Bad components happen. When Washington Roebling was building the Brooklyn Bridge he discovered that the cable contractor had cheated by supplying sub-standard steel. He was faced with a decision: rip it out and start over, or leave the bad cable in place. He chose to leave the bad cable in place because his design was robust enough to afford him that choice. And mind you, this was at the time the most advanced, most technically difficult bridge ever constructed. To this day the roadway is supported by defective steel cables.
Notice the moral of the story: shit happens in engineering, but nonetheless it's the project manager's job to deliver a quality result on time and on budget.
Failing early/often is building technological stretch into your project plans. Every project should contain some reach, something where success is not 100% guaranteed, because if you're too easy on yourself you get sloppy. You should build a little stretch into every project if you can, and budget for the possibility of failure.
As long as your project delivers the key things the customer needs on time or near as dammit, those are useful failures. Failures that take your project well past its delivery date are disastrous failures.
"Combat Ready" is being used in a highly contrived way. It does NOT mean any of the following things:
(1) That the system works like it is supposed to. (2) That the system in its current state is ready to provide a valuable set of capabilities in any real situation. (3) That you would even remotely consider operating the system in its current state in a hostile environment.
What "Combat Ready" means is that it meets a set of criteria designed, Texas Sharpshooter style, around the system's current progress. You could theoretically fly one of these things into a hostile environment and have it release a weapon, but you'd have no reason to except to make a political point.
I think it's a fair bet that if we get into any conflicts in the next three or four years any use of F35s will be carefully scripted. The dangerous work will be done by more mature, actually "combat ready" aircraft.
As an engineer I understand how a "track record of solving issues" works. You only get competency points for resolving an unexpected issue when you deliver the project on time.
I assume the law is fluid in this matter -- which it is -- and that in its current state disagrees with how most layman imagines it works -- which it does.
I understand that you can't stop people from judging you; but the "right to be forgotten" isn't about that. It's about record retention; "the right to be forgotten" is just a snappy label that misleads people who take that label literally.
Sure, but what about other kinds of information that leak into the public domain? For example what about when I give someone information for purpose A, and they use it for purpose B? Or what about information that leaks out of my life simply because it's impossible to live in an adiabatic bottle.
Don't feel insulted, this is really is a complicated issue. Simple, certain, categorical statements nearly always lead to unexpected consequences. I spent many years as a practicing system architect and as part of my ongoing education I took university courses in information privacy law and ethics. This doesn't make me an expert, but it does qualify me to recognize simplistic positions.
Aversion to big government can be a consistent ideology. You assume that this woman needs government to solve her problem. It sounds like competition (T Mobile) has provided her an alternative. As for the bill, is it not big government that might cause this woman problems, if it sides with mega-corp to enforce some type of action against her?
Top marks for the Randie impersonation!
Err... you were being ironic, right? It's hard to tell these days.
Because it ALSO means half of all Americans pay for at least 7 apps per year, if we're rounding to the nearest whole. That means that over, say five years the average American has accumulated some 35 apps.
Sure. But you can't completely avoid all contractual entanglements in the modern world, so it's nice to know that the other guy can't dictate terms because he's got you over the barrel.
However -- work expands to fill the available time; that's a time-tested maxim, as is its corollary -- the value of work time drops as the volume of work time increases.
I remember when fax machines were new. Oh, how naive and young we were! No more Friday afternoon Fedex deadlines! Indeed that came true; the deadlines became Monday 8:59 AM! Oh and the whole fax-the-lunch so we can keep working thing, we invented that, although of course these days you use an app.
Yes, young'uns, your older colleagues really were that dumb. The end of the personal/work time dichotomy was looming, and we walked civilization right into that sucker punch.
This, folks, is why you should pay attention to who runs for state attorney general.
Companies get away with this bullshit because private individuals can't hold them to account. It'd cost more than $9100, even counting your time as free, to fight this as an individual. So companies know they can do to you what they please.
This is why we have consumer protection laws, to protect people from bullshit they can't afford to litigate. A shot across the bow from your state's consumer protection bureau counts for a lot more than an angry contract termination call. And if your state AG's office doesn't have a consumer protection division, or if there aren't consumer protection laws in your state, well you're SOL until someone changes that.
That is the very issue in question: what privacy interests an individual enjoys with respect to information that is in other people's possession. Your argument completely begs the question.
I suggest you actually educate yourself on information privacy issues and law before taking such an unequivocal position.
We live in the golden age of priggery. The salacious tone of the posts make it a little harder to see, but the essential quality of any prig isn't what he's for or against; it's that petty, self-righteous tut-tutting.
This newfound possibility of being a foul-minded, vulgar prig is what makes this the Golden Age.
And that's if you're lucky. You see it's our connections to other people that makes us vulnerable. In particular there's nothing like the successful engagement of the gonads to turn someone smart into a dumbass. It's easy to maintain your illusion of invulnerability if your life is spent in your parents' basement watching porn and posting condescending Internet screeds.
I'd rather be what TR called "the man in the area", balls and all.
For most of human history human populations weren't dense enough for death by communicable diseases to be the norm. Deaths by things like tetanus, or septic shock due to staphylococcal wound infections would be the norm.
Either way, diabetes is and always has been a disease.
Seriously, you think that kind of systems work is boring, and it kind of is, but jeez can they ever file a useful bug report. It'll be a precise description of what is incorrect and the precise conditions under which the problem occurs, not some enigma wrapped in a turd.
These guys are very big on precisely the right amount of precision. They'll let a nickel slide, but squeeze a buck til it screams for mercy. One thing I learned about their mindset is this: if there is any doubt, make the assumption that's most beneficial to the client and then see if you're called on it. So this is not a case of Tim Cook twirling his evil mustache, it's a case of the finance guys doing their finance guy thing and the tax guys calling them on it. It's a bit like intentional fouling in basketball.
Corporations aren't evil, they're amoral but at the same time careful to avoid breaking rules where they'll get caught. The underlying problem is that the rules make a lot of sketchy practices legal, this kind of situation where they're "caught" is just the penumbra of the problem. The real problem is that the rules suck, and the rules are set by politicians.
The predictable anti-corporate reaction that occurs when something like this comes out is the left wing version of the right wing's vilification of IRS auditors -- who by the way are often some of the nicest guys you'll ever meet. IRS auditors are the public face of a system that everyone knows is over-complicated, and full of loopholes and gotchas that favor the wealthy and powerful. People don't like them because their job is enforcing rules you don't like. But who made the rules? The politicians. And when a politician is for reducing the number of auditors, it's not because he wants to help you. As one auditor I knew said, the rules have been written so there's really no place an ordinary person can hide income, and that makes the kind of audits people like you face perfunctory affairs. Cutting IRS staff is really all about making sure that the big boys aren't challenged on those tricky and aggressive calls they make. You need those armies of auditors to go after the people who don't want to abide even by rules that were written to favor them.
So whenever politicians left or right tries to get you riled up about some inevitable feature of the system they have created, know that you're being treated like a useful idiot.
one way or the other. Claiming their was "tremendous damage" doesn't mean there was any, or that it was indeed "tremendous". It just means you slapped an adjective onto your claim. By the same token calling someone a "hero" doesn't change anything about his actions; nor does calling him a "traitor". You shouldn't get a different set of rules based on whether your nametag has a smiley face on it or a frowny face.
Be especially wary of statements like this:
The Committee found no evidence that Snowden took any official effort to express concerns about U.S. intelligence activities — legal, moral, or otherwise — to any oversight officials within the U.S. government, despite numerous avenues for him to do so.
It sounds damning, but it really depends among other things on where those "official" channels lead to. If they lead to the people who are responsible for the situation he was blowing the whistle on, it's a meaningless condemnation.
In this enviornment, you have to be specific. The media and partisans are too lazy to go into details, they deal in "appearance" which can be manufactured.
Slashdot Mirror
Want to bet?
this probably isn't one of them.
Bad components happen. When Washington Roebling was building the Brooklyn Bridge he discovered that the cable contractor had cheated by supplying sub-standard steel. He was faced with a decision: rip it out and start over, or leave the bad cable in place. He chose to leave the bad cable in place because his design was robust enough to afford him that choice. And mind you, this was at the time the most advanced, most technically difficult bridge ever constructed. To this day the roadway is supported by defective steel cables.
Notice the moral of the story: shit happens in engineering, but nonetheless it's the project manager's job to deliver a quality result on time and on budget.
That's different.
Failing early/often is building technological stretch into your project plans. Every project should contain some reach, something where success is not 100% guaranteed, because if you're too easy on yourself you get sloppy. You should build a little stretch into every project if you can, and budget for the possibility of failure.
As long as your project delivers the key things the customer needs on time or near as dammit, those are useful failures. Failures that take your project well past its delivery date are disastrous failures.
s/or/and/g
"Combat Ready" is being used in a highly contrived way. It does NOT mean any of the following things:
(1) That the system works like it is supposed to.
(2) That the system in its current state is ready to provide a valuable set of capabilities in any real situation.
(3) That you would even remotely consider operating the system in its current state in a hostile environment.
What "Combat Ready" means is that it meets a set of criteria designed, Texas Sharpshooter style, around the system's current progress. You could theoretically fly one of these things into a hostile environment and have it release a weapon, but you'd have no reason to except to make a political point.
I think it's a fair bet that if we get into any conflicts in the next three or four years any use of F35s will be carefully scripted. The dangerous work will be done by more mature, actually "combat ready" aircraft.
As an engineer I understand how a "track record of solving issues" works. You only get competency points for resolving an unexpected issue when you deliver the project on time.
The Palainian Galactic Patrol base.
They have more say because voters are apathetic. This makes politicians cheap to buy.
I assume the law is fluid in this matter -- which it is -- and that in its current state disagrees with how most layman imagines it works -- which it does.
I understand that you can't stop people from judging you; but the "right to be forgotten" isn't about that. It's about record retention; "the right to be forgotten" is just a snappy label that misleads people who take that label literally.
Sure, but what about other kinds of information that leak into the public domain? For example what about when I give someone information for purpose A, and they use it for purpose B? Or what about information that leaks out of my life simply because it's impossible to live in an adiabatic bottle.
Don't feel insulted, this is really is a complicated issue. Simple, certain, categorical statements nearly always lead to unexpected consequences. I spent many years as a practicing system architect and as part of my ongoing education I took university courses in information privacy law and ethics. This doesn't make me an expert, but it does qualify me to recognize simplistic positions.
Aversion to big government can be a consistent ideology. You assume that this woman needs government to solve her problem.
It sounds like competition (T Mobile) has provided her an alternative. As for the bill, is it not big government that might cause this woman problems, if it sides with mega-corp to enforce some type of action against her?
Top marks for the Randie impersonation!
Err... you were being ironic, right? It's hard to tell these days.
Because it ALSO means half of all Americans pay for at least 7 apps per year, if we're rounding to the nearest whole. That means that over, say five years the average American has accumulated some 35 apps.
Sure. But you can't completely avoid all contractual entanglements in the modern world, so it's nice to know that the other guy can't dictate terms because he's got you over the barrel.
However -- work expands to fill the available time; that's a time-tested maxim, as is its corollary -- the value of work time drops as the volume of work time increases.
I remember when fax machines were new. Oh, how naive and young we were! No more Friday afternoon Fedex deadlines! Indeed that came true; the deadlines became Monday 8:59 AM! Oh and the whole fax-the-lunch so we can keep working thing, we invented that, although of course these days you use an app.
Yes, young'uns, your older colleagues really were that dumb. The end of the personal/work time dichotomy was looming, and we walked civilization right into that sucker punch.
This, folks, is why you should pay attention to who runs for state attorney general.
Companies get away with this bullshit because private individuals can't hold them to account. It'd cost more than $9100, even counting your time as free, to fight this as an individual. So companies know they can do to you what they please.
This is why we have consumer protection laws, to protect people from bullshit they can't afford to litigate. A shot across the bow from your state's consumer protection bureau counts for a lot more than an angry contract termination call. And if your state AG's office doesn't have a consumer protection division, or if there aren't consumer protection laws in your state, well you're SOL until someone changes that.
That is the very issue in question: what privacy interests an individual enjoys with respect to information that is in other people's possession. Your argument completely begs the question.
I suggest you actually educate yourself on information privacy issues and law before taking such an unequivocal position.
Oh they're for real.
We live in the golden age of priggery. The salacious tone of the posts make it a little harder to see, but the essential quality of any prig isn't what he's for or against; it's that petty, self-righteous tut-tutting.
This newfound possibility of being a foul-minded, vulgar prig is what makes this the Golden Age.
The "right to be forgotten" isn't about brainwashing. It's about record retention.
Stupidity kills.
... And sooner or later most of us act stupidly.
And that's if you're lucky. You see it's our connections to other people that makes us vulnerable. In particular there's nothing like the successful engagement of the gonads to turn someone smart into a dumbass. It's easy to maintain your illusion of invulnerability if your life is spent in your parents' basement watching porn and posting condescending Internet screeds.
I'd rather be what TR called "the man in the area", balls and all.
Which in our system is because we let them. Because we let them use us like tools.
That's more bullshit. The corporations can't make the rules, unless the rules let them.
For most of human history human populations weren't dense enough for death by communicable diseases to be the norm. Deaths by things like tetanus, or septic shock due to staphylococcal wound infections would be the norm.
Either way, diabetes is and always has been a disease.
Seriously, you think that kind of systems work is boring, and it kind of is, but jeez can they ever file a useful bug report. It'll be a precise description of what is incorrect and the precise conditions under which the problem occurs, not some enigma wrapped in a turd.
These guys are very big on precisely the right amount of precision. They'll let a nickel slide, but squeeze a buck til it screams for mercy. One thing I learned about their mindset is this: if there is any doubt, make the assumption that's most beneficial to the client and then see if you're called on it. So this is not a case of Tim Cook twirling his evil mustache, it's a case of the finance guys doing their finance guy thing and the tax guys calling them on it. It's a bit like intentional fouling in basketball.
Corporations aren't evil, they're amoral but at the same time careful to avoid breaking rules where they'll get caught. The underlying problem is that the rules make a lot of sketchy practices legal, this kind of situation where they're "caught" is just the penumbra of the problem. The real problem is that the rules suck, and the rules are set by politicians.
The predictable anti-corporate reaction that occurs when something like this comes out is the left wing version of the right wing's vilification of IRS auditors -- who by the way are often some of the nicest guys you'll ever meet. IRS auditors are the public face of a system that everyone knows is over-complicated, and full of loopholes and gotchas that favor the wealthy and powerful. People don't like them because their job is enforcing rules you don't like. But who made the rules? The politicians. And when a politician is for reducing the number of auditors, it's not because he wants to help you. As one auditor I knew said, the rules have been written so there's really no place an ordinary person can hide income, and that makes the kind of audits people like you face perfunctory affairs. Cutting IRS staff is really all about making sure that the big boys aren't challenged on those tricky and aggressive calls they make. You need those armies of auditors to go after the people who don't want to abide even by rules that were written to favor them.
So whenever politicians left or right tries to get you riled up about some inevitable feature of the system they have created, know that you're being treated like a useful idiot.
one way or the other. Claiming their was "tremendous damage" doesn't mean there was any, or that it was indeed "tremendous". It just means you slapped an adjective onto your claim. By the same token calling someone a "hero" doesn't change anything about his actions; nor does calling him a "traitor". You shouldn't get a different set of rules based on whether your nametag has a smiley face on it or a frowny face.
Be especially wary of statements like this:
The Committee found no evidence that Snowden took any official effort to express concerns about U.S. intelligence activities — legal, moral, or otherwise — to any oversight officials within the U.S. government, despite numerous avenues for him to do so.
It sounds damning, but it really depends among other things on where those "official" channels lead to. If they lead to the people who are responsible for the situation he was blowing the whistle on, it's a meaningless condemnation.
Which set of laws would that be?
In this enviornment, you have to be specific. The media and partisans are too lazy to go into details, they deal in "appearance" which can be manufactured.