Depends... one mod's "respectful" is another mod's "condescending", because intent is not always easy to read or put clearly when it comes to the printed word.
Take the Bible for instance. I'm picking on it because it's the oldest continuous book in publication, so don't anyone get their hackles up. Over a lifetime of reading the thing (from early childhood to now), I find that passages I had once thought meant one thing as a child, tend to change when viewed through more experienced eyes. As I learned more about the archaeology and life of the time periods in question, I gain a perspective that I didn't have before, making difficult passages clearer, and changing much of what I had originally thought was intended.
The same thing happens when it comes to writing as well, especially when you have folks to whom English is not their first language, or were not sufficiently trained in its use.
To top all that off, discerning the subtler intents - sarcasm, a gentle joke, cultural influence... it all combines to make reading something an imperfect art, as opposed to a precise science. Some languages make it a little easier due to inherent precision (German stands out in my mind), but English certainly does not.
Let's just keep it at illegal to produce. Open them and their entire families to civil lawsuits with crushing fines by any and all victims (and/or families thereof). Execute them if you feel the need.
However, any law that restricts possession or broadcast of *any* data, no matter how revolting or dangerous it may be, should be avoided at all costs. The only exception I can think of involves governmental secrets, but only because those who share them voluntarily obligated themselves before accessing that data.
That way, you don't have as much collateral damage against innocent websites, folks who stumble across the wrong search result, or folks who aren't technically inclined enough to fully encrypt their wireless access points against strangers....and as a bonus, you don't need to push anything down any slippery slopes, and can get rid of any bad precedents.
Once you've basically turned the computers into dumb terminals managed remotely and the only thing required is a connection to the net, you no longer need a network administrator.
I'd like to direct your attention to the part I emphasized. I'd also like to point out that all those workstations and other network-connected gear at your office building does require a bit more than fairy dust and unicorn farts to connect to "the net", yanno?
Now if you were talking about server admins, well, okay... you'd be sort of right.
The "plenty of states" you're talking about (Utah, Nebraska, Texas) which are "fiscally sound" are places where poverty is way up and children are uninsured. Prisons are a growth industry. In other words, shitholes where you wouldn't want to live.
Subjective opinion does not an objective rebuttal make. You also missed the mark a bit in your haste to wave that ideological flag of yours. Of the three states you mentioned, only Texas applies as per income tax. Washington, Nevada, and Florida (all three of which are "blue states") do not.
So... you were saying something about states with no income taxes being "shitholes", then?
As for the rest, If Californians demand all those services but are not willing to pay for them... wait, isn't California one of those states where prisons are also a growth industry, poverty is way up, and nearly a million children are uninsured?
Dunno, man... it's hard to point a finger when there are so many pointing right back at you.
Err, Comcast does this now here in the US. They erroneously sent me one a few years ago, at which point I called them up and demanded that they either prove it or issue an apology. I received neither, interestingly enough...
Actually, AU gave them corps and cartels even more rights.
In the US, they don't sue you for downloading, but for distribution. I can download anything I want to off of, say, rapidshare - all day long, right in front of the entire RIAA and MPAA's combined legal squad, and they legally can't do a damned thing about it.
Now if I used a torrent or otherwise provably uploaded copyrighted material that I had no rights to, then they'd be able to sue.
Or, maybe the summary and TFA goofed their terminology.
Dude - if you need a >32-core NUMA rig to write software, I do not want to know how much bloat you've got sitting in there.;)
If you need a testbed with >32 cores and NUMA going, I'm fairly sure there's going to be a server or two purchased and rigged for you to do just that, and since they don't quote make laptops with those kind of specs, odds are good it will be waiting for you in the server room.
Now if you mentioned 32 vs. 64-bit Windows, you may have had a point (because, but only in my opinion, PAE sucks donkey balls and fully compatible XP-64 apps are damned few). If you had mentioned the fact that in light of Microsoft EA licensing (and most other modes), an XP license costs the same as a W7 one? Maybe, but that's only one small rock in a mountain of stones that IT has had to move before your company network becomes fully W7 compliant/compatible in the entire organization.
Personally, if I wanted/needed/whatever a different OS that badly? I'd try and convince them to let me have {my OS choice} and a VMWare Workstation license to run the corporate XP license on. I would then stipulate that the only support IT needs to provide is as follows: repair/replacement of any provable hardware failure, enough space on my network share to store a backup of the VM containing the corporate image, and to make sure the image in turn gets backed up to tape on occasion (which they would probably be doing anyway). Then I could satisfy their needs and my own. Then again, I've worked both sides of the house - dev and IT.
Who are "they", and which "services" are you alluding to? Also, there are plenty of states which have no income tax at all, yet for some odd reason they seem to do okay (via taking their money from other sources of taxation).
Plus, Californians send a lot more money to Washington in Federal taxes than they get back..
Given the sheer number of representative and electoral votes they represent at the federal level, they certainly do get it back in quite a few other ways, no?
...which happen to be at either end of this little rail line.
Speakin' of which, given the ungodly size of both metro areas, how the hell are they going to avoid having to tack on at least another hour or two at each end just to negotiate the traffic, comply with speed and noise regulations, impositions tacked on by every burg that surrounds SanFran and LA, etc etc etc etc etc. ?
Jammer? Hell, I was curious to see what would happen if I swapped out the SIM card from the phone every time I walk into a different store, or perhaps at random? Gather the whole family's pile o' SIMs, and maybe a couple of expired ones (they still work for emergency calls, so odds are good their signal will pick up).
I figure if enough folks did that in one mall (say, 100-200 people?), the algorithms would show enough crap data to basically have the management demanding their money back from the company that sold it to 'em.
Even better... I wonder what would happen if you and enough cohorts went to the mall, selected some bits to buy at different stores, walked up to the counter, and proclaimed to the cashier that "this is what I would have bought if your mall wasn't so invasive of my privacy by tracking my cell signal", then walk out, leaving the goods on the counter unpaid-for.
Hell, at a previous job, we used to have a rubber chicken hanging (via a proper hangman's noose made of scrap cat5 cable) from a cable tray in the main server room. Stayed there for nearly a year until the Head of IT finally arsed himself to walk into the place. He went predictably ballistic, but the week after we took it down, we started seeing a large group of drive failures in the SAN that the thing hung next to.
Speaking of the original article, I wonder what they would use to detect a refrigerator hidden in an unused rack? It had an old tape library fascia taped to the inside of the mesh door, and a shelf immediately above it as camouflage. We kept our lunches in there after a rash of food thefts from the main employee fridges.
Apple is still the most closed choice in computing.
Depends on what angle you view it from:
Hardware? Yeah, Apple's a stickler, though Hackintoshing is not all that hard to do, as long as you do your homework first. Microsoft doesn't sell PC hardware, so it's kind of a non-comparison.
Until you can show me where I can download the Windows kernel/core source code without signing an NDA or paying a huge bucket of money? Microsoft is still king of the closed-source software, and since they are primarily a software company, they're still the most closed.
They could try, but it would cost them a mint, and they would not only put themselves in a bind, but their shareholders would start dumping MSFT stock in droves for being irresponsible. I wouldn't be surprised if a lawsuit came out of such an action, come to think of it.
I mean, hell, Apple could buy pretty much every outstanding share of Samsung and LG outright, but doing so would not only be dumb on their part, but would drop the stock price into the dirt.
What's to monitor? You get up some encryption keys and covertly get them to the bloggers. The bloggers load up some porn pics or video clips with a bit of steganographic information baked in, and upload them to one of a random selection of tube sites or pr0n forums. Others watch for posts and pics by that person's pseudonym, downloads the pr0n, decrypts the message, and broadcasts that.
C'mon, they managed to do some pretty amazing shit during World War II in occupied countries, and those folks didn't have half the technology we have today...
Just out of curiosity, what would constitute this revenge?
Certainly outing and naming/shaming gang members is a good start, but perhaps breaking into and emptying certain gang-run bank accounts would be another?
If ever there were opportunities for spear-phishing, this is certainly one of them.
I don't think they care all that much about bloggers who aren't in the local area watching them.
OTOH, maybe a means of helping those bloggers who are left down there set up VPN tunnels and encryption, so that anonymous broadcasts of gang activities can get out to the public Internet and be broadcast anyway to all interested parties. That way the reporting is perfectly anonymous, but the targets of that reporting are not.
While I just buy my gear now, when I was a poor young man, buying the parts used (usually at a 90-95% discount) and putting it together was a great way to get a running rig w/o blowing a ton of cash that I simply didn't have then.
The thing is, back then the shit was *expensive* when it was new. You could either blow $2k on a decent new computer with the basics and 'doze 3.0, or you could cobble together your own box for about $150 in used parts and shoehorn Linux onto it (or just grab eight floppies and copy off your own damned installs of DOS and Windows from a friend if you wanted that). I remember spending $100 on a used VGA monitor and $20 on parts to fix it... at a time when a new 14" VGA monitor would run you $1200.00 - the time spent fixing it up (a whopping two hours) paid for itself in spades.
It also kept me current enough on the hardware at the time to parlay my gained skills into a tidy (and well-paying) side-job fixing other folks' machinery. It also put me in touch with fellow enthusiasts, which eventually became a professional network. When I was dragged (initially kicking and screaming, I assure you) from EE work into being a sysadmin, it made the transition much easier than if I hadn't. It also meant I had a shitload of extra parts I could play with at home.
(My literal introduction into this madness we call IT? "...you play with computers at home and keep devices (scales and bar-code scanners) here on our network, don't you? Steve flunked a drug test, so we need someone to keep the computer and network going until we can find a replacement. We figure you're the guy for the job. " They never got around to finding a replacement until after I left the company. It was an RS/600 and a 4Mbps Token-Ring Network. Wound up changing careers after falling in love with the damned things. Fuckers.)
Things have changed drastically from then to now - computer bits are more likely to work as advertised as long as the parts still work. OTOH, it's a great way for a kid or evne a young man to get up a basic system without spending a lot of time on it.
Over its useful lifetime (15-30 years, depending on quality), it can generate more energy than was taken to produce it, but the resources utilized in their manufacture and distribution are still carbon-positive.
Solar panels on a commercial scale are lucky to get 18% efficiency. As AC stated, oil coughs up 60-70%.
By the by, an oil rig doesn't produce energy, it is a part of an infrastructure that moves existing stored energy (crude oil) from one place (underground) to another (gas tanks, plastics, etc).
The whole point is that even renewables consume resources, which in turn, according to the Church of AGW, leaves a big ol' carbon footprint in relation to the amount of resources used. When a panel factory eats enough electricity to require warning the utility of any major downtime periods at all, odds are good that it's not exactly running on unicorn farts, yanno?
we have a vested economic interest in keeping our environment the way we are used to it.
Really? I'd love to see the evidence. While obviously an ice age or an overly-hot overall climate would be catastrophic, unless we start seeing outright permanent flash-flooding of the coasts, or a rapid breakdown of overall society, your premise is just an assumption.
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Depends... one mod's "respectful" is another mod's "condescending", because intent is not always easy to read or put clearly when it comes to the printed word.
Take the Bible for instance. I'm picking on it because it's the oldest continuous book in publication, so don't anyone get their hackles up. Over a lifetime of reading the thing (from early childhood to now), I find that passages I had once thought meant one thing as a child, tend to change when viewed through more experienced eyes. As I learned more about the archaeology and life of the time periods in question, I gain a perspective that I didn't have before, making difficult passages clearer, and changing much of what I had originally thought was intended.
The same thing happens when it comes to writing as well, especially when you have folks to whom English is not their first language, or were not sufficiently trained in its use.
To top all that off, discerning the subtler intents - sarcasm, a gentle joke, cultural influence... it all combines to make reading something an imperfect art, as opposed to a precise science. Some languages make it a little easier due to inherent precision (German stands out in my mind), but English certainly does not.
Let's just keep it at illegal to produce. Open them and their entire families to civil lawsuits with crushing fines by any and all victims (and/or families thereof). Execute them if you feel the need.
However, any law that restricts possession or broadcast of *any* data, no matter how revolting or dangerous it may be, should be avoided at all costs. The only exception I can think of involves governmental secrets, but only because those who share them voluntarily obligated themselves before accessing that data.
That way, you don't have as much collateral damage against innocent websites, folks who stumble across the wrong search result, or folks who aren't technically inclined enough to fully encrypt their wireless access points against strangers. ...and as a bonus, you don't need to push anything down any slippery slopes, and can get rid of any bad precedents.
Got the box in three days, sent the old beastie back.
I wonder what they'll think about the install of Rockbox on it...
Once you've basically turned the computers into dumb terminals managed remotely and the only thing required is a connection to the net, you no longer need a network administrator.
I'd like to direct your attention to the part I emphasized. I'd also like to point out that all those workstations and other network-connected gear at your office building does require a bit more than fairy dust and unicorn farts to connect to "the net", yanno?
Now if you were talking about server admins, well, okay... you'd be sort of right.
The "plenty of states" you're talking about (Utah, Nebraska, Texas) which are "fiscally sound" are places where poverty is way up and children are uninsured. Prisons are a growth industry. In other words, shitholes where you wouldn't want to live.
Subjective opinion does not an objective rebuttal make. You also missed the mark a bit in your haste to wave that ideological flag of yours. Of the three states you mentioned, only Texas applies as per income tax. Washington, Nevada, and Florida (all three of which are "blue states") do not.
So... you were saying something about states with no income taxes being "shitholes", then?
As for the rest, If Californians demand all those services but are not willing to pay for them... wait, isn't California one of those states where prisons are also a growth industry, poverty is way up, and nearly a million children are uninsured?
Dunno, man... it's hard to point a finger when there are so many pointing right back at you.
Err, Comcast does this now here in the US. They erroneously sent me one a few years ago, at which point I called them up and demanded that they either prove it or issue an apology. I received neither, interestingly enough...
Actually, AU gave them corps and cartels even more rights.
In the US, they don't sue you for downloading, but for distribution. I can download anything I want to off of, say, rapidshare - all day long, right in front of the entire RIAA and MPAA's combined legal squad, and they legally can't do a damned thing about it.
Now if I used a torrent or otherwise provably uploaded copyrighted material that I had no rights to, then they'd be able to sue.
Or, maybe the summary and TFA goofed their terminology.
Dude - if you need a >32-core NUMA rig to write software, I do not want to know how much bloat you've got sitting in there. ;)
If you need a testbed with >32 cores and NUMA going, I'm fairly sure there's going to be a server or two purchased and rigged for you to do just that, and since they don't quote make laptops with those kind of specs, odds are good it will be waiting for you in the server room.
Now if you mentioned 32 vs. 64-bit Windows, you may have had a point (because, but only in my opinion, PAE sucks donkey balls and fully compatible XP-64 apps are damned few). If you had mentioned the fact that in light of Microsoft EA licensing (and most other modes), an XP license costs the same as a W7 one? Maybe, but that's only one small rock in a mountain of stones that IT has had to move before your company network becomes fully W7 compliant/compatible in the entire organization.
Personally, if I wanted/needed/whatever a different OS that badly? I'd try and convince them to let me have {my OS choice} and a VMWare Workstation license to run the corporate XP license on. I would then stipulate that the only support IT needs to provide is as follows: repair/replacement of any provable hardware failure, enough space on my network share to store a backup of the VM containing the corporate image, and to make sure the image in turn gets backed up to tape on occasion (which they would probably be doing anyway). Then I could satisfy their needs and my own. Then again, I've worked both sides of the house - dev and IT.
Of course, they still demand all the services.
Who are "they", and which "services" are you alluding to? Also, there are plenty of states which have no income tax at all, yet for some odd reason they seem to do okay (via taking their money from other sources of taxation).
Plus, Californians send a lot more money to Washington in Federal taxes than they get back..
Given the sheer number of representative and electoral votes they represent at the federal level, they certainly do get it back in quite a few other ways, no?
I was just thinking... you could give that $98bn to someone like SpaceX, and have them build a working, *profitable* lunar or space colony.
The only problems are directly around SF and LA.
...which happen to be at either end of this little rail line.
Speakin' of which, given the ungodly size of both metro areas, how the hell are they going to avoid having to tack on at least another hour or two at each end just to negotiate the traffic, comply with speed and noise regulations, impositions tacked on by every burg that surrounds SanFran and LA, etc etc etc etc etc. ?
...so let's get those expeditions going already.
Sitting around and saying 'oh it's too hard, better send up some eventual missions first' isn't going to get the job done.
Jammer? Hell, I was curious to see what would happen if I swapped out the SIM card from the phone every time I walk into a different store, or perhaps at random? Gather the whole family's pile o' SIMs, and maybe a couple of expired ones (they still work for emergency calls, so odds are good their signal will pick up).
I figure if enough folks did that in one mall (say, 100-200 people?), the algorithms would show enough crap data to basically have the management demanding their money back from the company that sold it to 'em.
Even better... I wonder what would happen if you and enough cohorts went to the mall, selected some bits to buy at different stores, walked up to the counter, and proclaimed to the cashier that "this is what I would have bought if your mall wasn't so invasive of my privacy by tracking my cell signal", then walk out, leaving the goods on the counter unpaid-for.
Question is, does the spin make the editorialized statement any less true?
I find it disturbing that the answer is, well, "no".
That is also known as stealing.
Bullshit. The files were returned in the exact same condition as he received them.
Now copyright violations OTOH...
Hell, at a previous job, we used to have a rubber chicken hanging (via a proper hangman's noose made of scrap cat5 cable) from a cable tray in the main server room. Stayed there for nearly a year until the Head of IT finally arsed himself to walk into the place. He went predictably ballistic, but the week after we took it down, we started seeing a large group of drive failures in the SAN that the thing hung next to.
Speaking of the original article, I wonder what they would use to detect a refrigerator hidden in an unused rack? It had an old tape library fascia taped to the inside of the mesh door, and a shelf immediately above it as camouflage. We kept our lunches in there after a rash of food thefts from the main employee fridges.
Apple is still the most closed choice in computing.
Depends on what angle you view it from:
Hardware? Yeah, Apple's a stickler, though Hackintoshing is not all that hard to do, as long as you do your homework first. Microsoft doesn't sell PC hardware, so it's kind of a non-comparison.
Software? I beg to differ, greatly.
Until you can show me where I can download the Windows kernel/core source code without signing an NDA or paying a huge bucket of money? Microsoft is still king of the closed-source software, and since they are primarily a software company, they're still the most closed.
They could try, but it would cost them a mint, and they would not only put themselves in a bind, but their shareholders would start dumping MSFT stock in droves for being irresponsible. I wouldn't be surprised if a lawsuit came out of such an action, come to think of it.
I mean, hell, Apple could buy pretty much every outstanding share of Samsung and LG outright, but doing so would not only be dumb on their part, but would drop the stock price into the dirt.
What's to monitor? You get up some encryption keys and covertly get them to the bloggers. The bloggers load up some porn pics or video clips with a bit of steganographic information baked in, and upload them to one of a random selection of tube sites or pr0n forums. Others watch for posts and pics by that person's pseudonym, downloads the pr0n, decrypts the message, and broadcasts that.
C'mon, they managed to do some pretty amazing shit during World War II in occupied countries, and those folks didn't have half the technology we have today...
Just out of curiosity, what would constitute this revenge?
Certainly outing and naming/shaming gang members is a good start, but perhaps breaking into and emptying certain gang-run bank accounts would be another?
If ever there were opportunities for spear-phishing, this is certainly one of them.
I don't think they care all that much about bloggers who aren't in the local area watching them.
OTOH, maybe a means of helping those bloggers who are left down there set up VPN tunnels and encryption, so that anonymous broadcasts of gang activities can get out to the public Internet and be broadcast anyway to all interested parties. That way the reporting is perfectly anonymous, but the targets of that reporting are not.
I disagree.
While I just buy my gear now, when I was a poor young man, buying the parts used (usually at a 90-95% discount) and putting it together was a great way to get a running rig w/o blowing a ton of cash that I simply didn't have then.
The thing is, back then the shit was *expensive* when it was new. You could either blow $2k on a decent new computer with the basics and 'doze 3.0, or you could cobble together your own box for about $150 in used parts and shoehorn Linux onto it (or just grab eight floppies and copy off your own damned installs of DOS and Windows from a friend if you wanted that). I remember spending $100 on a used VGA monitor and $20 on parts to fix it... at a time when a new 14" VGA monitor would run you $1200.00 - the time spent fixing it up (a whopping two hours) paid for itself in spades.
It also kept me current enough on the hardware at the time to parlay my gained skills into a tidy (and well-paying) side-job fixing other folks' machinery. It also put me in touch with fellow enthusiasts, which eventually became a professional network. When I was dragged (initially kicking and screaming, I assure you) from EE work into being a sysadmin, it made the transition much easier than if I hadn't. It also meant I had a shitload of extra parts I could play with at home.
(My literal introduction into this madness we call IT? "...you play with computers at home and keep devices (scales and bar-code scanners) here on our network, don't you? Steve flunked a drug test, so we need someone to keep the computer and network going until we can find a replacement. We figure you're the guy for the job. " They never got around to finding a replacement until after I left the company. It was an RS/600 and a 4Mbps Token-Ring Network. Wound up changing careers after falling in love with the damned things. Fuckers.)
Things have changed drastically from then to now - computer bits are more likely to work as advertised as long as the parts still work. OTOH, it's a great way for a kid or evne a young man to get up a basic system without spending a lot of time on it.
Over its useful lifetime (15-30 years, depending on quality), it can generate more energy than was taken to produce it, but the resources utilized in their manufacture and distribution are still carbon-positive.
Solar panels on a commercial scale are lucky to get 18% efficiency. As AC stated, oil coughs up 60-70%.
By the by, an oil rig doesn't produce energy, it is a part of an infrastructure that moves existing stored energy (crude oil) from one place (underground) to another (gas tanks, plastics, etc).
The whole point is that even renewables consume resources, which in turn, according to the Church of AGW, leaves a big ol' carbon footprint in relation to the amount of resources used. When a panel factory eats enough electricity to require warning the utility of any major downtime periods at all, odds are good that it's not exactly running on unicorn farts, yanno?
we have a vested economic interest in keeping our environment the way we are used to it.
Really? I'd love to see the evidence. While obviously an ice age or an overly-hot overall climate would be catastrophic, unless we start seeing outright permanent flash-flooding of the coasts, or a rapid breakdown of overall society, your premise is just an assumption.