Quality concerns should never be ignored with projects of this scale. Information like this should result in a shutdown of the project until the issue is addressed.
If you are developing a web site, you can get away with defects in quality because of the nature of the web and precompiled code. To correct an issue, all you have to do is deploy code that corrects the problem. There is no impact outside the site itself. If you want to reduce the possibility of things like this happening, you introduce more advanced testing procedures, beta tests with limited numbers of users, and other methods to reduce the potential for a disruption in services.
If you are building an oil rig, the potential risk of disaster has an impact that goes far beyond the capital involved in building the rig itself, and being faithful to the results of quality assessments is essential to avoiding catastrophes like the spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Any action failing to meet high quality standards should be considered criminal, as the outcome will have a harm on people / environment / wildlife around the rig.
Reading this powerpoint just makes me angry. BP has been lobbying Congress for a while now to reduce potential penalties they may have to pay, and their marketing arm has been doing a lot of damage control in the public arena. It is very important to hold these people accountable for their actions, since this is the way these people do business.
It sounds like the retroactive rape charge is in relation to the guy sleeping with two girls who know each other. They only went to the police after they found out about the other encounter. That would mean the charges are less about the AIDS and more about the cooties.
While I don't claim to be an expert in these matters, what I do know a thing or two about is the power of whisper campaigns. You can quickly dismantle someone's authority by just saying bad things about them and getting others to make jokes. The affect of the Assange affair, from what I have seen, is that he is getting smeared very effectively and a lot of people are in on it. If this was a political campaign and I was attempting to delegitimize a superior opponent, this is exactly how I would go about it.
I guess what I am saying is I have all the sympathy in the world for the victims and look forward to learning what brought these charges to the level of rape. I would not be surprised to learn the details failed to meet the high standards most people would recognize as sexual assault. I would be utterly stunned if a single one of these jackals attacking Assange takes back anything they said if he's eventually proven innocent.
I hacked together a glove consisting of 10 leads with an accelerometer attached to each palm. By rotating the angle of the glove, I am able to control the specific characters being typed. It works well, keeps me productive, and gives me a lot more space on my desk. Plus I can fit it into my pocket!
Yeah, I wish something like this existed. Ergonomic keyboards, for all their supposed benefits, still take up a lot of space and demand repetitive actions on a frequent basis. You can try one, but I don't think they are any better or worse than anything esle.
Traffic. They connect over a socket server that gets flooded by Slashdot traffic. I was talking to Suzette for a couple minutes and getting wierd responses before she went silent.
Modifying the screen height increases the distance between the upper and lower corners of a monitor, measured diagonally. This allows manufactures to say they are giving you a 15 inch screen when you are getting something that is much smaller. This is how you measure the size of a monitor.
My Sony WEGA 36 inch TV from 4 years ago is noticably larger than the 40 inch version of the Bravia. They are doing the same thing there.
You are living in Nazi germany and the SS is at the door. You have a bunch of Jews in your basement and the Nazis ask if this is true. You know if you hand them over, they will be shot immediately.
What is the right thing to do in this situation? Tell them yes, and let people be killed, or tell them no, with the understanding that the consequences could be dire for yourself as well.
I can't answer that question.
People have an obligation to do the 'right thing.' Whether that is to follow an oath to protect secrecy or expose details on war crimes, everyone has to answer that for themselves. But people are punished no matter what they do, it could be in the form of a court marshall or in the form of your conscience.
The idea that bothers me most is that people are more concerned about the fate of the whistleblower than the substance of what was revealed. The documents on Wikileaks detail some pretty messed up stuff, if you actually read through them. It's hard to believe no one has been doing anything about this.
In the real world, people are supposed to do something about corruption. That is what is called being honest.
The military does not make people pay for telling the truth. They make them pay for stepping out of line and breaking oaths, both of which are standards created by and for the military.
By definition, you are not talking about the real world, you are talking about military life.
The ethics of this particular leak are debateable, there are strong arguments for and against this being a just action. The substance of the documents is what matters and is what we should be talking about. I do not like it when I hear that the army goes on a mission to a village where women and children live and there are no survivors. That reeks and anyone in an operational role in the military will tell you the same.
The fact that no one does anything about it is the reason people leak things to the press. People have consciences and act according to their own systems of right and wrong. We live in an information society, and there are many means available to people to act on their conscience when they confront this kind of brutality.
That is the real world. People are more than the lowest common denominator and have a responsibility as human beings to deal with brutality. Whether this supersedes an oath and is deserving of punishment is the stuff of religion.
Big difference between evidence in a criminal matter and documents related to the operations of governments and corporations. One has to do with unproven allegations, the other has to do with details of operations. Apples and oranges.
The timing of the announcement is suspicious. A lot of important things Wikileaks has revealed recently are being almost ignored after all this.
The identity of his accusers is supicious too. One of them is a radical feminist who has written about using rape allegations as a means of achieving revenge. She was also his girlfriend and introduced the other girl to him earlier in the day.
Everyone in the US has a right to face their accusers and everyone is innocent until proven guilty. Assange should have the same rights and rushing to judgement in this matter is just silly.
I am saying the importance of what he did should not be overshadowed by this event. One does not rise the level of the other. The fact that people are talking about this instead of war crimes is inane.
If a rape happens in Washington DC, it is generally local news. This is not even a rape, this is a charge of molestation, which does not have the same meaning it does in other countries. Molestation is something like assault, but not quite, and can be applied quite broadly. From the way it was explained to me, if you fart during intercourse and your partner believes you derived sexual pleasure from it, he / she can bring a charge of molestation.
The only reason you are hearing about it is because it is Assange.
If that is the case, I know a lot of serial molesters.
The problem is the name of the charges is inflammatory, and carries certain connotations in different parts of the world. From the details that have emerged, it really does sound like he is just a player.
That's great. Someone comes forward with evidence of war crimes, and all anyone wants to talk about is his sexual habits.
I was just in Denmark, a friend and I met 2 Swedish women in a bar. Contrary to the rumors, they did not have blonde hair. They were out celebrating a recent birthday, and appeared to have all the same motivations going for them as anyone from anywhere else in the world.
Let me be the last person on Earth to attack a victim, if this 'molestation' actually happened that is just awful. But let me be the first to say, war crimes are more important. Evidence of armies going around wiping out villages is not something to ignore because there is some juicy innuendo (which may or may not be true) going on.
I remember the days when Yahoo search was the only search engine you worried about (97 - 2001-ish).
This reads as a cautionary tale about being a first mover. You may be on top one day, but you are trading the flexibiltiy of a start up for predictable lines of revenue that may not last. There are times when it is better to let someone else go first and build your strategy around what they are doing wrong.
I used to work for the government and had to buy a copy of Oracle 8i for a web application.
The web application had one sign up form and 130 people used it total. It took 2 weeks to build it.
They sold us a web license, under the premise that every user on the web site would be a unique user within Oracle. That was something like $50k. The agency I worked for was required to buy the largest installation of Oracle possible, which was a multiserver edition. That was over $100k.
They had a support contract that called for them to set up the server in our blade rack. The person who came in to install it charged us something like $300 an hour, because they scheduled the installation to happen overnight. There was no compelling reason for them to do it (I could have set it up, we had the disks). I don't remember what we paid for him, but the server did not work and they had to come back a second time to fix it. That was covered under a support contract, which cost us some ridiculous amount of money for a service we never used.
Medieval tactics are inferior to modern tactics in the same way that Unix is inferior to modern OSes like Windows. We may be more comfortable with "modern" things, but that doesn't make them better, or make the old things any less useful.
Absolutely, which is why I keep a loaded catapult for personal defense against anyone who crosses my moat. People may think me old fashioned, but flinging cauldrons of boiling oil is never not useful.
That's what Nixon said. Democracy should be open except for the parts someone decides should be all hush hush.
I agree with your point, that there is not enough information about really bad governments. I have not seen a single leak about the Cambodians, for instance, or anyone from Kuala Lampur.
We do hold ourselves to higher standards in the west tho, right? Democracy is supposed to be superior to 'unpleasant' regmies, and people are supposed to have a stake in their government. What is undemocratic about these leaks? They provide greater insight into government, which is in line with the western ethos.
Ultimately, upgrading your units to use the heat ray is not worth the points cost. Despite the superior strength and AP, you need to be within 12 inches to use it. This is assault range, and at most you are going to get one round of shooting before your opponent closes in. There's an excellent chance you will not get to use it except with bike mounted troops.
The heat ray is ultimately a weapon of opportunity, and you would be better off with the plasma gun for 5 more points. It's rapid fire and gives you a couple good rounds of shooting. Another alternative is a combi-gun with a melta attachment, for all intents and purposes you are going to get to use it the same number of times in a game. Even a standard rapid fire rifle is going to result in more shots against infantry, and the probability of a hit...
oh wait...
this isn't a conversation about 40k, and we are not talking about fantasy SF weapons that don't work. We are talking about real world fantasy weapons that don't work. My mistake!
Slashdot Mirror
Quality concerns should never be ignored with projects of this scale. Information like this should result in a shutdown of the project until the issue is addressed.
If you are developing a web site, you can get away with defects in quality because of the nature of the web and precompiled code. To correct an issue, all you have to do is deploy code that corrects the problem. There is no impact outside the site itself. If you want to reduce the possibility of things like this happening, you introduce more advanced testing procedures, beta tests with limited numbers of users, and other methods to reduce the potential for a disruption in services.
If you are building an oil rig, the potential risk of disaster has an impact that goes far beyond the capital involved in building the rig itself, and being faithful to the results of quality assessments is essential to avoiding catastrophes like the spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Any action failing to meet high quality standards should be considered criminal, as the outcome will have a harm on people / environment / wildlife around the rig.
Reading this powerpoint just makes me angry. BP has been lobbying Congress for a while now to reduce potential penalties they may have to pay, and their marketing arm has been doing a lot of damage control in the public arena. It is very important to hold these people accountable for their actions, since this is the way these people do business.
It sounds like the retroactive rape charge is in relation to the guy sleeping with two girls who know each other. They only went to the police after they found out about the other encounter. That would mean the charges are less about the AIDS and more about the cooties.
While I don't claim to be an expert in these matters, what I do know a thing or two about is the power of whisper campaigns. You can quickly dismantle someone's authority by just saying bad things about them and getting others to make jokes. The affect of the Assange affair, from what I have seen, is that he is getting smeared very effectively and a lot of people are in on it. If this was a political campaign and I was attempting to delegitimize a superior opponent, this is exactly how I would go about it.
I guess what I am saying is I have all the sympathy in the world for the victims and look forward to learning what brought these charges to the level of rape. I would not be surprised to learn the details failed to meet the high standards most people would recognize as sexual assault. I would be utterly stunned if a single one of these jackals attacking Assange takes back anything they said if he's eventually proven innocent.
This suggests that a conservative gene exists. If so, how do we identify it and remove it entirely?
I hacked together a glove consisting of 10 leads with an accelerometer attached to each palm. By rotating the angle of the glove, I am able to control the specific characters being typed. It works well, keeps me productive, and gives me a lot more space on my desk. Plus I can fit it into my pocket!
Yeah, I wish something like this existed. Ergonomic keyboards, for all their supposed benefits, still take up a lot of space and demand repetitive actions on a frequent basis. You can try one, but I don't think they are any better or worse than anything esle.
Traffic. They connect over a socket server that gets flooded by Slashdot traffic. I was talking to Suzette for a couple minutes and getting wierd responses before she went silent.
Be careful, you might get sued for saying that.
This is a simple marketing rip off.
Modifying the screen height increases the distance between the upper and lower corners of a monitor, measured diagonally. This allows manufactures to say they are giving you a 15 inch screen when you are getting something that is much smaller. This is how you measure the size of a monitor.
My Sony WEGA 36 inch TV from 4 years ago is noticably larger than the 40 inch version of the Bravia. They are doing the same thing there.
I won't worry until Gork and Mork show up
Here's something to chew on:
You are living in Nazi germany and the SS is at the door. You have a bunch of Jews in your basement and the Nazis ask if this is true. You know if you hand them over, they will be shot immediately.
What is the right thing to do in this situation? Tell them yes, and let people be killed, or tell them no, with the understanding that the consequences could be dire for yourself as well.
I can't answer that question.
People have an obligation to do the 'right thing.' Whether that is to follow an oath to protect secrecy or expose details on war crimes, everyone has to answer that for themselves. But people are punished no matter what they do, it could be in the form of a court marshall or in the form of your conscience.
The idea that bothers me most is that people are more concerned about the fate of the whistleblower than the substance of what was revealed. The documents on Wikileaks detail some pretty messed up stuff, if you actually read through them. It's hard to believe no one has been doing anything about this.
M
In the real world, people are supposed to do something about corruption. That is what is called being honest.
The military does not make people pay for telling the truth. They make them pay for stepping out of line and breaking oaths, both of which are standards created by and for the military.
By definition, you are not talking about the real world, you are talking about military life.
The ethics of this particular leak are debateable, there are strong arguments for and against this being a just action. The substance of the documents is what matters and is what we should be talking about. I do not like it when I hear that the army goes on a mission to a village where women and children live and there are no survivors. That reeks and anyone in an operational role in the military will tell you the same.
The fact that no one does anything about it is the reason people leak things to the press. People have consciences and act according to their own systems of right and wrong. We live in an information society, and there are many means available to people to act on their conscience when they confront this kind of brutality.
That is the real world. People are more than the lowest common denominator and have a responsibility as human beings to deal with brutality. Whether this supersedes an oath and is deserving of punishment is the stuff of religion.
Low blow. Reiser was a murderer, no one saw themselves that way.
Big difference between evidence in a criminal matter and documents related to the operations of governments and corporations. One has to do with unproven allegations, the other has to do with details of operations. Apples and oranges.
No, no one has any blind faith.
The timing of the announcement is suspicious. A lot of important things Wikileaks has revealed recently are being almost ignored after all this.
The identity of his accusers is supicious too. One of them is a radical feminist who has written about using rape allegations as a means of achieving revenge. She was also his girlfriend and introduced the other girl to him earlier in the day.
Everyone in the US has a right to face their accusers and everyone is innocent until proven guilty. Assange should have the same rights and rushing to judgement in this matter is just silly.
Absolutely not.
I am saying the importance of what he did should not be overshadowed by this event. One does not rise the level of the other. The fact that people are talking about this instead of war crimes is inane.
If a rape happens in Washington DC, it is generally local news. This is not even a rape, this is a charge of molestation, which does not have the same meaning it does in other countries. Molestation is something like assault, but not quite, and can be applied quite broadly. From the way it was explained to me, if you fart during intercourse and your partner believes you derived sexual pleasure from it, he / she can bring a charge of molestation.
The only reason you are hearing about it is because it is Assange.
What you said makes me unhappy, because it is so true.
I am going to go be sad for the world now.
If that is the case, I know a lot of serial molesters.
The problem is the name of the charges is inflammatory, and carries certain connotations in different parts of the world. From the details that have emerged, it really does sound like he is just a player.
Yes. To high heavens.
That's great. Someone comes forward with evidence of war crimes, and all anyone wants to talk about is his sexual habits.
I was just in Denmark, a friend and I met 2 Swedish women in a bar. Contrary to the rumors, they did not have blonde hair. They were out celebrating a recent birthday, and appeared to have all the same motivations going for them as anyone from anywhere else in the world.
Let me be the last person on Earth to attack a victim, if this 'molestation' actually happened that is just awful. But let me be the first to say, war crimes are more important. Evidence of armies going around wiping out villages is not something to ignore because there is some juicy innuendo (which may or may not be true) going on.
I remember the days when Yahoo search was the only search engine you worried about (97 - 2001-ish).
This reads as a cautionary tale about being a first mover. You may be on top one day, but you are trading the flexibiltiy of a start up for predictable lines of revenue that may not last. There are times when it is better to let someone else go first and build your strategy around what they are doing wrong.
M
Always suspected something was up with them.
I used to work for the government and had to buy a copy of Oracle 8i for a web application.
The web application had one sign up form and 130 people used it total. It took 2 weeks to build it.
They sold us a web license, under the premise that every user on the web site would be a unique user within Oracle. That was something like $50k. The agency I worked for was required to buy the largest installation of Oracle possible, which was a multiserver edition. That was over $100k.
They had a support contract that called for them to set up the server in our blade rack. The person who came in to install it charged us something like $300 an hour, because they scheduled the installation to happen overnight. There was no compelling reason for them to do it (I could have set it up, we had the disks). I don't remember what we paid for him, but the server did not work and they had to come back a second time to fix it. That was covered under a support contract, which cost us some ridiculous amount of money for a service we never used.
Oracle makes me sick.
M
*woosh* right over his head.
Hope that did not clip your do.
Medieval tactics are inferior to modern tactics in the same way that Unix is inferior to modern OSes like Windows. We may be more comfortable with "modern" things, but that doesn't make them better, or make the old things any less useful.
Absolutely, which is why I keep a loaded catapult for personal defense against anyone who crosses my moat. People may think me old fashioned, but flinging cauldrons of boiling oil is never not useful.
M
Moreover, it was a joke in response to the original joke of MOAR DAKKA. People missed that at so many levels.
I decry the general decline of true geekishness on Slashdot. The fact that only a few people got a rules reference to a tabletop game saddens me.
M
That's what Nixon said. Democracy should be open except for the parts someone decides should be all hush hush.
I agree with your point, that there is not enough information about really bad governments. I have not seen a single leak about the Cambodians, for instance, or anyone from Kuala Lampur.
We do hold ourselves to higher standards in the west tho, right? Democracy is supposed to be superior to 'unpleasant' regmies, and people are supposed to have a stake in their government. What is undemocratic about these leaks? They provide greater insight into government, which is in line with the western ethos.
M
Ultimately, upgrading your units to use the heat ray is not worth the points cost. Despite the superior strength and AP, you need to be within 12 inches to use it. This is assault range, and at most you are going to get one round of shooting before your opponent closes in. There's an excellent chance you will not get to use it except with bike mounted troops.
The heat ray is ultimately a weapon of opportunity, and you would be better off with the plasma gun for 5 more points. It's rapid fire and gives you a couple good rounds of shooting. Another alternative is a combi-gun with a melta attachment, for all intents and purposes you are going to get to use it the same number of times in a game. Even a standard rapid fire rifle is going to result in more shots against infantry, and the probability of a hit...
oh wait...
this isn't a conversation about 40k, and we are not talking about fantasy SF weapons that don't work. We are talking about real world fantasy weapons that don't work. My mistake!
M