Having lived in Iowa for awhile, I have to jump in and say that no, you're quite wrong. A typical Iowa farm does rotate crops between fields - usually between some variety of corn, soybean, and either alfalfa or wheat. They have even gone beyond and introduced no-till, contour plowing, and many other means of conserving the soil.
If there is a problem in farming there, it isn't in any alleged lack of crop rotation, but in the constant (and in many cases over-) use of Anhydrous Ammonia as a fertilizer - and in huge quantities.
The old UDP system wasn't as badassed as proclaimed. It was fairly quickly subverted by simple dint of getting another ISP account.
Netcop me over something that offended you in USENET? Hah - fuck you, I'm back on in less than two hours courtesy of an AOL floppy, some other uni's server which left their dial-in lines wide open (and lookie here - anon logins!), or one of a zillion other means of getting in. Seriously - it wasn't all it was cracked up to be, and get even less powerful as ISPs started popping up out of the woodwork. By 1999, even the little rural corner of Arkansas I lived in gave me a choice of at least 10 different ISPs (be they local and otherwise), not counting the UofA alumni accounts, the local government dial-ins (which also had a fun little generic login for awhile) and etc.
Now - fast forward to today. In the age of free wifi damned near everywhere, 3/4/whatever-G mobile devices, and IP assignments that are almost as disposable as toilet paper squares?
Yeah, good luck with that. Can't even call it by MAC addy, and until/unless an RFC is universally implemented that will simultaneous destroy any hope of privacy, you're kinda fucked...
Sorry 'mano, but we've been hearing/hashing similar arguments since the days when Uni/.mil/BBS dominated things.
Cool as hell, but I'm curious as to, well... why? And has anyone thought this through?
Okay, sounds alarmist, I know. That said, we're rapidly approachind a level in genetics where one fuckup in procedure or policy can have some really ugly repercussions. Not necessarily Resident Evil-scale ones, but possibly something fairly ugly in its own right.
Why not? Let the states handle it... like they've always done before then (example? Google for "get Iowa out of the mud" - the state went from crap roads to an extensive paved roadway system in the 1920's - long before Eisenhower even thought of politics, let alone entered it)
"Unproductive expenditures" to YOU might mean "the only thing keeping X industry from unceremoniously collapsing and causing a domino effect on the economy."
Please - that's the same crap argument used for everything from building bridges leading to nowhere, to paying farmers to not grow crops. I'm willing to wager that it was also the argument used to give the widowed Ms. Lautenberg a pile of money to keep the other 160 million dollars in her bank account company.
Personally? Let the damn industry in question collapse. If it's that damned important to the economy, someone will keep it going and make a profit off of it.
The "effin' difference"? In most cases, it is far, far easier to "throw the bums out" at a local level, where getting word out and mobilizing the citizenry is way easier to do. The local "bums" don't have the massive reservoir of money and consultants to get them out of a jam like the national office-holders do. You screw up as a local official, and you can almost count on being ejected from office.
The smaller the population, the more an official has to be attuned to the cares and whims of the people he ostensibly serves. It's a question of simple logistics.
Now this doesn't scale up very well, so places like Los Angeles or New York City have a harder time putting this into effect than, say, Minot, ND.
I've always wondered why there's so little real public outcry at the perpetual extension of copyrights and their increasing overreach. But now, after reading the comments on that story, it's no wonder corporations have yet again been able to run roughshod over the public, and it's the same reason as usual -- the public is willingly bending over for them:
The reason why isn't what you think. The real reason is quite simple:
It doesn't affect Joe Voter, so he doesn't give a shit - he's too busy with his job, his family, his favorite football team, taking that lifetime vacation to Disneyland, etc. Can't be bothered to look into the more insidious on his individual rights and freedoms, and most politicians always claim that this or that bill is a threat to something-or-other, so he ceases to give a shit about them too. He's bombarded by spam from every special-interest group on the planet who can reach him (be it by TV, email, online, whatever).
End result? The stuff that doesn't generate drastic controversy at first mention just slides right through until it gets too obscene to not notice. See also copyrights, which went from their original 20-30 year limit to, well, damned near eternity. Patents are following right behind it (and if it weren't for a specifically-written time limit in the US Constitution, I bet they'd last for centuries by now as well).
So, until Joe Voter discovers to his horror that he has to involuntarily jack out a considerable portion of his income to sustain the rent-seeking industry, he simply doesn't have time to care.
I suspect he was trying to differentiate between copying something off for giggles, and the act of selling copies of the movie w/o the copyright holder's permission/knowledge/etc.
If that was indeed his intention, then I agree - passing around a few movies or songs should not result in a literal multi-million-dollar judgement. Now if you;re *selling* copies, that's a whole different bucket of fish.
Currently, it will cost you more money to pass around a handful of songs (c.f. Jammie Thomas) than the statutory fines imposed for selling knock-off DVDs.
I love the concept and idea, but there's a couple of caveats:
* You'd have to build each 'node' in the system in such a way so as to completely sandbox the data (and limit its data capacity to something reasonable). Otherwise, you'll have cheap little Android phones filling up quickly (I have one of those phones), cr/hackers packing the phone full of crap (or worse, using the system as a means to exploit the rest of the phone), and idiots who would love nothing more than to shove kiddie pr0n onto a few phones, then calling the cops on whoever was nearby when he pushed the images out (sandboxing/isolation means that at least as the owner of the device, you can at least somewhat prove your innocence.)
* I live in a rural area. A working and reliable mesh network requires a reasonable population density.
* If you want something in particular, how long would it take to first find out where it is, request it, then get it? You'd have to wait for at least one partner node to send your query out, others to locate it, then still others to answer your request and start sending what it/they have.
Those are only the first three bits that came up in my head.
Why do you keep electing a privileged elite to represent you in DC, but you shy away from a privileged tech elite that have a track record for economic growth?
So you seriously want the likes of Mark Zukerberg, Steve Ballmer and Larry Ellison running government?
...and your comment about "standing offers" is hardly the norm in a corporate culture that views employees as largely interchangeable "resources" rather than people.
Depends on a few things...
1) the job. If we're talking about a burger-flipper or "barista", then yeah they are mostly interchangeable. If we're talking about a sysadmin or developer with a solid professional reputation, then good luck with finding one, and don't be surprised if he bails the moment a company really pisses him off.
2) experience. Retail salespeople that can stock shelves at the local mall clothing store are approximately 8 cents per baker's dozen. A top-notch sales pro with a huge client list who can routinely and profitably work with multi-million-dollar clients? That person is going to be a bit tougher to get hold of.
3) the market. A developer who specializes in some popular language (.NET, C++, Java, whatever) is going to have an easier time finding a job than an Ethnic Gender Studies Professor whose specialty centers around people living in Madagascar.
4) reputation. Mentioned in 1), but bears repeating: If you have a solid reputation in your local professional network, you're going to be prized. If no one knows who you are ( or worse - you wound up blackballed; say, you're a Linux developer who worked at SCOX before it blew up?), then good luck with that.
In other words, such a simple screed of all companies treating employees like chattel really doesn't hold true. Those which do tend to degrade over time as quality employees with the experience and skills 'pull the D-ring' to work in greener pastures. They leave the deadwood, newbs and screw-ups behind, and quality/productivity suffers accordingly.
I'd be careful on that one. This is about Oracle and well they have PostgresSQL beat by a mile
...until you actually have to *use* the Oracle docs - then the betting pool opens as to which hour has the DBA screaming "...what the fuck!?" at the top of his lungs.
(Hint: There's a damned good reason why Oracle requires support contracts from everyone who has a license...)
when in reality the natural state of business is collusion and consolidation.
Interesting, but not the end-state. In a truly free market, someone always crops up to challenge the status quo with innovation, and the cycle begins again.
MCI broke the 'Bells back in the early 1980s, Apple broke the 'traditional' mini-computer industry, FOX broke CNN, Internet pr0n killed the nudie mags and DVDs, Netflix/Hulu/etc is now threatening to kill the physical disc-based (DVD/Blu-Ray) movie industry, Apple's iPhone rose up and slammed the cozy BlackBerry/Palm/Nokia/Carrier relationships, and so on, and so on...
Sure, many of those challenged are still around, but now they're forced to innovate, to follow or be left in the dirt.
Hell, Napster began the wave that completely re-forced how music is distributed these days, and BitTorrent did the same to the movie industry - the only reason that the RIAA/MPAA cartels have any power left is because they (get this...) relied on (or rather, bought) laws to do for them what the free market would not (that is, rent-seeking.)
This "natural state" of collusion is only kept in stasis because of governmental intervention (be it witting or not.)
Well technically, the technique increases surface area (they use something similar on solar cells to increase efficiency), but yeah - otherwise good point.:)
Los Alamos has a "Nuclear Weapons Laboratory" on the premises, and it is that laboratory (or more specifically, the scientists within it that work on nuclear weaponry and related concepts) which produced the switch with the funny pattern on the contacts....but then "Scientist At The Nuclear Weapons Laboratory Sited Within The Realm Of What Is Known As Los Alamos" just doesn't quite fit too well on a business card (let alone a headline), does it?;)
(...mind you, I'm just typing this in jest. I get your point, but really, precision is not always possible or even practical.)
Signed, Some Guy Who Lives Where They "Put A Bird On It"
The false sense of security is only one reason why this is dangerous as hell (seriously, *any* form of DRM can eventually be cracked. It's just a question of motivation and resources.)
The biggest problem is that once implemented...... it'd likely be used as some form of identification (as opposed to ordinary recognition/paper IDs)and,... the data becomes irretrievable (to the average individual) by anything other than the tools used to build it.
This means that in total, for all practical/commercial intents and purposes, you're stuck with lock-in on one hell of a scale. I bet that Microsoft would be more than happy to be the company that gets to make those locks, no?
1) "millions an hour" is pure hyperbole if we're talking about any server that isn't processing stock trades in realtime.
2) VPN is your friend, but only if you take the time to do it right. Learn to architect it, build it, and secure it. At home, you have a hard cable going from your work laptop to the cable modem - no exceptions. I've logged into live banking sites that way with no ill effects or undue exposures.
[Worker]" Sure, no problem, I'll drive in which should take 2 hours so I don't telecommute."
I did that once (I lived 90 minutes' drive away)... it was the first and last time they ever thought a physical presence in a 'war room' to fix a gimped VM was that important to have.
yeah.. during the planning stage for the "shift".. wtf do you need people sitting in the office unsure of what they should be doing?
One word: Scrum. They're probably hoping that if they get enough devs stuck in an eternal round of pointless meetings (at work, and not at home where you can surf pr0n or game a little with the phone on mute), maybe something useful will come out of it from which they can then build new business.
I mean, how the hell else do you think Windows 8 got built?
No, news organizations are not the cause of most of the pain and suffering they report on
Problem is, they still are in far too many ways:
As evidence, I present the typical late-afternoon car chases in Los Angeles (where the fugitives in question know full well that there are news choppers out filming it). I also present the concept of the 'copycat killer', and of course any and all political posturings (which has brought us this recent US partial government shutdown and all of its follies.
If news organizations were even halfway responsible creatures, we would get an unbiased listing of events. I defy you to find any such thing among the US broadcast/print media. BTW: First one to say "NPR" is just as full of shit as the first one to say "FOX". )
Then of course there are the celebrity 'news' shows, which happily generate much misery among celebrities, but that's not as important in the way of evidence, IMHO.
Slashdot Mirror
If you work in an enterprise with 1000 users running Office, with cloud-Office all you need to do is give your users a hyperlink.
...you mean like you can now with SharePoint, or simply drop a document onto a disk share somewhere and give them the URI for that, right?
(note that the latter has way less, feature-wise, but it works rather well for small groups).
Having lived in Iowa for awhile, I have to jump in and say that no, you're quite wrong. A typical Iowa farm does rotate crops between fields - usually between some variety of corn, soybean, and either alfalfa or wheat. They have even gone beyond and introduced no-till, contour plowing, and many other means of conserving the soil.
If there is a problem in farming there, it isn't in any alleged lack of crop rotation, but in the constant (and in many cases over-) use of Anhydrous Ammonia as a fertilizer - and in huge quantities.
Well, maybe...
The old UDP system wasn't as badassed as proclaimed. It was fairly quickly subverted by simple dint of getting another ISP account.
Netcop me over something that offended you in USENET? Hah - fuck you, I'm back on in less than two hours courtesy of an AOL floppy, some other uni's server which left their dial-in lines wide open (and lookie here - anon logins!), or one of a zillion other means of getting in. Seriously - it wasn't all it was cracked up to be, and get even less powerful as ISPs started popping up out of the woodwork. By 1999, even the little rural corner of Arkansas I lived in gave me a choice of at least 10 different ISPs (be they local and otherwise), not counting the UofA alumni accounts, the local government dial-ins (which also had a fun little generic login for awhile) and etc.
Now - fast forward to today. In the age of free wifi damned near everywhere, 3/4/whatever-G mobile devices, and IP assignments that are almost as disposable as toilet paper squares?
Yeah, good luck with that. Can't even call it by MAC addy, and until/unless an RFC is universally implemented that will simultaneous destroy any hope of privacy, you're kinda fucked...
Sorry 'mano, but we've been hearing/hashing similar arguments since the days when Uni/.mil/BBS dominated things.
Cool as hell, but I'm curious as to, well... why? And has anyone thought this through?
Okay, sounds alarmist, I know. That said, we're rapidly approachind a level in genetics where one fuckup in procedure or policy can have some really ugly repercussions. Not necessarily Resident Evil-scale ones, but possibly something fairly ugly in its own right.
Do you REALLY want to defund interstate highways?
Why not? Let the states handle it... like they've always done before then (example? Google for "get Iowa out of the mud" - the state went from crap roads to an extensive paved roadway system in the 1920's - long before Eisenhower even thought of politics, let alone entered it)
"Unproductive expenditures" to YOU might mean "the only thing keeping X industry from unceremoniously collapsing and causing a domino effect on the economy."
Please - that's the same crap argument used for everything from building bridges leading to nowhere, to paying farmers to not grow crops. I'm willing to wager that it was also the argument used to give the widowed Ms. Lautenberg a pile of money to keep the other 160 million dollars in her bank account company.
Personally? Let the damn industry in question collapse. If it's that damned important to the economy, someone will keep it going and make a profit off of it.
The "effin' difference"? In most cases, it is far, far easier to "throw the bums out" at a local level, where getting word out and mobilizing the citizenry is way easier to do. The local "bums" don't have the massive reservoir of money and consultants to get them out of a jam like the national office-holders do. You screw up as a local official, and you can almost count on being ejected from office.
The smaller the population, the more an official has to be attuned to the cares and whims of the people he ostensibly serves. It's a question of simple logistics.
Now this doesn't scale up very well, so places like Los Angeles or New York City have a harder time putting this into effect than, say, Minot, ND.
I've always wondered why there's so little real public outcry at the perpetual extension of copyrights and their increasing overreach. But now, after reading the comments on that story, it's no wonder corporations have yet again been able to run roughshod over the public, and it's the same reason as usual -- the public is willingly bending over for them:
The reason why isn't what you think. The real reason is quite simple:
It doesn't affect Joe Voter, so he doesn't give a shit - he's too busy with his job, his family, his favorite football team, taking that lifetime vacation to Disneyland, etc. Can't be bothered to look into the more insidious on his individual rights and freedoms, and most politicians always claim that this or that bill is a threat to something-or-other, so he ceases to give a shit about them too. He's bombarded by spam from every special-interest group on the planet who can reach him (be it by TV, email, online, whatever).
End result? The stuff that doesn't generate drastic controversy at first mention just slides right through until it gets too obscene to not notice. See also copyrights, which went from their original 20-30 year limit to, well, damned near eternity. Patents are following right behind it (and if it weren't for a specifically-written time limit in the US Constitution, I bet they'd last for centuries by now as well).
So, until Joe Voter discovers to his horror that he has to involuntarily jack out a considerable portion of his income to sustain the rent-seeking industry, he simply doesn't have time to care.
Yep - it's a tragedy, but there it is.
I suspect he was trying to differentiate between copying something off for giggles, and the act of selling copies of the movie w/o the copyright holder's permission/knowledge/etc.
If that was indeed his intention, then I agree - passing around a few movies or songs should not result in a literal multi-million-dollar judgement. Now if you;re *selling* copies, that's a whole different bucket of fish.
Currently, it will cost you more money to pass around a handful of songs (c.f. Jammie Thomas) than the statutory fines imposed for selling knock-off DVDs.
Something is heinously *wrong* with that.
I love the concept and idea, but there's a couple of caveats:
* You'd have to build each 'node' in the system in such a way so as to completely sandbox the data (and limit its data capacity to something reasonable). Otherwise, you'll have cheap little Android phones filling up quickly (I have one of those phones), cr/hackers packing the phone full of crap (or worse, using the system as a means to exploit the rest of the phone), and idiots who would love nothing more than to shove kiddie pr0n onto a few phones, then calling the cops on whoever was nearby when he pushed the images out (sandboxing/isolation means that at least as the owner of the device, you can at least somewhat prove your innocence.)
* I live in a rural area. A working and reliable mesh network requires a reasonable population density.
* If you want something in particular, how long would it take to first find out where it is, request it, then get it? You'd have to wait for at least one partner node to send your query out, others to locate it, then still others to answer your request and start sending what it/they have.
Those are only the first three bits that came up in my head.
Wait until she hits menopause... then you'll have to swap out that AC unit for a ginormous pile of dry ice.
which is what I'm guessing you're trying to do with using a 'legal" term like harrassment.
Why the scare quotes? Harassment has a very specific legal definition, punishment, and course of action (note that this is for my home state. Other states may vary.)
A small exercise: Consider what your conclusion would be if you changed the words from "being mean" to "harrassment."
Why do you keep electing a privileged elite to represent you in DC, but you shy away from a privileged tech elite that have a track record for economic growth?
So you seriously want the likes of Mark Zukerberg, Steve Ballmer and Larry Ellison running government?
...and your comment about "standing offers" is hardly the norm in a corporate culture that views employees as largely interchangeable "resources" rather than people.
Depends on a few things...
1) the job. If we're talking about a burger-flipper or "barista", then yeah they are mostly interchangeable. If we're talking about a sysadmin or developer with a solid professional reputation, then good luck with finding one, and don't be surprised if he bails the moment a company really pisses him off.
2) experience. Retail salespeople that can stock shelves at the local mall clothing store are approximately 8 cents per baker's dozen. A top-notch sales pro with a huge client list who can routinely and profitably work with multi-million-dollar clients? That person is going to be a bit tougher to get hold of.
3) the market. A developer who specializes in some popular language (.NET, C++, Java, whatever) is going to have an easier time finding a job than an Ethnic Gender Studies Professor whose specialty centers around people living in Madagascar.
4) reputation. Mentioned in 1), but bears repeating: If you have a solid reputation in your local professional network, you're going to be prized. If no one knows who you are ( or worse - you wound up blackballed; say, you're a Linux developer who worked at SCOX before it blew up?), then good luck with that.
In other words, such a simple screed of all companies treating employees like chattel really doesn't hold true. Those which do tend to degrade over time as quality employees with the experience and skills 'pull the D-ring' to work in greener pastures. They leave the deadwood, newbs and screw-ups behind, and quality/productivity suffers accordingly.
I'd be careful on that one. This is about Oracle and well they have PostgresSQL beat by a mile
...until you actually have to *use* the Oracle docs - then the betting pool opens as to which hour has the DBA screaming "...what the fuck!?" at the top of his lungs.
(Hint: There's a damned good reason why Oracle requires support contracts from everyone who has a license...)
when in reality the natural state of business is collusion and consolidation.
Interesting, but not the end-state. In a truly free market, someone always crops up to challenge the status quo with innovation, and the cycle begins again.
MCI broke the 'Bells back in the early 1980s, Apple broke the 'traditional' mini-computer industry, FOX broke CNN, Internet pr0n killed the nudie mags and DVDs, Netflix/Hulu/etc is now threatening to kill the physical disc-based (DVD/Blu-Ray) movie industry, Apple's iPhone rose up and slammed the cozy BlackBerry/Palm/Nokia/Carrier relationships, and so on, and so on...
Sure, many of those challenged are still around, but now they're forced to innovate, to follow or be left in the dirt.
Hell, Napster began the wave that completely re-forced how music is distributed these days, and BitTorrent did the same to the movie industry - the only reason that the RIAA/MPAA cartels have any power left is because they (get this...) relied on (or rather, bought) laws to do for them what the free market would not (that is, rent-seeking.)
This "natural state" of collusion is only kept in stasis because of governmental intervention (be it witting or not.)
Well technically, the technique increases surface area (they use something similar on solar cells to increase efficiency), but yeah - otherwise good point. :)
True, but if you want to pick semantics, well...
Los Alamos has a "Nuclear Weapons Laboratory" on the premises, and it is that laboratory (or more specifically, the scientists within it that work on nuclear weaponry and related concepts) which produced the switch with the funny pattern on the contacts. ...but then "Scientist At The Nuclear Weapons Laboratory Sited Within The Realm Of What Is Known As Los Alamos" just doesn't quite fit too well on a business card (let alone a headline), does it? ;)
(...mind you, I'm just typing this in jest. I get your point, but really, precision is not always possible or even practical.)
Signed,
Some Guy Who Lives Where They "Put A Bird On It"
Besides, isn't most of the misuse being done by companies like Microsoft?
Well, not directly... but yeah.
The false sense of security is only one reason why this is dangerous as hell
(seriously, *any* form of DRM can eventually be cracked. It's just a question of motivation and resources.)
The biggest problem is that once implemented... ... it'd likely be used as some form of identification (as opposed to ordinary recognition/paper IDs)and, ... the data becomes irretrievable (to the average individual) by anything other than the tools used to build it.
This means that in total, for all practical/commercial intents and purposes, you're stuck with lock-in on one hell of a scale. I bet that Microsoft would be more than happy to be the company that gets to make those locks, no?
Couple o' bits:
1) "millions an hour" is pure hyperbole if we're talking about any server that isn't processing stock trades in realtime.
2) VPN is your friend, but only if you take the time to do it right. Learn to architect it, build it, and secure it. At home, you have a hard cable going from your work laptop to the cable modem - no exceptions. I've logged into live banking sites that way with no ill effects or undue exposures.
[Worker]" Sure, no problem, I'll drive in which should take 2 hours so I don't telecommute."
I did that once (I lived 90 minutes' drive away)... it was the first and last time they ever thought a physical presence in a 'war room' to fix a gimped VM was that important to have.
yeah.. during the planning stage for the "shift".. wtf do you need people sitting in the office unsure of what they should be doing?
One word: Scrum. They're probably hoping that if they get enough devs stuck in an eternal round of pointless meetings (at work, and not at home where you can surf pr0n or game a little with the phone on mute), maybe something useful will come out of it from which they can then build new business.
I mean, how the hell else do you think Windows 8 got built?
Given UK libel laws, I can safely say that he'd avoid the joint like it were radioactive.
No, news organizations are not the cause of most of the pain and suffering they report on
Problem is, they still are in far too many ways:
As evidence, I present the typical late-afternoon car chases in Los Angeles (where the fugitives in question know full well that there are news choppers out filming it). I also present the concept of the 'copycat killer', and of course any and all political posturings (which has brought us this recent US partial government shutdown and all of its follies.
If news organizations were even halfway responsible creatures, we would get an unbiased listing of events. I defy you to find any such thing among the US broadcast/print media. BTW: First one to say "NPR" is just as full of shit as the first one to say "FOX". )
Then of course there are the celebrity 'news' shows, which happily generate much misery among celebrities, but that's not as important in the way of evidence, IMHO.