Done well, audible alerts for critical information is very useful. The US Military has a system lovingly referred to as "Bitchin' Betty", and other militaries (notably Russian) have similar systems. Besides simple audibles (the "tone" of missile lock-on most of us learned from Top Gun), the military has found that a verbal warning system helps in emergency situations. For example, the Betty system calmly reports "altitude...altitude" when you fly below a certain altitude. My guess is that this is especially useful when dealing with groggy pilots just coming out of G-LOC. You wake up, hear someone saying "altitude...altitude..." and you pull up before your eyes and frontal lobes start working again.
The following is funny, but I am not making this up. The military had some think tanks working on the Betty system, and determined that (predominantly male) pilots react quickest to a female voice. Not a sultry female voice, just a female voice. Thus, it's not "Bitchin' Billy". It also happens that they determined that, the stronger the language, the faster the response.
They chose not to use that last bit of information in the Betty system. This was mostly because said think tankers didn't want to explain to Congress why they were spending millions of dollars of taxpayer money to have the plane shout "Pull up, you $(&*@#!"
I suspect that there are a few that know that they're just in it for the power trip, damn the principles. I can't give a better explanation for Bush and Gore collectively ripping up our democracy like so much bird cage liner.
The core of the kernel would have to be GPL, but even other pieces of the kernel (dynamically linkable kernel modules, I believe) don't have to be GPL'd. This means that M$ can make their own proprietary APIs. That is what M$ Linux would be. Perhaps they would start lobotimizing Windows so that you needed Windows or M$ Linux to connect to it. Perhaps they pay (or threaten, or otherwise coerce) the major software houses to write only to the M$ Linux APIs.
It's called "extend and escape". Alternately, it's called "extend, escape, and extinguish".
Many of the people posting to this story seem to be implying that MS is just plain evil and they will do anything in their power to close up open-source. That is plain and simply not true. MS in a large corporation that is in the business of making $$$$. Nothing more, nothing less. If MS begins to lose significiant market share to Linux, then the situation in the story may come true.
No, Microsoft isn't pure evil. Neither is it simply in the business of making money.
Microsoft still looks up to Bill Gates like a personality cult. Until and unless they change that, consider them less of a mere all-for-profit corporate entity and more of a large and powerful expression of Bill Gates' will. He may be just the CTO now, but he still has the authority of a monarch there.
This is important because Bill Gates believes in central control--his central control. I believe that this central control is more important to Bill Gates, and thus to Microsoft policy, than even profits. This centralized control is impossible to achieve using Open Source software, and that is why Microsoft has not ventured there.
My understanding is that Gates has a vision for user-friendly computing, and belives that he must control the entire show in order to provide that vision for the people. He's not evil, he's doing it for us, the users. I just think that his vision is sadly mistaken.
Open Source Software threatens Microsoft's corporate profits. It also threatens Bill Gates' world-view, personally. If and when Microsoft enters the Linux or Open Source arenas, it will be for one purpose only--to destroy it.
I didn't see the Emporer's costume, but your description makes it beyond tacky. They missed the point.
The emporer's robes of office consisted of an ornate Sardaukar uniform. House Corrino does this as a subtler-than-a-fist reminder of exactly where their power lies, not to mention a major morale boost to the Sardaukar.
OTOH, we are programmed to see a supreme leader wearing military garb and think "banana republic"...
Yes, the word "mutant" makes sense, in both the real and Marvel senses of the world.
In the Real World, a mutant is someone or something with a mutation, which is nothing more than accidental gene-tampering. People with XXY as their 23rd chromosome are mutants. People with six fingers on one hand("my name is Inigo Montoya...") are mutants.
Most mutations are "inferior" to the original species, in that they remove or surpress a capability. This woman is an exception; her mutation appears to give her a superhuman ability: a peculiar type of vision. In the comics, mutants are always the superior variety, with superhuman capabilities. While I don't imagine she is qualified to put on a silly costume and slam evil, she does have a special power.
The US government has more interest in protecting companies than people (indeed, I have letters from Representative Sununu and Senator Gregg of NH saying about as such), let's take a different tack: defending companies against other companies.
I used to be a cypherpunk for an e-commerce company. E-commerce obviously relies on good encryption, due to its use of credit card data. Indeed, failure to use such good encryption for credit data can lead to civil lawsuits for negligence, and possibly even criminal prosecution.
An e-commerce company is legally negligent if it uses encryption of dubious strength. The e-commerce company, or some trustworthy third party, must be able to test the decryption. The only way to do that is to actually try to break the encryption--something that, by virtue of the DMCA, is illegal.
Here's the scenario. A crypto vendor sells a "strong" encryption scheme. It unknowingly allows a "back door" (not rare at all--SSL had the "million question attack"). The current defense against such a vulnerability, independant attempts to crack the crypto (exactly what found the million question attack), are illegal.
The result is that the Bad Guys crack the crypto first, then start nabbing credit card data from an e-commerce site left and right. If the crackers are smart, nobody figures it out for months.
When people find out, customers file a class action lawsuit against the e-commerce site, claiming negligence because they used poor crypto hardware/software.
In short: the DMCA makes e-commerce a very risky business, indeed.
The way the law stands today, it is illegal for me to descramble a cable signal for channels (services) I have not purchased. However, it is legal for me to buy or build a descrambler. Indeed, there is a good reason for me to do so: I don't want to keep renting two descramblers from my cable company.
Imagine being caught in a situation where the "legal decryption hardware" (descramblers, DVD players, etc.) are no longer available for sale. What if people switched to a rental model? Consumers would have virtually no protection.
Returning signing bonus and similar things sound both fair and legal. If they had to do legal footwork, they could list your signing bonus as a loan that is forgiven after n days of work. Non-competes are state-by-state. However, a long-term contract becomes less enforcable the worse the consequences of leaving early: that's because you start going down the slope to indentured servitude, and slavery is illegal in the US.
That being said, people with H1-B visas are in a bit of a pickle. I've never dealt with it (I'm a citizen), but my understanding is that the consequences of leaving the job are being deported. This could be turned into indentured servitude, if I understand the law correctly.
In addition to the Independant Contractor (IC), there is a role I refer to as the Dependant Contractor (DC). This person is a W-2 employee hired by a contract house and paid hourly. Effectively, the house does the bookkeeping and marketing (getting new contracts), and the DC simply has to know his tech and put in the hours.
A DC is probably paid less than an IC who can negotiate well, but it is a great option for mediocre negotiators or people who don't want to incorporate, market, and handle paperwork themselves.
Frankly, some of us get our twelve hours of work in in eight hours. When I'm up to speed, I can't work useful overtime. I will work seven or eight hours, because that's how long it takes me to get mentally exhausted. Working longer is a waste of my time and their money.
Some will get the message if stated properly, some merely won't. Those who can be persuaded to understand will do what is right for the hospital, which involves doing what's right for the support staff (given how hard it is to replace the techies). Those who cannot be persuaded need to fully realize the consequences of their actions, through a sort of capitalistic darwinism.
In plain talk, if the clue-by-four doesn't work, find another job and let it be their problem.
That's a bit like shipping everybody a machine gun, delivered with a belt of ammo already loaded in the gun loaded, and saying that everything is alright because they shipped it with the safety on?
First off, by "Republican", I am not referring to
the American political party. I am referring to a political system where the citizens elect representatives to create the laws.
This pretty much derives from pure Athenian democracy. The problem with Athenian democracy is scalability. Too many issues, too many people voting over them, it's just a lot of time that you or I don't have. And scaling that to a state or a nation is ludicrous.
The republican solution is to simply vote for the people you "trust" to vote the way you would. This is a better solution than simple democracy on a large scale, but it has its drawbacks. A lot of these drawbacks occur due to the fact that, since a limited number of people are actually making the laws, whoever controls those people control the nation. And it's a lot easier to control a small number of legislators than a large population.
One solution is a proposed "pebble democracy", described here. This solution relies on the extensive IT infrastructure that we now have, that our forefathers had no access to.
The general ideas are:
Everyone gets an equivalent vote (but not necessarily one vote, perhaps one thousand).
Votes are kept, audited, and tallied on a computer network. You vote from your own computer.
All legislative issues come up to a general population vote. You still need executives and other "fast-acting" officers--democracies are good at long term decisions, not short term ones.
You can use as many of your votes as you want to vote on any given issue, until you run out of votes. This way, you have more influence on issues you know and care about, and little or no influence on issues that are irrelevant to you.
Anyone can set themselves up as a "legislator" by offering "tickets". A ticket is a suggestion on how to vote that you can download onto your own voting computer, if you trust the ticket's writer. A voter simply allocates votes to a ticket, and automatically uses those votes per the ticket's suggestions.
The last item, with "tickets", establishes the scalability of a republican government without the "limited number of people" issues. Special interests and lobbies become these legislators, writing tickets, and their power is directly related to the number of people who trust them, not how much money said people have.
If you have a setup like this, to screw things up you have to fool (bribe, blackmail, influence) the majority of the populace, rather than just a few hundred congressmen and fifty one Senators.
Yes, half the world works like this. And for half of the world, it works. The difference here is that the ISP market is so fast that three years is an eternity.
Normally, if I buy a contract for several years (say, a car lease), I have a reasonable expectation that their half of the contract will still be good at the end of that time (that is, the car will still work pretty well). Here, if you sign up for a 56K connection for three years, remember that 56K will be like 2400 baud by then.
OK, this will have zero effect. Why? Because slashdot people don't vote. And when they do vote, they vote for third parties that have no chance of winning. And when they do vote for major party candidates, it is based on abortion, or human rights in Uzbekistan, etc. Or more likely, who the media told them is the 'hip' candidate.
Frankly, you're full of it.
I vote. I vote for third party candidates. So what if they "don't have a chance of winning"? This is an election, not a horse race. The two major candidates are, IMHO, slime. Why vote for one or the other? That's what they want you to do.
If I vote for a third-party candidate, and one of the big two win, I get a slime officer. If I vote for one of the big two, and he or she wins, I get a slime officer; same difference. If one slimer needs one more vote to win, I stop him whether I vote for the other slimer or the third party candidate. You don't need more votes than anybody else, you need over 50% of the vote, period.
But if enough votes go to third party candidates, then a couple of things can happen. First, the slimers can see the lost votes and try to get us back. Secondly, if they fail, other voters see the third parties, believe they can make a difference, vote them in, and you get third-party officers. Self-fulfilling prophecy.
Democrats and republicans want you to believe that they are the only choices. Since they're both slime, that causes apathy, and an apathetic population is easier to control. Prove them wrong at the ballot box. It may take several elections, but it will work.
People have been noting that you can't predict the political situation fifty years from now. Fifty years is the tip of the iceberg. If you are going to build a trillion-dollar artifact, you are going to build it to last a millenium, at least. And no one country is going to be trusted with it. You are going to need a coalition of the big governments in order to get this going.
If the lower terminus is on land, that land won't belong to a country (at least when we're done with it). It will belong to some multi-national protectorate.
The alternative is that the lower terminus is right on the water. Remember that orbital forces are holding this up, so it's not resting on the ground.
Either way, the tech level doesn't matter. Most of this will be built from orbit anyhow. By the time the terminal buildings are created, the most backward region will have tons of tech there to build it.
Side note: you want the cable to be as simple as possible. No moving parts. Don't attach it to something like a building. We'll go through dozens of spaceports before the cable fails.
Software companies tend to be schitzophrenic. There is the geek side, and there is the business side. Both are needed for success.
The business types are the ones who pay the lobbies (or appropriate funds for same), and they are the ones that are pushing fo rthis. The geeks have a different view.
Slashdot is full of the software geeks, not the software business types.
Slashdot Mirror
The following is funny, but I am not making this up. The military had some think tanks working on the Betty system, and determined that (predominantly male) pilots react quickest to a female voice. Not a sultry female voice, just a female voice. Thus, it's not "Bitchin' Billy". It also happens that they determined that, the stronger the language, the faster the response.
They chose not to use that last bit of information in the Betty system. This was mostly because said think tankers didn't want to explain to Congress why they were spending millions of dollars of taxpayer money to have the plane shout "Pull up, you $(&*@#!"
I suspect that there are a few that know that they're just in it for the power trip, damn the principles. I can't give a better explanation for Bush and Gore collectively ripping up our democracy like so much bird cage liner.
It's called "extend and escape". Alternately, it's called "extend, escape, and extinguish".
No, Microsoft isn't pure evil. Neither is it simply in the business of making money.
Microsoft still looks up to Bill Gates like a personality cult. Until and unless they change that, consider them less of a mere all-for-profit corporate entity and more of a large and powerful expression of Bill Gates' will. He may be just the CTO now, but he still has the authority of a monarch there.
This is important because Bill Gates believes in central control--his central control. I believe that this central control is more important to Bill Gates, and thus to Microsoft policy, than even profits. This centralized control is impossible to achieve using Open Source software, and that is why Microsoft has not ventured there.
My understanding is that Gates has a vision for user-friendly computing, and belives that he must control the entire show in order to provide that vision for the people. He's not evil, he's doing it for us, the users. I just think that his vision is sadly mistaken.
Open Source Software threatens Microsoft's corporate profits. It also threatens Bill Gates' world-view, personally. If and when Microsoft enters the Linux or Open Source arenas, it will be for one purpose only--to destroy it.
The emporer's robes of office consisted of an ornate Sardaukar uniform. House Corrino does this as a subtler-than-a-fist reminder of exactly where their power lies, not to mention a major morale boost to the Sardaukar.
OTOH, we are programmed to see a supreme leader wearing military garb and think "banana republic"...
What a waste of water!
In the Real World, a mutant is someone or something with a mutation, which is nothing more than accidental gene-tampering. People with XXY as their 23rd chromosome are mutants. People with six fingers on one hand("my name is Inigo Montoya...") are mutants.
Most mutations are "inferior" to the original species, in that they remove or surpress a capability. This woman is an exception; her mutation appears to give her a superhuman ability: a peculiar type of vision. In the comics, mutants are always the superior variety, with superhuman capabilities. While I don't imagine she is qualified to put on a silly costume and slam evil, she does have a special power.
If you did that, you could save the rest of us a lot of grief.
I used to be a cypherpunk for an e-commerce company. E-commerce obviously relies on good encryption, due to its use of credit card data. Indeed, failure to use such good encryption for credit data can lead to civil lawsuits for negligence, and possibly even criminal prosecution.
An e-commerce company is legally negligent if it uses encryption of dubious strength. The e-commerce company, or some trustworthy third party, must be able to test the decryption. The only way to do that is to actually try to break the encryption--something that, by virtue of the DMCA, is illegal.
Here's the scenario. A crypto vendor sells a "strong" encryption scheme. It unknowingly allows a "back door" (not rare at all--SSL had the "million question attack"). The current defense against such a vulnerability, independant attempts to crack the crypto (exactly what found the million question attack), are illegal.
The result is that the Bad Guys crack the crypto first, then start nabbing credit card data from an e-commerce site left and right. If the crackers are smart, nobody figures it out for months.
When people find out, customers file a class action lawsuit against the e-commerce site, claiming negligence because they used poor crypto hardware/software.
In short: the DMCA makes e-commerce a very risky business, indeed.
Imagine being caught in a situation where the "legal decryption hardware" (descramblers, DVD players, etc.) are no longer available for sale. What if people switched to a rental model? Consumers would have virtually no protection.
That being said, people with H1-B visas are in a bit of a pickle. I've never dealt with it (I'm a citizen), but my understanding is that the consequences of leaving the job are being deported. This could be turned into indentured servitude, if I understand the law correctly.
Any H1-B employees have a perspective on this?
A DC is probably paid less than an IC who can negotiate well, but it is a great option for mediocre negotiators or people who don't want to incorporate, market, and handle paperwork themselves.
Yes, I am a DC.
We had that poll. IIRC, most of us work "Hemos".
Frankly, some of us get our twelve hours of work in in eight hours. When I'm up to speed, I can't work useful overtime. I will work seven or eight hours, because that's how long it takes me to get mentally exhausted. Working longer is a waste of my time and their money.
If I patent the atom, can I sue the particle physics labs?
In plain talk, if the clue-by-four doesn't work, find another job and let it be their problem.
That's a bit like shipping everybody a machine gun, delivered with a belt of ammo already loaded in the gun loaded, and saying that everything is alright because they shipped it with the safety on?
This pretty much derives from pure Athenian democracy. The problem with Athenian democracy is scalability. Too many issues, too many people voting over them, it's just a lot of time that you or I don't have. And scaling that to a state or a nation is ludicrous.
The republican solution is to simply vote for the people you "trust" to vote the way you would. This is a better solution than simple democracy on a large scale, but it has its drawbacks. A lot of these drawbacks occur due to the fact that, since a limited number of people are actually making the laws, whoever controls those people control the nation. And it's a lot easier to control a small number of legislators than a large population.
One solution is a proposed "pebble democracy", described here. This solution relies on the extensive IT infrastructure that we now have, that our forefathers had no access to.
The general ideas are:
- Everyone gets an equivalent vote (but not necessarily one vote, perhaps one thousand).
- Votes are kept, audited, and tallied on a computer network. You vote from your own computer.
- All legislative issues come up to a general population vote. You still need executives and other "fast-acting" officers--democracies are good at long term decisions, not short term ones.
- You can use as many of your votes as you want to vote on any given issue, until you run out of votes. This way, you have more influence on issues you know and care about, and little or no influence on issues that are irrelevant to you.
- Anyone can set themselves up as a "legislator" by offering "tickets". A ticket is a suggestion on how to vote that you can download onto your own voting computer, if you trust the ticket's writer. A voter simply allocates votes to a ticket, and automatically uses those votes per the ticket's suggestions.
The last item, with "tickets", establishes the scalability of a republican government without the "limited number of people" issues. Special interests and lobbies become these legislators, writing tickets, and their power is directly related to the number of people who trust them, not how much money said people have.If you have a setup like this, to screw things up you have to fool (bribe, blackmail, influence) the majority of the populace, rather than just a few hundred congressmen and fifty one Senators.
Normally, if I buy a contract for several years (say, a car lease), I have a reasonable expectation that their half of the contract will still be good at the end of that time (that is, the car will still work pretty well). Here, if you sign up for a 56K connection for three years, remember that 56K will be like 2400 baud by then.
"Yes, Dilbert, but what if you accidentally DELETE a FILE?"
Frankly, you're full of it.
I vote. I vote for third party candidates. So what if they "don't have a chance of winning"? This is an election, not a horse race. The two major candidates are, IMHO, slime. Why vote for one or the other? That's what they want you to do.
If I vote for a third-party candidate, and one of the big two win, I get a slime officer. If I vote for one of the big two, and he or she wins, I get a slime officer; same difference. If one slimer needs one more vote to win, I stop him whether I vote for the other slimer or the third party candidate. You don't need more votes than anybody else, you need over 50% of the vote, period.
But if enough votes go to third party candidates, then a couple of things can happen. First, the slimers can see the lost votes and try to get us back. Secondly, if they fail, other voters see the third parties, believe they can make a difference, vote them in, and you get third-party officers. Self-fulfilling prophecy.
Democrats and republicans want you to believe that they are the only choices. Since they're both slime, that causes apathy, and an apathetic population is easier to control. Prove them wrong at the ballot box. It may take several elections, but it will work.
People have been noting that you can't predict the political situation fifty years from now. Fifty years is the tip of the iceberg. If you are going to build a trillion-dollar artifact, you are going to build it to last a millenium, at least. And no one country is going to be trusted with it. You are going to need a coalition of the big governments in order to get this going. If the lower terminus is on land, that land won't belong to a country (at least when we're done with it). It will belong to some multi-national protectorate. The alternative is that the lower terminus is right on the water. Remember that orbital forces are holding this up, so it's not resting on the ground. Either way, the tech level doesn't matter. Most of this will be built from orbit anyhow. By the time the terminal buildings are created, the most backward region will have tons of tech there to build it. Side note: you want the cable to be as simple as possible. No moving parts. Don't attach it to something like a building. We'll go through dozens of spaceports before the cable fails.
The business types are the ones who pay the lobbies (or appropriate funds for same), and they are the ones that are pushing fo rthis. The geeks have a different view.
Slashdot is full of the software geeks, not the software business types.
This is kind of like a low-key version of Double Jeopardy, is it not?
The game is Katz: the Delusion
What do we need for cards?