat. Then once 9/11 happens it sort of removes all constraints that they might have had prior to that in their interest and inclination to use force. There’s a quote in the book from a senior administration official who was really involved in the decision to invade Iraq and who regrets it now who says we went into Iraq because Afghanistan was so easy. We needed someone harder to beat; 9/11 felt like such a signal event that it required action and response beyond simply toppling the Taliban.
EK: That quote is amazing. But it sounds like he also doesn’t know why they went into Iraq. And he was there! That’s less an explanation of the policy than of the psychology. And that’s something the book details really well. I think people can remember what it felt like to be scared after 9/11. But the amount of fear there is in the White House and the degree to which fear of a worse attack drives the decisions after 9/11 -- it’s a really psychologically unusual administration.
PB: That’s absolutely right. Every day they receive a briefing telling them 100 ways bad guys around the world are trying to kill Americans, Some are real, and some are fanciful. But in that moment the intelligence agencies, having missed the dots on 9/11, begin throwing everything they have at the White House.
Cheney has this history in continuity-of-government issues. He has for years contemplated the notion of an apocalyptic attack on the United States -- 9/11 convinces him his fears are real. Nineteen guys with box cutters, to him, are only a scratch on the surface compared to what could have happened. And that makes a lot of things seem more reasonable. Eventually, Frances Townsend becomes head of the Homeland Security Advisor and begins taking some of these threats out of the briefings because she felt it was so skewed towards danger and it was warping everyone’s mindset to be so exposed to every piece of raw data like that.
Happened to a neighbor and a friend, both with similar models. Neighbor's brand new garage and hundred-year-old tree got toasted too (luckily it was detached and the house survived); friend had his transcript put on hold because he failed to obey campus police order to move his vehicle (which was entirely melted {the whole vehicle, not just the tires} and the wheels locked, and the insurance company told him to leave it there until their scraping crew arrived). Insurance agent told my neighbor that that model was well known for having the power door locks short out and burn down the car.
I'm claiming that the story that "no one knew or could tell whether or not SH had nuclear weapons" is a back formation developed after the fact to try to justify launching an unprovoked invasion of a sovereign nation, that said story not only doesn't fit with the facts of the situation in 2002/2003 but doesn't even fit the words that were being spoken by senior Bush/Cheney Administration officials in public at the time, that it doesn't account for Cheney's program of juicing intelligence information that fit his precepts and suppressing all other reports, and that said program of back-justification kicked into high gear on November 6th 2008 for some odd reason.
Nokia. Nokia. Where have I been reading about Nokia lately? Oh yeah, that was the world-dominating handset company whose senior team decided in 2007 that the Apple iPhone was not a serious threat to their existing business. And a few years later killed their potentially iPhone-competitive product line. Good source of techno-business insight without a doubt.
NIST is required by law to consult with the NSA before publishing cryptographic standards. What "consult" means is unknown.
More conventionally, it stands to reason that NSA personnel would be participating in NIST projects on computer security, cryptography, and theoretically math, since they [NSA] have a lot of experts in those fields working for them.
xTuple is a possibility, as are a number of midrange packages depending on your industry (e.g. Visual Manufacturing for machine shops / small make-to-stock operations). But you really need to get a handle on your requirements and budget first. Budget includes not only dollars but willingness of director-level managers to second key players onto the implementation team for as long as it takes. If you can't get that, well, time to get the resume to the headhunters.
If you tell us what your line of business is and approximate headcount (fixed + field personal) and annual turnover I/we can give better suggestions. But it isn't something that can be done offhand (I've been doing this since 1996).
Not necessary to question their intelligence or even their competence. What happens is perfectly illustrated by the business I worked for which was in a highly-marketing-oriented (=trendy) business and which tried to outsource and offshore most of its business systems development. It was a failure, but not really for technical reasons; the fundamental problem was cultural communication. Highly detailed specs would be written and sent offshore and software would return that would meet the letter of the spec and function beautifully but which was absolutely useless for business purposes. It was impossible to communicate why the results weren't correct to someone who hadn't grown up with US teenagers and spent a lot of time with same in US shopping malls. The cultural barriers, on top of the language and timezone issues and lack of contextual communication made the process an utter disaster.
- - - - - They're outsourced not to save money, but to make the department more agile. They can have 20 guys today and 50 next month if they want. - - - - -
And how exactly does that magic work? 30 people who are not only highly technically competent but who understand the intersection of business and technology unique to your organization just sitting around waiting for the call? Like the fire dept?
Somehow, it has never really worked out that way any time I have seen it tried. And I've been on the receiving end of many a call from recruiters (ironically now themselves offshored) desperate to "fill this req by tomorrow morning" for minimum-dollar staff augmentation subcontracts to EDS, etc. $25/hr to the subcontract technician billed at $75/hr to the contractor billed at $150/hr to the client. Very agile.
Based on your reading of the relevant documents, is your ISP following or violating its terms of service? If they are following their terms of service then you shop for another service (with the same or different provider).
If you think they are violating their terms of service, you (1) open a tech support request pointing that out. Assuming that the ISP rejects your support request, you then (2) hire a lawyer with some experience in telecommunications regulatory law to advise you. The lawyer might tell you he can try a bark letter or that you should just forget about it. If the latter, you can then (3) direct him to prepare a formal letter of complaint [1] to whatever legal and regulatory agencies might have jurisdiction in your state (state commerce commission, state justice dept consumer fraud, FCC, US Justice). While you are waiting for those to be resolved, you can then (4) shop for another service.
Really there is very little choice here. The US hasn't been great on consumer protection since a brief burst in the Teddy Roosevelt/Upton Sinclair/post-Crash of 1929 days, and the Clinton and Bush II administrations between them pretty much polished off what little was left - particularly in telecom. And in fairness a lot of heavy-duty end user bandwidth consumption was allowed to slip through the gaps in service agreements during a period when ISPs had rapidly growing business and infrastructure and plenty of money. Now that that is no longer the case they are tightening up. Stinks for the high use consumer, but the answer is generally to buy a business-class service with very tightly defined terms of service and pay for exactly what you need.
Oh yeah - don't wait for those letters of complaint to have any effect.
sPh
[1] A formal letter of complaint to a regulatory agency or attorney general's office is a very different thing from a hand-written citizen complaint. It follows very precise form and contains specific information and causes of complaint. Unless you're willing to spend hundreds of hours in an administrative law library figuring it out you'll need a lawyer to write one for you.
Slashdot Mirror
I believe it was the Medici family which first documented the need for bank regulation in the 1500s, although it is possible that other civilizations with extensive merchant activity may have realized that earlier but not left records. Bank and banking system failures in the 1600s, 1700s, 1800s, and early 1900s led all nations with large merchant, industrial, and financial economies to pass and implement banking regulation, oversight, and auditing requirements.
Bitcoin? "Freedom!"
sPh
Actually the environments where computer programming was developed had plenty of men - they just considered the activity too mundane and low-level for their capabilities and put "the girls" (many of whom had MAs in math) on that task.
sPh
So... how was it that women's brains were "wired" for programming from 1940 to 1985 [1], but suddenly around 1990 they stopped being interested in "coding" and "IT"?
sPh
[1] From 1940-1950 approximately 100% of programmers were women; from 1950-1980 the percentage was still very high and probably a majority. 1984 was the peak year for women graduating with engineering degrees since WWII and a large percentage of those women took CS degrees.
1953 coup and the subsequent torture chambers just flushed down the memory hole, eh?
Megadittos, as a certain demographic likes to say. healthcare.gov was in essence one of the largest EDI projects of all time, with all the transactions going live on the same day rather than phased in. And we all know how much the current generation of Web n.x people loves to work on EDI code. They just run to sign on for EDI projects the way lemmings run to embrace Disney film crews.
Very, very complex project. Certainly some senior management failures all the way to the Oval Office, and probably (as is often the case) a portion of those failures due to arrogance and failure to listen. But at the same time, not working too badly given the size, scope, and hard deadlines, and apparently getting better day-by-day as anyone with megaproject experience would expect.
sPh
Just thought we should memorialize that as the deep, thoughtful, centrist political analysis of the Anonymous Coward at 45521181.
sPh
There is a also a myth that hospitals and hospital emergency rooms are required to provide care for medical conditions. They aren't - they are only required to stabilize and provide palliative care to any patient who arrives at their doors. Colon cancer and no insurance? The ER will give you a diagnosis and some painkillers, then on your way.
sPh
Technically the Speaker of the House serves the entire House, Congress, and Nation, not just his personal political party; the House Majority Leader serves the majority political party. The Speakership hasn't operated that way since before the Civil War, but Boehner always has the option of working with the Minority Leader to obtain a majority of votes to pass anything that truly needs to be passed. Which is what he did with the debt ceiling, actually, once the inability of certain members of his own caucus to count became apparent.
sPh
It is always easy to spot the breitbart.com fans in the office:
1) They all subscribe to the "Nancy Pelosi as ultimate evil librul WITCH" theory - despite Pelosi being an ordinary centrist Democrat. Which is to say, a bit to the left of the DLC/Third Way, a bit more to the left of the neoliberals: just about at the median of US voters.
2) They have no understanding of how a legislature that intends to endure for many years and which uses parliamentary rules of procedure, actually works
3) They have no understanding of what the Speaker of the House's job actually is.
sPh
Pelosi is, to be sure, a very good political manager (and therefore a very effective Speaker of the House). Perhaps that is what makes her unforgivable compared to Boehner and - particularly - Cruz.
No, you are specifically claiming (1) that this "uncertainty" about Iraq's possession of nuclear weapons was a justification for the United States to launch an unprovoked invasion of Iraq and (2) that that was the reason that the Bush/Cheney did in fact order the invasion of Iraq. #1 is false under international law and just about every system of nation-state interaction since the Babylonian Empire [1], and #2 was very clearly false even at the time and as the author indicates wasn't believed in any way shape or form by the Bush Administration itself.
You're also conveniently leaving out PNAC and the entire "stir the beehive" theory, of which one Richard Cheney was a leading proponent in the 1995-2000 time frame. And you are gliding right by the false intelligence that Cheney and Bolton worked very hard to introduce into the system. It doesn't matter a whit what Saddam Hussein told an FBI interrogator or anyone else since the actual facts on the ground in Iraq (whether true or deceptive) /were never a factor in the decision to invade/.
sPh
[1] So given that it was reported this week that a certain nation is not only bankrolling Pakistan's nuclear weapon development but has one on order for themselves, is the US now justified in invading that nation? Why or why not?
Yeah, no. You are reciting the story that Cheney's handlers developed and pushed into the Washington DC media when things really started to go bad in Iraq (around 2005). And Cheney is very, very good at that kind of thing (managing his image and stroking the egos of DC "thought leaders"). The story was then revised and expanded during the trial of traitor Irving Libby (I'm surprised you haven't worked the name Armitage into your hard right fantasy narrative) and re-pushed very hard during 2008 and 2009 in an attempt to set the narrative and pre-write the history.
Here's what a reporter who spent five years researching the Bush/Cheney Administration had to say:
Lots more at that link.
sPh
Happened to a neighbor and a friend, both with similar models. Neighbor's brand new garage and hundred-year-old tree got toasted too (luckily it was detached and the house survived); friend had his transcript put on hold because he failed to obey campus police order to move his vehicle (which was entirely melted {the whole vehicle, not just the tires} and the wheels locked, and the insurance company told him to leave it there until their scraping crew arrived). Insurance agent told my neighbor that that model was well known for having the power door locks short out and burn down the car.
sPh
I'm claiming that the story that "no one knew or could tell whether or not SH had nuclear weapons" is a back formation developed after the fact to try to justify launching an unprovoked invasion of a sovereign nation, that said story not only doesn't fit with the facts of the situation in 2002/2003 but doesn't even fit the words that were being spoken by senior Bush/Cheney Administration officials in public at the time, that it doesn't account for Cheney's program of juicing intelligence information that fit his precepts and suppressing all other reports, and that said program of back-justification kicked into high gear on November 6th 2008 for some odd reason.
sPh
Thanks for that nice summary Mr. Cheney.
Nokia. Nokia. Where have I been reading about Nokia lately? Oh yeah, that was the world-dominating handset company whose senior team decided in 2007 that the Apple iPhone was not a serious threat to their existing business. And a few years later killed their potentially iPhone-competitive product line. Good source of techno-business insight without a doubt.
sPh
Three words: W, T, and O. Add "complaint" and you have a restraint of trade case.
sPh
I think the EU might be facing a pretty strong WTO complaint if they actually attempt to force Apple to use USB only.
sPh
NIST is required by law to consult with the NSA before publishing cryptographic standards. What "consult" means is unknown.
More conventionally, it stands to reason that NSA personnel would be participating in NIST projects on computer security, cryptography, and theoretically math, since they [NSA] have a lot of experts in those fields working for them.
sPh
xTuple is a possibility, as are a number of midrange packages depending on your industry (e.g. Visual Manufacturing for machine shops / small make-to-stock operations). But you really need to get a handle on your requirements and budget first. Budget includes not only dollars but willingness of director-level managers to second key players onto the implementation team for as long as it takes. If you can't get that, well, time to get the resume to the headhunters.
If you tell us what your line of business is and approximate headcount (fixed + field personal) and annual turnover I/we can give better suggestions. But it isn't something that can be done offhand (I've been doing this since 1996).
sPh
Be interesting to see how they get through their newly-mandated CIP cybersecurity review with outsourced and offshored IS/IT.
sPh
Not necessary to question their intelligence or even their competence. What happens is perfectly illustrated by the business I worked for which was in a highly-marketing-oriented (=trendy) business and which tried to outsource and offshore most of its business systems development. It was a failure, but not really for technical reasons; the fundamental problem was cultural communication. Highly detailed specs would be written and sent offshore and software would return that would meet the letter of the spec and function beautifully but which was absolutely useless for business purposes. It was impossible to communicate why the results weren't correct to someone who hadn't grown up with US teenagers and spent a lot of time with same in US shopping malls. The cultural barriers, on top of the language and timezone issues and lack of contextual communication made the process an utter disaster.
sPh
And how exactly does that magic work? 30 people who are not only highly technically competent but who understand the intersection of business and technology unique to your organization just sitting around waiting for the call? Like the fire dept?
Somehow, it has never really worked out that way any time I have seen it tried. And I've been on the receiving end of many a call from recruiters (ironically now themselves offshored) desperate to "fill this req by tomorrow morning" for minimum-dollar staff augmentation subcontracts to EDS, etc. $25/hr to the subcontract technician billed at $75/hr to the contractor billed at $150/hr to the client. Very agile.
sPh
Based on your reading of the relevant documents, is your ISP following or violating its terms of service? If they are following their terms of service then you shop for another service (with the same or different provider).
If you think they are violating their terms of service, you (1) open a tech support request pointing that out. Assuming that the ISP rejects your support request, you then (2) hire a lawyer with some experience in telecommunications regulatory law to advise you. The lawyer might tell you he can try a bark letter or that you should just forget about it. If the latter, you can then (3) direct him to prepare a formal letter of complaint [1] to whatever legal and regulatory agencies might have jurisdiction in your state (state commerce commission, state justice dept consumer fraud, FCC, US Justice). While you are waiting for those to be resolved, you can then (4) shop for another service.
Really there is very little choice here. The US hasn't been great on consumer protection since a brief burst in the Teddy Roosevelt/Upton Sinclair/post-Crash of 1929 days, and the Clinton and Bush II administrations between them pretty much polished off what little was left - particularly in telecom. And in fairness a lot of heavy-duty end user bandwidth consumption was allowed to slip through the gaps in service agreements during a period when ISPs had rapidly growing business and infrastructure and plenty of money. Now that that is no longer the case they are tightening up. Stinks for the high use consumer, but the answer is generally to buy a business-class service with very tightly defined terms of service and pay for exactly what you need.
Oh yeah - don't wait for those letters of complaint to have any effect.
sPh
[1] A formal letter of complaint to a regulatory agency or attorney general's office is a very different thing from a hand-written citizen complaint. It follows very precise form and contains specific information and causes of complaint. Unless you're willing to spend hundreds of hours in an administrative law library figuring it out you'll need a lawyer to write one for you.
Isolation level and transaction are key concepts as well, ones that many people working with databases miss entirely.
sPh
I hope someone has some Funny points left to give your post.
Then again, given what I've seen over the years I'm sure this has been done... More than once.
sPh