Where are the screenshots? Where are the reviews? See, both sides can play that game. I think that future package managers are going to have to include a lot more metadata to be as friendly as the app store.
Synaptic and Ubuntu Software Center include screenshots when available. But yeah - no reviews. I want to say there used to be a popularity counter in Ubuntu's tool but I don't see one now.
I've got mixed feelings on the usefulness of these features. On one hand, they're nice to have and sometimes saves me a trip to Google to decide which software I want to try first or whether it's even what I expect it to be. On the other hand, I find that most reviews are pretty inane in Adroid's Market; the more general-audience the app, the less helpful the reviews. I check reviews out for manual updates to see if people are complaining about the latest release breaking something. But in general, I turn to Google and mine blogs and forums for opinions before turning to app reviews from the masses.
Also, the DoD themselves have admitted that there isn't any evidence that anybody has been harmed as a result of Wikileaks's publication choices, so you can stop with that tired canard.
The DoD did not say that no harm was done. What is stated is that no intelligence sources or methods are revealed. And separately, a NATO commander noted that no action has been required to protect any Afghans due to the leak. But at the same time, the DoD does maintain that the leaks represent a "risk likely to cause significant harm or damage to national security interests of the United States and are examining mitigation options." Even if no intelligence operations are exposed, it does not mean the information presented offers no intelligence itself. There still is the matter of operational security and named names - albeit, as of 16 Aug, still unharmed. It's not quite the old canard you'd like it to be.
I do think it's funny that you would overstep your bounds and pass judgement on Manning's attitude toward personal duty. Condescending, to say the least.
I appreciate your personal observations and the condescending attitude with which you delivered them. I did find it amusing.
If the war was not made on false premises, then Bush Jr. should have been removed from office for giving the Taliban $43m in aid in May 2001.
Definitely. Another in the long line of mistakes attributed to the "war on drugs."
Also the Taliban offered to hand OBL over if the US showed them the evidence demonstrating it was OBL who planned the heinous acts attributed to him.
Really. I'm sure the Taliban were all shocked at the accusations that Al Queada was involved in an attack on the US. It's not like there was a history, right? As soon as some proof was forthcoming, they'd jump to help out. Keep in mind that it's been reported that Taliban representatives attempted to warn the US about the 9/11 attack. If this is true, then what proof was required from the US?
Okay this is overly simplistic and only works if you're dealing with short sighted people with no knowledge of the real world, but it's good enough for government work;-)
The big question is whether the individual involved can get that budget. If one can outline the plan and get added budget territory, then yes, it's a no-brainer. Ponying up on that expense without expanding the budget means a business justification that's not much different than someone watching the "bottom line" in the corporate sector. And even if one does manage to get an increase in budget, it doesn't mean that additional head-count has to always do the same thing. One could decide to out-source to Dell and give the new headcount different projects if it turns out to be more cost effective.
The point here is that the economics don't immediately change just because Government is involved. Been there; done that.
Again - the leak should be making a point. It should be a smoking gun. There should be something so egregious that it's worth ignoring personal duty and putting people at risk to bring light to an issue that so badly needs it.
That doesn't seem to be the situation here. Manning has a general complaint. The leak articles don't make particular points. It's all part of a conversation that's been ongoing for awhile. The only difference I can see is including Wikileaks itself in to the subjects at hand. I don't believe self-promotion should be the justification for publishing classified material. So then, what is the justification? What validated ruining the lives and careers of whistle-blowers and endangering military forces in the field?
So internalising the workforce would be to the aspiring manager's benefit. Just make sure that you have the cost benefit analysis correct/signed in triplicate.
Yes - if you have the budget with which to do it. Now, the enterprising manager trying to grow their fiefdom will use the "required" increase in headcount to justify more budget. But they may not get it. Inversely, the smart bureaucrat will be price conscious as anything that draws from that budget means less budget to do other things.
That the DoD would respond as your parent said, with self-preservation in mind.
So you're saying the whole purpose of this exercise is to annoy the DoD? I thought the whole purpose was to watch the watchers. And you're describing Punked for Government.
Because it looks like the parent is clueless. Sure - it all SOUNDS good. Rail against the US Government. Fly the anti-war flag. But when it comes down to it, the facts are bogus.
But hey - let's not let minor details like facts get in to way.
It's difficult to make a decent point if that point is underlined by false information and a clear lack of understanding of the subject. Isn't that one of the criticisms of the US Military and Government?
I'm a military veteran and I may have authored some of the documents that were leaked. But pretty much all of the information was already publicly available in some form or another. We all knew Pakistan was playing a double game. We all knew that the CIA was operating secret drones along the boarder - who else could it be, the Mongolians? If you drop a bomb on somebody, you can keep it secret from the press, but everybody on the ground will know about it. It just takes a little investigative journalism to get at the truth.
A lot of this was already in the press as well. Which leads me to wonder what the smoking gun was supposed to be. Exactly what was the big story that justified publishing this material? It could have been more corroborating evidence to back up speculation and other sources on these stories. And if so - why not limit the information to specifically those topics?
The fact that these events were taking place isn't going to be a secret - as you've noted. However, the details to how things are done might be. Some of those reports look like they contain operational details that may or may not be gleened by opposing forces. In which case, Wikileaks did present intelligence and the US Military should be upset.
The main problem the Pentagon has is one of credibility. The fact that a low level intelligence clerk could smuggle out many GBs of classified documents while lip syncing to Lady Gaga makes the military and the entire chain of command look like a bunch of incompetent boobs. It just goes to show that WallMart has better protection against shoplifters than the military has against internal leaks. So the initial reaction is one of self-preservation. "If you leak this, people will die." Which is another way of saying, we royally screwed up and we're placing the blame on you because we don't want to be the ones getting busted over this. I am no longer in the military, so I can speak my mind on this. I still think Julian Assange is an idiot, but that's another topic.
The blame game rears its ugly head in almost any bureaucracy. The military is a bureaucractic force in to itself. To be sure - that's part of the story. But Manning (if he is the sole source) wasn't just some soldier from the motor pool wandering off with a book of military secrets. Manning was an intelligence analyst with access and a need to know. Although, if the story is to be believed, the huge question is why this system had a CD burner installed when supposedly these systems already have USB ports disabled to prevent data being transferred via thumbdrives.
There's certainly some blame to go around in this case. However, I don't believe the entire story is simply smoke and mirrors to cover up someone's ineptitude. There is still intelligence value in the raw data. And Wikileaks' goal is to publish that data.
I'm not going to say that "privacy doesn't matter"... But our idea of privacy is a fairly modern invention. Move out to a small town and you'll quickly see what a lack of privacy really is. Everybody knows what everybody else is doing. Doesn't matter if you're on Facebook or not. It's just the relatively recent migration to large cities where you can get lost in the crowd that has created this idea of privacy.
While that's all very interesting in historical perspective, how does that apply to here and now? If you want to stretch out history, you can find all manner of modern notions that we hold dear. Things like human rights and civil liberties. Adjust your scale and you can look at any aspect of today as being a modern notion. Adjusting that scale is interesting as part of a history lesson. But it has very limited use in dealing with modern issues and politics.
But it isn't like Facebook/Google/Bing/Big Brother/whatever are eroding this ancient and mighty establishment called "privacy".
What is new is that this is being done on a scale and to a degree that's beyond any other time in history. Processing power and storage capacity has made it economical to store and cross-reference every piece of data that can be collected.
Yes, I know, "Don't post data about yourself online!" That is not really the answer when most people think that Facebook is the way to be social. I do not have a Facebook profile, and I stay off of other social networking websites too; I am not going to pretend for a moment, though, that I am even close to representative of the norm. It is easy to make fun of all those "fools" out there who are undermining their own privacy, but in the end, that is not going to solve the problem, and eventually even people who want to have privacy will find that it is not possible to do so.
But on the other hand, there's still something to personal accountability. There are laws out there that make most cons illegal. Yet people fall for cons all the time. If these people were a little more cautious they likely wouldn't have become victims. That doesn't mean we give the conmen a free pass to fleece their victims. But we don't stop educating and warning people to watch out for themselves either.
YES I personally hate opt out schemes, I dont mind that my public data is public, but I hate being signed up for all sorts of BS and then being told its my responsibility to go to a billion different "services" to tell them no
That falls in line with email addresses. I believe an email address to be one of the most public pieces of information related to me. But I don't want to be in a situation where I have to opt-out of every spam list in the word... and the 20 that just popped in to existence during the time I was clicking the opt-out button on the last one.
I think the real issue here is that we need to rethink our notions of "privacy."
There's nothing wrong with our notions of privacy. What we need to adjust is our understanding of the motivations and mechanisms used to collect information about us. And, along those lines, how to better protect our privacy in this age.
You're missing the point. It's not that these are big problems. It's that there is variation. And while it's not entirely apples-to-apples, the variation is very similar to what you'll find in (as is our example) Linux; so are the solutions.
You've obviously decided which piece of software you want to recommend even though the only reason you can think of to recommend it is that it is FOSS?
Keep in mind that the blade cuts in both directions. There's this tenancy to paint any FOSS advocate as a zealot and the Proprietary side as "best tool for the job" pragmatists. However, there is zealotry to be found in the proprietary world as well to include strong biases and ignorance towards OSS products. You touched on this with noting "if your boss is actively against FOSS" but I think the point is worth stressing.
They are relatively standard and predictable OS distributions. The point the GPP is making is that you always know what libraries come with the base system and where they will be installed with OS X and Windows.
Even when you remove hardware, Windows still has considerable variation. Are you coding for WinXP or Win7? Do you require DirctX? Silverlight?.NET? It's not like "Windows" is all that static (not even touching on the bad old days of "DLL hell").
Linux (for example) isn't entirely predictable, granted. But one doesn't code for "Linux". Pick a distro or two. Support RHEL or Ubunutu. Code to the library versions they're putting out. Or, like other software houses, include your own libraries and use those.
Slashdot Mirror
Where are the screenshots? Where are the reviews? See, both sides can play that game. I think that future package managers are going to have to include a lot more metadata to be as friendly as the app store.
Synaptic and Ubuntu Software Center include screenshots when available. But yeah - no reviews. I want to say there used to be a popularity counter in Ubuntu's tool but I don't see one now.
I've got mixed feelings on the usefulness of these features. On one hand, they're nice to have and sometimes saves me a trip to Google to decide which software I want to try first or whether it's even what I expect it to be. On the other hand, I find that most reviews are pretty inane in Adroid's Market; the more general-audience the app, the less helpful the reviews. I check reviews out for manual updates to see if people are complaining about the latest release breaking something. But in general, I turn to Google and mine blogs and forums for opinions before turning to app reviews from the masses.
MasterBlaster run Bartertown! Wait... wrong question.
Also, the DoD themselves have admitted that there isn't any evidence that anybody has been harmed as a result of Wikileaks's publication choices, so you can stop with that tired canard.
The DoD did not say that no harm was done. What is stated is that no intelligence sources or methods are revealed. And separately, a NATO commander noted that no action has been required to protect any Afghans due to the leak. But at the same time, the DoD does maintain that the leaks represent a "risk likely to cause significant harm or damage to national security interests of the United States and are examining mitigation options." Even if no intelligence operations are exposed, it does not mean the information presented offers no intelligence itself. There still is the matter of operational security and named names - albeit, as of 16 Aug, still unharmed. It's not quite the old canard you'd like it to be.
I do think it's funny that you would overstep your bounds and pass judgement on Manning's attitude toward personal duty. Condescending, to say the least.
I appreciate your personal observations and the condescending attitude with which you delivered them. I did find it amusing.
Not if they visit using a Live CD based OS. Ooops, sorry, just broke your new thing there. :)
I would suspect you represent a very small minority.
If you can't be bothered to RTFA, you likely can't be bothered reading an explanation.
I wish I had an evercookie. A magical cookie that regrows every time you take a bite out of it sounds like an amazing idea.
Stay away from the one with blueberries in it.
If the war was not made on false premises, then Bush Jr. should have been removed from office for giving the Taliban $43m in aid in May 2001.
Definitely. Another in the long line of mistakes attributed to the "war on drugs."
Also the Taliban offered to hand OBL over if the US showed them the evidence demonstrating it was OBL who planned the heinous acts attributed to him.
Really. I'm sure the Taliban were all shocked at the accusations that Al Queada was involved in an attack on the US. It's not like there was a history, right? As soon as some proof was forthcoming, they'd jump to help out. Keep in mind that it's been reported that Taliban representatives attempted to warn the US about the 9/11 attack. If this is true, then what proof was required from the US?
Okay this is overly simplistic and only works if you're dealing with short sighted people with no knowledge of the real world, but it's good enough for government work ;-)
The big question is whether the individual involved can get that budget. If one can outline the plan and get added budget territory, then yes, it's a no-brainer. Ponying up on that expense without expanding the budget means a business justification that's not much different than someone watching the "bottom line" in the corporate sector. And even if one does manage to get an increase in budget, it doesn't mean that additional head-count has to always do the same thing. One could decide to out-source to Dell and give the new headcount different projects if it turns out to be more cost effective.
The point here is that the economics don't immediately change just because Government is involved. Been there; done that.
Again - the leak should be making a point. It should be a smoking gun. There should be something so egregious that it's worth ignoring personal duty and putting people at risk to bring light to an issue that so badly needs it.
That doesn't seem to be the situation here. Manning has a general complaint. The leak articles don't make particular points. It's all part of a conversation that's been ongoing for awhile. The only difference I can see is including Wikileaks itself in to the subjects at hand. I don't believe self-promotion should be the justification for publishing classified material. So then, what is the justification? What validated ruining the lives and careers of whistle-blowers and endangering military forces in the field?
So internalising the workforce would be to the aspiring manager's benefit. Just make sure that you have the cost benefit analysis correct/signed in triplicate.
Yes - if you have the budget with which to do it. Now, the enterprising manager trying to grow their fiefdom will use the "required" increase in headcount to justify more budget. But they may not get it. Inversely, the smart bureaucrat will be price conscious as anything that draws from that budget means less budget to do other things.
That the DoD would respond as your parent said, with self-preservation in mind.
So you're saying the whole purpose of this exercise is to annoy the DoD? I thought the whole purpose was to watch the watchers. And you're describing Punked for Government.
Yeah, but it's a government agency, so profit doesn't mean anything.
Governments don't care about profit but they do care about budget; governmental agencies and the little feifdoms within them live and die by budget.
This makes any difference whatsoever how?
Because it looks like the parent is clueless. Sure - it all SOUNDS good. Rail against the US Government. Fly the anti-war flag. But when it comes down to it, the facts are bogus.
But hey - let's not let minor details like facts get in to way.
It's difficult to make a decent point if that point is underlined by false information and a clear lack of understanding of the subject. Isn't that one of the criticisms of the US Military and Government?
On the other hand the Pentagon killed half a million civilians (collateral damage) in war based on false premises. Sorry, Assange wins.
War on false premises? We are are talking about Afghanistan here, right?
I'm a military veteran and I may have authored some of the documents that were leaked. But pretty much all of the information was already publicly available in some form or another. We all knew Pakistan was playing a double game. We all knew that the CIA was operating secret drones along the boarder - who else could it be, the Mongolians? If you drop a bomb on somebody, you can keep it secret from the press, but everybody on the ground will know about it. It just takes a little investigative journalism to get at the truth.
A lot of this was already in the press as well. Which leads me to wonder what the smoking gun was supposed to be. Exactly what was the big story that justified publishing this material? It could have been more corroborating evidence to back up speculation and other sources on these stories. And if so - why not limit the information to specifically those topics?
The fact that these events were taking place isn't going to be a secret - as you've noted. However, the details to how things are done might be. Some of those reports look like they contain operational details that may or may not be gleened by opposing forces. In which case, Wikileaks did present intelligence and the US Military should be upset.
The main problem the Pentagon has is one of credibility. The fact that a low level intelligence clerk could smuggle out many GBs of classified documents while lip syncing to Lady Gaga makes the military and the entire chain of command look like a bunch of incompetent boobs. It just goes to show that WallMart has better protection against shoplifters than the military has against internal leaks. So the initial reaction is one of self-preservation. "If you leak this, people will die." Which is another way of saying, we royally screwed up and we're placing the blame on you because we don't want to be the ones getting busted over this. I am no longer in the military, so I can speak my mind on this. I still think Julian Assange is an idiot, but that's another topic.
The blame game rears its ugly head in almost any bureaucracy. The military is a bureaucractic force in to itself. To be sure - that's part of the story. But Manning (if he is the sole source) wasn't just some soldier from the motor pool wandering off with a book of military secrets. Manning was an intelligence analyst with access and a need to know. Although, if the story is to be believed, the huge question is why this system had a CD burner installed when supposedly these systems already have USB ports disabled to prevent data being transferred via thumbdrives.
There's certainly some blame to go around in this case. However, I don't believe the entire story is simply smoke and mirrors to cover up someone's ineptitude. There is still intelligence value in the raw data. And Wikileaks' goal is to publish that data.
Is buying a company the same as partnering with it?
I'm not going to say that "privacy doesn't matter"... But our idea of privacy is a fairly modern invention. Move out to a small town and you'll quickly see what a lack of privacy really is. Everybody knows what everybody else is doing. Doesn't matter if you're on Facebook or not. It's just the relatively recent migration to large cities where you can get lost in the crowd that has created this idea of privacy.
While that's all very interesting in historical perspective, how does that apply to here and now? If you want to stretch out history, you can find all manner of modern notions that we hold dear. Things like human rights and civil liberties. Adjust your scale and you can look at any aspect of today as being a modern notion. Adjusting that scale is interesting as part of a history lesson. But it has very limited use in dealing with modern issues and politics.
But it isn't like Facebook/Google/Bing/Big Brother/whatever are eroding this ancient and mighty establishment called "privacy".
What is new is that this is being done on a scale and to a degree that's beyond any other time in history. Processing power and storage capacity has made it economical to store and cross-reference every piece of data that can be collected.
Yes, I know, "Don't post data about yourself online!" That is not really the answer when most people think that Facebook is the way to be social. I do not have a Facebook profile, and I stay off of other social networking websites too; I am not going to pretend for a moment, though, that I am even close to representative of the norm. It is easy to make fun of all those "fools" out there who are undermining their own privacy, but in the end, that is not going to solve the problem, and eventually even people who want to have privacy will find that it is not possible to do so.
But on the other hand, there's still something to personal accountability. There are laws out there that make most cons illegal. Yet people fall for cons all the time. If these people were a little more cautious they likely wouldn't have become victims. That doesn't mean we give the conmen a free pass to fleece their victims. But we don't stop educating and warning people to watch out for themselves either.
YES I personally hate opt out schemes, I dont mind that my public data is public, but I hate being signed up for all sorts of BS and then being told its my responsibility to go to a billion different "services" to tell them no
That falls in line with email addresses. I believe an email address to be one of the most public pieces of information related to me. But I don't want to be in a situation where I have to opt-out of every spam list in the word... and the 20 that just popped in to existence during the time I was clicking the opt-out button on the last one.
I think the real issue here is that we need to rethink our notions of "privacy."
There's nothing wrong with our notions of privacy. What we need to adjust is our understanding of the motivations and mechanisms used to collect information about us. And, along those lines, how to better protect our privacy in this age.
These problems were all solved 10 years ago.
You're missing the point. It's not that these are big problems. It's that there is variation. And while it's not entirely apples-to-apples, the variation is very similar to what you'll find in (as is our example) Linux; so are the solutions.
I recently deployed a FOSWiki setup for our group. It is considerably more refined than the TWiki version I messed with several years ago.
You've obviously decided which piece of software you want to recommend even though the only reason you can think of to recommend it is that it is FOSS?
Keep in mind that the blade cuts in both directions. There's this tenancy to paint any FOSS advocate as a zealot and the Proprietary side as "best tool for the job" pragmatists. However, there is zealotry to be found in the proprietary world as well to include strong biases and ignorance towards OSS products. You touched on this with noting "if your boss is actively against FOSS" but I think the point is worth stressing.
They are relatively standard and predictable OS distributions. The point the GPP is making is that you always know what libraries come with the base system and where they will be installed with OS X and Windows.
See my other follow-on comment on this.
Even when you remove hardware, Windows still has considerable variation. Are you coding for WinXP or Win7? Do you require DirctX? Silverlight? .NET? It's not like "Windows" is all that static (not even touching on the bad old days of "DLL hell").
Linux (for example) isn't entirely predictable, granted. But one doesn't code for "Linux". Pick a distro or two. Support RHEL or Ubunutu. Code to the library versions they're putting out. Or, like other software houses, include your own libraries and use those.