I would also give the police the power to go out and beat the holy shit out of whomsoever they damn well pleased. While we're at it, let's let some special agents dressed in dark clokes and answerable only to the president pick people to be put in internment camps and made into glue.
Hell, man, why just stop at 'surveilling' everyone when we can REALLY do things to strike fear into someone who would discredit Mom, the flag, apple pie or baseball.
I've got kids. One of the things that I've learned is that I can't protect them from everything. Sometimes they just have to take care of themselves. Trying to coral them in enough that they never will get hurt means that they can't have a LIFE. I'm not willing to make that tradeoff. Neither am I willing to give the government enough power to make sure that I never get hurt, because again it will mean that I can't have a LIFE. The truth is that the government CAN'T protect us from some things. Crazy ass idiots willing to sacrifice themselves for some sort of 'cause' is one of those things.
PS - You can't protect yourself against some crazy ass idiots willing to sacrifice themselves, because you have nothing to bargain with, and neither does the government.
The thing that drives down the cost of equipment earthside is volume. Why not design a mini-satellite platform that accepts custum modules. This platform would contain as part of its design all the attitudinal and orbital controls. As part of that design, include a simple system that would respond to a signal by moving the satellite away from the source. Thereby, the shuttle or other manned or higher priority craft would just need to transmit the signal as a warning and all the hords of mini-satellite would move to the side.
I pay beaucoup bucks so that some old guy can stand and lecture me. If I fail to regurgitate the old guys spew, then I have to pay him to lecture me again (assuming that I want to earn that passport to a decent corporate job known as a degree at some point in the future). So instead of paying attention to the old guys spew, I choose to cruise/.
Who gives a fuck. Let the idiot cruise. They'll be out of school soon enough, and you'll have your money. If some kid is smart enough to cruise and memorize the spew, let 'em. Quit trying to be everyone's momma and let adults be adults.
For those who consider this a rant, please note my perspective. I finished my degree at the ripe old age of 32. You have a completely different perspective on college after working a few years. Professors go from being overbearing jerks to service providers. Straight out of high school kids cheered when teacher didn't show. I was pissed and would go to the dean. I payed for that class time, and if I wasn't going to get it, I expected a refund. Other students would cheer when teach gave an extension on homework due date. I was pissed, 'cause I had mine done and I didn't want a bunch of lazy dipshit who couldn't get a couple pages of homework done in a week getting the same degree as me. Yes, I wanted them to drop out so that the market wouldn't be flooded with CS degrees that shouldn't exist.
This falls into the same category. Let those without a modicum of self control do what they deserve to do, dig ditches or flip burgers, but damn the nanny state.
What a deal? I mean the other broadcast crap is free, but this broadcast crap only cost $420. And remember back in the '80s when all your friends had cable and didn't have to sit through commercials. Well, now you won't have to listen to commercials on the radio, until everyone has a satellite radio and they decide to add commercials.
Really people. Is/. concerned about anything other than where their next bit of entertainment is coming from? $420 to listen to the same crap that my wife tortures me with now? Sheesh!!
With quantum computers, the only way to do crypto would be transferring huge XOR mask keys physically (or possibly with quantum encryption channels). Pretty hard.
Only if you plan to be exchanging information with any John Doe out there. The Great Bogeyman that crypto laws seek to thwart would be a fool to use and publicly availble crypto system when so many other schemes are available and easily implementable.
Consider this: I WacknoNut-Laden, and I have a plan to blow up a large building with a commercial airline. Would I be discussing this with a large group of people or just my fellow WackoNuts? My guess is the former.
Now, would I feel safer downloading and using PGP/other available crypto system of choice, or would it look more innocent for me to exchange pictures of the homeland with my WackoNutPilotInTraining. Picture that are slightly scrambled because they have a embedded message XOR in that requires a five line perl script to extract, a script which is not saved but memorized and typed in each time it is needed. This gives an encrypted message that only WackoNutPilotInTraining2 can decipher. He must manually decode the first 19 bits of the encrypted message which tells him the article number on Slashdot to use as a one-time pad. Only three people in the world know this last system, and it was engineered in a deep cave somewhere in the most desolate part of a desolate country.
So, if you know being found out means your death, do you go with the publicly available system, or do you go with a system of your own design which depends on several levels of unfathonable and unwritten secrets.
Unbreakable cryptography amoung a small band is as easy as email. It's simple to devise a system that can't be broken with ANY amount of computing power. In fact it's easy to devise a system where the only weak link is some knowledge bearer's resistance to torture. (Sodium penethol is here considered torture)
At one point, people laughed at the idea of outlawing a weed that grew naturally and profusely along the Potomac river (the one that runs through Washington, DC, America's capital, for the non-US and geographically challenged amoung us).
After a few years and a media blitz to create some uninformed public hysteria, workers were sent out to eradicate the weed, marijauna (notice the Spanish/Mexican pronunciation of the 'j' and try to guess who the real targets of the law were), and so began America's war on drugs. We still have laws and demonic misconceptions about a weed that produces a mild hallucagenic (sp?) that is no worse than alchohol, with people that the powers that be don't like going to jail for possessing.
Don't ever believe for one second that idiots and their laws will go away without a hard and sustained fight. Ashcroft, like most other leaders, is a meglomaniac. He believes that the world can be made safe if only he were allowed to be in controll. It's not that he is evil, it's just that he has an idea of what the world should be like, and he is motivated to make it that way. Unfortunately, the Taliban and BinLaden also have a vision and motivation. The only things seperating the two are our elected representatives, our right to be heard before laws are made, and our right to have our cases heard before a panel of our peers. These sort of laws attempt to make an end run around these protections.
Pity, because if this had appeared elsewhere without any MS connection folks would be talking about it in a positive way, taking the discussion someplace interesting.
Bzzzt. Wrong. Most of the people here on/. know computers intimately. We know what they do well, and what they fuck up from real world experience. This shit is so unrealistic that it is only worth laughing at. Combine this with the fact that it's coming from a company known mostly for distributing easily crackable operating systems software that crashes constantly and refuses to do anything intelligent with the hardware errors that it gets now, and why would we do anything but ridicule it?
You leave out one very important point that is missed. Computers that attempt to manage themselves generally fuck it up VERY badly. Hell, I can't even get PlugNPray to work most of the time. All it takes is one error condition that the designer didn't account for to kill the whole house of cards. Error conditions are finite in a design spec, but infinite in real life.
Unfortunately, execution of the laws will NOT be uniform and just.
there will be so much crappy legislation in place that it will be impossible to move an inch without breaking some law or another.
It's nice to see that you do, in fact, understand the point in all of this. Remember, when there are enough laws that everyone is a criminal, then those in power get to jail whomsoever they please. Law enforcement becomes arbitrary and capricious. And that is just how some powers want it. It'll be, "Heh, I'm a policeman and I suspect you of terrorism (defined as: sleeping with my wife), I'm throwing you in jail for chewing gum. See what a great guy I am for 'protecting the public'!"
The court room will not fill, because only those on the 'sherif's' hit list will find themselves there. As long as you toe the line and pay hommage to the correct authority, you'll be alright.
I'm usually against the government getting involved in just about anything, because they do tend to screw things up a lot. But the things that I consider valid for the government are basic things that:
A) everyone needs
B)for which there can be little to no market distinction
C)has a costly infrastructure associated with it
One such case is vaccinations. A vaccine will either work or it won't, and every child has to have them before they begin school. Company A's brand will really differ very little from Company B's, and I'd hate to see what kind of disgusting commercials companies would produce to try to distinquish thier product from a competitors. ("See twisted knarled Eddy? He used the wrong Streptomiacin vaccine!)
Another good case is school systems.
I see internet service as being the same. Everybody needs or will soon need a connection if they want to exist normally in a developed nation. One pipe is nearly identical to the next, and it is starting to get ridiculous to have a twisted pair in the ground next to a coax cable next to a fiber optic line while there is a satellite dish on the house next door and a wireless transmitter on a tower down the street. A simple connection (as opposed to the things that the broadband services currently want to provide--they want to sell you 'services', ie. baggage you don't need) is not difficult to provide and puts everyone at a level playing field.
In my view, government run internet equates to government run roads. It's too expensive for everyone to build and manage their own.
Brings to mind the argument I've been having with my wife. On the day of the attack, some FAA spokesman was on the air proclaiming how well trained the terrorist must have been due to the difficulty of flying such a large plane. My immediate response was, "Bullshit, they just want to inflate the enemy so that they don't look so pathetically insecure." Think about it. If anyone could pull this off this means that we don't have a chance in hell of covering our asses.
Well, guess what. I've been hearing people who actually fly plane saying how easy this would be. Take off and landing would be hard without the proper training and experience, but aiming at a spot and flying the plane into it would be simple.
The government types want you to think they can protect you completely, and they want you to hand over all your liberties as payment. The fact is they can't protect you from BinLaden or McFey (don't know the correct spelling of his name). If someone wants to blow something up, they WILL find a way, EVEN in a police state.
If you don't believe that, then explain how Allies guerilla operations can take out Axis infrastructure (even if only a small amount) during WWII when Germany was a POLICE STATE!!
Linux has a dedicated, knowledgable, sometimes prickly, and definately motley following of people who have it in their best interest to see this operating system thrive. This means that, by and large, they're more willing to help.
Could you find some of that motley crew to help me find out why sound doesn't work on my IBM 380Z Thinkpad. It has the CS4237 chipset, and I've been trying for weeks to get it to work, even sent it in for warranty repair. 'Course it worked when they installed a Windows drive.
I'm not disagreeing that the motley band of helpful following isn't there, I'm arguing that they are hard to find when your down. Two different problems entirely.
And yes, I refuse to use windows on my thinkpad, because if I did the only good sound would do is let me hear how much windows sucks.
Anyways, you are precisely right - the best admin is at heart a lazy, worthless bastard who will do anything, script anything, to get out of work.
And you are a either a liar, or just completely clueless. Good admins are lazy, worthless bastards who will do anything, script anything, to get back to reading/. and playing the 3D game du jour. It's not that we dislike work. It's just that it distracts us from what is truly important, our FRAG ratio.
What was that bull about it possibly being more difficult to have such a structure built due to the cost of having to have precise curve? I see strangely shaped building all over the place that are that way for nothing more than aesthetics (sp?). Straight, curved, pyramid or just plain weird, would you want to work in a building that was not laid out precisely? Aren't the tallest buildings in the world (in Singapore?) round, and don't they have a crosswalk that vaguely resembles the cross-struts in the articles concept picture?
Not only do I see this as an excellent idea, but if I owned the Sears Towers in Chicago I would investigate the possibility of such an addition (to provide crosswalks AND power).
This doesn't look comfortable at all. Movement would seem to require moving your whole arm. I haven't used one, but it looks like it would be really clunky to use.
A project for an embedded system using C++. (Why they chose C++ for embeded systems, I'll never know...anyway) Developer A is a long time C++ advocate, while Developer B is an C programmer of embedded processes that has been dragged kicking and screaming into the project.
The design calls for one class to collect alarms from the hardware, and another class to massage the data and pass the results to a higher level.
A implements a design that calls for the Massage class to call a callback function in the Collector which sends itself a system level message which calls several functions which eventually sends a message back to the Massage class with the address of the alarm block. All the message passing and function calling was implemented to support the C++ concept of data hiding. Damn good quality, but very heavy code that has to be executed for hundreds of objects twice every second.
Developer B looks at the abstraction of the implementation and says, "What the f%$#?!" He changes the code to make the alarm block public, and then the Massage class will simply look directly at the alarm block. Breaks the hell out of C++ methodology, but it's a pointer lookup versus a stack of message passing and function calls.
Who is the better developer?
I submit that if a thread discussing such a situation runs more than 4 serious messages then it would be foolish to give your manager the 'my way or the highway' speech. If he went 'your way' then he would get the same speech from another developer with a 'different way', and since he doesn't really give a shit (as long as something works) then it'd be the highway for you.
but the fact that the EU takes the privacy of its citizens seriously and is eagerly promoting information security and encryption.
The 'EU' doesn't give any more of a damn about the privacy of its citizens than the 'US' does. By 'EU' and 'US' we refer to the political power brokers of the respective organizations. Recall the draconian British laws that require law enforcement to be able to have access to any encryption that a private citizen my employ on pain of jail time.
What the 'EU' is truly concerned with here is that they US may be able to spy on 'EU' corporations and obtain market advantages. The fact that the most popular desktop software is owned by and US corporation with a reputation (deserved or not) for backdoors and hacks to break competitors doesn't sit well with the 'EU'. They would much rather be in control themselves.
Brazil and China place heavy export duties on technology products, which effectively forces U.S. companies to build local facilities and employ large portions of the population.
The countries in question impose import duties. They charge you to bring it into the country. They're tickled pink for you to make it there and then sell it to other countries.
Otherwise, I think the article is quite correct in its central theme, other countries don't want to be beholden to the US in any way, shape or form. They would rather take care of themselves than live hand-to-mouth from crumbs off the American table. Hell, can you blame 'em!?!
Most elementary school teaching (hell, from what I've seen in some college undergrads, all the way through high school) is just babysitting. If the 6 hours a day spent in the school playpen was actually dedicated to learning, we'd all be geniuses.
As it is, most kids just want to be entertained. A few would like to learn everything they can. A a small number just want to make a ruckus. The teacher will spend half her time keeping the first group busy, a little bit of her time marvelling at the second group, and the rest of his time trying to not be shot by the latter. Meanwhile they've got parents screaming at them to teach their dumbass kids who won't sit still for 10 minutes to be great literary masters for a pauper salary and without raising their voices. If there is a problem it's the teacher's fault. And if they ever try to shield their faces when little Johny spits at it, the parents will raise hell in court.
The only sane thing to do is give up on teaching and be what you really are...a child care manager. And that doesn't take a PhD. Just nerves of steel and a penchant for pain.
Besides, elementary school is as much about developing character as instilling knowledge, and I don't see a PhD being a credential for developing character in children (it wouldn't hurt, it just doesn't help.)
The other problem is that anyone dedicated enough to one subject to get a PhD will go insane in the topsy-turvey land of pre-college school. You don't cover one subject to understanding. You constantly jump from one to another, always disoriented. (why the hell do they have 50min classes in the US anyway?) A high school science teacher has to teach chemistry, then physics and then possibly biology. And if they try to teach with any depth, they'll immediately loose most of the class.
I thought people were fed up with all the politics going on- and it sure seems like more of the same- refusal to take a real stand, because, horrors of horrors, he may lose some of his constintuency.
You've got serious people with serious concerns on both sides of an issue. The whole point of politics and the government is to facilitate the process of us all living together. Would you rather have fighting in the streets to resolve the issue?
Besides, he did say 'no'. He said, "No new harvesting." He also said a firm yes. He said, "Yes, use what you have."
It doesn't look like this decision will make embryonic stem cell research any easier- now they will need documentation on the particular line of the cell and so forth.
Say you run a Journal. Would any research that did not have this documentation be worth the time of other researchers to read? Wouldn't anything you do without this documentation be totally worthless?
-"Hey, Bubba. We got these here cells thingies to develope into a living, growing, jumping frog."
-"Wow, that's cool Jethro. Where'd the cells come from."
-"I dunno."
Commercial work in this area is great- but companies need to push for profits and drop research in areas that are not immediately promising.
Bullshit. I worked as a security guard at Ciba-Geigy(sp?) when I was in school. They had been doing research on pre-emergent insecticide/herbicides for years(>20), because of the promise that it would use a fraction of the chemicals and be more potent. Obviously not immediately promising, and yet the company persist. I hear this argument on/. constantly. Companies only work on stuff that will show on next quarters stock report.
I'll turn it around at you and say that most academics spend time chasing rainbows that have no application (obvious or otherwise), and that only occasionally does someone develope something that is useful. (Yes, this statement is also full of shit, but no more so than yours.)
I listened to the speech, and I thought he made a very wise, reasoned decision. Unfortunately, what I heard on talk radio was that he 'waffled'. 'He didn't make a decision at all,' the commentator spouted.
The sad thing about politics is that sometimes exactly half of the people are for one side and exactly half are for the other. There is no way to please both sides completely. I thought this decision did the job of giving both sides what they claimed they wanted (research on the one side vs. not killing babies on the other).
You can say he waffled. You can say he is an idiot. You can say whatever you want, but in the end I'm proud to call this man President. He to the time to carefully consider the argument from both sides are reached a decision that should make everyone happy.
Of course, this is the real world, and for a lot of people (especially the blowhards who dominate the media) it's not about getting what they claim they want. It's about being in control. The previously mentioned commentator would only be happy if Bush had denied all funding for research, and would then claim Bush was a weeny if the President didn't send his own personal bodygaurds out to hunt down rogue scientist who would dare try to cure Parkinson's disease (which my father has, and I dread). A lot of the 'scientist' (ie, liberal blowhards) would only be happy if Bush came out and said that he is putting up a billion federal dollars to start cell farms, then would get upset if he balked over spending more money to harvest near-term babies from underprivileged women for body parts. You won't hear either of these parties expressing thankfullness that everyone got what they needed, even if they didn't get what they wanted.
Reminds me of some sage advice once imparted unto me that many here can benefit from.
Do not go straight home from work for the first week of marriage. Hang out, go to a park for an hour, park and read a book, do anything, but do not go straight home to your new wife. If you go straight home, she will expect it to be that way for the rest of the marriage.
Trust me on this one.
Yes, this may seem sexist, but I don't know any guys who flip when their spouse shows up at 6:05 instead of 6.
Except that the EULA, any EULA, is absolute and total bullshit, except in Maryland and Virginia(?) who think UCITA makes sense.
You can't make addendums to a contract after the sale without agreement from both sides. Clicking a button or hitting a key does not constitute proof of agreement. That requires a signature. Please help spread the news that EULA's are bullshit until they are upheld in a court of law or supported by legislation. At the present, they are just some grandstanding bullshit from rich software companies with nothing more than threats from lawyers standing behind them.
BTW, did I mention that EULAs are BULLSHIT mumbo-jumbo legalese that don't have the force of spit.
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I would also give the police the power to go out and beat the holy shit out of whomsoever they damn well pleased. While we're at it, let's let some special agents dressed in dark clokes and answerable only to the president pick people to be put in internment camps and made into glue.
Hell, man, why just stop at 'surveilling' everyone when we can REALLY do things to strike fear into someone who would discredit Mom, the flag, apple pie or baseball.
I've got kids. One of the things that I've learned is that I can't protect them from everything. Sometimes they just have to take care of themselves. Trying to coral them in enough that they never will get hurt means that they can't have a LIFE. I'm not willing to make that tradeoff. Neither am I willing to give the government enough power to make sure that I never get hurt, because again it will mean that I can't have a LIFE. The truth is that the government CAN'T protect us from some things. Crazy ass idiots willing to sacrifice themselves for some sort of 'cause' is one of those things.
PS - You can't protect yourself against some crazy ass idiots willing to sacrifice themselves, because you have nothing to bargain with, and neither does the government.
The thing that drives down the cost of equipment earthside is volume. Why not design a mini-satellite platform that accepts custum modules. This platform would contain as part of its design all the attitudinal and orbital controls. As part of that design, include a simple system that would respond to a signal by moving the satellite away from the source. Thereby, the shuttle or other manned or higher priority craft would just need to transmit the signal as a warning and all the hords of mini-satellite would move to the side.
Let me see:
/.
I pay beaucoup bucks so that some old guy can stand and lecture me. If I fail to regurgitate the old guys spew, then I have to pay him to lecture me again (assuming that I want to earn that passport to a decent corporate job known as a degree at some point in the future). So instead of paying attention to the old guys spew, I choose to cruise
Who gives a fuck. Let the idiot cruise. They'll be out of school soon enough, and you'll have your money. If some kid is smart enough to cruise and memorize the spew, let 'em. Quit trying to be everyone's momma and let adults be adults.
For those who consider this a rant, please note my perspective. I finished my degree at the ripe old age of 32. You have a completely different perspective on college after working a few years. Professors go from being overbearing jerks to service providers. Straight out of high school kids cheered when teacher didn't show. I was pissed and would go to the dean. I payed for that class time, and if I wasn't going to get it, I expected a refund. Other students would cheer when teach gave an extension on homework due date. I was pissed, 'cause I had mine done and I didn't want a bunch of lazy dipshit who couldn't get a couple pages of homework done in a week getting the same degree as me. Yes, I wanted them to drop out so that the market wouldn't be flooded with CS degrees that shouldn't exist.
This falls into the same category. Let those without a modicum of self control do what they deserve to do, dig ditches or flip burgers, but damn the nanny state.
What a deal? I mean the other broadcast crap is free, but this broadcast crap only cost $420. And remember back in the '80s when all your friends had cable and didn't have to sit through commercials. Well, now you won't have to listen to commercials on the radio, until everyone has a satellite radio and they decide to add commercials.
/. concerned about anything other than where their next bit of entertainment is coming from? $420 to listen to the same crap that my wife tortures me with now? Sheesh!!
Really people. Is
With quantum computers, the only way to do crypto would be transferring huge XOR mask keys physically (or possibly with quantum encryption channels). Pretty hard.
Only if you plan to be exchanging information with any John Doe out there. The Great Bogeyman that crypto laws seek to thwart would be a fool to use and publicly availble crypto system when so many other schemes are available and easily implementable.
Consider this: I WacknoNut-Laden, and I have a plan to blow up a large building with a commercial airline. Would I be discussing this with a large group of people or just my fellow WackoNuts? My guess is the former.
Now, would I feel safer downloading and using PGP/other available crypto system of choice, or would it look more innocent for me to exchange pictures of the homeland with my WackoNutPilotInTraining. Picture that are slightly scrambled because they have a embedded message XOR in that requires a five line perl script to extract, a script which is not saved but memorized and typed in each time it is needed. This gives an encrypted message that only WackoNutPilotInTraining2 can decipher. He must manually decode the first 19 bits of the encrypted message which tells him the article number on Slashdot to use as a one-time pad. Only three people in the world know this last system, and it was engineered in a deep cave somewhere in the most desolate part of a desolate country.
So, if you know being found out means your death, do you go with the publicly available system, or do you go with a system of your own design which depends on several levels of unfathonable and unwritten secrets.
Unbreakable cryptography amoung a small band is as easy as email. It's simple to devise a system that can't be broken with ANY amount of computing power. In fact it's easy to devise a system where the only weak link is some knowledge bearer's resistance to torture. (Sodium penethol is here considered torture)
At one point, people laughed at the idea of outlawing a weed that grew naturally and profusely along the Potomac river (the one that runs through Washington, DC, America's capital, for the non-US and geographically challenged amoung us).
After a few years and a media blitz to create some uninformed public hysteria, workers were sent out to eradicate the weed, marijauna (notice the Spanish/Mexican pronunciation of the 'j' and try to guess who the real targets of the law were), and so began America's war on drugs. We still have laws and demonic misconceptions about a weed that produces a mild hallucagenic (sp?) that is no worse than alchohol, with people that the powers that be don't like going to jail for possessing.
Don't ever believe for one second that idiots and their laws will go away without a hard and sustained fight. Ashcroft, like most other leaders, is a meglomaniac. He believes that the world can be made safe if only he were allowed to be in controll. It's not that he is evil, it's just that he has an idea of what the world should be like, and he is motivated to make it that way. Unfortunately, the Taliban and BinLaden also have a vision and motivation. The only things seperating the two are our elected representatives, our right to be heard before laws are made, and our right to have our cases heard before a panel of our peers. These sort of laws attempt to make an end run around these protections.
Pity, because if this had appeared elsewhere without any MS connection folks would be talking about it in a positive way, taking the discussion someplace interesting.
/. know computers intimately. We know what they do well, and what they fuck up from real world experience. This shit is so unrealistic that it is only worth laughing at. Combine this with the fact that it's coming from a company known mostly for distributing easily crackable operating systems software that crashes constantly and refuses to do anything intelligent with the hardware errors that it gets now, and why would we do anything but ridicule it?
Bzzzt. Wrong. Most of the people here on
You leave out one very important point that is missed. Computers that attempt to manage themselves generally fuck it up VERY badly. Hell, I can't even get PlugNPray to work most of the time. All it takes is one error condition that the designer didn't account for to kill the whole house of cards. Error conditions are finite in a design spec, but infinite in real life.
Unfortunately, execution of the laws will NOT be uniform and just.
there will be so much crappy legislation in place that it will be impossible to move an inch without breaking some law or another.
It's nice to see that you do, in fact, understand the point in all of this. Remember, when there are enough laws that everyone is a criminal, then those in power get to jail whomsoever they please. Law enforcement becomes arbitrary and capricious. And that is just how some powers want it. It'll be, "Heh, I'm a policeman and I suspect you of terrorism (defined as: sleeping with my wife), I'm throwing you in jail for chewing gum. See what a great guy I am for 'protecting the public'!"
The court room will not fill, because only those on the 'sherif's' hit list will find themselves there. As long as you toe the line and pay hommage to the correct authority, you'll be alright.
I'm usually against the government getting involved in just about anything, because they do tend to screw things up a lot. But the things that I consider valid for the government are basic things that:
A) everyone needs
B)for which there can be little to no market distinction
C)has a costly infrastructure associated with it
One such case is vaccinations. A vaccine will either work or it won't, and every child has to have them before they begin school. Company A's brand will really differ very little from Company B's, and I'd hate to see what kind of disgusting commercials companies would produce to try to distinquish thier product from a competitors. ("See twisted knarled Eddy? He used the wrong Streptomiacin vaccine!)
Another good case is school systems.
I see internet service as being the same. Everybody needs or will soon need a connection if they want to exist normally in a developed nation. One pipe is nearly identical to the next, and it is starting to get ridiculous to have a twisted pair in the ground next to a coax cable next to a fiber optic line while there is a satellite dish on the house next door and a wireless transmitter on a tower down the street. A simple connection (as opposed to the things that the broadband services currently want to provide--they want to sell you 'services', ie. baggage you don't need) is not difficult to provide and puts everyone at a level playing field.
In my view, government run internet equates to government run roads. It's too expensive for everyone to build and manage their own.
Brings to mind the argument I've been having with my wife. On the day of the attack, some FAA spokesman was on the air proclaiming how well trained the terrorist must have been due to the difficulty of flying such a large plane. My immediate response was, "Bullshit, they just want to inflate the enemy so that they don't look so pathetically insecure." Think about it. If anyone could pull this off this means that we don't have a chance in hell of covering our asses.
Well, guess what. I've been hearing people who actually fly plane saying how easy this would be. Take off and landing would be hard without the proper training and experience, but aiming at a spot and flying the plane into it would be simple.
The government types want you to think they can protect you completely, and they want you to hand over all your liberties as payment. The fact is they can't protect you from BinLaden or McFey (don't know the correct spelling of his name). If someone wants to blow something up, they WILL find a way, EVEN in a police state.
If you don't believe that, then explain how Allies guerilla operations can take out Axis infrastructure (even if only a small amount) during WWII when Germany was a POLICE STATE!!
Linux has a dedicated, knowledgable, sometimes prickly, and definately motley following of people who have it in their best interest to see this operating system thrive. This means that, by and large, they're more willing to help.
Could you find some of that motley crew to help me find out why sound doesn't work on my IBM 380Z Thinkpad. It has the CS4237 chipset, and I've been trying for weeks to get it to work, even sent it in for warranty repair. 'Course it worked when they installed a Windows drive.
I'm not disagreeing that the motley band of helpful following isn't there, I'm arguing that they are hard to find when your down. Two different problems entirely.
And yes, I refuse to use windows on my thinkpad, because if I did the only good sound would do is let me hear how much windows sucks.
Anyways, you are precisely right - the best admin is at heart a lazy, worthless bastard who will do anything, script anything, to get out of work.
/. and playing the 3D game du jour. It's not that we dislike work. It's just that it distracts us from what is truly important, our FRAG ratio.
And you are a either a liar, or just completely clueless. Good admins are lazy, worthless bastards who will do anything, script anything, to get back to reading
What was that bull about it possibly being more difficult to have such a structure built due to the cost of having to have precise curve? I see strangely shaped building all over the place that are that way for nothing more than aesthetics (sp?). Straight, curved, pyramid or just plain weird, would you want to work in a building that was not laid out precisely? Aren't the tallest buildings in the world (in Singapore?) round, and don't they have a crosswalk that vaguely resembles the cross-struts in the articles concept picture?
Not only do I see this as an excellent idea, but if I owned the Sears Towers in Chicago I would investigate the possibility of such an addition (to provide crosswalks AND power).
This doesn't look comfortable at all. Movement would seem to require moving your whole arm. I haven't used one, but it looks like it would be really clunky to use.
I need to support this. Consider this scenario:
A project for an embedded system using C++. (Why they chose C++ for embeded systems, I'll never know...anyway) Developer A is a long time C++ advocate, while Developer B is an C programmer of embedded processes that has been dragged kicking and screaming into the project.
The design calls for one class to collect alarms from the hardware, and another class to massage the data and pass the results to a higher level.
A implements a design that calls for the Massage class to call a callback function in the Collector which sends itself a system level message which calls several functions which eventually sends a message back to the Massage class with the address of the alarm block. All the message passing and function calling was implemented to support the C++ concept of data hiding. Damn good quality, but very heavy code that has to be executed for hundreds of objects twice every second.
Developer B looks at the abstraction of the implementation and says, "What the f%$#?!" He changes the code to make the alarm block public, and then the Massage class will simply look directly at the alarm block. Breaks the hell out of C++ methodology, but it's a pointer lookup versus a stack of message passing and function calls.
Who is the better developer?
I submit that if a thread discussing such a situation runs more than 4 serious messages then it would be foolish to give your manager the 'my way or the highway' speech. If he went 'your way' then he would get the same speech from another developer with a 'different way', and since he doesn't really give a shit (as long as something works) then it'd be the highway for you.
but the fact that the EU takes the privacy of its citizens seriously and is eagerly promoting information security and encryption.
The 'EU' doesn't give any more of a damn about the privacy of its citizens than the 'US' does. By 'EU' and 'US' we refer to the political power brokers of the respective organizations. Recall the draconian British laws that require law enforcement to be able to have access to any encryption that a private citizen my employ on pain of jail time.
What the 'EU' is truly concerned with here is that they US may be able to spy on 'EU' corporations and obtain market advantages. The fact that the most popular desktop software is owned by and US corporation with a reputation (deserved or not) for backdoors and hacks to break competitors doesn't sit well with the 'EU'. They would much rather be in control themselves.
protect_privacy != protect_privacy_from_US
How the hell do you verify the implementation of an algorithm without the source code.
Here's a sample closed source algorithm:
encrypt(msg)
{
send_msg_home(msg);
e_msg = use_unbreakable_encryption_scheme(msg);
return e_msg;
}
Don't you feel all safe and comfy with your closed source now!!
The article has several blazing errors, such as:
Brazil and China place heavy export duties on technology products, which effectively forces U.S. companies to build local facilities and employ large portions of the population.
The countries in question impose import duties. They charge you to bring it into the country. They're tickled pink for you to make it there and then sell it to other countries.
Otherwise, I think the article is quite correct in its central theme, other countries don't want to be beholden to the US in any way, shape or form. They would rather take care of themselves than live hand-to-mouth from crumbs off the American table. Hell, can you blame 'em!?!
Most elementary school teaching (hell, from what I've seen in some college undergrads, all the way through high school) is just babysitting. If the 6 hours a day spent in the school playpen was actually dedicated to learning, we'd all be geniuses.
As it is, most kids just want to be entertained. A few would like to learn everything they can. A a small number just want to make a ruckus. The teacher will spend half her time keeping the first group busy, a little bit of her time marvelling at the second group, and the rest of his time trying to not be shot by the latter. Meanwhile they've got parents screaming at them to teach their dumbass kids who won't sit still for 10 minutes to be great literary masters for a pauper salary and without raising their voices. If there is a problem it's the teacher's fault. And if they ever try to shield their faces when little Johny spits at it, the parents will raise hell in court.
The only sane thing to do is give up on teaching and be what you really are...a child care manager. And that doesn't take a PhD. Just nerves of steel and a penchant for pain.
Besides, elementary school is as much about developing character as instilling knowledge, and I don't see a PhD being a credential for developing character in children (it wouldn't hurt, it just doesn't help.)
The other problem is that anyone dedicated enough to one subject to get a PhD will go insane in the topsy-turvey land of pre-college school. You don't cover one subject to understanding. You constantly jump from one to another, always disoriented. (why the hell do they have 50min classes in the US anyway?) A high school science teacher has to teach chemistry, then physics and then possibly biology. And if they try to teach with any depth, they'll immediately loose most of the class.
PhDs in classrooms == bad idea.
Now I can keep recieving anonymous spam!!
Damn double-edged swords.
I thought people were fed up with all the politics going on- and it sure seems like more of the same- refusal to take a real stand, because, horrors of horrors, he may lose some of his constintuency.
/. constantly. Companies only work on stuff that will show on next quarters stock report.
You've got serious people with serious concerns on both sides of an issue. The whole point of politics and the government is to facilitate the process of us all living together. Would you rather have fighting in the streets to resolve the issue?
Besides, he did say 'no'. He said, "No new harvesting." He also said a firm yes. He said, "Yes, use what you have."
It doesn't look like this decision will make embryonic stem cell research any easier- now they will need documentation on the particular line of the cell and so forth.
Say you run a Journal. Would any research that did not have this documentation be worth the time of other researchers to read? Wouldn't anything you do without this documentation be totally worthless?
-"Hey, Bubba. We got these here cells thingies to develope into a living, growing, jumping frog."
-"Wow, that's cool Jethro. Where'd the cells come from."
-"I dunno."
Commercial work in this area is great- but companies need to push for profits and drop research in areas that are not immediately promising.
Bullshit. I worked as a security guard at Ciba-Geigy(sp?) when I was in school. They had been doing research on pre-emergent insecticide/herbicides for years(>20), because of the promise that it would use a fraction of the chemicals and be more potent. Obviously not immediately promising, and yet the company persist. I hear this argument on
I'll turn it around at you and say that most academics spend time chasing rainbows that have no application (obvious or otherwise), and that only occasionally does someone develope something that is useful. (Yes, this statement is also full of shit, but no more so than yours.)
I listened to the speech, and I thought he made a very wise, reasoned decision. Unfortunately, what I heard on talk radio was that he 'waffled'. 'He didn't make a decision at all,' the commentator spouted.
The sad thing about politics is that sometimes exactly half of the people are for one side and exactly half are for the other. There is no way to please both sides completely. I thought this decision did the job of giving both sides what they claimed they wanted (research on the one side vs. not killing babies on the other).
You can say he waffled. You can say he is an idiot. You can say whatever you want, but in the end I'm proud to call this man President. He to the time to carefully consider the argument from both sides are reached a decision that should make everyone happy.
Of course, this is the real world, and for a lot of people (especially the blowhards who dominate the media) it's not about getting what they claim they want. It's about being in control. The previously mentioned commentator would only be happy if Bush had denied all funding for research, and would then claim Bush was a weeny if the President didn't send his own personal bodygaurds out to hunt down rogue scientist who would dare try to cure Parkinson's disease (which my father has, and I dread). A lot of the 'scientist' (ie, liberal blowhards) would only be happy if Bush came out and said that he is putting up a billion federal dollars to start cell farms, then would get upset if he balked over spending more money to harvest near-term babies from underprivileged women for body parts. You won't hear either of these parties expressing thankfullness that everyone got what they needed, even if they didn't get what they wanted.
Reminds me of some sage advice once imparted unto me that many here can benefit from.
Do not go straight home from work for the first week of marriage. Hang out, go to a park for an hour, park and read a book, do anything, but do not go straight home to your new wife. If you go straight home, she will expect it to be that way for the rest of the marriage.
Trust me on this one.
Yes, this may seem sexist, but I don't know any guys who flip when their spouse shows up at 6:05 instead of 6.
Except that the EULA, any EULA, is absolute and total bullshit, except in Maryland and Virginia(?) who think UCITA makes sense.
You can't make addendums to a contract after the sale without agreement from both sides. Clicking a button or hitting a key does not constitute proof of agreement. That requires a signature. Please help spread the news that EULA's are bullshit until they are upheld in a court of law or supported by legislation. At the present, they are just some grandstanding bullshit from rich software companies with nothing more than threats from lawyers standing behind them.
BTW, did I mention that EULAs are BULLSHIT mumbo-jumbo legalese that don't have the force of spit.