Basically, the IBM guy said the code of Notes was an absolute mess
Having worked with notes that does not surprise me. What does surprise me is that an IBM guy would admit that. Usually when I ask the local IBM rep about buggy software he gets this distant zombie like look in his eyes and responds with the same mantra (in a hollow, mechanical voice):
Firstly, no I am not an American. Secondly keep in mind that while the caste system is still upheld in vast areas of India. Those short sighted greedy little Americans canned their own apartheit system with a single ruling of their Supreme Court. I would like to see Indians, and especially those of you who pride your selves on not being inhabitants of ArsholeVille, who let the cast system live on in other parts of your country, beat the Americans on that count. The Americans like all other people have their faults but when it comes to Apartheit they are way ahead of India.
The phenomenally poor in India are seeing a big jump in their standard of living, while the fat American is simply seeing a slow down in their accumulation of wealth.
It is not the phenominally poor in India who are benefitting from the export of high tech jobs it is India's upper and middle classes. India has a cast system and the people who are benefitting from this would rather drown than touch a rope that has previously been handled by one of Inda's phenominally poor low cast "Untouchables", unless of course the rope was ritually purified first. It seems to me this has alot less to do with "fat Americans" and more to do with "short sighted greedy little American corporate executives" who are pissing away a highly trained workforce for short term gains and making a present of high technology to India which is only too happy to accept it since the technological exchange will eventually allow her to dispense with the Americans and compete with them.
"meteorites cast off from earth "contaminating" Mars already"
Even if Meteroites have not contaminated Mars what about our probes? I somehow doubt that the early probes were sterilized. If anything from Earth has already contaminated Mars, human probes would have to rank high on the list.
In that case you should like this crossbreed between a palmtop and a mobile phone. From what I have heard the clunkyness is just about worth putting up with because of the features. It is expensive of course, but it has bluetooth and many palmtop features. Personally I prefer the Vanilla phones because so far none of the features were good enough to pay for. This is the first time anybody has managed to stuff features into a mobile phone that are good enough to tempte me to pay for them.
Does this mean that based on this study anti-privacy activists (how else to call them) will start saying that "as shown by studies, if you don't want to share your private information, thoughts
I don't think they need a justification for that. But Judging from what it says in the/. intro:
..to identify the monetary value of private information to individuals..f
They will now be able to calculate exactly how much money they have saved by poking their noses into our private thoughts and information without our permission.
The Blair government did just as much by implying that 45minute timeframe applied to longer ranged strategic weapons. The 45 mintues may have applied to tactical weapons such as mortar bombs, aircraft bombs and artillery shells, yes but not Scuds, modified Scuds or any of the other missiles the Iraqui's may have had in the pipes. It has been comical to watch how the Bush-Blair alliance went from touting WMD as the cause for going to war to using the humanitarian angle of getting rid of one of the most cruel mass murderering tyrants of the 20th century as a fallback position! I won't miss Saddam Hussein and I do not think the war in Iraq was wrong. Saddam got what was coming to him. I just wish Bush-Blair had gone to war a honestly claiming they wanted to rid the world of a murdering tyrant rather than half truths and spin about WMD which is looking more and more like a whole lot of smoke and mirrors.
"Every country except for the US is against Israel."
Not every body is against Israel. Just like it is possible to dislike communism without hating Russians in general it is quite possible to dislike Ariel Sharon, his fanatical Zionist cronies and their landgrabbing in the occupied territories without at the same being against Israel and hating all Jews.
If I had the choice between spending eternity either in "The Office" or "Sex and the City's" New York I think I would abscond and run screaming for the safety of Helms deep (straight through Fangorn forest AND the Uruk'hai army). Busting the heads of evil scum with the Rohirrim must be better than spending eternity with a bunch of neurotic yuppies...
Oh, of course there is life out there. The universe is simply to huge for that not to be the case. The question is, are these aliens sentient, have they evolved a sophisticated culture and if the above are true, what will they think of us when their SETI program picks up the first episodes of Twin Peaks.
All of this location information is already available to the mobile network operator, the network would not be able to function without it. And yes the government has access to it. This is not to say that it is being used to keep track of every individual that showed up in the last census and owns a mobile telephone. Police forces do however use this information to track down stolen phones, cars (list goes on), find missing persons (typically it saves accident victims and sick people, unable to use the telephone due to their injury) and perhaps, best of all it has shattered the alibi of several scumbag rapists, murderers and child molesters who claimed to have been:"... away from the scene of the crime with a group of 'friends' and I even called 'John Doe' on my mobile he can testify to that!. Unfortunately for him the pervert can often be proven by police to have been somewhere else because the call he made at the time of the murder was made from close to the scene of the crime and not at the local pub where the pervert's alibi witness had placed him. Not quite conclusive but a powerful argument for a prosecutor when comined with forensics and other circumstantial evidnece. Especially since it is only afterwards that the accused suddenly starts claiming the only thing he can, Ohhh, I forgot the phone was stolen I made that call from a payphone!
It seems to me that this will only be a factor in mobile spam if the mobile network operators let people spam your mobile phone (for profit of course) since that is the only way spammers are going to get at this information; and the way anti spam regulation is evloving that would seem unlikely. At the very least ther will be a legally mandated option for a user to turn mobile spam off. As for the Government I already demonstrated how it uses this information in a very limited way as we speak. Trakcing the entire population this is theoretically possible. But it is also up to you to decide if it happens. Keep in mind that in the USA as well as in any other Democratic society people who would like to practice mass tracking of citizens can only do that if YOU and I enough other people are stupid enough to elect them into office.
There are quite a few reasons to put Linux in a watch. NASA could for example put a scanner and OCR engine in the Linux based watch so those braniacs at NASA could verify their Metric to English unit calculations with a flick of their wrist. And before you say 'BAH! Humbug!'.... Just think of it, a trillon dollar 'Man to Mars' mission on its way to Jupiter because somebody screwed up his conversion calculations.
Just a few nitpicks here. For one thing nobody has proven that the Clovis people eradicated the N-American megafauna along with several other species such as horses when they came across them when migrating into the continent. AFAIK Scientists are still arguing about that. His claim about DDT is also strange. It does not kill birds AFAIK (feel free to cite cedable scientific references to set me straight here), it keeps them from procreating normally. Which is not killing birds so technically his statement can be said to be correct. Still that does not mean the ban on DDT was wrong unless he, and you, think the planet can do without cariverous birds who are the birds that suffer most from DDT. He does have one good point, some enviromentalists have progressed from treating enviromentalism as an ideal to practicing it as fundamentalist religion. That still does not mean that ALL enviromentalists are like that and writing them all off as "treehuggers" makes you just as stupid as the extreme enviromentalists you so despise.
Calm down, this will eventually lead to useful developments. Just imagine how cool the USMC would look stomping over the armies of the worlds rogue nations in Starwars style AT-PT/AT-AT Assault Walkers.
And with all those jobs gone to India we can raise a new army from the subequently swollen ranks of jobless americans, equip them with high tech weapons bought with all the money we save with the outsourcing of techjobs to India, and send the new Legions to clean up N-Korea. According to the CIA the jobless Geeks will come in handy for defusing the stack of A-Bombs Kim Il Song is sitting on. Unless of course they outsource that to India as well.
Now if only that was true of Al Quaeda operatives as well perhaps we would get security warnings when something is actually about to happen. Or dare I hope, perhaps the CIA and NSA's brightest would actually eliminate the need for these warnings by preempting attacs and better yet find Osama Bin Liner or whatever is left of him. As is it seems that we go to a higtened alarm state every time the traffic on rogue servers in the middle east picks up with no visible results.
The point was more to demonstrate that nobody would blame the parents of a drugaddict for the what this addict does. And yet you feel perfectly comfortable supporting the contention that the parents whos children do other undesirable things should be punished for the actions of their children. I wonder, should the parents of joyriding teenagers should be convicted for grand theft auto? What you fail to appreciate is that in the end a child is an individual and it is impossible to transfer any and all resposibility for what the child does completely and without a second thought onto the parent. If you ever tried to regulate the behavior of a teenager you would know this. In the end kids have a mind of their own, they are not midless drones in the process of being programmed by their parents who are then resposible for any suboptimal behavior like a robot manufacturer. Believe it or not a Parents resposibility for the actions of the child is limited under the law. Even in countries where parents are by law resposible for the actions of their child provisions are made to limit this responsibility. Usuall this means that if the parents can demonstrate that they exercised reasonable supervision over the child or made reasonable efforts to discourage or prevent the child from committing a crime they are considered not responsible for the actions of a said child, anything else would be draconian.
Why is it that whenever a crime supposedly results because of drugs, it is only the drugdealers who are blamed? Why are people blaming the drugdealers, and not the parents of those who actually went out and bought the drugs? Why not the medical supply companies, without whom there wouldn't be syringes to shoot up with? Why don't we actually go after those responsible? If parents are incapable of keeping inappropriate materials away from their offspring, be they drugs or alcohol, we must seriously question their parental ability.
Funny how swapping a few words puts a new perspective on it....
"Who really gives a damn about the users anyways?"
Hey! we at DHS/NSA care about users! We CARE what they read, where they go, what they buy, what they say on their cellphone, what is in their email, how often they download communism in the form of linux, what color their underware is.....
**Snap!**
Damn I hate it when that happens......
Re:Kind of emphasizes a major point.
on
Global Dimming
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Environmentalism is much more about ideaology than realism.
From my point of view it is about:
Leaving my house and not having to be greeted by the nausiating smell of burnt gasoline.
Living in a place where everytning is not covered with thin black layer of soot from car exhausts.
Being able to see the mountain on the other side of the bay that is currently obscured by a thick curtain of smog.
Being able to eat the fish I catch in one of the local rivers without risking my health.
Actually that would be over 100 years. The first recorded instance of a balloon being used in war was during the Napoleonic wars when French scientist Charles Coutelle used a ballon to spy on Austrian and Dutch troops during fighting near Mauberge in 1794. The Austrians senior officers at first protested that this was 'unfair' and 'against the rules of war'. In the mean time the commander of an Austrian howitzer battery took a more practical approach and decided that it had been incumbent on him to achieve another first when he istructed his gunners to fire off history's first FLAK/AAA barrage.
Slashdot Mirror
Basically, the IBM guy said the code of Notes was an absolute mess
Having worked with notes that does not surprise me. What does surprise me is that an IBM guy would admit that. Usually when I ask the local IBM rep about buggy software he gets this distant zombie like look in his eyes and responds with the same mantra (in a hollow, mechanical voice):
It will be fixed in the next version....
Firstly, no I am not an American. Secondly keep in mind that while the caste system is still upheld in vast areas of India. Those short sighted greedy little Americans canned their own apartheit system with a single ruling of their Supreme Court. I would like to see Indians, and especially those of you who pride your selves on not being inhabitants of ArsholeVille, who let the cast system live on in other parts of your country, beat the Americans on that count. The Americans like all other people have their faults but when it comes to Apartheit they are way ahead of India.
The phenomenally poor in India are seeing a big jump in their standard of living, while the fat American is simply seeing a slow down in their accumulation of wealth.
It is not the phenominally poor in India who are benefitting from the export of high tech jobs it is India's upper and middle classes. India has a cast system and the people who are benefitting from this would rather drown than touch a rope that has previously been handled by one of Inda's phenominally poor low cast "Untouchables", unless of course the rope was ritually purified first.
It seems to me this has alot less to do with "fat Americans" and more to do with "short sighted greedy little American corporate executives" who are pissing away a highly trained workforce for short term gains and making a present of high technology to India which is only too happy to accept it since the technological exchange will eventually allow her to dispense with the Americans and compete with them.
That's easy, Bart Simpson with a Windows PC....
"meteorites cast off from earth "contaminating" Mars already"
Even if Meteroites have not contaminated Mars what about our probes? I somehow doubt that the early probes were sterilized. If anything from Earth has already contaminated Mars, human probes would have to rank high on the list.
"Or even put in a palm pilot"
In that case you should like this crossbreed between a palmtop and a mobile phone. From what I have heard the clunkyness is just about worth putting up with because of the features. It is expensive of course, but it has bluetooth and many palmtop features. Personally I prefer the Vanilla phones because so far none of the features were good enough to pay for. This is the first time anybody has managed to stuff features into a mobile phone that are good enough to tempte me to pay for them.
...perhaps he can blackmail these guys out of their doman, it would be the perfect one for him.
Does this mean that based on this study anti-privacy activists (how else to call them) will start saying that "as shown by studies, if you don't want to share your private information, thoughts
/. intro:
..to identify the monetary value of private information to individuals..f
I don't think they need a justification for that. But Judging from what it says in the
They will now be able to calculate exactly how much money they have saved by poking their noses into our private thoughts and information without our permission.
MWUHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!!!
Uhummm...
The Blair government did just as much by implying that 45minute timeframe applied to longer ranged strategic weapons. The 45 mintues may have applied to tactical weapons such as mortar bombs, aircraft bombs and artillery shells, yes but not Scuds, modified Scuds or any of the other missiles the Iraqui's may have had in the pipes. It has been comical to watch how the Bush-Blair alliance went from touting WMD as the cause for going to war to using the humanitarian angle of getting rid of one of the most cruel mass murderering tyrants of the 20th century as a fallback position! I won't miss Saddam Hussein and I do not think the war in Iraq was wrong. Saddam got what was coming to him. I just wish Bush-Blair had gone to war a honestly claiming they wanted to rid the world of a murdering tyrant rather than half truths and spin about WMD which is looking more and more like a whole lot of smoke and mirrors.
"Every country except for the US is against Israel."
Not every body is against Israel. Just like it is possible to dislike communism without hating Russians in general it is quite possible to dislike Ariel Sharon, his fanatical Zionist cronies and their landgrabbing in the occupied territories without at the same being against Israel and hating all Jews.
Borders can't be see from space.
Not quite, this one can be seen from space.
- Did I just nitpick a troll?
If I had the choice between spending eternity either in "The Office" or "Sex and the City's" New York I think I would abscond and run screaming for the safety of Helms deep (straight through Fangorn forest AND the Uruk'hai army). Busting the heads of evil scum with the Rohirrim must be better than spending eternity with a bunch of neurotic yuppies...
Oh, of course there is life out there. The universe is simply to huge for that not to be the case. The question is, are these aliens sentient, have they evolved a sophisticated culture and if the above are true, what will they think of us when their SETI program picks up the first episodes of Twin Peaks.
All of this location information is already available to the mobile network operator, the network would not be able to function without it. And yes the government has access to it. This is not to say that it is being used to keep track of every individual that showed up in the last census and owns a mobile telephone. Police forces do however use this information to track down stolen phones, cars (list goes on), find missing persons (typically it saves accident victims and sick people, unable to use the telephone due to their injury) and perhaps, best of all it has shattered the alibi of several scumbag rapists, murderers and child molesters who claimed to have been:" ... away from the scene of the crime with a group of 'friends' and I even called 'John Doe' on my mobile he can testify to that!. Unfortunately for him the pervert can often be proven by police to have been somewhere else because the call he made at the time of the murder was made from close to the scene of the crime and not at the local pub where the pervert's alibi witness had placed him. Not quite conclusive but a powerful argument for a prosecutor when comined with forensics and other circumstantial evidnece. Especially since it is only afterwards that the accused suddenly starts claiming the only thing he can, Ohhh, I forgot the phone was stolen I made that call from a payphone!
It seems to me that this will only be a factor in mobile spam if the mobile network operators let people spam your mobile phone (for profit of course) since that is the only way spammers are going to get at this information; and the way anti spam regulation is evloving that would seem unlikely. At the very least ther will be a legally mandated option for a user to turn mobile spam off. As for the Government I already demonstrated how it uses this information in a very limited way as we speak. Trakcing the entire population this is theoretically possible. But it is also up to you to decide if it happens. Keep in mind that in the USA as well as in any other Democratic society people who would like to practice mass tracking of citizens can only do that if YOU and I enough other people are stupid enough to elect them into office.
"Putting Linux on a watch is just silly"
.... Just think of it, a trillon dollar 'Man to Mars' mission on its way to Jupiter because somebody screwed up his conversion calculations.
There are quite a few reasons to put Linux in a watch. NASA could for example put a scanner and OCR engine in the Linux based watch so those braniacs at NASA could verify their Metric to English unit calculations with a flick of their wrist. And before you say 'BAH! Humbug!'
Just a few nitpicks here. For one thing nobody has proven that the Clovis people eradicated the N-American megafauna along with several other species such as horses when they came across them when migrating into the continent. AFAIK Scientists are still arguing about that. His claim about DDT is also strange. It does not kill birds AFAIK (feel free to cite cedable scientific references to set me straight here), it keeps them from procreating normally. Which is not killing birds so technically his statement can be said to be correct. Still that does not mean the ban on DDT was wrong unless he, and you, think the planet can do without cariverous birds who are the birds that suffer most from DDT. He does have one good point, some enviromentalists have progressed from treating enviromentalism as an ideal to practicing it as fundamentalist religion. That still does not mean that ALL enviromentalists are like that and writing them all off as "treehuggers" makes you just as stupid as the extreme enviromentalists you so despise.
Calm down, this will eventually lead to useful developments. Just imagine how cool the USMC would look stomping over the armies of the worlds rogue nations in Starwars style AT-PT/AT-AT Assault Walkers.
And with all those jobs gone to India we can raise a new army from the subequently swollen ranks of jobless americans, equip them with high tech weapons bought with all the money we save with the outsourcing of techjobs to India, and send the new Legions to clean up N-Korea. According to the CIA the jobless Geeks will come in handy for defusing the stack of A-Bombs Kim Il Song is sitting on. Unless of course they outsource that to India as well.
Criminals are not always the smartest apples...
Now if only that was true of Al Quaeda operatives as well perhaps we would get security warnings when something is actually about to happen. Or dare I hope, perhaps the CIA and NSA's brightest would actually eliminate the need for these warnings by preempting attacs and better yet find Osama Bin Liner or whatever is left of him. As is it seems that we go to a higtened alarm state every time the traffic on rogue servers in the middle east picks up with no visible results.
The point was more to demonstrate that nobody would blame the parents of a drugaddict for the what this addict does. And yet you feel perfectly comfortable supporting the contention that the parents whos children do other undesirable things should be punished for the actions of their children. I wonder, should the parents of joyriding teenagers should be convicted for grand theft auto? What you fail to appreciate is that in the end a child is an individual and it is impossible to transfer any and all resposibility for what the child does completely and without a second thought onto the parent. If you ever tried to regulate the behavior of a teenager you would know this. In the end kids have a mind of their own, they are not midless drones in the process of being programmed by their parents who are then resposible for any suboptimal behavior like a robot manufacturer. Believe it or not a Parents resposibility for the actions of the child is limited under the law. Even in countries where parents are by law resposible for the actions of their child provisions are made to limit this responsibility. Usuall this means that if the parents can demonstrate that they exercised reasonable supervision over the child or made reasonable efforts to discourage or prevent the child from committing a crime they are considered not responsible for the actions of a said child, anything else would be draconian.
Why is it that whenever a crime supposedly results because of drugs, it is only the drugdealers who are blamed? Why are people blaming the drugdealers, and not the parents of those who actually went out and bought the drugs? Why not the medical supply companies, without whom there wouldn't be syringes to shoot up with? Why don't we actually go after those responsible? If parents are incapable of keeping inappropriate materials away from their offspring, be they drugs or alcohol, we must seriously question their parental ability.
Funny how swapping a few words puts a new perspective on it....
"Who really gives a damn about the users anyways?"
.....
Hey! we at DHS/NSA care about users! We CARE what they read, where they go, what they buy, what they say on their cellphone, what is in their email, how often they download communism in the form of linux, what color their underware is
**Snap!**
Damn I hate it when that happens......
From my point of view it is about:
Those seem pretty practical demands to me.
Executio Protection
Old man Saddam could use feature that right about now.
Actually that would be over 100 years. The first recorded instance of a balloon being used in war was during the Napoleonic wars when French scientist Charles Coutelle used a ballon to spy on Austrian and Dutch troops during fighting near Mauberge in 1794. The Austrians senior officers at first protested that this was 'unfair' and 'against the rules of war'. In the mean time the commander of an Austrian howitzer battery took a more practical approach and decided that it had been incumbent on him to achieve another first when he istructed his gunners to fire off history's first FLAK/AAA barrage.