Fixing the damage done by cheap fuckups keeps me employed and makes me look good in the process. But there's an optimal level, maybe one low level fuckup per company. Just enough to remind management that something needs money spent to fix, but not so much that everything collapses. If we do our jobs really well nobody will notice. It's like the sewage system. So without a few fuckups, management forgets why they pay us.
I was started to worry I was the only one who made improvised flamethrowers as a kid. I used fly spray and a lighter. A good can reached half way across the living room. Being a kid was fun. Now I work in injury research:-) The reverse vacuum cleaner idea above sound amazing. I wonder if that would make fly spray shoot further?
The nice guys at NSA will totally respect your wish. Just create a file in the top level of your partition called "crackbots.txt", containing the text "guesses_per_second=0.5".
If your skull is wrench proof, maybe. Otherwise "give me your paper or I crack you skull" is about as secure as "give me your password or I crack your skull".
Page one of Google search for "Apple Church" throws up The church of Apple. No shit. And a parody Apple news site. I like this one. Plus a couple of seriousarticles full of worlds like devotion, mecca, evangelical fervor, reverence... you get the idea.
I can't remember where I read it recently, but basically plenty of old fogies at FTC still remember the protracted and expensive cases against MS in the nineties and are weary of repeating that with other large companies. Large companies can afford good lawers who drag things out for many years, thereby draining limited FTC resources away from many smaller problems. Apple is one of the bigger companies out there, so they have more breathing space than smaller companies in this respect. Things have a get blatently criminal before the FTC will step in.
Doesn't help when software overuses such an annoying feature. A teacher at university actually insisted we respond to every user action with a popup acknowledging the action. User saves a file. Popup: "File saved". Well thank fuck you told me, because there is no way I would have noticed pressing the save button if you hadn't blocked me from doing my thing to show a popup! Or even worse: "Are you sure you want to action X?" where X is benign and completely reversable. Of course I fucking want to do X, I just told you I want to do X, why won't you do X already! I tried to explain to my teacher how I stop reading popups after the second one and how other people probably do the same, so it's better to use context based feedback. Disable the save button or something until there are changes to save again. Use popups only when it's absolutely critical to do so. But no, popups for everything. I see commercial software use this same braindead design. Needless to say, I ignore everything the software tells me, even the critical stuff.
In the backup scenario you present the users don't care. They pay someone else to care. But if shit hits the fan and they need a recovery, they will demand blood if they don't get what they paid for. Best to send warnings somewhere else instead.
The first thing I thought was "wouldn't it cool if this could answer my emails!". Given the banality of most emails, and the terseness of the medium, most people wouldn't even notice the difference between me or a bot answering. That leaves me more time to do real work. Most of my bosses emails are along the lines of "how far are with this project?" and "can we have a meeting about this?", and most of my responses are along the lines of [delete], [ignore], "still working on that", "OK, finished", and "of course we can have another meeting". It would be great if something took a meeting request from my boss, checked my diary, confirmed and recorded the date and time, or suggested some other date and time if not available. Even a dismal bot should be able to pull that off convincingly. And given the shitty replies I get from tech support I'm surprised if companies aren't doing this already.
Your rant is based on a figure derived from an annual report of the National Crime Records Bureau of India. That figure is for reported rapes. Yes, India does appear to have a relatively low rate of reported rapes. But that doesn't mean that the actual rape rate is low for so many reasons. Reported rapes are a subset of all rapes. The more unreported rapes there are, the smaller that subset.
If there is a stigma associated with rape, for example if a young woman can't find a husband if everyone in her village knows she was raped, then there is a strong incentive not to report a rape. If a woman knows the perpetrator will blame her, and the police are likely to believe the perpetrator is right, then she may simply not bother to report the rape. Most rapes are committed by a relative or close friend of the family, so there may be family pressures not to report the rape. Rape within marriage is not even considered rape in India, so there is simply nothing to report because a judge can't do anything. I am sure there are many more reasons why a rape would not be reported.
So, officially a woman is raped in India every 20 minutes. In reality? Probably a lot more. The fact that so many women feel they can't even report a rape deserves everyones outrage. Maybe if India was a little less concerned with how the rest of the world sees it, and a little more concerned with actually solving its problems, then the rest of the world wouldn't make such an issue of it.
It really should be a big deal. We still have major cred overseas as that tiny country with the balls to tell the yanks to fuck off with their nukes. They still haven't forgiven us for that. Yet here we are helping them damage our own reputation as a fair, fearless, and independent nation. I guess we don't need our reputation when negotiating trade deals with other countries anymore. Maybe if we grovel really hard the US will throw us some scraps instead. Look at Australia (six prime ministers no less) begging Indonesia to save the lives of two of it's citizens on death row, a year after Australia was revealed to have spied on Indonesias’ president on behalf of the US. We don't need that. Reputation matters.
I found a fairly in-depth interview with this guy where he admits he actually wants to be famous. Check this out:
I probably will be a professor eventually," he says. "After I make all the money, and get old, turn 50-something. I'll be old and gray-haired and over-the-hill, I'll be teaching English in some rural facility somewhere. And I'll be like, 'You know, I used to be a famous celebrity. Here I am in your English class, and I used to be somebody famous.
There are too many other nuggets in there, here is just one...
The job market is really screwed up. A talented guy like me is easily worth seven figures or more in a good economy.... Do you know what I'd be doing with my life if it wasn't for this website? Nothing. Zilch. Zero. Back against the wall, going to interview after interview and being rejected like every other honest, hard-working American
Gonna have a real hard time finding work now buddy. And you can forget about finding a girlfriend for a long time too. Sadly, I don't think this is the last we hear of this scum.
Dang, you must think humans are special or something. I can't think of a single period in history when people weren't mindlessly killing each other, let alone other animals.
Right now we have Syria, Iraq, Ukraine, Central African Republic, and Israel vs Palestine. Mexico just killed 43 students, plus countless other drug cartel related deaths we never hear about. A few years ago it was Libya, Egypt, and Mali. Since the end of the second world war... Pol Pot comes to mind, for killing 25% of the people of Cambodia in the 1970s. Rwanda genocide wiped out between 500,000 and 1,000,000 Rwandans during a 100 day period in 1994. Vietnam War, nuff said. The first and second world wars were simply meat grinders. The Nazis hardly even bothered to disguise the herding and butchering like animals of thousands of civilians per day.
Humans are animals. We strut around in our fancy clothes, scratching ourselves, picking our noses, and pointing bang sticks at the other tribe.
I think the fact that UK Defence officials issued a Defence Advisory Notice to the BBC requesting they don't mention certain espionage programs, which may-or-may-not exist, basically confirms that they in fact do exist. It's damn near an official acknowledgement even. Same goes for the US Army restricting personel access to The Guardian website since they started mentionain PRISM and Tempora. Well done chaps!
I should add:
7) Is obiedient, listens, and doesn't talk back.
8) Stays technically current, but not on company time.
9) Gives their manager credit for good results. If the manager gets promoted, they will want you right behind them, making them look good.
Agreed. We need transparency so we can hold people accountable. It would help level the playing field and rebuild some much needed trust in the government too.
Too many countries have secret laws and secret courts giving thier secret services immunity from their countries own laws. If it looks like these agencies are breaking laws, it is because they ARE, and because they are ALLOWED to do so. But the average citizen is not allowed to know the content of these secret laws, or witness secret court proceedings. I want to see these secret laws so I can know exactly what laws the secret services are allowed to break. I want to be able to print some of these laws, walk into my nearest politicians office, drop it on his desk, and have a very frank discussion about it. Who voted for these laws, why, do they even know the content themselves, what are they going to do about it, etc.
There must be ways to see a copy of every secret law. National Library? University law libraries? Do law firms have access to them? Lets shine a light on the cockroaches and watch them scuttle.
This. My company has a Mac OS web server. We run Apache, MySQL, and php. Nothing Linux can't do cheaper, and without the GUI bloat. Some fanboy before my time recomended Macs of EVERYTHING, and the boss had a hard-on for them, so now we have a nice looking server that no one ever sees. The hardware is fine for a webserver, but without updates, the number of security issues is starting to accumulate, and I can't upgrade php any further without compiling from source. Time to ditch Mac OS for Linux.
When a criminal chooses to use a lethal weapon such as a gun, they do so knowing that they may end up killing someone. They also know that by using that weapon, other people may use lethal force in return to defend themselves, or law enforcement may respond with lethal force on behalf of the general population. The criminal chooses to uses a lethal weapon knowing they may kill, or be killed.
Likewise, law enforcement officers know that at some point in their career they may be required to face an assailant with a lethal weapon, at great risk to their own life, and they may have to use lethal force against such an assailant to protect themselves and the general public. When they chose to become a law enforcement officer they did so knowing they may have to kill, or be killed, as part of their duty.
Is the general public willing to make these choices? To kill or be killed? Is your mother willing to carry a lethal weapon, knowing that at some point in time she may have to kill someone, and risk being killed herself? Your grandparents? Your spouse? What about your children? At what age do you let a child carry a lethal weapon to defend themselves from armed bullies?
If arming everybody makes society safer, then why not just give every single citizen a government issued gun when they reach a certain age and be done with it? Seems fair. A few 'bad' people would get guns, but more 'good' people would too, so it's a net win right? And if someone chooses not to carry their government issued weapon and happens to be killed by a 'bad' person, then you can just blame the victim. It was their own fault for not carrying their weapon.
What if the 'bad' guys start carrying bigger fully automatic machine guns? As you say, these people don't care about laws or restrictions. Do we then let everyone carry bigger weapons? What if the 'bad' guys then start wearing bullet proof vests? At what point does the escalation stop? Do we then create some magical law that not even the 'bad' guys will escalate past so that all the forces balances out nicely?
I don't think reality is as simple as arming more people.
Slashdot Mirror
Fixing the damage done by cheap fuckups keeps me employed and makes me look good in the process. But there's an optimal level, maybe one low level fuckup per company. Just enough to remind management that something needs money spent to fix, but not so much that everything collapses. If we do our jobs really well nobody will notice. It's like the sewage system. So without a few fuckups, management forgets why they pay us.
Everybody wants to buy a date. How much?
I was started to worry I was the only one who made improvised flamethrowers as a kid. I used fly spray and a lighter. A good can reached half way across the living room. Being a kid was fun. Now I work in injury research :-) The reverse vacuum cleaner idea above sound amazing. I wonder if that would make fly spray shoot further?
The nice guys at NSA will totally respect your wish. Just create a file in the top level of your partition called "crackbots.txt", containing the text "guesses_per_second=0.5".
If your skull is wrench proof, maybe. Otherwise "give me your paper or I crack you skull" is about as secure as "give me your password or I crack your skull".
xkcd to the rescue again. Try this:
makepassphrase() // Chosen by fair dice roll. Guaranteed to be random
{
return 4;
}
Page one of Google search for "Apple Church" throws up The church of Apple. No shit. And a parody Apple news site. I like this one. Plus a couple of serious articles full of worlds like devotion, mecca, evangelical fervor, reverence... you get the idea.
I can't remember where I read it recently, but basically plenty of old fogies at FTC still remember the protracted and expensive cases against MS in the nineties and are weary of repeating that with other large companies. Large companies can afford good lawers who drag things out for many years, thereby draining limited FTC resources away from many smaller problems. Apple is one of the bigger companies out there, so they have more breathing space than smaller companies in this respect. Things have a get blatently criminal before the FTC will step in.
Doesn't help when software overuses such an annoying feature. A teacher at university actually insisted we respond to every user action with a popup acknowledging the action. User saves a file. Popup: "File saved". Well thank fuck you told me, because there is no way I would have noticed pressing the save button if you hadn't blocked me from doing my thing to show a popup! Or even worse: "Are you sure you want to action X?" where X is benign and completely reversable. Of course I fucking want to do X, I just told you I want to do X, why won't you do X already! I tried to explain to my teacher how I stop reading popups after the second one and how other people probably do the same, so it's better to use context based feedback. Disable the save button or something until there are changes to save again. Use popups only when it's absolutely critical to do so. But no, popups for everything. I see commercial software use this same braindead design. Needless to say, I ignore everything the software tells me, even the critical stuff.
In the backup scenario you present the users don't care. They pay someone else to care. But if shit hits the fan and they need a recovery, they will demand blood if they don't get what they paid for. Best to send warnings somewhere else instead.
No worries. Tourism NZ is already planning it's next promotion around this one: "Visit NZ - Free accommodation and food!*"
*Some conditions apply:
The first thing I thought was "wouldn't it cool if this could answer my emails!". Given the banality of most emails, and the terseness of the medium, most people wouldn't even notice the difference between me or a bot answering. That leaves me more time to do real work. Most of my bosses emails are along the lines of "how far are with this project?" and "can we have a meeting about this?", and most of my responses are along the lines of [delete], [ignore], "still working on that", "OK, finished", and "of course we can have another meeting". It would be great if something took a meeting request from my boss, checked my diary, confirmed and recorded the date and time, or suggested some other date and time if not available. Even a dismal bot should be able to pull that off convincingly. And given the shitty replies I get from tech support I'm surprised if companies aren't doing this already.
I can't even control my meat arms when I',m sober.
Your rant is based on a figure derived from an annual report of the National Crime Records Bureau of India. That figure is for reported rapes. Yes, India does appear to have a relatively low rate of reported rapes. But that doesn't mean that the actual rape rate is low for so many reasons. Reported rapes are a subset of all rapes. The more unreported rapes there are, the smaller that subset.
If there is a stigma associated with rape, for example if a young woman can't find a husband if everyone in her village knows she was raped, then there is a strong incentive not to report a rape. If a woman knows the perpetrator will blame her, and the police are likely to believe the perpetrator is right, then she may simply not bother to report the rape. Most rapes are committed by a relative or close friend of the family, so there may be family pressures not to report the rape. Rape within marriage is not even considered rape in India, so there is simply nothing to report because a judge can't do anything. I am sure there are many more reasons why a rape would not be reported.
So, officially a woman is raped in India every 20 minutes. In reality? Probably a lot more. The fact that so many women feel they can't even report a rape deserves everyones outrage. Maybe if India was a little less concerned with how the rest of the world sees it, and a little more concerned with actually solving its problems, then the rest of the world wouldn't make such an issue of it.
It really should be a big deal. We still have major cred overseas as that tiny country with the balls to tell the yanks to fuck off with their nukes. They still haven't forgiven us for that. Yet here we are helping them damage our own reputation as a fair, fearless, and independent nation. I guess we don't need our reputation when negotiating trade deals with other countries anymore. Maybe if we grovel really hard the US will throw us some scraps instead. Look at Australia (six prime ministers no less) begging Indonesia to save the lives of two of it's citizens on death row, a year after Australia was revealed to have spied on Indonesias’ president on behalf of the US. We don't need that. Reputation matters.
I am really happy the jury acquitted the activists who sabotaged the Waihopai spy station. It shows we haven't gone completely limp yet.
Good idea. Took me a few millets just to get my head around the summary.
I probably will be a professor eventually," he says. "After I make all the money, and get old, turn 50-something. I'll be old and gray-haired and over-the-hill, I'll be teaching English in some rural facility somewhere. And I'll be like, 'You know, I used to be a famous celebrity. Here I am in your English class, and I used to be somebody famous.
There are too many other nuggets in there, here is just one...
The job market is really screwed up. A talented guy like me is easily worth seven figures or more in a good economy. ... Do you know what I'd be doing with my life if it wasn't for this website? Nothing. Zilch. Zero. Back against the wall, going to interview after interview and being rejected like every other honest, hard-working American
Gonna have a real hard time finding work now buddy. And you can forget about finding a girlfriend for a long time too. Sadly, I don't think this is the last we hear of this scum.
Dammit. Commenting to undo 'Troll' mod. Sorry.
Dang, you must think humans are special or something. I can't think of a single period in history when people weren't mindlessly killing each other, let alone other animals.
Right now we have Syria, Iraq, Ukraine, Central African Republic, and Israel vs Palestine. Mexico just killed 43 students, plus countless other drug cartel related deaths we never hear about. A few years ago it was Libya, Egypt, and Mali. Since the end of the second world war... Pol Pot comes to mind, for killing 25% of the people of Cambodia in the 1970s. Rwanda genocide wiped out between 500,000 and 1,000,000 Rwandans during a 100 day period in 1994. Vietnam War, nuff said. The first and second world wars were simply meat grinders. The Nazis hardly even bothered to disguise the herding and butchering like animals of thousands of civilians per day.
Humans are animals. We strut around in our fancy clothes, scratching ourselves, picking our noses, and pointing bang sticks at the other tribe.
Some links to pages describing Tempora.
I think the fact that UK Defence officials issued a Defence Advisory Notice to the BBC requesting they don't mention certain espionage programs, which may-or-may-not exist, basically confirms that they in fact do exist. It's damn near an official acknowledgement even. Same goes for the US Army restricting personel access to The Guardian website since they started mentionain PRISM and Tempora. Well done chaps!
Sounds like my boss :-)
I should add:
7) Is obiedient, listens, and doesn't talk back.
8) Stays technically current, but not on company time.
9) Gives their manager credit for good results. If the manager gets promoted, they will want you right behind them, making them look good.
Agreed. We need transparency so we can hold people accountable. It would help level the playing field and rebuild some much needed trust in the government too.
Too many countries have secret laws and secret courts giving thier secret services immunity from their countries own laws. If it looks like these agencies are breaking laws, it is because they ARE, and because they are ALLOWED to do so. But the average citizen is not allowed to know the content of these secret laws, or witness secret court proceedings. I want to see these secret laws so I can know exactly what laws the secret services are allowed to break. I want to be able to print some of these laws, walk into my nearest politicians office, drop it on his desk, and have a very frank discussion about it. Who voted for these laws, why, do they even know the content themselves, what are they going to do about it, etc.
There must be ways to see a copy of every secret law. National Library? University law libraries? Do law firms have access to them? Lets shine a light on the cockroaches and watch them scuttle.
This. My company has a Mac OS web server. We run Apache, MySQL, and php. Nothing Linux can't do cheaper, and without the GUI bloat. Some fanboy before my time recomended Macs of EVERYTHING, and the boss had a hard-on for them, so now we have a nice looking server that no one ever sees. The hardware is fine for a webserver, but without updates, the number of security issues is starting to accumulate, and I can't upgrade php any further without compiling from source. Time to ditch Mac OS for Linux.
No, TempleOS.
Sumbodee... shit. Sumebodie... dammit. Sombodii... fuck. Summ... far out. Say it again? My dicklessia playing up something orfull.
When a criminal chooses to use a lethal weapon such as a gun, they do so knowing that they may end up killing someone. They also know that by using that weapon, other people may use lethal force in return to defend themselves, or law enforcement may respond with lethal force on behalf of the general population. The criminal chooses to uses a lethal weapon knowing they may kill, or be killed.
Likewise, law enforcement officers know that at some point in their career they may be required to face an assailant with a lethal weapon, at great risk to their own life, and they may have to use lethal force against such an assailant to protect themselves and the general public. When they chose to become a law enforcement officer they did so knowing they may have to kill, or be killed, as part of their duty.
Is the general public willing to make these choices? To kill or be killed? Is your mother willing to carry a lethal weapon, knowing that at some point in time she may have to kill someone, and risk being killed herself? Your grandparents? Your spouse? What about your children? At what age do you let a child carry a lethal weapon to defend themselves from armed bullies?
If arming everybody makes society safer, then why not just give every single citizen a government issued gun when they reach a certain age and be done with it? Seems fair. A few 'bad' people would get guns, but more 'good' people would too, so it's a net win right? And if someone chooses not to carry their government issued weapon and happens to be killed by a 'bad' person, then you can just blame the victim. It was their own fault for not carrying their weapon.
What if the 'bad' guys start carrying bigger fully automatic machine guns? As you say, these people don't care about laws or restrictions. Do we then let everyone carry bigger weapons? What if the 'bad' guys then start wearing bullet proof vests? At what point does the escalation stop? Do we then create some magical law that not even the 'bad' guys will escalate past so that all the forces balances out nicely?
I don't think reality is as simple as arming more people.