"people"? You misspelled "legislators" - in 2003/4, Qwest (now CenturyStink) and Comcast went nuts and brib^M convinced Utah legislators to abandon the UTOPIA multi-city municipal broadband project, then they began slathering on lawsuits and threats thereof.
Everyone likes accountability when they have control over it. The cops would have control over the tapes, right? So they get to choose which parts to show and which parts to "inconveniently lose."
One small problem with that theory... if they "inconveniently lose" a critical bit of video evidence at trial, the defense would savage them for it, and the jury is likely to let that fact color their decision in a way that is not advantageous to the prosecution.
All said, since most prosecutions end up plea-bargains this may be moot, but for those that go to trial...?
If one cannot order it cheaply and easily on the web ala Amazon shopping experience, who is going to bother to go through a reseller? That was the model 40 years ago!
Unless you meant AWS or similar, err, WTF?
If you buy any actual server iron at most companies, you get to play with an RFQ/RFP, untangle the resulting bids, and deal with the PO process, courtesy of Accounts Payable (and Lord help you if you try and circumvent that!)
Seriously - a VAR is usually the only way to make comprehensible sense out of such a purchase, because usually you're not only buying the metal, but you're buying VMWare/Oracle/Whatever licenses to go along with it as well (and if you're dumb enough to do Windows and don't have an SA/EA, you get to buy that too).
Shit, man - the time saved by having a VAR bundle that mess and bid against each other is *way* more than worth the hassle sometimes...
I can vouch for this one - the whole LPAR/IVM set is licensed in such a way that makes it effing impossible to be a 3rd-party VAR for the things.
Then again, I'd hate to be the sorry mofo that either a) had to manage the things, or b) had to write a web-based wrapper to track and tie together individual iSeries/i5/AS400-based IVM interfaces (*shudder*).
(no, seriously, I'd much prefer to do that with Solaris/Sparc Logical Domains, if only because LDOMS can be way more easily handled from the command prompt, and thus scriptable...)
Dunno if you can apply a criminal statute to it, but there has to be some precedent formed around taxi companies getting borked out of a fare that way, or perhaps something similar to how pizza delivery was once crank-called... it would depend on the locale, though, and I doubt you'd find anything beyond local laws to support it.
1) If you got that H1-B by way of Infosys or Tata (as opposed to getting it straight from the US company), the dynamics are radically different than what you state, and those two companies alone make up an almost-majority of visa-holders (how that happened? 'hell if I know.)
2) Your statement only applies to those workers who are sufficiently competent in the field they work in, which is, sadly, only a fraction of the total (mind you, this is the case in any given group of people in any given field, so don't take it as a snipe against foreign workers specifically). I say this because you still have to demonstrate the competence at an interview. It is one thing to get recruiter offers, but another entirely when you have to sit in the interview.
Exception: My ancient and long-dead first domain/site ever had never got hacked, and it never will: I shuttered it in 2001 (-ish) when I sold the domain name (spark.org).;)
True - and how is it that they say they're not counting vulns when that is precisely what they're doing (albeit counting past vulns and extrapolating...)
But what about military secrets? What about ongoing stings of organized crime syndicates, and the undercover police who might threatened?
Both eventually become open records to the public anyway (after an expiration date, naturally), so aside from keeping such exceptional data sufficiently isolated from the public until their expiration dates (which happens anyway), what do you think detracts from GP's philosophy as per data format?
Back in the Bad Old Days, everything was typewritten on paper... a completely open data format. So...
I think it'd be a combination of the two - sure, the top three gents would still control the thing, but if GOOG dropped to $0.01 (assuming they weren't delisted first), then they'd have nothing but existing cash reserves to draw from, plus any patent royalties and alternate non-site-related sources of income. That in turn would dry up in a few years (not quite "decades") just from operational costs alone.
By the way scholarly articles or even books published a century ago have downright incorrect information in them all over the place, even if written by experts, but such is scientific published literature.
True - though to be fair, the really old stuff was based on what they knew at the time (with the rest being based on theories and suppositions; e.g. where posited that "ether" existed in space, where we know hard vacuum exists today.)
It's still fun to read, though - anyone with sufficient knowledge on the subject and a love of the evolution of human thinking can see and appreciate how far we've come, no? For instance, I have a 2nd Edition copy of Worlds Other Than Ours, printed in 1870-something (forgot exactly which year - it's at home.) It even came with color illustrations of various planets that were known about at the time. A huge chunk of it is grossly and flat-out wrong about what our environment is like viz. the Solar System. Some of it is so far off kilter that it's funny that folks seriously thought certain things were true, but at the same time you can still see in those words the yearning to learn more, and to know more - even in a book that claimed to be authoritative on the subject.
So yeah - I wouldn't go too hard on those now long-dead folks. I just wouldn't take everything they wrote as gospel, either.
In the bad/good old days, many of us did it for two reasons: one, to elicit responses and anguish (many of which were often hilarious), and two, to learn a bit more about the 'opposing' side, while forcing them to think harder as well (and not just rely on soundbites.) Many of the most classic trolls were witty, devastating, and sharp as a scalpel... enough so that even if you were the target, you often laughed your ass off in spite of yourself.
It was, sadly, nothing at all like the dreck you often see today.
Call it a nasty side-effect of Eternal September (the AOL/WebTV crowd) - along with the masses coming online, you wound up with their level of thinking.:(
The cost of solar dropped 20% in the last couple years, and is expected to drop quite a bit more, due to both technological and manufacturing improvements.
FYI - the biggest reason for the price drop wasn't economies of scale, but because China flooded the unholy fuck out of the solar market, in a bid to dominate it since manufacturing solar panels isn't all that technically complex (at least not when compared to most other things).
It used to cost around $3/Wp, and China's backing of SunPower, SunTech and similar ventures glutted the price down to ~$0.90/Wp; however, last I checked a couple of years ago (I used to work for SolarWorld) it still cost around $1.25/Wp to manufacture a 250W panel, and that's not counting margins slimmer than even a PC OEM enjoys.
What sibling said, and in addition most stealth-based aircraft carry radar reflectors in peacetime to aid ATC as a safety measure (the F-117's reflectors bolted right onto the sides.)
I once worked for a company that wrote web banking software. The laptops/desktops/etc of certain employees had a 'driver' that continually monitored the USB ports. If anything plugged into it that had storage on it but not the proper corporate auth key to connect as an approved storage device? It would automatically send an email to the IT department, immediately shut off the entire USB subsystem in the OS, and it stayed that way until the device was re-imaged (in many cases making the device completely useless). It also got you immediately perp-walked out of the building and freshly unemployed, unless you could immediately give them a reasonable (and provable) explanation as to why it happened.
Now in this case, I suspect that if the bad stick presented itself to the OS as a keyboard/mouse/whatever, it may circumvent that (I say "may" because I don't know if it would be able to dump any non-keyboard/mouse-related data onto the machine w/o presenting itself as storage.)
Either way, if you're that worried about it, then epoxy the USB ports shut (well, except on the phone for obvious reasons...)
Give the physiologic changes that microgravity brings, I'd be surprised if sex was even possible without some engineering and pharmaceutical assistance...
When it's time for an asteroid mission, it will probably be robotic.
Sadly, you're right. The same fuckers that make that decision are probably the same ones who think that artificial insemination is vastly superior to sex. Objectively they'd be right for the purpose of reproduction, but they're still a bunch of heartless assholes for basing public policy on it.
It's amazing how much money NASA can spend not going into space.
Agreed again - open the damn thing to commercial exploitation and see how fast NASA catches up.
Slashdot Mirror
"people"? You misspelled "legislators" - in 2003/4, Qwest (now CenturyStink) and Comcast went nuts and brib^M convinced Utah legislators to abandon the UTOPIA multi-city municipal broadband project, then they began slathering on lawsuits and threats thereof.
heh - don't eat much? You should see the electrical and HVAC bills...
Everyone likes accountability when they have control over it. The cops would have control over the tapes, right? So they get to choose which parts to show and which parts to "inconveniently lose."
One small problem with that theory... if they "inconveniently lose" a critical bit of video evidence at trial, the defense would savage them for it, and the jury is likely to let that fact color their decision in a way that is not advantageous to the prosecution.
All said, since most prosecutions end up plea-bargains this may be moot, but for those that go to trial...?
If one cannot order it cheaply and easily on the web ala Amazon shopping experience, who is going to bother to go through a reseller? That was the model 40 years ago!
Unless you meant AWS or similar, err, WTF?
If you buy any actual server iron at most companies, you get to play with an RFQ/RFP, untangle the resulting bids, and deal with the PO process, courtesy of Accounts Payable (and Lord help you if you try and circumvent that!)
Seriously - a VAR is usually the only way to make comprehensible sense out of such a purchase, because usually you're not only buying the metal, but you're buying VMWare/Oracle/Whatever licenses to go along with it as well (and if you're dumb enough to do Windows and don't have an SA/EA, you get to buy that too).
Shit, man - the time saved by having a VAR bundle that mess and bid against each other is *way* more than worth the hassle sometimes...
Why wouldn't they just support Linux on the new hardware?
They do - well, if you put it in an LPAR ;)
I can vouch for this one - the whole LPAR/IVM set is licensed in such a way that makes it effing impossible to be a 3rd-party VAR for the things.
Then again, I'd hate to be the sorry mofo that either a) had to manage the things, or b) had to write a web-based wrapper to track and tie together individual iSeries/i5/AS400-based IVM interfaces (*shudder*).
(no, seriously, I'd much prefer to do that with Solaris/Sparc Logical Domains, if only because LDOMS can be way more easily handled from the command prompt, and thus scriptable...)
Dunno if you can apply a criminal statute to it, but there has to be some precedent formed around taxi companies getting borked out of a fare that way, or perhaps something similar to how pizza delivery was once crank-called... it would depend on the locale, though, and I doubt you'd find anything beyond local laws to support it.
Oh, it gets even better - wait until politispam pages all over the site go apeshit and claim outright censorship...
This is not always true, for a couple of reasons:
1) If you got that H1-B by way of Infosys or Tata (as opposed to getting it straight from the US company), the dynamics are radically different than what you state, and those two companies alone make up an almost-majority of visa-holders (how that happened? 'hell if I know.)
2) Your statement only applies to those workers who are sufficiently competent in the field they work in, which is, sadly, only a fraction of the total (mind you, this is the case in any given group of people in any given field, so don't take it as a snipe against foreign workers specifically). I say this because you still have to demonstrate the competence at an interview. It is one thing to get recruiter offers, but another entirely when you have to sit in the interview.
Exception: ;)
My ancient and long-dead first domain/site ever had never got hacked, and it never will: I shuttered it in 2001 (-ish) when I sold the domain name (spark.org).
True - and how is it that they say they're not counting vulns when that is precisely what they're doing (albeit counting past vulns and extrapolating...)
But what about military secrets?
What about ongoing stings of organized crime syndicates, and the undercover police who might threatened?
Both eventually become open records to the public anyway (after an expiration date, naturally), so aside from keeping such exceptional data sufficiently isolated from the public until their expiration dates (which happens anyway), what do you think detracts from GP's philosophy as per data format?
Back in the Bad Old Days, everything was typewritten on paper... a completely open data format. So...
I think it'd be a combination of the two - sure, the top three gents would still control the thing, but if GOOG dropped to $0.01 (assuming they weren't delisted first), then they'd have nothing but existing cash reserves to draw from, plus any patent royalties and alternate non-site-related sources of income. That in turn would dry up in a few years (not quite "decades") just from operational costs alone.
Question is, would the more proper term be "disruption"? :)
By the way scholarly articles or even books published a century ago have downright incorrect information in them all over the place, even if written by experts, but such is scientific published literature.
True - though to be fair, the really old stuff was based on what they knew at the time (with the rest being based on theories and suppositions; e.g. where posited that "ether" existed in space, where we know hard vacuum exists today.)
It's still fun to read, though - anyone with sufficient knowledge on the subject and a love of the evolution of human thinking can see and appreciate how far we've come, no? For instance, I have a 2nd Edition copy of Worlds Other Than Ours, printed in 1870-something (forgot exactly which year - it's at home.) It even came with color illustrations of various planets that were known about at the time. A huge chunk of it is grossly and flat-out wrong about what our environment is like viz. the Solar System. Some of it is so far off kilter that it's funny that folks seriously thought certain things were true, but at the same time you can still see in those words the yearning to learn more, and to know more - even in a book that claimed to be authoritative on the subject.
So yeah - I wouldn't go too hard on those now long-dead folks. I just wouldn't take everything they wrote as gospel, either.
Depends on the troll...
In the bad/good old days, many of us did it for two reasons: one, to elicit responses and anguish (many of which were often hilarious), and two, to learn a bit more about the 'opposing' side, while forcing them to think harder as well (and not just rely on soundbites.) Many of the most classic trolls were witty, devastating, and sharp as a scalpel... enough so that even if you were the target, you often laughed your ass off in spite of yourself.
It was, sadly, nothing at all like the dreck you often see today.
Call it a nasty side-effect of Eternal September (the AOL/WebTV crowd) - along with the masses coming online, you wound up with their level of thinking. :(
The cost of solar dropped 20% in the last couple years, and is expected to drop quite a bit more, due to both technological and manufacturing improvements.
FYI - the biggest reason for the price drop wasn't economies of scale, but because China flooded the unholy fuck out of the solar market, in a bid to dominate it since manufacturing solar panels isn't all that technically complex (at least not when compared to most other things).
It used to cost around $3/Wp, and China's backing of SunPower, SunTech and similar ventures glutted the price down to ~$0.90/Wp; however, last I checked a couple of years ago (I used to work for SolarWorld) it still cost around $1.25/Wp to manufacture a 250W panel, and that's not counting margins slimmer than even a PC OEM enjoys.
What sibling said, and in addition most stealth-based aircraft carry radar reflectors in peacetime to aid ATC as a safety measure (the F-117's reflectors bolted right onto the sides.)
Depends.
I once worked for a company that wrote web banking software. The laptops/desktops/etc of certain employees had a 'driver' that continually monitored the USB ports. If anything plugged into it that had storage on it but not the proper corporate auth key to connect as an approved storage device? It would automatically send an email to the IT department, immediately shut off the entire USB subsystem in the OS, and it stayed that way until the device was re-imaged (in many cases making the device completely useless). It also got you immediately perp-walked out of the building and freshly unemployed, unless you could immediately give them a reasonable (and provable) explanation as to why it happened.
Now in this case, I suspect that if the bad stick presented itself to the OS as a keyboard/mouse/whatever, it may circumvent that (I say "may" because I don't know if it would be able to dump any non-keyboard/mouse-related data onto the machine w/o presenting itself as storage.)
Either way, if you're that worried about it, then epoxy the USB ports shut (well, except on the phone for obvious reasons...)
Sure a bunch of geeks with no legal training could use Wikipedia and slashdot. To pass a law exam.
...same way a lot of them made MCSE back in the dot-boom: braindump websites.
So yeah, it's a pretty huge deal to be sentenced to 6 months of unemployment...
Wait - you can still work as a paralegal or in a similar support role until you pass the bar as a full-blown lawyer, no?
You kidding? I'd love to go myself - you see, some of us actually want to know what's out there, and to see it first-hand.
I meant "heartless" in the vein that they have no heart for it.
Give the physiologic changes that microgravity brings, I'd be surprised if sex was even possible without some engineering and pharmaceutical assistance...
When it's time for an asteroid mission, it will probably be robotic.
Sadly, you're right. The same fuckers that make that decision are probably the same ones who think that artificial insemination is vastly superior to sex. Objectively they'd be right for the purpose of reproduction, but they're still a bunch of heartless assholes for basing public policy on it.
It's amazing how much money NASA can spend not going into space.
Agreed again - open the damn thing to commercial exploitation and see how fast NASA catches up.
Well, there's always the Core Installation... well, if you really like PowerShell.
(...and seriously, bash is 10 miles more flexible, effective, intuitive...)