As much as I think US gun culture clearly is unhealthy, blaming the shootings on access to guns just plain doesn't work. Countries like Norway or Switzerland also have huge number of guns available. For a long time tens of thousand of AG-3's were kept in private homes in Norway as part of military strategy, and this has been common practice in many other countries too.
There are a couple of marked differences though: First, few places have so easy access to small, concealable handguns. Secondly, few other places have a culture where carrying guns outside of a few well defined situations (such as hunting) is seen as worth the risk to many people.
In Norway, for example, while access to AG-3's used to be easy, it's not exactly a weapon you carry around with you in public... And secondly, few criminals are stupid enough to carry guns anyway, as they know that doing so will mean they'll face an armed response, whereas if they are clearly unarmed, they will at worst face unarmed police.
The same is pretty much the case in the UK, where death due to firearms is an even rarer occurence than in Norway. Few police officers are armed - armed response is carried out by special "firearms officers" that only get called out when there is a likelihood of facing armed criminals.
Add to that a system in many countries, including Norway, of massively increasing sentences if a crime is carried out with a weapon, and where sentences for carrying out economic crimes like robbery without a weapon are fairly short, and you have an environment where using a gun is rarely worth the risk.
The ease of access of military assault weapons in many European countries demonstrate clearly that you CAN let a populace be armed without a massive problem with gun violence.
The problem is how to get from the US situation where those guns are being brought out in public and used for crime, to a situation where criminals don't consider them worthwhile without putting police at massive risk - it's not like you can ask police officers to leave their guns as long as they face a massive risk of being met with guns.
I worked for a company years ago where several of the engineers were seriously impressed when I showed them I could "break" their "base64 encryption" in realtime...
They had added it to close a previous security problem I'd pointed out with their product that stored an internal customer id in a cookie to grant access to a web app - problem was, the customer id's were allocated sequentially, so anyone brute-forcing it would get access to all their customer data in minutes, including the adress books of the entire top management team.... base64 "encrypting" the customer id was supposed to prevent anyone from trying that trick again... I left that company pretty much as soon as I could..
Apparently you haven't heard of this thing called RPM and how you can install or remove packages whenever it pleases you. Besides, if you don't actually run X on your servers, the only side-effect of having it installed is wasting some disk space.
I'd suggest you read up on US history. Specifically the period from the articles of confederation until the constitution established the current federal state. The US went through a lot of the same processes, though some of it was simplified in part because there were no entrenched powerful nation states involved.
In light of that a lot of the infighting between various EU member-states will make a lot more sense.
You miss the point entirely. In the Apple example, the owners of apple.com and apple.co.uk are different companies. That is fairly common - there are millions of companies worldwide with clashing names where one company owns the ".com" and one or more other companies own various national TLD's suitable for their markets.
These days, most people need to know a lot more than whether machine X is up. They need to know which part(s) of their web apps are not functioning correctly. They need a lot more intricate detail than is possible with Nagios or SNMP-based monitoring tools.
Seriously, if you think that you have no clue what Nagios does/can do. The monitoring in Nagios is 100% based around probes that are not built into Nagios, though a typical Nagios install comes with a huge number of standard probes. The only hard requirement for a probe is that it returns a single line of output giving the status of whatever service or services it checks, though Nagios will also collect any other output from the probe (which can be used to feed into performance monitoring etc.).
Since writing custom probes is so trivial, covering things like which parts of your web apps are not functioning properly is just a matter of writing a probe (in whatever language you can think of) that spits out OK/WARNING/CRITICAL to standard output together with any additional info, and add a few lines to the config files.
If I'm going to install an agent, I want it to be small, non-intrusive, have little or no dependencies and be reliable. I don't ascribe any of those things to a java based agent.
I'd like to second that... We have Nagios probes written in C, Perl and Ruby so far. Nagios is ugly, but it works, and the fact that the only real requirement for a probe is that it does something and spits out a string that starts with OK/WARNING/CRITICAL to standard out is one of the important features. Setting up monitoring is a pain. Not configuring the monitoring system, but writing all the custom probes needed for full coverage of failure modes for our own apps.
Being able to pick whichever language works based on whatever people prefer or whatever you already use is a big thing. Being able to write probes with no support code to depend on etc. is a big thing.
In my case, and this is the case for everyone working for me too, I'm salaried. My work does not pay by the hour. The legal distinction between those two in most places is that a salaried worker need to have reasonable control of their own working schedule, as they bear the responsibility themselves for ensuring their tasks get carried out in a timely manner. That is why salaried workers are generally not entitled to overtime.
If I want a break, I take a break, and I make up for it when I feel more productive. Generally I end up working far more than the hours I am paid for, and the hours I do actually work are more productive than they would have been if I had worked uninterrupted from 9-5 every day.
If you are paid by the hour, then yes, you have an argument. For salaried employees you don't. If your employers can't be trusted to set their own schedule and/or you are unable to follow them up to make sure they do their job, then they shouldn't be given the responsibilities that come with being salaried.
I don't believe in policing much except where we see potential problems. If someones performance is dropping and we suspect it's because they spend excessive time surfing I'd confront them about it, and warn them we might monitor them if things don't improve and they don't have a valid explanation. If we run into bandwidth problems, I'd look at aggregate traffic and determine if there is cause to send out some warnings. We might look at aggregate traffic to make sure people don't do anything really stupid we might get liability for (such doing filesharing from the office network).
That's about where I draw the line. Turning work into prison won't do much good for performance and work satisfaction, and it will give those of your people who can easiest switch jobs an incentive to look for better employers.
A company I did consulting with years ago posted a "top ten" list of sites they considered unsuitable for work ordered by amount of traffic.... It very quickly killed off the porn surfing without even reminding people about any possible consequences, even though the list was completely anonymous and none of the people with access to the firewall data ever tried tracking someone down (to my knowledge anyway).
So I assume it is ok for your manager to insist on cavity searches, and on following you into toilet stalls to monitor what you are doing then?
We all expect some level of privacy even in the workplace, and the question isn't IF privacy is guaranteed in the workplace, but how much. Generally most countries allow quite a lot of monitoring, but very few allow singling out specific employees for harsher treatment or not informing employees of what types of monitoring may be used.
"The Internet" isn't an entity. The only way of achieving that would be by refusing connectivity to anyone not agreeing to be just as restrictive as you, which would leave you pretty much alone, and with the rest of the world operating their own network.
You do know that the "slippery slope" is a classical logical fallacy right?
Without discussing whether it is right or wrong, it is certainly not a logical fallacy, as the argument is not based on claiming that it is a logical necessity but that human psychology means that it is easier to convince someone to give a little bit at a time than a large chunk at once. If someone specifically makes the claim that it logically has to be like that, then yes it would be a logical fallacy, but thats not how the argument is usually made - at least when I've heard someone use the "slippery slope" it has almost always been backed with claims of being based on empirical data, not logic.
MySQL can already use another database as a storage backend through federation. The "benefit" a PostgreSQL storage engine would be that you could pick and choose whether PostgreSQL or InnoDB, MyISAM and all other other backends fits the requirements of your app the best without changing your database environment.
It may have been an April Fools joke this time, but I wouldn't be the slightest bit surprised if someone actually went ahead and implemented this. There are far weirder MySQL backends, such as one that stores the data in a memcached server...
I'm not up to date on European immigration policy, but I'm sure it would be much more relaxed than the US when it comes to skilled labor. I couldn't imagine it being any more tighter.
Imagine harder. Most of Europe have very strict immigration policies. As much as there's many parts of US policy I think is beyond braindead, the US is taking much larger number of immigrants per capita than most other industrialized countries.
On my machine you just run it for a couple of days with lots of tabs. After a while closing the tabs will not make any difference at all in memory consumption.
I have a Linux box and a Macbook Pro running OSX, and it happens consistently on both of them, and have since 1.0.x at least.
Star Trek is more than 40 years old. People have grown up with it, either the original run of TOS or reruns, the movies or TNG. It's had time to establish a far wider fan base. It's also much more accessible than SG1.
Star Trek is essentially morality plays set in space. Its only half-assed departure from the one episode morality play formula was Deep Space 9, and even that was full of short morality plays intermingled with the longer story arks. The advantage of that formula is that you don't need the audience to know what's happened, or care about/for this or that species or character - each episode largely establishes it's own little moral problem and the characters use the different species to establish arketypes for the characters so you don't really need to know all that much about any one character to be familiar with what's going to happen (Ferengi's will generally be greedy, Klingon's will generally be agressive etc., just like you know someone with a magnifying glass and an exaggerated British accent is likely to be a private detective), and you know you'll likely see a clear resolution at the end.
People like morality plays. They're simple and easy to relate to, and they also give people something to think about and talk about without requiring too much mental activity to just enjoy what's going on.
While SG also largely has finished episodes, it doesn't have anything of the morality play aspect. The series has also kept moving forward, making seeing episodes out of order or jumping in for the occasional episode a lot less satisfying. And while there is some closure at the end of the episodes, there's no "answer". Personally I prefer the more lasting story arks and the movement forward, and that's also the reason why my favorite Star Trek series was DS9.
Star Trek "wears out" when a specific setting for the morality plays gets overused. You can only set so many morality plays in the same setting before it starts seeming repetitive and everyone knows the exact formulas. It also depends on relevant problems in contemporary life to feed off, and again you can only do so many stories on the same problems before it gets old. Star Trek will return when society has moved on and issues we face are different enough that they can come up with a series that seems "new"
That it often takes decades to get parity with even poorly equipped government forces?
In Vietnam it took about 50 years or so despite the fact that both the French and the US were fighting remote wars with little support from the local populace. Even then, they were victorious mostly because they were fighting parties that did not have the same vested interest, and who had their own countries to withdraw to.
Most guerrilla movements over the last 100 years or so have failed. Of those that have succeeded, most replaced one dictatorship with another.
I think, though I've made no attempt at tallying it up, that the peaceful uprisings over the last 100 years have been far more likely to lead to democracy than any armed uprisings or guerrilla wars have been, even if you only count those with widespread public support.
If anything, that should be worth considering when thinking about whether the populace need to or ought to be armed...
Who do you think makes up the US Armed Forces? Citizens.
That's true of almost every army that has every propped up oppressive and even genocidal dictators through the ages, and so it's a meaningless argument.
You completely miss the point: Google did not fight COPA - they fought a subpoena asking them to hand over search data that the DOJ wanted to use to try to find examples of how "innocent" searches would return porn, only. Since the government got that data from the other targets, and got some data from Google too, Google's stand on the matter had little to no effect on the overall case.
Instead of fawning over Google, thank Salon.com and the other sites that sued, and ACLU for helping them.
That only works in a market where all parties have full access to all information. Providing potential employees with information about how potential employers behaves is a vital part of that. Google has for a long time tried to portrayed itself as all saintly, and has had a reputation in some circles for being an amazing place to work - now some things have changed that might change that reputation, and hence people make a fuss. What's so hard to understand? If nobody made a fuss, a lot of people would keep raving about Google and some people might end up making stupid choices.
It is pretty hilarious that you drag out "a capitalist model" but ignore that spread of information is one of the most important parts of a well functioning market.
In many countries in the world spanking a child is considered assault just as it would if you spanked an adult against their will, often with significantly stricter prison sentences as a result. It is by no means non-controversial.
Really? In most countries I've been to you'd get convicted for shooting someone even if you did have a sign unless you had a genuine reason to fear for your own life.
There's another downside to it for them: If the amounts are outrageous, and they still offer to settle for reasonably small amounts and/or any judgements in their favor does not cover their costs, it means the risk of illegal copying will be seen as low. They simply won't be prepared to or able to suffer the losses of large numbers of lawsuits if they lose large amounts of money on each lawsuit.
So it may turn out to dramatically reduce the deterrent effect of their threats to sue.
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There are a couple of marked differences though: First, few places have so easy access to small, concealable handguns. Secondly, few other places have a culture where carrying guns outside of a few well defined situations (such as hunting) is seen as worth the risk to many people.
In Norway, for example, while access to AG-3's used to be easy, it's not exactly a weapon you carry around with you in public... And secondly, few criminals are stupid enough to carry guns anyway, as they know that doing so will mean they'll face an armed response, whereas if they are clearly unarmed, they will at worst face unarmed police.
The same is pretty much the case in the UK, where death due to firearms is an even rarer occurence than in Norway. Few police officers are armed - armed response is carried out by special "firearms officers" that only get called out when there is a likelihood of facing armed criminals.
Add to that a system in many countries, including Norway, of massively increasing sentences if a crime is carried out with a weapon, and where sentences for carrying out economic crimes like robbery without a weapon are fairly short, and you have an environment where using a gun is rarely worth the risk.
The ease of access of military assault weapons in many European countries demonstrate clearly that you CAN let a populace be armed without a massive problem with gun violence.
The problem is how to get from the US situation where those guns are being brought out in public and used for crime, to a situation where criminals don't consider them worthwhile without putting police at massive risk - it's not like you can ask police officers to leave their guns as long as they face a massive risk of being met with guns.
They had added it to close a previous security problem I'd pointed out with their product that stored an internal customer id in a cookie to grant access to a web app - problem was, the customer id's were allocated sequentially, so anyone brute-forcing it would get access to all their customer data in minutes, including the adress books of the entire top management team.... base64 "encrypting" the customer id was supposed to prevent anyone from trying that trick again... I left that company pretty much as soon as I could..
Apparently you haven't heard of this thing called RPM and how you can install or remove packages whenever it pleases you. Besides, if you don't actually run X on your servers, the only side-effect of having it installed is wasting some disk space.
In light of that a lot of the infighting between various EU member-states will make a lot more sense.
Why would someone be proud of a country they don't want to be a citizen of?
You miss the point entirely. In the Apple example, the owners of apple.com and apple.co.uk are different companies. That is fairly common - there are millions of companies worldwide with clashing names where one company owns the ".com" and one or more other companies own various national TLD's suitable for their markets.
Seriously, if you think that you have no clue what Nagios does/can do. The monitoring in Nagios is 100% based around probes that are not built into Nagios, though a typical Nagios install comes with a huge number of standard probes. The only hard requirement for a probe is that it returns a single line of output giving the status of whatever service or services it checks, though Nagios will also collect any other output from the probe (which can be used to feed into performance monitoring etc.).
Since writing custom probes is so trivial, covering things like which parts of your web apps are not functioning properly is just a matter of writing a probe (in whatever language you can think of) that spits out OK/WARNING/CRITICAL to standard output together with any additional info, and add a few lines to the config files.
I'd like to second that... We have Nagios probes written in C, Perl and Ruby so far. Nagios is ugly, but it works, and the fact that the only real requirement for a probe is that it does something and spits out a string that starts with OK/WARNING/CRITICAL to standard out is one of the important features. Setting up monitoring is a pain. Not configuring the monitoring system, but writing all the custom probes needed for full coverage of failure modes for our own apps.
Being able to pick whichever language works based on whatever people prefer or whatever you already use is a big thing. Being able to write probes with no support code to depend on etc. is a big thing.
Seriously, if you think it's that hard to build something like Nagios you should not be allowed anywhere near any production servers.
If I want a break, I take a break, and I make up for it when I feel more productive. Generally I end up working far more than the hours I am paid for, and the hours I do actually work are more productive than they would have been if I had worked uninterrupted from 9-5 every day.
If you are paid by the hour, then yes, you have an argument. For salaried employees you don't. If your employers can't be trusted to set their own schedule and/or you are unable to follow them up to make sure they do their job, then they shouldn't be given the responsibilities that come with being salaried.
I don't believe in policing much except where we see potential problems. If someones performance is dropping and we suspect it's because they spend excessive time surfing I'd confront them about it, and warn them we might monitor them if things don't improve and they don't have a valid explanation. If we run into bandwidth problems, I'd look at aggregate traffic and determine if there is cause to send out some warnings. We might look at aggregate traffic to make sure people don't do anything really stupid we might get liability for (such doing filesharing from the office network).
That's about where I draw the line. Turning work into prison won't do much good for performance and work satisfaction, and it will give those of your people who can easiest switch jobs an incentive to look for better employers.
A company I did consulting with years ago posted a "top ten" list of sites they considered unsuitable for work ordered by amount of traffic.... It very quickly killed off the porn surfing without even reminding people about any possible consequences, even though the list was completely anonymous and none of the people with access to the firewall data ever tried tracking someone down (to my knowledge anyway).
We all expect some level of privacy even in the workplace, and the question isn't IF privacy is guaranteed in the workplace, but how much. Generally most countries allow quite a lot of monitoring, but very few allow singling out specific employees for harsher treatment or not informing employees of what types of monitoring may be used.
"The Internet" isn't an entity. The only way of achieving that would be by refusing connectivity to anyone not agreeing to be just as restrictive as you, which would leave you pretty much alone, and with the rest of the world operating their own network.
Without discussing whether it is right or wrong, it is certainly not a logical fallacy, as the argument is not based on claiming that it is a logical necessity but that human psychology means that it is easier to convince someone to give a little bit at a time than a large chunk at once. If someone specifically makes the claim that it logically has to be like that, then yes it would be a logical fallacy, but thats not how the argument is usually made - at least when I've heard someone use the "slippery slope" it has almost always been backed with claims of being based on empirical data, not logic.
It may have been an April Fools joke this time, but I wouldn't be the slightest bit surprised if someone actually went ahead and implemented this. There are far weirder MySQL backends, such as one that stores the data in a memcached server...
Imagine harder. Most of Europe have very strict immigration policies. As much as there's many parts of US policy I think is beyond braindead, the US is taking much larger number of immigrants per capita than most other industrialized countries.
I have a Linux box and a Macbook Pro running OSX, and it happens consistently on both of them, and have since 1.0.x at least.
Star Trek is essentially morality plays set in space. Its only half-assed departure from the one episode morality play formula was Deep Space 9, and even that was full of short morality plays intermingled with the longer story arks. The advantage of that formula is that you don't need the audience to know what's happened, or care about/for this or that species or character - each episode largely establishes it's own little moral problem and the characters use the different species to establish arketypes for the characters so you don't really need to know all that much about any one character to be familiar with what's going to happen (Ferengi's will generally be greedy, Klingon's will generally be agressive etc., just like you know someone with a magnifying glass and an exaggerated British accent is likely to be a private detective), and you know you'll likely see a clear resolution at the end.
People like morality plays. They're simple and easy to relate to, and they also give people something to think about and talk about without requiring too much mental activity to just enjoy what's going on.
While SG also largely has finished episodes, it doesn't have anything of the morality play aspect. The series has also kept moving forward, making seeing episodes out of order or jumping in for the occasional episode a lot less satisfying. And while there is some closure at the end of the episodes, there's no "answer". Personally I prefer the more lasting story arks and the movement forward, and that's also the reason why my favorite Star Trek series was DS9.
Star Trek "wears out" when a specific setting for the morality plays gets overused. You can only set so many morality plays in the same setting before it starts seeming repetitive and everyone knows the exact formulas. It also depends on relevant problems in contemporary life to feed off, and again you can only do so many stories on the same problems before it gets old. Star Trek will return when society has moved on and issues we face are different enough that they can come up with a series that seems "new"
In Vietnam it took about 50 years or so despite the fact that both the French and the US were fighting remote wars with little support from the local populace. Even then, they were victorious mostly because they were fighting parties that did not have the same vested interest, and who had their own countries to withdraw to.
Most guerrilla movements over the last 100 years or so have failed. Of those that have succeeded, most replaced one dictatorship with another.
I think, though I've made no attempt at tallying it up, that the peaceful uprisings over the last 100 years have been far more likely to lead to democracy than any armed uprisings or guerrilla wars have been, even if you only count those with widespread public support.
If anything, that should be worth considering when thinking about whether the populace need to or ought to be armed...
That's true of almost every army that has every propped up oppressive and even genocidal dictators through the ages, and so it's a meaningless argument.
Instead of fawning over Google, thank Salon.com and the other sites that sued, and ACLU for helping them.
It is pretty hilarious that you drag out "a capitalist model" but ignore that spread of information is one of the most important parts of a well functioning market.
In many countries in the world spanking a child is considered assault just as it would if you spanked an adult against their will, often with significantly stricter prison sentences as a result. It is by no means non-controversial.
Really? In most countries I've been to you'd get convicted for shooting someone even if you did have a sign unless you had a genuine reason to fear for your own life.
So it may turn out to dramatically reduce the deterrent effect of their threats to sue.