One of the problems this causes is the lack of appreciation for the mathematics that defines computer science, and computers.
The end result is politicians making stupid laws and judges making stupid rulings...
With stupid patents on software being the stupid result.
Umm, dunno how else to say it, but honestly? Ignorance of mathematics isn't the cause of stupid laws and policy around technology; lobbyist money, bullshit ideological agendas, and self-serving BS flowing from big tech corporations would be your most likely sources for that.
I'm perfectly willing and eager to be proven wrong on this, but I figure in the list of causes? Ignorance of CompSci-oriented mathematics is waaaaaaaaaaaaaay down on the list of causes for stupid governmental tech policy, somewhere around "Clippy".
Plus their benefit vs harm ratio is kinda crap. Any idiot knows that online game stuff is vulnerable to DDOS. It's normally not a big problem because there doesn't seem to be enough money for most attackers to DDOS such stuff regularly. Most of them probably want more than vouchers from Kim Dotcom. So you cause a problem now and you don't really reduce future problems.
Whereas it seems lots of people actually didn't know the bad and evil things their governments were doing, and Assange and Snowden opened at least some of their eyes. Greater awareness of that is a step towards eventually reducing the bad stuff. It may not actually fix stuff (people might still not care), but what other better options and paths are there?
Quoted complete for greater exposure. You should have posted this under a 'nym or login, because it needs to be modded way the fuck up.:)
Or maybe they are more like Snowden and Assange and just egotistical assholes but on a smaller scale.
Need to take a bit of exception here, but mostly because of degree and motive:
* You can agree or disagree with what Snowden did, but you cannot deny that the man acted on principle - more importantly, he put his name and his ass on the line for what he did. Note that he also could have just as easily just anonymously *sold* the info viz. Silk Road/BTC and quietly retired as a zillionare in Ecuador.
* Assange? IMHO he's a narcissistic asswipe (I base this mostly on Cryptome's assessment of Wikileaks' early dealings with them), but again, he put his name and ass out there for better or worse.
* These "lizard" guys? Script kiddies who wanted a 'rep and managed to get paid, then tried to cover it up with some nobility bullshit. Perhaps a smaller-scale version of Assange in the aspect that they wanted a reputation, but unlike Assange, they weren't willing to stick their necks out.
How much it would cost the EPA to mandate the change? Nothing!
...how many of those ships are US-registered? A quick guess would be way less than 10%, if even that. Hell, much (if not most) US-owned ships are often flagged in Liberia (or some similar country) for tax/inspection/regulation purposes.
You mean, didn't get caught. There's a difference.
They'd have to have kept those crimes to extremely petty ones at the most. Even though the 1960's didn't have facial recognition, the TSA (for what that's worth), instant background checks, widespread Social Security Number checking mechanisms, or any of the stuff we have today? They definitely had fingerprinting, and at least some semblance of a national fingerprint database of sorts to check against (the FBI would have had these guys' fingerprints after the break.)
They could have eventually slipped through the cracks even if they re-offended (e.g. it wasn't uncommon for, say, truck drivers to have multiple drivers' licenses from multiple states), but any crime beyond a misdemeanor would have had the local PD looking at some stranger (stranger in their town that is) and doing at least a cursory check, if only to build a rap sheet for the prosecution.
IMHO, if they made it, they likely hoofed it to Canada or Mexico (or perhaps further South) and built an assumed identity from which to live out the rest of their lives in as obscure a manner as possible. Over time, that new identity would become reinforced.
It wouldn't be the first time either... I recall a few instances in the '80s and even the '90s where some schlub or other escaped prison in that era (or before), got himself a new identity, and decades later did something stupid (IIRC, in one case the dumbass ran for a local public office, and a local reporter researching his background found the inconsistencies).
But while Isaac is a Joyent employee, Ben is not—and if he had been, he wouldn't be as of this morning: to reject a pull request that eliminates a gendered pronoun on the principle that pronouns should in fact be gendered would constitute a fireable offense for me and for Joyent.
That's some rather petty bullshit, truth be told - by all parties involved, including the author of that blog entry. Now if they were fighting over something, you know, *technical*, I'd be more sympathetic, but really - ideological bullshit like that? Call me when the dude added some actual code to the damn thing and got rude treatment.
if these open source projects are going to accept corporate sponsorship, they must do that corporation's bidding.
No. If an open source project's leadership accepts monetary or other sponsorship, then the leadership of that project has to do the corporation's bidding. The other contributors can still do whatever the fuck they want.
To be honest, unless there's a contract (with a term) involved, the project's leadership can change or reject the terms at any time, and can definitely negotiate or even reject any changes (proposed or actual in their relationship with the sponsor.
Finally, this is a two-way street - the sponsor must accept that the project they took on simply is what it is.
I disagree over the degree of which this would be a problem - think of it more like the free market. Under ideal conditions, the best ideas with the broadest appeal tend to win, grow and evolve, while the worst ideas with little appeal tend to fade away relatively quickly.
It also provides a very useful ejection seat of sorts in case of corporate asshattery (see also OpenOffice/Libre Office), patent follies, or worse. Also, consider this: Closed-Source/proprietary software can be just as prone to this kind of internal dissent as OSS, but you the end-user will never have a say in the results.
Forking is awesome to have as an option - either as a threat or as an actuality. A company who knows that their shit could be forked will either behave themselves, or they will lose control of their product. IMHO that's a damned good thing.
Agreed, though it brings up a bigger (albeit personal) bitch-n-moan on my part...
We went from zero to Moon in about 24 years (1945-1969), but then did approximately bupkis in the realm of manned exploration for 45 years after that (okay, Space Shuttle, ISS, etc - but we're talking manned planetary exploration here, not just repeating the same shit we've done over and over again with only trivial increments.)
I remember as a kid anticipating a shot of going to distant worlds as an adult, but damn - by the time they *finally* get around to putting someone on Mars, I'll be damned near retired (and definitely too old for consideration of such a thing.) I just wish NASA would have gotten their shit straight and kept pushing, instead of dropping it in the early 1970s and deciding 'hey, let's make this shuttle thingy!'
Some of us would have wanted to see things happen faster, and sooner - I know I'm not alone in thinking this...
I haven't read stories about malware on Xbox Live Marketplace, PlayStation Store, and Nintendo eShop.
Fair call, but consider that it costs a pretty penny to get an app into any of those marketplaces, and they're almost orders of magnitude smaller than even Blackberry's App store...
No - it's Microsoft's incarnation of Apple's AppNap feature. (think of it as an aggressive and automatic version of the *nix renice function with a suspend feature latched onto it.)
Wasn't stuff like this supposed to be prevented by having a walled garden?
A handful out of several million ain't half bad, considering.
I think the only other app store that could do better would be Blackberry, but only due to the fact that nobody uses it anymore (or at least not enough to have found and purchased a scam app).
He'll probably assume the reason is that girls need extra help because they're dumb.
Quoted for visibility: Most folks, when not given a sufficient reason for something, will come up with one of their own. A child isn't going to know (much less comprehend) all the (let's face it, oftentimes dumb) nuances of ideology or politics, so they'll often come up with and go for the simplest explanation they can contrive given what they know.
Depends, really. When my ex-wife first began nursing school, the only guys you saw in her class were considered to be homosexual (even by many of the female classmates). This stemmed from the perception of nursing as a caring and nurturing profession, more akin to motherhood than to traditional male traits.
I suspect that aside form what other guys think, there's also the 'ick' factor among male patients who have a male nurse, especially when it comes to things involving the more intimate bits of the human body; it's one thing to have a woman shaving your nether regions in preparation for a surgery or giving you an enema (or similar), but some dude doing it to you introduces a bit of mental discomfort in guys. I suspect the biggest reason stems from nearly everyone having had their mother bathe them and care for them when they were kids, so it's easier to overcome if a woman does it. Mind you this isn't sexism, but the result of conditioning.
If it went to trial, we *would* know all the facts.
No, no you wouldn't. You would only know what the prosecution and defense could find and present. Nothing more, nothing less.
As it so happens, the DA promised to release all the evidence they have to the public shortly. When, how, and in what format I do not know, but nonetheless, that's what they intend to do according to their statement.
A grand jury doesn't determine guilt or innocence, it only decides whether a trial should happen.
Agreed. The reason for having one in the first place is to determine whether there is enough credible evidence and testimony to be worth a trial.
This... IIRC, they teamed up with U2 (the band) to do it. You bought a candy apple red iPod (IIRC) it came with a free U2 album on it, and a portion of the proceeds went towards AIDS research. Nothing new about that or TFA.
PS: Jobs was just as much of an ideological left-winger then as his replacement is now - likely more so.
As for future product lines? Dunno. None of that shit is easy, Jobs was just damned good at picking the winners.
Its ironic that one of the potential benefits of geoengineering research is that it will force many climate change deniers to admit that its possible for human activity to have major deleterious effects on Earth's climate.
...assuming it works, doesn't require the entire GDP of multiple nations, and a timescale that would put trees to shame, let alone humans.
Here's the funny part: in your haste to make a snark, you forget something: Humans can certainly alter clime - on a micro scale. Whether or not they can do it on a macro scale (let alone global) within any sort of sane time frame is a whole different (and honestly open) debate.
Here in PDX, I've worked in boiler rooms, for amoral shitheaded corporations, clueless startups, and similar places. I lost count of how many interviews I would suddenly walk out of due to a strong sense that the place is completely wrong to work for.
I've finally found a place where the folks running the show actually give a damn about their employees, and are willing to prove it in spades. It's a non-profit org, but damn it feels good to go home every day...
It depends... Zynga was run by an amoral asswipe (Mr. Pincus) for quite awhile. It took the fading of games like Farmville and Yoville with no real viable replacement from them, coupled with the arrival of new shinies to distract their customers (e.g. Angry Birds, Candy Crush Saga, and similar crap) before they were cut down to size.
I guess what I'm saying is that it takes a public and/or industry willing to both pay attention to the company's doings and a willingness to do something about it. See also the demise of SCO viz. Darl McBride.
Right. Because in-house infrastructure never fails.
Power outages never happen.
Lines are never cut...
If the power goes out in your company building, odds are perfect that your users are going to be sitting in front of dark workstations long before the UPS gives out and the servers shut down.;) Same with most general IT outage situations... if a patch borks your 'doze servers, it's likely going to bork your 'doze workstations. If your Internet/WAN is dead, it's going to affect your users too. Unless your users are all remote and on VPN, a local problem is going to affect your users in more ways than just the IT infrastructure.
Contrast that with the cloud, where you have all of your users just sitting around, surfing Facebook/Etsy/Whatever (err, Slashdot?) and twiddling their thumbs while some dudes off in CloudLand figure out what broke.
Another point: a local break in any competent IT infrastructure will likely be fixed much faster, the executives will get their updates sooner, and there's no information/communications gap - everyone knows what's going on as it is found (instead of waiting for some opaque-as-fuck tidbit of info that's first been spun-all-to-hell by some cloud company's PR department, then filtered through a battery of company lawyers to avoid having to pay up over any SLA breaches).
Slashdot Mirror
One of the problems this causes is the lack of appreciation for the mathematics that defines computer science, and computers.
The end result is politicians making stupid laws and judges making stupid rulings...
With stupid patents on software being the stupid result.
Umm, dunno how else to say it, but honestly? Ignorance of mathematics isn't the cause of stupid laws and policy around technology; lobbyist money, bullshit ideological agendas, and self-serving BS flowing from big tech corporations would be your most likely sources for that.
I'm perfectly willing and eager to be proven wrong on this, but I figure in the list of causes? Ignorance of CompSci-oriented mathematics is waaaaaaaaaaaaaay down on the list of causes for stupid governmental tech policy, somewhere around "Clippy".
Plus their benefit vs harm ratio is kinda crap. Any idiot knows that online game stuff is vulnerable to DDOS. It's normally not a big problem because there doesn't seem to be enough money for most attackers to DDOS such stuff regularly. Most of them probably want more than vouchers from Kim Dotcom. So you cause a problem now and you don't really reduce future problems.
Whereas it seems lots of people actually didn't know the bad and evil things their governments were doing, and Assange and Snowden opened at least some of their eyes. Greater awareness of that is a step towards eventually reducing the bad stuff. It may not actually fix stuff (people might still not care), but what other better options and paths are there?
Quoted complete for greater exposure. You should have posted this under a 'nym or login, because it needs to be modded way the fuck up. :)
Or maybe they are more like Snowden and Assange and just egotistical assholes but on a smaller scale.
Need to take a bit of exception here, but mostly because of degree and motive:
* You can agree or disagree with what Snowden did, but you cannot deny that the man acted on principle - more importantly, he put his name and his ass on the line for what he did. Note that he also could have just as easily just anonymously *sold* the info viz. Silk Road/BTC and quietly retired as a zillionare in Ecuador.
* Assange? IMHO he's a narcissistic asswipe (I base this mostly on Cryptome's assessment of Wikileaks' early dealings with them), but again, he put his name and ass out there for better or worse.
* These "lizard" guys? Script kiddies who wanted a 'rep and managed to get paid, then tried to cover it up with some nobility bullshit. Perhaps a smaller-scale version of Assange in the aspect that they wanted a reputation, but unlike Assange, they weren't willing to stick their necks out.
How much it would cost the EPA to mandate the change? Nothing!
...how many of those ships are US-registered? A quick guess would be way less than 10%, if even that. Hell, much (if not most) US-owned ships are often flagged in Liberia (or some similar country) for tax/inspection/regulation purposes.
We may yet find out... most of the smarter escapees tend to wait until their deathbed to let something like that slip out.
I suspect that prison makes you learn a few things rather quickly...
You mean, didn't get caught. There's a difference.
They'd have to have kept those crimes to extremely petty ones at the most. Even though the 1960's didn't have facial recognition, the TSA (for what that's worth), instant background checks, widespread Social Security Number checking mechanisms, or any of the stuff we have today? They definitely had fingerprinting, and at least some semblance of a national fingerprint database of sorts to check against (the FBI would have had these guys' fingerprints after the break.)
They could have eventually slipped through the cracks even if they re-offended (e.g. it wasn't uncommon for, say, truck drivers to have multiple drivers' licenses from multiple states), but any crime beyond a misdemeanor would have had the local PD looking at some stranger (stranger in their town that is) and doing at least a cursory check, if only to build a rap sheet for the prosecution.
IMHO, if they made it, they likely hoofed it to Canada or Mexico (or perhaps further South) and built an assumed identity from which to live out the rest of their lives in as obscure a manner as possible. Over time, that new identity would become reinforced.
It wouldn't be the first time either... I recall a few instances in the '80s and even the '90s where some schlub or other escaped prison in that era (or before), got himself a new identity, and decades later did something stupid (IIRC, in one case the dumbass ran for a local public office, and a local reporter researching his background found the inconsistencies).
And, well, fuck the non-disparagement agreement. It's not disparagement to post factual information.
Wait, WTF?
From your first link:
That's some rather petty bullshit, truth be told - by all parties involved, including the author of that blog entry. Now if they were fighting over something, you know, *technical*, I'd be more sympathetic, but really - ideological bullshit like that? Call me when the dude added some actual code to the damn thing and got rude treatment.
if these open source projects are going to accept corporate sponsorship, they must do that corporation's bidding.
No. If an open source project's leadership accepts monetary or other sponsorship, then the leadership of that project has to do the corporation's bidding. The other contributors can still do whatever the fuck they want.
To be honest, unless there's a contract (with a term) involved, the project's leadership can change or reject the terms at any time, and can definitely negotiate or even reject any changes (proposed or actual in their relationship with the sponsor.
Finally, this is a two-way street - the sponsor must accept that the project they took on simply is what it is.
The scourge of Open Source disguised as choice..
I disagree over the degree of which this would be a problem - think of it more like the free market. Under ideal conditions, the best ideas with the broadest appeal tend to win, grow and evolve, while the worst ideas with little appeal tend to fade away relatively quickly.
It also provides a very useful ejection seat of sorts in case of corporate asshattery (see also OpenOffice/Libre Office), patent follies, or worse. Also, consider this: Closed-Source/proprietary software can be just as prone to this kind of internal dissent as OSS, but you the end-user will never have a say in the results.
Forking is awesome to have as an option - either as a threat or as an actuality. A company who knows that their shit could be forked will either behave themselves, or they will lose control of their product. IMHO that's a damned good thing.
Agreed, though it brings up a bigger (albeit personal) bitch-n-moan on my part...
We went from zero to Moon in about 24 years (1945-1969), but then did approximately bupkis in the realm of manned exploration for 45 years after that (okay, Space Shuttle, ISS, etc - but we're talking manned planetary exploration here, not just repeating the same shit we've done over and over again with only trivial increments.)
I remember as a kid anticipating a shot of going to distant worlds as an adult, but damn - by the time they *finally* get around to putting someone on Mars, I'll be damned near retired (and definitely too old for consideration of such a thing.) I just wish NASA would have gotten their shit straight and kept pushing, instead of dropping it in the early 1970s and deciding 'hey, let's make this shuttle thingy!'
Some of us would have wanted to see things happen faster, and sooner - I know I'm not alone in thinking this...
I haven't read stories about malware on Xbox Live Marketplace, PlayStation Store, and Nintendo eShop.
Fair call, but consider that it costs a pretty penny to get an app into any of those marketplaces, and they're almost orders of magnitude smaller than even Blackberry's App store...
No - it's Microsoft's incarnation of Apple's AppNap feature.
(think of it as an aggressive and automatic version of the *nix renice function with a suspend feature latched onto it.)
Wasn't stuff like this supposed to be prevented by having a walled garden?
A handful out of several million ain't half bad, considering.
I think the only other app store that could do better would be Blackberry, but only due to the fact that nobody uses it anymore (or at least not enough to have found and purchased a scam app).
He'll probably assume the reason is that girls need extra help because they're dumb.
Quoted for visibility: Most folks, when not given a sufficient reason for something, will come up with one of their own. A child isn't going to know (much less comprehend) all the (let's face it, oftentimes dumb) nuances of ideology or politics, so they'll often come up with and go for the simplest explanation they can contrive given what they know.
Depends, really. When my ex-wife first began nursing school, the only guys you saw in her class were considered to be homosexual (even by many of the female classmates). This stemmed from the perception of nursing as a caring and nurturing profession, more akin to motherhood than to traditional male traits.
I suspect that aside form what other guys think, there's also the 'ick' factor among male patients who have a male nurse, especially when it comes to things involving the more intimate bits of the human body; it's one thing to have a woman shaving your nether regions in preparation for a surgery or giving you an enema (or similar), but some dude doing it to you introduces a bit of mental discomfort in guys. I suspect the biggest reason stems from nearly everyone having had their mother bathe them and care for them when they were kids, so it's easier to overcome if a woman does it. Mind you this isn't sexism, but the result of conditioning.
If it went to trial, we *would* know all the facts.
No, no you wouldn't. You would only know what the prosecution and defense could find and present. Nothing more, nothing less.
As it so happens, the DA promised to release all the evidence they have to the public shortly. When, how, and in what format I do not know, but nonetheless, that's what they intend to do according to their statement.
A grand jury doesn't determine guilt or innocence, it only decides whether a trial should happen.
Agreed. The reason for having one in the first place is to determine whether there is enough credible evidence and testimony to be worth a trial.
This... IIRC, they teamed up with U2 (the band) to do it. You bought a candy apple red iPod (IIRC) it came with a free U2 album on it, and a portion of the proceeds went towards AIDS research. Nothing new about that or TFA.
PS: Jobs was just as much of an ideological left-winger then as his replacement is now - likely more so.
As for future product lines? Dunno. None of that shit is easy, Jobs was just damned good at picking the winners.
Its ironic that one of the potential benefits of geoengineering research is that it will force many climate change deniers to admit that its possible for human activity to have major deleterious effects on Earth's climate.
...assuming it works, doesn't require the entire GDP of multiple nations, and a timescale that would put trees to shame, let alone humans.
Here's the funny part: in your haste to make a snark, you forget something: Humans can certainly alter clime - on a micro scale. Whether or not they can do it on a macro scale (let alone global) within any sort of sane time frame is a whole different (and honestly open) debate.
Seriously - the two biggest (ab)users of the H1B system are Tata and Infosys... and they're both Indian corporations.
{rant}I guess in fairness to Obama, he managed to screw both blue and white-collar workers in one fell swoop...{/rant}
Anyone know the lobbyist money trail for this bit of it, or can I safely guess Microsoft, Apple, Google, Intel, etc... ?
That's true even outside of the Bay area.
Here in PDX, I've worked in boiler rooms, for amoral shitheaded corporations, clueless startups, and similar places. I lost count of how many interviews I would suddenly walk out of due to a strong sense that the place is completely wrong to work for.
I've finally found a place where the folks running the show actually give a damn about their employees, and are willing to prove it in spades. It's a non-profit org, but damn it feels good to go home every day...
It depends... Zynga was run by an amoral asswipe (Mr. Pincus) for quite awhile. It took the fading of games like Farmville and Yoville with no real viable replacement from them, coupled with the arrival of new shinies to distract their customers (e.g. Angry Birds, Candy Crush Saga, and similar crap) before they were cut down to size.
I guess what I'm saying is that it takes a public and/or industry willing to both pay attention to the company's doings and a willingness to do something about it. See also the demise of SCO viz. Darl McBride.
Not my problem, I'll be long gone.
...and at another company which did the same thing, except this time it's your head on the chopping block (even if it isn't your fault.)
Saw that happen to an IT director once. It was messy, to say the least...
Right. Because in-house infrastructure never fails.
Power outages never happen.
Lines are never cut...
If the power goes out in your company building, odds are perfect that your users are going to be sitting in front of dark workstations long before the UPS gives out and the servers shut down. ;) Same with most general IT outage situations... if a patch borks your 'doze servers, it's likely going to bork your 'doze workstations. If your Internet/WAN is dead, it's going to affect your users too. Unless your users are all remote and on VPN, a local problem is going to affect your users in more ways than just the IT infrastructure.
Contrast that with the cloud, where you have all of your users just sitting around, surfing Facebook/Etsy/Whatever (err, Slashdot?) and twiddling their thumbs while some dudes off in CloudLand figure out what broke.
Another point: a local break in any competent IT infrastructure will likely be fixed much faster, the executives will get their updates sooner, and there's no information/communications gap - everyone knows what's going on as it is found (instead of waiting for some opaque-as-fuck tidbit of info that's first been spun-all-to-hell by some cloud company's PR department, then filtered through a battery of company lawyers to avoid having to pay up over any SLA breaches).