As long as they also include every other creation story. There should be text from scientology, islam, hinduism, buddhism, and thousands of other creation myths from all over the world, in a separate book called "Creationism". Leave evolution in the science textbook with the theories on gravity, germ theory, and all of the other accepted, testable hypotheses.
Similarly I'm okay with religion classes, as long as the world's eight major religions are all given equal time. For some reason I think equal access to alternative theories isn't what they are really after...
This is always what I find so amusing.
They claim that evolution is flawed, and that it's "just a theory." They claim they want to "teach the controversy."
But they don't. They aren't actually concerned about giving equal time to all the viewpoints out there. If they were, they'd be teaching all the creation stories.
They don't want to teach any controversies, they just want to make sure their kids get properly indoctrinated.
I personally don't see much distinction between getting drunk and getting high.
Nor do I. Sure, there are some specific substances that are downright nasty... But it isn't like alcohol is without harmful effects. To be completely honest, there's no good, rational reason why alcohol and tobacco are legal and marijuana isn't.
Would we have the same reaction if the teacher had been caught getting high or doing a line of coke or smoking crack?
That would at least be illegal. Getting drunk isn't.
How about promiscuous sex? Cursing? Spitting on the sidewalk?
I'm honestly of the opinion that none of this should matter much when talking about somebody's professional capacities.
I really don't care if somebody likes to get drunk, or sleeps around, or is a complete asshole to their friends and family - as long as they can get the job done, that's all I care about.
If they can't get the job done - maybe because they're showing up drunk, or all their conquests are calling all day long - then it's an issue.
My friend has a picture of him looking much like a stereotypical urban gangster: Hands in a (faux) gang sign, firearms, cash, jewelry.. the whole deal. The backstory is that it was specifically for a role in a short film put on by his film student buddies. It's on his Facebook and MySpace and if was seen out of context he'd probably be passed over in a hiring decision.
Yup. But it's even worse than that.
Anyone snap any pictures of him during rehearsal? Anyone got any clips of the film? They could post those as well, it doesn't have to be your friend doing the posting. And then somebody else might find it amusing, and turn it into a demotivational poster on some forum somewhere.
single of American beer gives me a headache, though I understand that's not unusual in itself. And I have bad breathing problems around smoke, strong perfumes, and most scented cleaners.
My wife is hypersensitive to virtually everything.
She can't finish a beer without getting sick. She's usually nicely tipsy after only about half of it.
She can't drink coffee either, that much caffeine gives her horrible heart palpitations. She's also got to be careful with chocolate and tea and soft drinks.
Even a single of American beer gives me a headache
I've recently discovered that I can't drink red wine anymore. Just one glass and I'll have a mind-shattering migraine the next day. Not pleasant.
I have bad breathing problems around smoke, strong perfumes, and most scented cleaners.
Strong scents bother me as well. No breathing problems, but I'll get a headache pretty quick. Can't shop around places like Bath & Body Works.
You know the stuff people remember isn't the good job you did on your TPS report, the stuff that already gets remembered is the time you got drunk and the office party and put the lamp shade on your head. There may not be pictures, but everyone at the office already remembers that long after you're gone.
Yup. And if you'd done that, you wouldn't have gotten a teaching certificate from these folks. Not because there was a picture on the Internet that wasn't forgotten, but because you'd actually gotten drunk at the office party and put a lamp shade on your head.
What if you were arrested for shoplifiting in a small town where the newspaper publishes the daily arrest record online? Later you are convicted and your sentence includes getting your record expunged once you serve your community service. However, the record in the paper of your arrest is not. The town doesn't have the power to tell the paper to expunge your record. A background check might find that arrest, but not evidence of the outcome. Now you could lose jobs, security clearences all for something that is not supposed to exist. When your record is expunged, you are supposed to be able to answer no to having been arrested, but the internet says otherwise.
This isn't a problem unique to the Internet however, especially in a small town.
There's usually lots of fanfare when somebody gets arrested. It'll show up in the paper, folks will gossip about it, maybe the local radio station will mention it, maybe it'll be on the evening news. It's a big deal. Especially if you're at all prominent or if the crime is at all interesting.
There's usually a hell of a lot less fanfare when somebody is acquitted. You don't usually have nearly as much gossip if someone is found innocent.
So you'll apply for a job later... And it really doesn't matter what's in the archives on the Internet, or who purged what record. All folks remember is your name and the fact that you were involved in something criminal.
The responsible thing to do, for the employer, is to ask for clarification. I seem to remember your name in connection with that big scandal last year... Can you explain what happened with that?
What we need is to ensure you can say anonymous online, or at least not have to use your real name. Online identitites are easy to reinvent, real ones aren't.
No. What we need is to stop judging people so harshly every time they act like a human being.
I realise this is all very well for me to say, but I've always known that this was the case and acted accordingly. On a simple level, I've never said anything online that I wouldn't say to my mother or I wouldn't be prepared to stand behind in future. There is no such thing as anonymity on the 'net, never has been. That's the reason why I don't have alt's. There isn't anything to gain.
I do recognise however that most of the non-geek audience won't have thought of this, and may be bitten, but them's the breaks IMO. The expectation of anonymity is no excuse for acting like an idiot. That said my hormones had already raged. Though Dr Aleks Krotoski does say that in the future, people who do not have a complete record, warts and all, will not be taken seriously, because they are not fully three dimensional people.
You are completely missing the point.
Most of us have gotten drunk at some point in time. Most of us have done something at least vaguely embarrassing at some point in time. Most of us have at least one photo of us doing something stupid that we aren't terribly proud of. None of that should preclude us from getting a job.
My wife went to the local county fair on Friday. They had a stage hypnotist. She volunteered. She was making a fool of herself on stage - dancing around like Lady Gaga, fighting non-existent birds, searching for her stolen belly button. There is video of the event. Is it OK for somebody not to hire her because she made a fool of herself? I'm sorry, but that just doesn't project the kind of professionalism that we expect here.
It doesn't matter if you're careful to censor yourself on-line, somebody else could post a photo of you doing something unprofessional. It really shouldn't matter if you're being unprofessional outside of work, because you're not at work.
The problem isn't that this lady got drunk... The problem isn't that a photo was taken... The problem isn't that the photo was posted to MySpace... The problem isn't that somebody else saw the photo...
The problem is that these folks based a hiring decision on what this lady did in her free time, rather than how qualified she was to do the job.
What's next? Only hiring folks that play D&D? Not hiring people who like Halo? Attend a Gay Pride rally and you're fired? Vote the wrong way and you're suspended for a week?
Maybe this kind of thing will cause a shift in people's opinions. Perhaps when people realize that everybody has made bad decisions in their life, everybody's got too drunk and done something stupid and nobody is perfect, the world will be a better place for it.
We're already seeing a shift, but in the wrong direction. People are becoming less accepting of flaws, not more.
Re:Learning Without a Negative Response?
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The End of Forgetting
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· Score: 5, Insightful
This isn't about forgetting on the web, it's about managing your public image. Some people are slow to catch on that if it's on the internet, the world can see it. So don't put your dirty laundry on the internet.
Wrong.
This isn't about managing your public image, and it doesn't matter if you don't put your dirty laundry on the Internet. If she hadn't posted that picture, somebody else might very well have done that, and the consequences would have been the same.
The problem isn't that this picture was posted. The problem is that the school board over-reacted to something that really had absolutely no bearing on her ability to teach.
The problem is that we're seriously blurring the line between public and private... Between our professional time and our personal time... Between our professional occupations and our leisure occupations...
We've got some kind of new Puritanism going around. You have to uphold the professionalism of your position 24/7. There is no room these days for being human.
Obviously we don't want our high school teachers showing up to work drunk. We don't want them drinking on the job. But she's a human being, and entitled to do whatever the hell she wants to in her off time.
But now she can't. Because somebody might snap a picture of her getting drunk. And somebody might post that on the Internet. And then she might get fired from some other job.
Don't forget to bring human psychology into play. The "air gap" will make people look at the system in question differently. It can be the difference between someone deciding "hey, I can update MyFace on this computer" and "oh, this is technical." That psychology is also viral, e.g. the computer they produce said removable media on will also become "technical."
Either that... Or they'll think oh, this thing is secure, it's got an air gap, nothing can get to it, so I don't have to worry about viruses/worms/whatever.
Not always. Some control systems are run on a dedicated computer without Internet access. Some control systems need to have little downtime to avoid serious consequences. (Some manufacturing plants or refineries have razor-thin margins - an extra 1% downtime could mean the difference between profit and bankruptcy.) In cases like these, if a hard-coded password means a faster system recovery, it's the right choice.
So, why not have a password that is generated in some known way?
The HIS system where I work has a "daily password" - it changes every day. That password is necessary to conduct some operations. Folks who need to conduct those operations know how to look up the daily password. They do so, then they have that password to hand out to whoever needs to do stuff that day. And the daily password becomes useless the next day, so you don't have to worry about it being abused.
The POS system I used to work with had some kind of dynamically generated password. If you had to call technical support for something they'd have you read off some numbers on the screen, and they'd give you back a password to get into the register's internals. Again, it isn't static so it can't be abused for long. But it is generated in a known way so it can readily be obtained.
Seems to me that this would have been a better way to do things.
However, for some industrial applications (including some SCADA installations) , the simplicity of not needing to enter a unique password plus a physical air gap of security trumps a forced-unique password with only digital security
"Air gap" doesn't mean much if you're just using some kind of removable media to transfer information from the insecure world to the secure world, instead of CAT5. If you aren't somehow protecting access to that removable media, your air gap gives you no additional security.
It should be genuinely impossible for anything to auto-run on removable media. Only allow media in your own, special format. Or only allow specific file types to be accessed or imported. And put some kind of password on the media access portion, to make sure only folks who know what they're doing are accessing it.
If you're letting anyone transfer anything on a USB stick, you may as well plug the machine into the network because your air gap isn't doing you any good.
The B&N Unbound Blog is marketing. Their Friday giveaway is marketing.
Yes, it is. It is marketing being conducted by Barnes & Noble, not whoever publishes the books.
In the fine article, we're talking about a number of authors who've bypassed their publishers to sell directly on Amazon. Amazon can go right ahead and market things. The publishers are not necessary.
You could write the best book in the world, but until someone other than yourself knows about it you are not going to sell a single copy. As soon as you tell someone, you have begun marketing it.
Yes, I have begun marketing it - without involving a publisher.
And these days I can potentially reach millions of people simply by posting something on my blog, or on Slashdot, or on Facebook, or wherever. All without requiring the services of a publisher.
Next, it does no good at all to have thousands (millions?) of people clamoring for your book if they can't buy it anywhere.
I could host the book on-line and accept donations. Or I could use one of several on-line ebook publication services. There's absolutely no need for me involve a traditional book publisher.
So before you have consumers wanting your book, you better convince the retailers that this is going to be a best-seller so that they can stock up on it.
You're talking about brick & mortar retailers, and physically stocking up on paper books, aren't you?
Because this article, and my comments, are aimed at digital ebooks.
If you're doing digital distribution, nobody needs to stock up. And it isn't too hard to convince folks to stock digital products. They don't take up any shelf space. There's no trade-off between some no-name and someone famous. You can throw both of them on your digital storefront and let them sell whatever they want.
That is marketing (and is in fact the real heavy-duty marketing as far as books are concerned).
As I said before, and just clearly illustrated, it is no longer necessary to have a publisher do your marketing for you.
so in your idealized world, who does the marketing?
Interesting that you should mention this...
I don't check any newspaper's best seller list. I don't generally read any publications that really feature book reviews. I generally skip over the book reviews here on Slashdot. With the exception of a very few books that actually show up on TV commercials, I have basically no idea what books are out there.
So, I'd suggest that if publishers are currently responsible for marketing their books, they're doing a crappy job of it.
Generally I find the books I want to read through word of mouth (or word on blog) advertising.
I'll see somebody here on Slashdot mention something that sounds interesting, and I'll go look it up. Or somebody I know will tell me that they just finished reading something good, and I'll go look it up.
Ever since I bought my nook, I've been subscribed to the Barnes & Noble Unbound Blog RSS feed. That's their nook/ebook-centric blog. There's some genuine advertising for various ebooks... New releases and things like that... But they also give away an ebook every Friday. Frequently it's something I'm not very interested in. But I've picked up more than a few free ebooks and found them quite entertaining.
One such title was Already Dead. This is the first book in a series, and was being given away free for a while. I picked it up, read it, and wound up buying more of the series.
So, I'd suggest that if you're turning out halfway decent books, you don't really need a marketing department to help you sell them.
"Net Neutrality" is a term used to describe the Internet as it originally was, and still (to a large degree) is. The idea is that the Internet itself is just a passive means to transfer information from one place to another. The various ISPs along the way have to remain neutral. They cannot give any particular packet special treatment just because they're partnered with a specific company. This means that I'm pretty much able to visit whatever websites I want, download whatever files I want, etc.
The large media companies don't like this, because you can pirate their stuff.
Some ISPs have decided that you ought to be paying extra for special treatment. They'd like to charge you extra to view certain websites. Maybe they'll partner with certain companies... Put together a special package... So your Internet is dead slow if you connect to Google, but blazing fast if you use Bing.
Right now, there are no laws that really govern how the Internet should work. It's been neutral all these years largely just because that's the way it's always been done. But a number of companies now want to start doing things differently.
The "net neutrality" legislation being discussed right now is an attempt to put into law the way the Internet has always worked. So that ISPs cannot charge you extra just to view Google. The current legislation is an attempt to make sure that the Internet remains neutral.
Until you have 16 choices, all of them dirt. At least GPS can show you which one is least curvy. It's also great for curvy roads that you don't know and don't have signs, so you can see that hairpin half a mile before you fly off the road.
What I really like it for is the 'unguided and unplanned meandering drive'. Turn on the GPS, drive around and take random roads you'd never take if you were worried about getting lost. Go ahead, get lost. Navigate by the sun or follow a river.
Eventually, tell it to take you home. It's actually a pretty decent way to explore your area.
I love this.
I always carry a road atlas (or two) in the trunk of my car. I have never gotten so lost that I was unable to find my way home. But I've wound up some places where it took me a good half hour or more just to figure out where I was, much less how to get home.
With a GPS I can just wander off wherever the hell I want. I don't need to worry about getting back home. When I eventually get bored I can just hit a button and it'll plot a course back home for me.
And if I find myself running low on gas... Or if I get hungry... Or if I wind up spending the night... My GPS has a POI feature that lets me find local points of interest. Very, very handy.
> They didn't grow up in the area, they didn't know that choice A was 150km, > and choice B was 250km. That's exactly when they turn on the GPS and confirm > which fork in the road to take.
Because, you know, what else could they do? Use a paper map? That's so twentieth century!
I'm a big fan of paper maps. I've navigated from one end of the country to the other with paper maps. I still carry a couple different road atlases in the trunk of my car.
But a decent GPS beats a paper map hands-down.
I don't need to dig through the atlas ahead of time and find the right section for the area I'm driving to/through. If I change my mind, or spontaneously decide to head somewhere else, I don't have to dig out a different map. And if I'm alone, I don't have to try to read a map or follow directions while driving - I can just set the GPS and it'll tell me when I need to turn.
Plus, most GPS devices have some kind of "points of interest" function. So I can simply hit a button and find the nearest gas station, or restaurant, or hotel, or museum, or whatever I think I need. Depending on where you are, finding the nearest gas station can be fairly difficult.
So, you're telling me that game designers are sacrificing realism to produce entertaining weapons?
Shocking!
Next thing you'll tell me is that there is no secret Black Mesa research facility.
Sure, for some games some degree of realism adds to the enjoyment. STALKER, for example, benefits from having vaguely realistic settings and weapons. But even if you're playing something that's genuinely set in the real world - like one of the Call of Duty games - you're still playing a game. You still have to simplify things down to the point where information can be conveyed quickly and easily with nothing more than a screen and some speakers. You have to be able to interact with the world with a keyboard and mouse. The world needs to be altered and constrained and limited enough to run on a modern computer. And it all has to ultimately be fun to play.
That is definitely true, but the video itself seems to have had any reference to "The Onion" stripped out. Unless you click through to the YouTube page and read the fine print attribution, you won't see the word "Onion" anywhere.
So yeah, still they are idiots for accepting something so ridiculous as this as fact, and for failing to have any innate sense of skepticism about random shit on the internet that doesn't come from at least a moderately vetted news source, but you can't blame people for not knowing what The Onion is when the video says nothing about "The Onion" and most people probably clicked on it in an embedded form from Facebook or other websites.
But... That's kind of the problem.
I mean, I can post pretty much any random thing I want - doesn't make it true.
If you see something horrifying or upsetting on teh interwebs, it's generally a good idea to check the source before you run screaming for the hills.
In this case, they really ought to have followed it back to the YouTube page and read the attribution. And then checked to see what "The Onion" is.
But what good is it to chase readers who go so far as to block ads and don't think the content maker is entitled to anything?
Except that the content maker isn't entitled to anything.
Just because you make content doesn't mean I have to give you money. I'm not going to mail a check to Stephen King just because he's written a new novel. I'm only going to give you money if I decide your content is worth it. How exactly that works varies somewhat from one medium to the next... Maybe you show me some previews and I decide to pay for a ticket to go see your movie. Or maybe I read the first few pages or chapter of your book and then decide to buy the thing. Or maybe I'm so thrilled with the content of your blog that I donate some money to you. But just turning out content doesn't entitle you to anything at all.
Generally speaking, I block ads. It isn't because I'm a malicious asshole that wants to see the entire web publishing industry fall down and die - it's because I don't want to waste my bandwidth loading advertising that I'm not going to look at anyway.
If I like a site enough, and there isn't some handy way to subscribe or donate, I'll enable ads on that site. But I'll disable them again if they're too annoying. Google adword blocks are great, I hardly even notice them. Flashing, animated, audible banner crap is not great - I'll disable that shit in a heartbeat.
If the sites I peruse don't like that, they don't have to put up with it. It's their choice. They can hide behind a paywall if they want to. And if I care enough about the site - if the content they offer is genuinely unique and useful and interesting - I might just pay for it. But if I can get that content elsewhere, without the annoying ads or without having to subscribe or whatever else, I'm going to.
Yeah. It was the press that was politicizing this.
I never said the press was politicizing anything.
I listed a number of problems affecting/influencing this current disaster.
The regulatory agency that was supposed to make sure things like this didn't happen was in bed with the folks it was supposed to be regulating, and didn't do its job. Bureaucracy has gotten in the way at pretty much every step of the process. The whole thing has been completely politicized. The media has turned it into some kind of circus.
If that list is too hard to parse, I can break it up for you.
The regulatory agency that was supposed to make sure things like this didn't happen was in bed with the folks it was supposed to be regulating, and didn't do its job.
Bureaucracy has gotten in the way at pretty much every step of the process.
The whole thing has been completely politicized.
The media has turned it into some kind of circus.
I don't think the media has politicized anything. It's been the politicians (on both sides) who have been politicizing the disaster.
You didn't. But you did say "some kind of government involvement is necessary", so it's important to remember that they fuck up too.
Obviously.
Everybody fucks up.
And if it was just a matter of oops, well sprung a leak that'd be one thing...
But we've got evidence that they were having trouble for months before the actual blowout. And an argument that very morning about how best to seal things up for the switchover. And now we see that they've just been copying and pasting their emergency plan from one rig to the next, with no actual research into what it would take to deal with an emergency at any one particular location. And they very obviously didn't have a plan for how to deal with something like this, since they've been making it up as they go along.
All of which indicates a fairly clear disregard for the possibility of something going wrong.
Which isn't really surprising, considering that the Gulf of Mexico isn't really BP's problem. I mean, they're drilling there... But it isn't like that's their back yard. Or where they fish for a living. Or anything like that. BP can keep pumping oil in the middle of a polluted Gulf of Mexico. Or if they couldn't for some reason, they could just pick up and drill somewhere else.
I mean, let's be completely honest here... I'm sure BP would like to get this well under control and start pumping that oil profitably again. But, in the absence of any fines or anything like that - do you honestly think they'd put any time/money/effort into cleaning this mess up?
And that's why you need an organization bigger than BP that is concerned with the Gulf of Mexico, to make sure that something like this is taken care of.
No, our government hasn't done a very good job with this.
The regulatory agency that was supposed to make sure things like this didn't happen was in bed with the folks it was supposed to be regulating, and didn't do its job. Bureaucracy has gotten in the way at pretty much every step of the process. The whole thing has been completely politicized. The media has turned it into some kind of circus.
But that doesn't mean we don't need somebody bigger than BP to make sure they don't just walk away from a disaster like this.
What it means is that we need somebody bigger than BP, who actually does their job, to make sure they don't just walk away from a disaster like this.
Well why should they? They only have to look after the interest of the shareholders and thats maximising Profit Baby!*
* may not be true but thats how it seems to be in practice.
A corporation's only goal is to maximize profit. That's how it works. They actually have a responsibility to their shareholders to make money. I wouldn't really expect a corporation to invest money into something like developing technology to clean up oil spills unless it could demonstrate that the technology would somehow earn the shareholders money.
You could make the argument that if BP (or Exxon or whoever) developed the technology they'd be able to sell it to others... Or minimize the fines/cleanup that they have to pay for... But, the way things actually work in the real world, there's little point in that. Business as usual makes more than enough money.
Which is why, much as some people hate to admit it, some kind of government involvement is necessary.
You can regulate the oil companies - force them to invest some amount of their profits into cleanup R&D.
Or you can fund your own R&D project to develop the technology.
But, as we've seen, The Market isn't interested in this stuff.
This is why I love that Opera comes build-in with all the features you need and a lot more
As a geek, I enjoy complexity to an extent. It's cool to have a gadget with lots of nifty features and shiny buttons. But even I'll admit that at some point it can become unwieldy.
I personally prefer a basic browser with a plug-in model that allows me to extend the functionality in whatever way I feel necessary. That way I can add all the shiny buttons I want, without having to deal with the unwieldy stuff that other people want.
Not only are they made using the same quality standards and conventions, there is no way some rogue developer could hide password stealing code in them.
Actually, there is.
One of the Opera developers could go rogue. Or some machine in their development environment could be compromised, which could lead to the distributed software being compromised.
And since Opera is not open source, we'd have to rely on the Opera developers themselves to find the issue. An open source model means that basically anyone with the time/inclination/skills can go in and take a look at the code.
Slashdot Mirror
As long as they also include every other creation story. There should be text from scientology, islam, hinduism, buddhism, and thousands of other creation myths from all over the world, in a separate book called "Creationism". Leave evolution in the science textbook with the theories on gravity, germ theory, and all of the other accepted, testable hypotheses.
Similarly I'm okay with religion classes, as long as the world's eight major religions are all given equal time. For some reason I think equal access to alternative theories isn't what they are really after...
This is always what I find so amusing.
They claim that evolution is flawed, and that it's "just a theory." They claim they want to "teach the controversy."
But they don't. They aren't actually concerned about giving equal time to all the viewpoints out there. If they were, they'd be teaching all the creation stories.
They don't want to teach any controversies, they just want to make sure their kids get properly indoctrinated.
I personally don't see much distinction between getting drunk and getting high.
Nor do I. Sure, there are some specific substances that are downright nasty... But it isn't like alcohol is without harmful effects. To be completely honest, there's no good, rational reason why alcohol and tobacco are legal and marijuana isn't.
Would we have the same reaction if the teacher had been caught getting high or doing a line of coke or smoking crack?
That would at least be illegal. Getting drunk isn't.
How about promiscuous sex? Cursing? Spitting on the sidewalk?
I'm honestly of the opinion that none of this should matter much when talking about somebody's professional capacities.
I really don't care if somebody likes to get drunk, or sleeps around, or is a complete asshole to their friends and family - as long as they can get the job done, that's all I care about.
If they can't get the job done - maybe because they're showing up drunk, or all their conquests are calling all day long - then it's an issue.
My friend has a picture of him looking much like a stereotypical urban gangster: Hands in a (faux) gang sign, firearms, cash, jewelry.. the whole deal. The backstory is that it was specifically for a role in a short film put on by his film student buddies. It's on his Facebook and MySpace and if was seen out of context he'd probably be passed over in a hiring decision.
Yup. But it's even worse than that.
Anyone snap any pictures of him during rehearsal? Anyone got any clips of the film? They could post those as well, it doesn't have to be your friend doing the posting. And then somebody else might find it amusing, and turn it into a demotivational poster on some forum somewhere.
single of American beer gives me a headache, though I understand that's not unusual in itself. And I have bad breathing problems around smoke, strong perfumes, and most scented cleaners.
My wife is hypersensitive to virtually everything.
She can't finish a beer without getting sick. She's usually nicely tipsy after only about half of it.
She can't drink coffee either, that much caffeine gives her horrible heart palpitations. She's also got to be careful with chocolate and tea and soft drinks.
Even a single of American beer gives me a headache
I've recently discovered that I can't drink red wine anymore. Just one glass and I'll have a mind-shattering migraine the next day. Not pleasant.
I have bad breathing problems around smoke, strong perfumes, and most scented cleaners.
Strong scents bother me as well. No breathing problems, but I'll get a headache pretty quick. Can't shop around places like Bath & Body Works.
You know the stuff people remember isn't the good job you did on your TPS report, the stuff that already gets remembered is the time you got drunk and the office party and put the lamp shade on your head. There may not be pictures, but everyone at the office already remembers that long after you're gone.
Yup. And if you'd done that, you wouldn't have gotten a teaching certificate from these folks. Not because there was a picture on the Internet that wasn't forgotten, but because you'd actually gotten drunk at the office party and put a lamp shade on your head.
Good luck with changing human nature.
Human nature is not constant.
It varies from one place to another.
It shifts from one year to the next.
What was acceptable a few years ago is now taboo. What was taboo a few years ago is now acceptable.
We have been far more accepting of flaws in the past. And we have also been far less accepting of flaws in the past.
I just hope we don't keep heading in the current direction for long.
What if you were arrested for shoplifiting in a small town where the newspaper publishes the daily arrest record online? Later you are convicted and your sentence includes getting your record expunged once you serve your community service. However, the record in the paper of your arrest is not. The town doesn't have the power to tell the paper to expunge your record. A background check might find that arrest, but not evidence of the outcome. Now you could lose jobs, security clearences all for something that is not supposed to exist. When your record is expunged, you are supposed to be able to answer no to having been arrested, but the internet says otherwise.
This isn't a problem unique to the Internet however, especially in a small town.
There's usually lots of fanfare when somebody gets arrested. It'll show up in the paper, folks will gossip about it, maybe the local radio station will mention it, maybe it'll be on the evening news. It's a big deal. Especially if you're at all prominent or if the crime is at all interesting.
There's usually a hell of a lot less fanfare when somebody is acquitted. You don't usually have nearly as much gossip if someone is found innocent.
So you'll apply for a job later... And it really doesn't matter what's in the archives on the Internet, or who purged what record. All folks remember is your name and the fact that you were involved in something criminal.
The responsible thing to do, for the employer, is to ask for clarification. I seem to remember your name in connection with that big scandal last year... Can you explain what happened with that?
What we need is to ensure you can say anonymous online, or at least not have to use your real name. Online identitites are easy to reinvent, real ones aren't.
No. What we need is to stop judging people so harshly every time they act like a human being.
I realise this is all very well for me to say, but I've always known that this was the case and acted accordingly. On a simple level, I've never said anything online that I wouldn't say to my mother or I wouldn't be prepared to stand behind in future. There is no such thing as anonymity on the 'net, never has been. That's the reason why I don't have alt's. There isn't anything to gain.
I do recognise however that most of the non-geek audience won't have thought of this, and may be bitten, but them's the breaks IMO. The expectation of anonymity is no excuse for acting like an idiot. That said my hormones had already raged. Though Dr Aleks Krotoski does say that in the future, people who do not have a complete record, warts and all, will not be taken seriously, because they are not fully three dimensional people.
You are completely missing the point.
Most of us have gotten drunk at some point in time. Most of us have done something at least vaguely embarrassing at some point in time. Most of us have at least one photo of us doing something stupid that we aren't terribly proud of. None of that should preclude us from getting a job.
My wife went to the local county fair on Friday. They had a stage hypnotist. She volunteered. She was making a fool of herself on stage - dancing around like Lady Gaga, fighting non-existent birds, searching for her stolen belly button. There is video of the event. Is it OK for somebody not to hire her because she made a fool of herself? I'm sorry, but that just doesn't project the kind of professionalism that we expect here.
It doesn't matter if you're careful to censor yourself on-line, somebody else could post a photo of you doing something unprofessional. It really shouldn't matter if you're being unprofessional outside of work, because you're not at work.
The problem isn't that this lady got drunk... The problem isn't that a photo was taken... The problem isn't that the photo was posted to MySpace... The problem isn't that somebody else saw the photo...
The problem is that these folks based a hiring decision on what this lady did in her free time, rather than how qualified she was to do the job.
What's next? Only hiring folks that play D&D? Not hiring people who like Halo? Attend a Gay Pride rally and you're fired? Vote the wrong way and you're suspended for a week?
Maybe this kind of thing will cause a shift in people's opinions. Perhaps when people realize that everybody has made bad decisions in their life, everybody's got too drunk and done something stupid and nobody is perfect, the world will be a better place for it.
We're already seeing a shift, but in the wrong direction. People are becoming less accepting of flaws, not more.
This isn't about forgetting on the web, it's about managing your public image. Some people are slow to catch on that if it's on the internet, the world can see it. So don't put your dirty laundry on the internet.
Wrong.
This isn't about managing your public image, and it doesn't matter if you don't put your dirty laundry on the Internet. If she hadn't posted that picture, somebody else might very well have done that, and the consequences would have been the same.
The problem isn't that this picture was posted. The problem is that the school board over-reacted to something that really had absolutely no bearing on her ability to teach.
The problem is that we're seriously blurring the line between public and private... Between our professional time and our personal time... Between our professional occupations and our leisure occupations...
We've got some kind of new Puritanism going around. You have to uphold the professionalism of your position 24/7. There is no room these days for being human.
Obviously we don't want our high school teachers showing up to work drunk. We don't want them drinking on the job. But she's a human being, and entitled to do whatever the hell she wants to in her off time.
But now she can't. Because somebody might snap a picture of her getting drunk. And somebody might post that on the Internet. And then she might get fired from some other job.
Don't forget to bring human psychology into play. The "air gap" will make people look at the system in question differently. It can be the difference between someone deciding "hey, I can update MyFace on this computer" and "oh, this is technical." That psychology is also viral, e.g. the computer they produce said removable media on will also become "technical."
Either that... Or they'll think oh, this thing is secure, it's got an air gap, nothing can get to it, so I don't have to worry about viruses/worms/whatever.
Not always. Some control systems are run on a dedicated computer without Internet access. Some control systems need to have little downtime to avoid serious consequences. (Some manufacturing plants or refineries have razor-thin margins - an extra 1% downtime could mean the difference between profit and bankruptcy.) In cases like these, if a hard-coded password means a faster system recovery, it's the right choice.
So, why not have a password that is generated in some known way?
The HIS system where I work has a "daily password" - it changes every day. That password is necessary to conduct some operations. Folks who need to conduct those operations know how to look up the daily password. They do so, then they have that password to hand out to whoever needs to do stuff that day. And the daily password becomes useless the next day, so you don't have to worry about it being abused.
The POS system I used to work with had some kind of dynamically generated password. If you had to call technical support for something they'd have you read off some numbers on the screen, and they'd give you back a password to get into the register's internals. Again, it isn't static so it can't be abused for long. But it is generated in a known way so it can readily be obtained.
Seems to me that this would have been a better way to do things.
However, for some industrial applications (including some SCADA installations) , the simplicity of not needing to enter a unique password plus a physical air gap of security trumps a forced-unique password with only digital security
"Air gap" doesn't mean much if you're just using some kind of removable media to transfer information from the insecure world to the secure world, instead of CAT5. If you aren't somehow protecting access to that removable media, your air gap gives you no additional security.
It should be genuinely impossible for anything to auto-run on removable media. Only allow media in your own, special format. Or only allow specific file types to be accessed or imported. And put some kind of password on the media access portion, to make sure only folks who know what they're doing are accessing it.
If you're letting anyone transfer anything on a USB stick, you may as well plug the machine into the network because your air gap isn't doing you any good.
The B&N Unbound Blog is marketing. Their Friday giveaway is marketing.
Yes, it is. It is marketing being conducted by Barnes & Noble, not whoever publishes the books.
In the fine article, we're talking about a number of authors who've bypassed their publishers to sell directly on Amazon. Amazon can go right ahead and market things. The publishers are not necessary.
You could write the best book in the world, but until someone other than yourself knows about it you are not going to sell a single copy. As soon as you tell someone, you have begun marketing it.
Yes, I have begun marketing it - without involving a publisher.
And these days I can potentially reach millions of people simply by posting something on my blog, or on Slashdot, or on Facebook, or wherever. All without requiring the services of a publisher.
Next, it does no good at all to have thousands (millions?) of people clamoring for your book if they can't buy it anywhere.
I could host the book on-line and accept donations. Or I could use one of several on-line ebook publication services. There's absolutely no need for me involve a traditional book publisher.
So before you have consumers wanting your book, you better convince the retailers that this is going to be a best-seller so that they can stock up on it.
You're talking about brick & mortar retailers, and physically stocking up on paper books, aren't you?
Because this article, and my comments, are aimed at digital ebooks.
If you're doing digital distribution, nobody needs to stock up. And it isn't too hard to convince folks to stock digital products. They don't take up any shelf space. There's no trade-off between some no-name and someone famous. You can throw both of them on your digital storefront and let them sell whatever they want.
That is marketing (and is in fact the real heavy-duty marketing as far as books are concerned).
As I said before, and just clearly illustrated, it is no longer necessary to have a publisher do your marketing for you.
so in your idealized world, who does the marketing?
Interesting that you should mention this...
I don't check any newspaper's best seller list. I don't generally read any publications that really feature book reviews. I generally skip over the book reviews here on Slashdot. With the exception of a very few books that actually show up on TV commercials, I have basically no idea what books are out there.
So, I'd suggest that if publishers are currently responsible for marketing their books, they're doing a crappy job of it.
Generally I find the books I want to read through word of mouth (or word on blog) advertising.
I'll see somebody here on Slashdot mention something that sounds interesting, and I'll go look it up. Or somebody I know will tell me that they just finished reading something good, and I'll go look it up.
Ever since I bought my nook, I've been subscribed to the Barnes & Noble Unbound Blog RSS feed. That's their nook/ebook-centric blog. There's some genuine advertising for various ebooks... New releases and things like that... But they also give away an ebook every Friday. Frequently it's something I'm not very interested in. But I've picked up more than a few free ebooks and found them quite entertaining.
One such title was Already Dead. This is the first book in a series, and was being given away free for a while. I picked it up, read it, and wound up buying more of the series.
So, I'd suggest that if you're turning out halfway decent books, you don't really need a marketing department to help you sell them.
I do believe you are confused.
"Net Neutrality" is a term used to describe the Internet as it originally was, and still (to a large degree) is. The idea is that the Internet itself is just a passive means to transfer information from one place to another. The various ISPs along the way have to remain neutral. They cannot give any particular packet special treatment just because they're partnered with a specific company. This means that I'm pretty much able to visit whatever websites I want, download whatever files I want, etc.
The large media companies don't like this, because you can pirate their stuff.
Some ISPs have decided that you ought to be paying extra for special treatment. They'd like to charge you extra to view certain websites. Maybe they'll partner with certain companies... Put together a special package... So your Internet is dead slow if you connect to Google, but blazing fast if you use Bing.
Right now, there are no laws that really govern how the Internet should work. It's been neutral all these years largely just because that's the way it's always been done. But a number of companies now want to start doing things differently.
The "net neutrality" legislation being discussed right now is an attempt to put into law the way the Internet has always worked. So that ISPs cannot charge you extra just to view Google. The current legislation is an attempt to make sure that the Internet remains neutral.
What I really like it for is the 'unguided and unplanned meandering drive'. Turn on the GPS, drive around and take random roads you'd never take if you were worried about getting lost. Go ahead, get lost. Navigate by the sun or follow a river.
Eventually, tell it to take you home. It's actually a pretty decent way to explore your area.
I love this.
I always carry a road atlas (or two) in the trunk of my car. I have never gotten so lost that I was unable to find my way home. But I've wound up some places where it took me a good half hour or more just to figure out where I was, much less how to get home.
With a GPS I can just wander off wherever the hell I want. I don't need to worry about getting back home. When I eventually get bored I can just hit a button and it'll plot a course back home for me.
And if I find myself running low on gas... Or if I get hungry... Or if I wind up spending the night... My GPS has a POI feature that lets me find local points of interest. Very, very handy.
> They didn't grow up in the area, they didn't know that choice A was 150km,
> and choice B was 250km. That's exactly when they turn on the GPS and confirm
> which fork in the road to take.
Because, you know, what else could they do? Use a paper map? That's so twentieth century!
I'm a big fan of paper maps. I've navigated from one end of the country to the other with paper maps. I still carry a couple different road atlases in the trunk of my car.
But a decent GPS beats a paper map hands-down.
I don't need to dig through the atlas ahead of time and find the right section for the area I'm driving to/through. If I change my mind, or spontaneously decide to head somewhere else, I don't have to dig out a different map. And if I'm alone, I don't have to try to read a map or follow directions while driving - I can just set the GPS and it'll tell me when I need to turn.
Plus, most GPS devices have some kind of "points of interest" function. So I can simply hit a button and find the nearest gas station, or restaurant, or hotel, or museum, or whatever I think I need. Depending on where you are, finding the nearest gas station can be fairly difficult.
So, you're telling me that game designers are sacrificing realism to produce entertaining weapons?
Shocking!
Next thing you'll tell me is that there is no secret Black Mesa research facility.
Sure, for some games some degree of realism adds to the enjoyment. STALKER, for example, benefits from having vaguely realistic settings and weapons. But even if you're playing something that's genuinely set in the real world - like one of the Call of Duty games - you're still playing a game. You still have to simplify things down to the point where information can be conveyed quickly and easily with nothing more than a screen and some speakers. You have to be able to interact with the world with a keyboard and mouse. The world needs to be altered and constrained and limited enough to run on a modern computer. And it all has to ultimately be fun to play.
That is definitely true, but the video itself seems to have had any reference to "The Onion" stripped out. Unless you click through to the YouTube page and read the fine print attribution, you won't see the word "Onion" anywhere.
So yeah, still they are idiots for accepting something so ridiculous as this as fact, and for failing to have any innate sense of skepticism about random shit on the internet that doesn't come from at least a moderately vetted news source, but you can't blame people for not knowing what The Onion is when the video says nothing about "The Onion" and most people probably clicked on it in an embedded form from Facebook or other websites.
But... That's kind of the problem.
I mean, I can post pretty much any random thing I want - doesn't make it true.
If you see something horrifying or upsetting on teh interwebs, it's generally a good idea to check the source before you run screaming for the hills.
In this case, they really ought to have followed it back to the YouTube page and read the attribution. And then checked to see what "The Onion" is.
But what good is it to chase readers who go so far as to block ads and don't think the content maker is entitled to anything?
Except that the content maker isn't entitled to anything.
Just because you make content doesn't mean I have to give you money. I'm not going to mail a check to Stephen King just because he's written a new novel. I'm only going to give you money if I decide your content is worth it. How exactly that works varies somewhat from one medium to the next... Maybe you show me some previews and I decide to pay for a ticket to go see your movie. Or maybe I read the first few pages or chapter of your book and then decide to buy the thing. Or maybe I'm so thrilled with the content of your blog that I donate some money to you. But just turning out content doesn't entitle you to anything at all.
Generally speaking, I block ads. It isn't because I'm a malicious asshole that wants to see the entire web publishing industry fall down and die - it's because I don't want to waste my bandwidth loading advertising that I'm not going to look at anyway.
If I like a site enough, and there isn't some handy way to subscribe or donate, I'll enable ads on that site. But I'll disable them again if they're too annoying. Google adword blocks are great, I hardly even notice them. Flashing, animated, audible banner crap is not great - I'll disable that shit in a heartbeat.
If the sites I peruse don't like that, they don't have to put up with it. It's their choice. They can hide behind a paywall if they want to. And if I care enough about the site - if the content they offer is genuinely unique and useful and interesting - I might just pay for it. But if I can get that content elsewhere, without the annoying ads or without having to subscribe or whatever else, I'm going to.
Yeah. It was the press that was politicizing this.
I never said the press was politicizing anything.
I listed a number of problems affecting/influencing this current disaster.
The regulatory agency that was supposed to make sure things like this didn't happen was in bed with the folks it was supposed to be regulating, and didn't do its job. Bureaucracy has gotten in the way at pretty much every step of the process. The whole thing has been completely politicized. The media has turned it into some kind of circus.
If that list is too hard to parse, I can break it up for you.
I don't think the media has politicized anything. It's been the politicians (on both sides) who have been politicizing the disaster.
You didn't. But you did say "some kind of government involvement is necessary", so it's important to remember that they fuck up too.
Obviously.
Everybody fucks up.
And if it was just a matter of oops, well sprung a leak that'd be one thing...
But we've got evidence that they were having trouble for months before the actual blowout. And an argument that very morning about how best to seal things up for the switchover. And now we see that they've just been copying and pasting their emergency plan from one rig to the next, with no actual research into what it would take to deal with an emergency at any one particular location. And they very obviously didn't have a plan for how to deal with something like this, since they've been making it up as they go along.
All of which indicates a fairly clear disregard for the possibility of something going wrong.
Which isn't really surprising, considering that the Gulf of Mexico isn't really BP's problem. I mean, they're drilling there... But it isn't like that's their back yard. Or where they fish for a living. Or anything like that. BP can keep pumping oil in the middle of a polluted Gulf of Mexico. Or if they couldn't for some reason, they could just pick up and drill somewhere else.
I mean, let's be completely honest here... I'm sure BP would like to get this well under control and start pumping that oil profitably again. But, in the absence of any fines or anything like that - do you honestly think they'd put any time/money/effort into cleaning this mess up?
And that's why you need an organization bigger than BP that is concerned with the Gulf of Mexico, to make sure that something like this is taken care of.
No, our government hasn't done a very good job with this.
The regulatory agency that was supposed to make sure things like this didn't happen was in bed with the folks it was supposed to be regulating, and didn't do its job. Bureaucracy has gotten in the way at pretty much every step of the process. The whole thing has been completely politicized. The media has turned it into some kind of circus.
But that doesn't mean we don't need somebody bigger than BP to make sure they don't just walk away from a disaster like this.
What it means is that we need somebody bigger than BP, who actually does their job, to make sure they don't just walk away from a disaster like this.
A corporation's only goal is to maximize profit.
So, if a company was able to maximise profits by boiling live babies, you'd be in favour of that? You monster.
Babies are tasty.
Don't get so mad at the corporations that you forget that government does bad things too - like capping liability payments.
Where in my post did I suggest that the government never did bad things?
Well why should they? They only have to look after the interest of the shareholders and thats maximising Profit Baby!*
* may not be true but thats how it seems to be in practice.
A corporation's only goal is to maximize profit. That's how it works. They actually have a responsibility to their shareholders to make money. I wouldn't really expect a corporation to invest money into something like developing technology to clean up oil spills unless it could demonstrate that the technology would somehow earn the shareholders money.
You could make the argument that if BP (or Exxon or whoever) developed the technology they'd be able to sell it to others... Or minimize the fines/cleanup that they have to pay for... But, the way things actually work in the real world, there's little point in that. Business as usual makes more than enough money.
Which is why, much as some people hate to admit it, some kind of government involvement is necessary.
You can regulate the oil companies - force them to invest some amount of their profits into cleanup R&D.
Or you can fund your own R&D project to develop the technology.
But, as we've seen, The Market isn't interested in this stuff.
This is why I love that Opera comes build-in with all the features you need and a lot more
As a geek, I enjoy complexity to an extent. It's cool to have a gadget with lots of nifty features and shiny buttons. But even I'll admit that at some point it can become unwieldy.
I personally prefer a basic browser with a plug-in model that allows me to extend the functionality in whatever way I feel necessary. That way I can add all the shiny buttons I want, without having to deal with the unwieldy stuff that other people want.
Not only are they made using the same quality standards and conventions, there is no way some rogue developer could hide password stealing code in them.
Actually, there is.
One of the Opera developers could go rogue. Or some machine in their development environment could be compromised, which could lead to the distributed software being compromised.
And since Opera is not open source, we'd have to rely on the Opera developers themselves to find the issue. An open source model means that basically anyone with the time/inclination/skills can go in and take a look at the code.