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  1. Re:Wrong! on Handling Discrimination in the IT Workplace? · · Score: 2

    Try denying someone a legal "necessity" due to their age, e.g., only renting apartments to people over 25. A car rental, and a beer, are legally luxuries. But denying food, housing, or employment due to age alone is a very different thing.

    That said, what's often overlooked in the "discrimination" complaints is that it is rare for for companies to be denied the ability consider other pertinent factors. Car insurance is more expensive for young drivers because they're involved in a disproportionate number of accidents. Car rental companies saw the same thing - not every renter in their early 20's trashed the car, but enough did that they can legitimately demand far higher standards for those rentals. (I haven't checked the policies in a long time, but there's a huge difference between "no rental under any circumstances" and "rental only with large deposit.")

    In this case, the reason most age-discrimination actions protect older workers is because it's hard to come up with legitimate reasons why a person is suddenly unsuitable for a position they have held for years. Historically, when mostly older workers are terminated it's because the company wants to cut salary (and benefits) costs, nothing else. In contrast, very young workers have a far harder time proving that they can do everything their job requires.

    This guy says he's had good reviews... but he also claims to have 5 years experience starting around age 14. Either he broke a lot of laws (child labor laws, school truancy laws) or he's exaggerating. So are those reviews good, or did they include a lot of "needs further work" items that he's downplaying? Is he doing everything required for the position, or are some older coworkers covering some tasks?

  2. Re:Kerberized NFS? on Is There a Better Way to do UNIX Workgroups? · · Score: 2

    There's more to the story than this. "Kerberized NFS" actually uses RPC-GSSAPI, and once you push GSSAPI (Kerberos 5) into the RPC layer then you have a lot of options. Think of RPC-SUN and NIS+, NFS+.

    I know that one OS supports it, but it hasn't been added to OpenBSD or Linux yet (AFAIK). OpenBSD still uses Kerberos 4, not Kerb5/GSSAPI, and Linux has had some policies that made it hard to add crypto. Hopefully a suitable patch will be available through the new security API.

  3. calculus on Fast Track to a CS Degree? · · Score: 2

    I was a math/physics major, spent about half of my career in scientific or engineering shops, and I think I've used calculus to solve a problem once in 20 years.

    But I use it every day. Not directly, but the skills I developed in those classes map well to the skills required to write robust code. Maybe there are other ways to develop those skills, but for now the best correlation appears to between math and coding, with juggling/coding a promising lead.

  4. Re:what about... on Fast Track to a CS Degree? · · Score: 2

    These certificates are essentially "trade school" certs. They're great if you need a tradesman, but mean absolutely squat beyond that point. It seems that the original poster has suddenly realized that a HS degree (if that) and some experience means little once you get past the lowest levels of the industry.

  5. No... and the very question is insulting on Fast Track to a CS Degree? · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Damn it, a university is not a trade school! Only a small amount of the time in classes (maybe 1/3?) is spent in the nominal field of study - the rest of the time is spent getting a broad general education.

    For CS in particular, any university worth the effort of attending will probably require you to complete the first-year courses in all other sciences - physics, chemistry, biology. Plus first year courses in mathematics. Plus the humanities - literature, humanities, etc. You aren't expected to become an expert in any of these fields, but you should learn enough to be able to recognize when someone is trying to sell you a pack of lies in an election, in a courtroom (as a juror), or as the next-of-kin when a loved one is seriously ill. That's the stuff that ultimately matters, not just knowing how to write LALR(a) grammars.

  6. People free to leave - cashless on Europe Adding RFID Tags to Euro Currency · · Score: 2

    You're missing a key point here. The person is not charged with a crime, and the legal system puts the burden of proof on the state to prove that he commited a crime.

    But cash is seized. The cash does not have the same legal protections as a person, and the burden is on the owner to "prove" that their money is "innocent." The owner is free to leave at any time - without his money, or car, or business, or whatever else was seized.

    This is an impossible burden for most working people. There was an especially horrific local case a while back where a coed's boyfriend borrowed her car *without her permission* and used it to drive to buy pot. The car was seized "as a criminal instrument," and the woman was told that to get her car back she had to post a bond equal to the value of the car - and there was some weird catch-22 where she would have probably been out either the car or the money regardless of the way the case was resolved. She couldn't get to her classes or work, and even if she could she would need to use her tuition money to get her car back.

    So this woman, convicted of absolutely no crime, charged with absolutely no crime, morally guilty of absolutely no crime other than possibly having a poor choice in boyfriends, was forced out of college and forced out of her job "to fight the drug trade." And she was damn lucky - there are other well-documented cases where women were sentenced to ten fscking years in prison without possibility of parole for no reason other than havnig a poor choice in boyfriends. He was a low-level dealer and able to negotiate a reduced sentence by turning on his suppliers, but she was a chump who got caught with a kilo stashed in her bathroom - without her knowledge or consent - and the "get tough" laws require blood.

    Do some people win? Rarely, but it almost always requires broad press coverage and well-attended rallies. The only local case where I know this happened involved a popular sub shop seized and closed for several days - and threatened with forfeiture - because a single employee received money for a 'shroom sale at work. There was never any allegation of drug transactions occuring at work, much less the knowledge and consent of the owner, yet their business was closed and nearly seized.

    Somehow I doubt that a similar transaction on the law on the US Attorney would result in his house being seized, his family thrown onto the street, and the prosecutor threatened with disbarrment...

  7. It's not a "loaf of bread" that worries us on Europe Adding RFID Tags to Euro Currency · · Score: 2

    It's not the government tracking the purchase of a loaf of bread that worries us.

    How would you like to explain to your boss, or your wife, why the police came by to ask how money you withdrew from an ATM ended up in the possession of a drug dealer? Or a prostitute? History is absolutely clear on this: the "big fish" have the resources and motivation to bribe officials (or "trade" information for leniancy), it's the little guy who gets hit with 10-years-without-parole mandatory sentences or has their car (or house!) confiscated as "tainted"... and innocence is often no defense. With the "seizer gets the goods" laws, there's also clear evidence that many (not all) police deliberately target the weak for institutionalized theft - ask anyone who had their car confiscated on some southern interstates because they couldn't prove that the car (which does not have constitutional protection) was "innocent."

    The stupidest thing is that these laws will have absolutely no impact on the low-level criminal activities. The *only* thing criminalization does is close the courts to people with small disputes, forcing them into big disputes. If a guy rips you off in a used car sale, you can haul him into court, possibly even file a criminal complaint. If you're ripped off in a drug deal of the same size, your options are to either absorb the loss (and be marked as an easy target for future abuse) or kill the bastard. Gee, is it any wonder why "low level drug dealer" and "dead" appear in the same sentence so much? Ditto "street walker" and "victim of sadistic mass-murderer"?

    The proposal, today, is to only mark large bills. But it won't be long until the standard bill coming out of the ATM is marked (due to inflation and cheaper second-generation technology). Once the bills are marked and tracked, some grandstanding politician will be unable to resist the "get tough on street crime" temptation, esp. when data farming machines are powerful enough to track this information.

    It will only catch the stupid drug user, john, etc., but what will the street find as a currency to replace it? I think most of us would prefer the occasional streetcorner transaction than, oh, a 2400% increase in petty burglaries because the street trade now uses small untracked items like CDs and the like.

  8. Re:Am I the only one? on Cringely Wants A Supercomputer in Every Garage · · Score: 2

    Katu barrata nicko, or something very close to that.

  9. water, bananas on Geeks and Weight-loss? · · Score: 2

    This combination can be... risky. Excess water consumption can mess up electrolyte balances because you cells try to balance sodium et al across the cell boundary. If you drink a lot of water (no salt), it suck the sodium out of the cell. This can interfere with muscle contractions - in the worst case it can trigger a heart attack.

    On a related note, low potassium levels (e.g., due to exercise) can also mess with cardiac function and cause dizziness and even blackouts. Bananas are a good source of potassium, which is why a lot of athletes always toss a banana into their protein shakes.

    Considering the typical weight watcher, that advice might have just been a corrupted warning that the potassium in a banana might cause modest water retention. If that's the case, you'll be far better off eating the banana.

  10. please learn sophomore physics! on Possible Explanation of Unpredictable Sun · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Please pick up an introductory book on quantum mechanics. The typical second-year book should be adequate provided it's calculus-based.

    Newtonian mechanics has the concepts of "position" and "momentum," but in QM there is only the wave equation. That wave equation can be solved for position or momentum, or both with a bit of "smearing," but the equations themselves incorporate a minimum amount of uncertainty when you try to solve for both simultaneously.

    No problem, the equations just describe behavior, not reality, right? Only problem is the "hidden variables" theory was disproved by some clever experiments back in the 30's (iirc).

    It's possible that QM will someday be superceded by a new theory... but that new theory has to explain close to a century of experiments that have repeatedly demonstrated that the Uncertainty Principle, or something functionally equivalent to it, is real. In other words, any direct replacement for QM will still show Uncertainty.

    Is all hope lost? Not quite - all of these experiments were conducted with tools that themselves incorporated a number of implicit assumptions. It's conceivable that some radically different technology could yield absolute knowledge. But the problem here is that we don't have this technology, we don't know where to start looking for it, and even if we found some instruments in a crashed UFO the concepts may be totally foreign. Perhaps these instruments can precisely measure the snerk and squutl... but there will again be inevitable uncertainty when we convert snerk and squutl to position and momentum.

  11. Re:You're right, it's not really PIRACY, is it? on Educating Youngsters About Piracy · · Score: 2

    The serious studies of traffic accidents puts this even more strongly. Vehicles going *modestly* faster than surrounding traffic, up to 10 mph, generally cause few problems as long as they aren't violating other laws. (If they're tailgating, making sudden lane changes, or blocking traffic because they're passing in the right then *those* activities, not the speeding, causes problems.)

    Traffic going slower than surrounding traffic tend to cause a disproportionate number of accidents.

    This makes sense, if you think about it. A speeding car has to adjust to you, so only one driver is affected. A slow car forces every car behind it and beside it to adjust - either to the sudden slowdown or traffic trying to get around it.

    With this strong statistical link to increased accidents you would expect "photo radar" to ticket people going 5 mph under ambient traffic flow, and not ticket people going less than 5-10 mph over the speed limit, but AFAIK every jurisdiction that uses them actually tries to force drivers to become far more hazardous to themselves and others "in the name of safety."

    The worst offender was Denver putting them where two interstates merged. In the name of safety (on TV, defending this policy), they wanted drivers to slow down by 10 MPH so the merging subcompacts would "force" the speeding semis on I-70 to slow down. Yeah, right, the chief of police was clearly dipping in the evidence locker again.

  12. Re:Illegalities and Kids ... on Educating Youngsters About Piracy · · Score: 2

    If those "backups" are true backups, they're completely legal and in fact protected by Federal law. Not that the RIAA lawyers have ever heard of this law while testifying before Congress.

    I'm not stupid, I know that a lot of these copies are shared with friends. But that doesn't change the fact that there are many legitimate and legal reasons for making and using copies of the original disc.

    In fact, I have enough scratched CDs (despite transporting them in a case inside a backpack) that I'm never taking original discs out of my home again. This is doubly true if I get a "copy protected" disc that *requires* me to create a 'broken' copy of it if I want to listen to it at work (on the computer's CD drive).

  13. Disney World, fire fighters and police officers... on Who Works During the Holidays? · · Score: 3, Interesting

    When I was a kid, I never knew when we would open presents was because my father was a firefighter who often pulled Christmas duty. Most years we celebrated a day or two early... probably because I still remember that one year we didn't....

    By the time my father was senior enough to regularly have the holidays off, I was working at Disney World and low enough on the pecking order (seasonal, HS or college age) that I always worked during the peak holiday hours.

    I've always found it interesting how indifferent people are to this. I'm not sure if it's a defense mechanism (against guilt), or something else. The Duke University book on Disney World even mentioned this - one researcher visited on Thanksgiving Day and noted just how disconnected most people were between their holiday and the way they treated the people who had to work.

  14. Focus on your real problem on Geeks and Weight-loss? · · Score: 4, Informative

    Having "been there, done that," I can tell you that you're focusing on a symptom, not the real problem.

    How much regular exercise do you get? How much "jog three times a week, rain or shine, snow or scorcher" exercise, how much "drink beer with the buddies at weekly softball game" exercise?

    Exercise will not cause the pounds to melt away, at least at first. In fact it's common for people to *gain* weight initially - I've been doing a basic "get back into motion" program for 13 weeks, and my weight is back where I started. But my waist is down by over 2" and I can comfortably, if slowly, jog for 3 miles without taking a break.

    Most importantly, I'm finally in good enough shape to start one of those "beginner" programs like the "Business Plan for the Body" plan. If I had tried one 3 months ago, I would have soon been injured and had to stop.

    As for diets... don't bother. Eat better, not less. Cut out the soda and junk food, replace it healthier choices, and don't worry about it. Exercise is actually an appetite suppressant (unless you're in incredibly poor shape) so you'll eat less naturally. Toss in replacing hundreds of empty calories in a bag of chips with a handful of calories in several handfuls of raw veggies, and that's all the calorie restriction you need.

  15. Better solution: switch to base-8 everywhere! on Megabytes (MB) or Mebibytes (MiB)? · · Score: 5, Funny

    Instead of fixing the symptoms, we should address the underlying problem: our silly use of decimal numbers.

    If we used base 8 like God intended (after all, He gave us 8 finger and 2 thumbs, not ten fingers!) this wouldn't be an issue.

    As an extra benefit, the sudden conversion of account balances from decimal to octal numbers will be much need shot in the arm economically. Everyone will be richer! (or owe more money, but we can't all be winners unless we're competing in the Special Olympics.)

  16. Jonathan Creek on Joss Whedon Is Creating a Sci-Fi Drama For Fox · · Score: 2

    That sounds like Jonathan Creek, another BBC show. Sorta a cross between Penn & Teller and Columbo. (The hero, JC, is the guy behind a well-known magician. After hooking up with an author sent to profile the magician, they investigate "paranormal" events and write them up as a series of well-selling books.)

    The series is highly regarded in the usual Anglophilic PBS circles, but I've found it takes several viewings to figure out what's going on. The problem is the language, not the plot. In a BritCom it rarely matters if you miss the subtle points of an off-handed comment, but in a mystery series those are usually the key clues!

    It's possible that Ripper covers the same ground, but the synopsis is so close that it's inevitable that at least some people will confuse the two series unless they've seen both.

  17. Bright asses... on Joss Whedon Is Creating a Sci-Fi Drama For Fox · · Score: 2

    I thought this was supposed to be a dark show. Fireflies are cute, not scary.

    If they have to name after the fact that its ass lights up (unlike every other ship out there?) how about giving it a scary name?

    Something like FLAMING MONKEY BUTT. Normally abbreviated to FMB unless they have a late time slot.

    ... actually, since that's often a sign of sexual arousal and a red light has long been a symbol of cathouses for the same reason, this would be a good theme for a show following a band of itinerant whores. But that would make it a cable show, something for Cinemax or maybe Showtime (when Wormhole X-treme's run ends).

  18. It's sweeps month - call the TV stations! on Universal to Copyprotect All CDs · · Score: 2

    Forget small claims court, at least for now.

    Call your local investigative TV reporters and consumer advocates and explain how Best Buy sold you a bum CD and won't remedy the situation. Tell them that you want to warn others about this problem - or there will be a lot of even-more-angry-than-usual teenagers this Christmas.

    If you want to be really nasty, print up some flyers and hand them out at the front door. Tell the TV stations when you will be there, and insist that a real cop (not a rent-a-cop) is the one who tells you that you must stand on the sidewalk 1.2 miles away instead of immediately in front of the store... but don't push it too far.

    (Why do you think these big chains like "big box" architecture? That parking lot is all private property and they *can* eject from the parking lot, but not from adjacent sidewalks. Since many of the lots don't have adjacent sidewalks, they'll claim you have to stand in the street. The city cops, on the other hand, will know (or can find out) where local law allows you to protest when commercial property does not have a safe sidewalk.)

    A good time for this would be this Saturday afternoon - peak pre-Christmas rush.

    As others have pointed out, the CD producer did not sell you the defective product, your local store did. They also don't have as much to lose as the local store - if you can get the media involved (and make it clear that you aren't trying to rip off anyone, just play the damn CD some stock equipment) you might not just get your money back, you might force BB (and other merchants) to consider banning all "copyprotected"/unplayable CDs because a single refused return may cost a *lot* of bad PR.

  19. Re:The "problems" went the other way around on Free & Non-Free Documentation · · Score: 2

    Look at your own language! Debian wants to "impose" a license on documents contributed by volunteer authors to a completely independent organization?!

    Here's a clue: I write documents for my own purposes, and if I think they'll be useful to others I'm willing to invest a considerable amount of effort into preparing them for publication. I don't mind LDP changing formats as the tools improve (first LinuxDoc, now DocBook) because adhering to a *single* set of external constraints helps me ensure that I'll have few problems myself in the future. But I'll be damned if I'll meekly comply with demands from every third party that wants to act as a self-appointed editor. Today Debian wants me to drop everything to check my licenses, then next year Red Hat or Microsoft or the People Republic of Freedonia will be demanding that I make other "small" changes.

    If Debian's argument has merit, then LDP will change what it accepts and I'll deal with it then. But until then, I see it as no different than being in a restaurant and having another patron suddenly demand that I leave the rest of my meal uneaten because, *gasp*, I was eating chicken and *they* are a vegetarian.

  20. Re:we should appreciate Debian on Free & Non-Free Documentation · · Score: 2

    The problem is that the "crisis" was totally manufactured by Debian itself. Let's agree, for sake of argument, that a large number of documents couldn't be released under the "main" section....

    BFD. They could probably still be released under the "non-free" section. We aren't talking about documents that had no license, or were clearly commercial products, these are (from what I understand) mostly documents that predate the "Debian-approved" license they prefer. This isn't the first time this has happened, nor will it be the last time, and there's a well-defined section precisely for this "problem."

    Finally, your argument lacks a certain critical symmetry. Why is the volunteer effort of Debian maintainers to be applauded, while the volunteer effort of authors (who arguably have a harder job since there are far fewer authors than Debian maintainers) of no consequence?

  21. The "problems" went the other way around on Free & Non-Free Documentation · · Score: 3, Flamebait

    As an author, I'm offended by your suggestion that the LDP, and by inference the authors of various documents, had "problems" with the Debian license.

    It's the other way around. Debian manufactured a crisis and is trying to put the blame on the volunteer authors instead of accepting that their quest for ideological purity is going too far. If Debian has a problem with one of my documents, they're free to rewrite it from scratch. Paraphrasing is *not* sufficient.

  22. Home business lines are treated as residential on VPN Clients Not Allowed On Residential Service · · Score: 3, Interesting

    "Business" lines are usually sold to brick-and-mortar businesses, e.g., a pizza shop, because they tend to use the phone far more than most residential customers. This requires more resources (switches, physical lines), and they are charged more. By the time a business has a PBX, the lines may be use constantly.

    But then modems came along - and the telcos had to beef up their switching equipment because evening residential usage jumped way up. That's why there was a short-lived proposal for a modem tax. But the telcos eventually figured out that selling second (and third lines) for modems, teenagers and other heavy users was more profitable than that tax, and a lot less politically explosive.

    Nowadays, I doubt many telcos care about home business use - during the day there's excess capacity in the residential areas since they're currently designed to handle everyone getting online in the evening.

  23. Postgresql on IP Allocation and Management? · · Score: 3, Informative

    Your first step may be to put everything into a postgresql database. It supports IPADDR (IPv4) and CIDR directly, support for IPv6 addresses is being added, and if necessary you can define your own types and functions.

    The first table could be something as simple as (CIDR, customer), plus blank entries for the unallocated blocks. You'll eventually want a separate customer table, a new field that shows the parent block (did this /24 come from a /23, or a /22?), etc., but this is a good start.

    The benefits? You can access the database from anything - command line, MS Access (via ODBC), web pages (via Perl or JSP/JDBC), etc. It's easy to make complex queries, e.g., "show me all unassigned IP blocks adjacent to a block owned by this customer." (That particular query should actually be added as a stored procedure.)

    The drawbacks? It's a SQL database, so if you (or your coworkers haven't used SQL before there's a learning curve). Finally, as others have pointed out it's easy for others to dogpile on your project - you need to be able to insist that you have something that works for you before adding in features that other groups want. Tell them it's better to wait a month (for you to finish) than for nobody to have anything (because the project is too big for your current staffing levels).

  24. HTTP is not synonymous with HTML! on Another Gaping Microsoft Security Hole Goes Unpatched · · Score: 5, Informative

    The upstream comment is 100% pure bullshit.

    When you're using Netscape or Lynx and the URL starts with "http:", it's speaking HTTP. It can use that protocol to send whatever type of data the server wants to send - text/html, application/x-pdf, whatever. You seem to be confusing HTTP and HTML - the communications protocol and what's being communicated.

    Meanwhile, the canonical way to identify the type of a file on a Unix system is to look at for "magic numbers," and then hopefully verify them by parsing what you think is the header and making sure checksums are valid, values are sane, etc. Any Unix application developer that looks at the extension *alone* should usually be fired on the spot. (The sole exception is completely unstructured text where you have to use it as a hint, e.g., ".c" means C, ".cc" means C++.)

    This isn't just a bad attitude, it reflects the fact that Unix tools have to deal with pipes and often don't have any filename (much less extension) associated with the data stream. If you require a file extension to understand what you have, you've crippled your application.

  25. Re:Federal piracy and entrapment on Fed Raids Software Pirates in 27 Cities · · Score: 2

    That phrasing was awkward, but the point is correct. The "entrapment defense" requires that the defendant agree that they commited the act in question, but only because the cops created an enticement no reasonable person could ignore. It doesn't mean that the cops can't create the situation or advertise it.